Afghanistan

[akiva]

is huge.

One of things I don't understand is that many enlisted military people have a strong loyalty to the military as an institution, even though the officers (especially the generals) often do things that hurt the enlisted people. In this case, for example, a lot of soldiers were being sent to a war that officers believed was fundamentally flawed--and many of those soldiers were killed or wounded. I get the loyalty to your fellow soldiers/sailors/airmen/marines. But to the institution? I don't understand--the institution often fucks them.

To be fair, I don't have a military background, and I don't know many people in the military, so I could be lacking understanding because of that.

[Stan]

I guess many people like the idea enough to divorce themselves from the reality. Analogous to Trump's popularity. I don't know how military people can be conservative after what they witness.

Very few politicians are pro-military. They are pro-military industrial complex. Military spending is so huge that they get away with massively inflating item costs with plenty of room to hide kickbacks and deep pockets can give big contributions. But the majority of national level politicians are from moneyed class and don't give a crap about the poor people making up the majority of the military, who might as well be another species. For example, I think Bush Sr. was the last president with real war experience.

We could have gotten out of Afghanistan in less than a year after going in. Many of the Taliban are actually Pashtun without a their own country. They wanted to negotiate. But we went all MacArthur in Korea and had to be hardass until we made things worse. One of the factors is that there are more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan and Pakistan doesn't want to see any kind of strong independent Pashtun region - they prefer a weak buffer state so they kept funding groups until Taliban attacks started hitting Pakistani targets. Notice how the only way we got bin Laden was by keeping Pakistan out of the loop; they are not good friends and we started the relationship mainly because of Russian invasion of Afghanistan.

[Mike]

[Stan]

Yea, I was finding it hard to maintain this and the mimekiller personas.

[Kyle]

[Phoebe]

Why does no-one alert me?!

[poorpete]

Dang

“We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich. We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”

A dishonest representation of what America does (in fact sometimes we invade democratic countries to make them authoritarian), but as close as I've seen to a idealized US military mission statement. For better or worse, that's supposed to be what the world's police force is supposed to do. And under that ideal, it kind of shows how Afghanistan was a just war but also a failure.

Blah.

[Phoebe]

Tragic that we find out now what was suspected to be true all along, and at what terrible cost?

[Kyle]

The Atlantic has a great article about what we could have done with the 2300 lives lost and the over $1 trillion dollars wasted. I remember the scorn my wife and I got from everyone, including our liberal friends, when we opposed going into Afghanistan right after 911. But this is why. (Yes, I’m tastelessly saying I told you so. But I did tell you. So...)

[poorpete]

I was against the war at first only in that
1. I was sick and scared from watching too many people die that month
2. I was worried I'd get drafted
The Iraq War I was more in-tune with people who warned that the WMD evidence was thin/nonexistent and the ties to Al Qaeda were thin/nonexistent.

Aside: If you look back at 9/11 response from Iraq, a kinda "sad to see, but the US had it coming" should be a text-book example of what not to say to your enemy. Then fast forward to the terrorist attack on the Irani Parliament in 2017 and the US gave pretty much the exact response. it was pitiful.