American Politics Discussion Thread

[Bobchillingworth]

Wow, total acquittal? Thought it would be mistrial without prejudice. Bad day to be an arsonist terrorist in America.

I see you're trying hard to supplant Ipecac as RB's #1 cringe edgelord.


In practical terms, this will encourage both people to shoot at demonstrators, and for demonstrators to arm themselves. Though I suspect most law enforcement officers will cheer the verdict, this will make their jobs much more dangerous.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

What do you think of the idea that the Afghan withdrawal was deliberately mishandled by the Mil-Ind complex so as to punish Biden for ordering it to go ahead?

Kabul fell so quickly because the Afghan goverment pocketed solder's money. The speed caused the chaos. Now, if you do things that account for the speed of the collapse, you are acknowledging the Afghan goverment will implode and are explicitly handing the country over to the Taliban.

Afghan government post US-withdrawal lasted negative days (US was still leaving). After Soviets left, afghanistan lasted for a few years longer despite US supplying mujaheds with arms and equipment. This is what happens when you educate kids in Afghanistan that war never happened:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asi...story.html

> A series of government-issued textbooks funded by the United States and several foreign aid organizations do just that, pausing history in 1973. There is no mention of the Soviet war, the mujaheddin, the Taliban or the U.S. military presence. In their efforts to promote a single national identity, Afghan leaders have deemed their own history too controversial.

This is what you get when you come in to build abstract notions of "democracy" (which was never attained either), rather than schools, hospitals, and theaters.

[Bobchillingworth]

But the U.S. and dozens of other countries and innumerable nonprofits did invest countless billions in developing civil infrastructure, including hospitals and schools. Blaming the collapse on democracy promotion is fashionable but shallow and unsatisfactory analysis. Numerous factors at play, but the simplest answers are sometimes the best: the Afghan government was rife with systemic corruption which went largely unaddressed for two decades, and very few soldiers are going to willingly fight and quite possibly die for a regime which is stealing their pay. They will however do things such as sell their weapons and ammunition to their erstwhile enemies, and then take bribes to surrender.

I doubt that replacing democracy with Soviet communism or some sort of Western-backed traditional Afghan feudal monarchy or whatever would have done much to address the core issues of waste, fraud, and theft within their government. Reform needed to be imposed by donor and allied nations in a way which would have been difficult and inconvenient in at least the short-term, and therefore never occurred to any substantial or effective degree.

[Jowy]

Basically a school shooter just walked free. He just decided to shoot up a pro-black protest instead of his high school.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Give the government control of your body for a vaccination and you set the precedent to give them control of your body for everything.  Let's reduce obesity, that would be a good thing, let's deny access to ice cream if you don't have your healthy bodyweight pass.  Let's improve physical health, that would be a good thing, let's issue mandatory Fitbits and fire you from your job if you haven't done your compulsory hours of exercise this week.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/...hould-you/

Corporations are much more likely to readily abuse you than the government. But that doesn't align with your libertarian ideology, so you conveniently ignore all that. OR should the gov't prevent corporations from doing this? But isn't that a violation of corporate freedom (corporations are people after all )? (It's just all internal contradictions here man)

But also, T-hawk, if you and your ilk had not been against mask mandates, we wouldn't be in this position. And if you can't tell apart a mask mandate from a vaccine mandate, you need to reevaluate how you conceive the world past your addled libertarianism. Maybe start by reading Kant.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

But the U.S. and dozens of other countries and innumerable nonprofits did invest countless billions in developing civil infrastructure, including hospitals and schools.  Blaming the collapse on democracy promotion is fashionable but shallow and unsatisfactory analysis.  Numerous factors at play, but the simplest answers are sometimes the best: the Afghan government was rife with systemic corruption which went largely unaddressed for two decades, and very few soldiers are going to willingly fight and quite possibly die for a regime which is stealing their pay.  They will however do things such as sell their weapons and ammunition to their erstwhile enemies, and then take bribes to surrender. 

I doubt that replacing democracy with Soviet communism or some sort of Western-backed traditional Afghan feudal monarchy or whatever would have done much to address the core issues of waste, fraud, and theft within their government.  Reform needed to be imposed by donor and allied nations in a way which would have been difficult and inconvenient in at least the short-term, and therefore never occurred to any substantial or effective degree.

