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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow do you feel about our withdrawing from Afghanistan?
25 votes, 0 passes | Time left: Unlimited | |
It was perfectly executed. | |
2 (8%) |
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It should have been done more slowly. | |
0 (0%) |
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We should have left a small number of troops for an indefinite time. | |
4 (16%) |
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It was a botched deal. | |
3 (12%) |
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Other | |
16 (64%) |
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0 DU members did not wish to select any of the options provided. | |
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Klaralven
(7,510 posts)applegrove
(118,589 posts)That did not help.
MoonRiver
(36,926 posts)Hoyt
(54,770 posts)we never should have occupied the country in the first place. It's going to be ugly, no matter what.
panader0
(25,816 posts)walkingman
(7,591 posts)were crimes against humanity and we have no moral ground for the needless killing of thousands of people. It will come back to haunt us as will all of our previous unnecessary wars.
Polybius
(15,368 posts)Now let's get out and never go back.
hlthe2b
(102,197 posts)more than 20 years ago-- and for every armed force dating back to Alexander the Great. This is what happens when our "exceptionalism" overrides any attempt to develop CULTURAL COMPETENCY. The same thing happened with our approach to Iran--before and after the Shah. Had we listened to those on the ground, rather than politicians who knew NOTHING, that might have been a world of difference there too.
It is the pathetic but predictable outcome. No winners. Lots of losers.
JCMach1
(27,555 posts)Graveyard of empires...
crickets
(25,959 posts)Wicked Blue
(5,826 posts)I fear they will suffer intensely
MoonRiver
(36,926 posts)wyn borkins
(1,109 posts)"The Taliban insurgency remains resilient nearly two decades after U.S.-led forces toppled its regime in what led to the United States longest war."
IcyPeas
(21,856 posts)MoonRiver
(36,926 posts)Mr.Bill
(24,264 posts)The worst would be staying.
Just another Democratic President cleaning up a republican mess.
UnderThisLaw
(318 posts)uncertain but so many conservatives are opposed to it I have to think its a good idea
Maru Kitteh
(28,333 posts)It was wrong from the beginning and there was no way to make it right.
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)Rustyeye77
(2,736 posts)but there are bad answers.
MyOwnPeace
(16,925 posts)On Friday, it was announced that U.S. troops were going to be dispatched to Kabul in Afghanistan in order to cover the evacuation of the American embassy. NPR reported that the staff of the embassy had been ordered to destroy all sensitive documents. In the old days, this used to involve burning all the papers, and it was either a signal that somebody was going to
go to war with somebody somewhere, or a sign that somebody somewhere was losing a war badly and felt an urgent and imminent need to cover their tracks. This latest news from Afghanistan strikes me as far more an example of the latter. As NPR also reported:
The Embassy also employs many Afghan workers. Their future was not immediately clear.
Nothing good comes from that sentence. Nothing good at all.
For a number of years now, every time another spasm of violence happened in Afghanistan, I wondered just what in the hell we were still doing there. I understood the initial engagement; no American president could have survived not having retaliated after 9/11. I tried to understand the mission of the ground troops we sent in there despite the fact that I knew Afghanistan historically was a sinkhole that made Vietnam look like the War of Jenkins Ear. I am not sorry at all that we iced Osama bin Laden the way we did. But still, what in hell were we still doing there? Didnt we know about the British and the Soviets? Didnt we know about Alexander the Great, who, after his great victory at Gaugamela, went into that area of Asia and promptly came apart? Frank Holt, in his Into the Land of Bones, explained the long, bloody comeuppance every great power had received when they meddled in that rocky corner of the world.
First, with exuberant expectations, the British Empire gathered in 1838 a grand army to quell the unruly Afghans. The goal was simply to replace one ruler (Dost Muhammed) with another (the exiled Shah Shuja) more amenable to British interests. There have been few military campaigns in British history, writes Major General James Lunt, which were more ineptly planned and more incompetently executed than the first Afghan War; and that is saying a good deal.
they placed Shah Shuja on the throne. This foreign intervention, however, stirred growing resentment among the native peoples even as most of the British troops swaggered back to India. Tribal opposition mounted across Afghanistan, erupting disastrously when terrorists butchered a prominent British official named Alexander Bukhara Burnes. In January 1842, the empires remaining 4,500 soldiers and their 12,000 camp followers retreated from Kabul in a long wintry death-march that only one European survived The Second Afghan War (18781880) commenced with a swift invasion by 33,500 troops.
The Second Afghan War went as bloodily for Great Britain as the first one did, and a General named Sir Frederick Roberts concluded that the best thing for all concerned was to leave Afghanistan to the people who lived there. Roberts advised, according to Holt:
It may not be very flattering to our amour propre, but I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us the less they will dislike us. Should Russia in future years attempt to conquer Afghanistan, or invade India through it, we should have a better chance of attaching the Afghans to our interests if we avoid all interference with them in the meantime.
(There was one upside to the Second Afghan War, albeit a completely fictional one: a Royal Army surgeon named John H. Watson was wounded there and rescued by his intrepid orderly, Murray. He returned to London, where he accepted an offer to share a suite of rooms at 221B Baker Street with an eccentric private detective named Sherlock Holmes.)
We were just the latest Great Power to go crashing into Afghanistan.
Of course, Russia, then d/b/a the Soviet Union, ignored Sir Fredericks warning and marched 100,000 troops into Afghanistan in order to put a puppet in place. The U.S. took Sir Fredericks advice and attached the various tribal chieftains and warlords to our interests in order to bleed the Soviets the way every invader inevitably bleeds out in Afghanistan. That plan succeeded, and then we left, and the bill came due in the fall of 2001. And then we went back in, overtly this time. In 2008, a Russian veteran of their Afghan adventure named Ruslan Aushev gave an interview to the Toronto Globe and Mail.
