American Politics Discussion Thread

[superdeath]

We Americans dont like to keep it civil. We'd rather 3rd party ourselves into every conflict

We have people playing civ 4 that were alive for Nam'? Wow

[Jowy]

I don't know much about Afghanistan, but for the country to fall a couple of days after USA starts leaving, it doesn't seem like they managed to do anything over there.

[superdeath]

I don't know much about Afghanistan, but for the country to fall a couple of days after USA starts leaving, it doesn't seem like they managed to do anything over there.

we got a ton of money building our military industrial complex.

[Bobchillingworth]

It's not great for the people of Afghanistan, but 20 years, several thousand lives, and over a trillion invested was far more than enough. One of the key lessons of counterinsurgency operations is that a more powerful force intervening on behalf of the government beset by insurgents cannot achieve victory if they want it more than their local partners.

The deposed government of Afghanistan had an entire generation and uncountable fortunes granted to it, which could have been invested in the sort of physical and social infrastructure necessary to have a functioning civil society, cohesive national identify, and a citizenry with enough "skin in the game" that they would be willing to assume potentially serious risk on its behalf. Instead it developed expertise only in graft, cronyism, embezzlement, and corruption of all kinds on an unimaginable scale. Now time has finally run out, and it has been overthrown by heavily armed, uneducated reactionaries, who will inevitably proceed to drag whatever remains of the country into premodernity.


Maybe there's a lesson or two somewhere in there, I don't know.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I feel USA could have won if they didn't overextend by invading Iraq. GWB was extremely eager to invade because no-fly zone couldn't last forever and USA wouldn't get another chance. So not invading is throwing the Kurds under the bus.

Iraq goverment held on because, unlike Taliban, ISIS blew their load before the US left. So USA should have lost both so I think the moral is "If you chase two rabbits, you lose them both".

[Bobchillingworth]

ISIS transitioning to conventional military warfare too early is indeed one reason they lost, but likely not the most important. The government of Iraq also recieved material support to varying degrees from almost every regional power, and several international ones, who all recognized ISIS as a common threat, whereas in comparison it's an open secret that countries like Pakistan almost certainly provided covert support to the Taliban. Likely the most critical difference is that ISIS did not give Iraq's Shia majority nor its various non-Sunni minorities an "out"; even soldiers who are badly-led, underpaid, poorly-trained, and generally unmotivated will typically fight if flight isn't an option and the alternative is annihilation. The Taliban conversely have been negotiating peaceful surrenders for months now. They may look toward retribution once the eyes of the international community inevitably wander away to the next shiny object, but at least up till now the choice for an Afghan Army soldier wasn't a binary between "fight or die".

[Cyneheard]

Keep in mind that there's two separate questions here - they're connected, but not identical:

1) Should we have withdrawn?

2) Was it a well-executed withdrawal?

For #1, I think that's a clear yes. Note that there wasn't a particularly viable "keep the status quo forever" without sending in 10s of ks of more troops - the Taliban have been continually gaining ground, just slowly, until the withdrawal started and then it became "all at once."

For #2, could it have been executed better? Probably, but basically the only way it goes smoother is if we more explicitly said "everyone who works with us needs to leave NOW because the government isn't going to survive and therefore neither would you" which can accelerate the process faster than you can get people out. I'm sure the people making decisions didn't expect the government to fall in a matter of days.

And one reason it was executed poorly was that Trump's deal with the Taliban in 2020 let them get all their people back (including their new President of Afghanistan).

It doesn't help that everything has to be flown in/out.

[Gustaran]

I watched a 40 minute video by a Paratrooper of the German army who was deployed in Afghanistan around 2011 to train the Afghan army. After listening to him, the current outcome doesn't seem that surprising, at least for the German area of deployment. Some interesting points for me:

- Only 20% of the Afghan population live in Urban areas in cities located around the "Ring Road", 80% live in rural areas that are sometimes not even accessible for military vehicles.

- The majority don't see themselves as Afghan, but their loyalty belongs to their specific ethnic group or their village, so not many people have reason to fight for a central "Afghan" government.

- Apparently in 2011, 10 years after the misson started, German soldiers didn't even have complete reliable road maps of the rural areas in their deployment zone. They would basically come through villages, where the locals encountered an ISAF or Afghan soldier for the first time in 10 years.

- In the rural areas, there is no independant judicial or democratic policitical system. People follow a traditional code of laws (Pashtunwali). Important decisions are made by an assembly of elders. Hence, nobody is going to fight for democracy or an independent judicial system.

- Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. Rural villages lack road access, running water, electricity. In these circumstances, almost nobody cares about equal rights for women. One takeaway seemed to be that the lack of infrastructure projects severely harmed all social progress. If you can't offer people something tangible to improve their everyday lives, why should they change their social structure?

- Last but not least, there are the other well-known problems: Active Afghan soldiers who are drug addicts, most people only joining the army for the pay, corrupt superior officers who fake soldier numbers and keep the pay, terrible health care for soldiers, soldiers setting up personal checkpoints to extort money from civilians, etc.


From a strategical kind of view, IMHO Trump's "negotiation" was the final nail in the coffin. The best achievable outcome would probably have been some sort of power sharing agreement with the Taliban to preserve some of the liberties in the urban parts of the country. But the international troops should have stayed, until that treaty was signed. Once you declare a fixed point in time, at which you are going to withdraw all your troops, your leverage is gone.

[Tarkeel]

Thanks Gustaran, that was pretty insightful.

I've found that another good source of insight into the situation is actually a game, A Distant Plain, which is part of the COIN (COunter-INtelligence) series. It's an assymetrical game where the four factions have very different victory conditions:

• The Coalition forces want to spend their money on local forces to build support for the legitimate government while getting their troops out.
  
• The Government wants to stop the coalition from spending all their money on the Afghan forces and police so that they can funnel it into patronage instead.
  
• The Taliban wants establish bases inside Afghanistan and turn the people agains the government and support the Taliban instead.
  
• The Warlords wants to be left alone in a power-vacuum and grow their opium without interference.
  

[Gustaran]

Saw this video on Reddit the other day. After watching this, I really start to wonder why nobody seemed to have major doubts about the actual capabilities of the Afghan army.