"Canadians and Americans are learning the hard way. You have been there seven years and you have no prospect of early victory," said Ruslan Aushev, a highly decorated combat veteran who served two tours, totalling nearly five years with the Soviet army in Afghanistan. "We knew by 1985 that we could not win," he recalls. It then took Moscow four more years to extricate hundreds of thousands of troops from Afghanistan, while claiming victory on the way out. Afghanistan was plunged into civil war "We could take any village, any town and drive the mujahedeen out," Mr. Aushev said, recalling his two combat tours, first as an infantry battalion commander and later in charge of a full Soviet regiment - roughly the size of the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan. "But when we handed ground over to the Afghan army or police they would lose it in a week.
"The Taliban may not be able to win militarily but they can't be defeated and sooner or later the Western alliance will be forced with pullout," he warned. Support for the insurgents will grow the longer the foreign armies remain in Afghanistan, he said. Although the Soviets deployed more than 100,000 soldiers across Afghanistan - roughly double the number of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops currently deployed - and trained an Afghan army three times the size of Kabul's current security forces, it was never enough, Mr. Aushev said "There will have to be an accord with the Taliban, because at least 50 per cent of the Afghan population supports them It's impossible to conquer the Afghans ... Alexander the Great couldn't do it, the British couldn't do it, we couldn't do it and the Americans won't do it ... no one can.
What the hell were we doing there, and why didnt we listen to anyone who had been?
Now, as has been the case in so many of our recent wars, nothing is left but the bitter recriminations. The Taliban likely will own Afghanistan by Labor Day at the very latest, because they are the best organized power gang in the country. They likely will be as ruthless and retrograde as they were the last time. Whatever gains the women of Afghanistan had made under the umbrella of United States protection likely will be violently swept away. The Seventh Century will make one more comeback in the strange bell jar that is that country.
There is nothing we can do about any of that. There never was anything we could do about that, short of leaving a massive army of occupation there in virtual perpetuity. We had one specific purpose in mindto bring to justice, one way or another, the people who had committed atrocities in this country on September 11, 2001. That we could do. That we did. And then some think-tank cowboys and honorarium-fattened hyenas decided to lie the country into an invasion of Iraq before our work in Afghanistan, whatever it was supposed to be, was done. Soon, we had two slow-rolling calamities on our hands, and Iraq shuffled Afghanistan off the main stage. This was another terrible idea. History shows that Afghanistan is a marvelous environment for those. Theres a limit to the crops you can grow there, but its a highly fertile place for Great Power foolishness.
We will now hear a lot from people who accuse us of betraying Afghanistan, as though 20 years, 2,400 KIA, and more than $2 trillion was insufficient. None of those people have produced an adequate answer to the question of what the hell we were doing there, and what the hell we would do there for the next 10, 20, or 50 years. Sooner or later, we have to learn the lessons of history, because weve been deaf to them for so long. In Vietnam, we shouldve learned that the only people who really want the places in which we choose to make war are the people who live there. But we didnt, and Afghanistan is further proof of that. We hung around there until we became part of the historical architecture of the place. As Frank Holt writes:
When in turn the British, Russians, and Americans each seized Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, they occupied a city founded by Alexander himself and still bearing the Arabic version of his name. When U.S. troops charged on horseback against the Taliban strongholds of Mazar-i-Sharif, they rode past the crumbling walls of Alexanders main camp, and the capital of the Greek kingdom that endured there for centuries.
What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan? Leaving, the way everyone always has.
Retrograde
(10,132 posts)to witness this debacle and have the blame laid at his feet. (Yeah, I'm naive enough still to believe people will be held responsible for their warmongering.)
Nexus2
(1,261 posts)It is going to lead to a train wreck, no doubt. Thing is, nothing was every going to get better there. We've been there 20 years and the Afghan national government is 100% as dysfunctional as it was the day we set it up.
All staying there will do is kill more Americans. We stay there another 20 years then 20 years worth of Americans will die and then the government will collapse the day we leave. So might as well pull the band aid off and get the humanitarian disaster started now.
NewHendoLib
(60,013 posts)good way forward from that point on. No win situation. Getting out of there is essential.
LymphocyteLover
(5,641 posts)Tetrachloride
(7,826 posts)this movie is one scenario
GoodRaisin
(8,921 posts)I'm not smart enough to second guess our exit strategy, but it's clear that Bush didn't have one when we weren't out by the end of his second administration. Obviously Joe Biden does have a strategy and commitment to get our soldiers out. Hopefully it's successful and we get all our people and friends out of harms way in the process. I have no doubt he will do his best to achieve that end. If we have to send troops back in long enough to achieve that, then okay. It's better he's doing it instead of a stupid president.
Tetrachloride
(7,826 posts)LastLiberal in PalmSprings
(12,577 posts)There was no evidence that either Saddam Hussein or Afghanistan had anything to do with 9-11. There was evidence that the hijackers were nearly all Saudis, and Saudi money paid for their flight lessons and living expenses in the U.S. The Afghanis don't know anything about 9-11, and there's an entire generation that has been raised in American-occupied Afghanistan. There was no good way to end our participation in this disaster, but now that it's over there will no longer be spouses and children who suffered the loss of a loved one who was killed in Dubya's war.
"All the great presidents were war time presidents," had said in an interview. When I read that I just knew he was going start a war.
gopiscrap
(23,733 posts)Iggo
(47,546 posts)Now. Ten years ago. Ten years from now.
Deminpenn
(15,273 posts)The US could give the non-taliban army as much training and equipment as they wanted but we could not give them the will to fight.
The same ending would have happened regardless.
Tetrachloride
(7,826 posts)pansypoo53219
(20,968 posts)JI7
(89,244 posts)made ?