Much of that investment went absolutely nowhere, mostly because of said Afghan government. Soviet investment went places because it was done in a heavy-fisted way with a willing collaboratory gov't which was not there afterwards for the US to use.

> I doubt that replacing democracy with Soviet communism or some sort of Western-backed traditional Afghan feudal monarchy 

Yeah you're right on that point. The soviet approach would have failed eventually in Afghanistan even if you subtract the massive US funding, it simply would've taken more time. However, disarming the northern alliance and trying to create national identity without relying on tribal past (read article i sent earlier) really was the key mistake by the US. Perhaps nothing could've addressed the corruption, but keeping the Taliban in check was not impossible. That's where the democracy promotion is the problem - it prevented the US from taking action that made sense in the context of Afghanistan by guiding policy in the wrong direction.

[Bobchillingworth]

I think you're right that the insistence on trying to prematurely develop a national identify with a centralized power structure in Kabul was a mistake, at least in retrospect. Devolving / dispersing state authority at the regional level would have risks of its own, though- allowing tribes too much leeway and entirely abandoning the concept of a unifying ideology beyond loyalty to one's clan could be a quick path to internecine ethnic conflict and encourages the emergence of warlords to fill resulting power vacuums.

I doubt the Taliban will have much more success in the long-term; their radical ideology isn't particularly popular and will be difficult to sustain over time, meaning I don't anticipate it being an adequate force to keep the country stable and unified. People are fond of saying that history shows Afghanistan cannot be conquered, but that isn't true at all; the Greeks, Mongols, Persians, English, Russians, Taliban, U.S., and others I'm surely forgetting all overran the territory with general ease. The problems are that it's difficult to hold, and almost impossible to govern. Ultimately it'll likely splinter into smaller ethno-sectarian states, some of which may be absorbed by its neighbors and others further divide on a political basis, but there's plenty of good reasons why regional powers have a vested interest in that not happening.

[BING_XI_LAO]

Basically the West put the cart before the horse, thinking that you start with liberal values which then create prosperity and stability, when it's actually the other way around. South Korea, Taiwan, Spain, Portugal, and Chile all went through a post-WW2 period of military rule that then led into a fairly bloodless transition to democracy, why not follow that precedent? I still can't get over the absurdity of disbanding the Iraqi Army.

What about even setting up monarchical rule in the countries post-invasion, sourced either from the oil states or from Afghanistan's old royal bloodline which is probably kicking around in Monaco? Would that have been a ridiculous LARP?

[Boro]

The main issue of trying to build a nation in afghanistan is the lack of the thing called "the afghan nation". Looking at the cia world factbook we can see the ethnolinguisgic composition as the following:

Pashtun 42%, Tajik 27%, Hazara 9%, Uzbek 9%, Aimak 4%, Turkmen 3%, Baloch 2%, other 4%

https://web.archive.org/web/201310142009...de=sas&#af

In the most recent factbook where languages are listed, (sum greater than 100% because of bilingualism) these are the languages:

Afghan Persian or Dari (official) 78% (Dari functions as the lingua franca), Pashto (official) 50%, Uzbek 10%, English 5%, Turkmen 2%, Urdu 2%, Pashayi 1%, Nuristani 1%, Arabic 1%, Balochi 1%, other <1% (2017 est.)

For who speaks which, Pashtuns are the pashto speakers, and the taliban are mainly a pashto nationalist group. Tajik and Hazara both speak Persian, and the tajiks are essentially the same people as the iranian persians. Hazara are people of turkic origins who adopted Persian during the time of persian empire centuries ago.

Uzbeks, Turkmens and Balochi are nationalities that were stuck outside their home nation's borders when the feudal and colonial powers drew today's border lines across the land. Balochi in particular are a nation mostly in the west of Pakistan, which is also a multinational formation with artificial borders.

This is the national situation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region of central asia.

edit: here is the ethnic map of Afghanistan, from Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/item/80692154/

Ethnic map of Pakistan: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g7640.cp000...74,0.169,0

[Bobchillingworth]

You're correct of course on several counts, about Afghanistan's externally-imposed borders, ethno-sectarian-linguistic makeup (though Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmen are also all Turkic peoples, with Tajiks also having neighboring Tajikistan), and I would give better than even odds for the country to break up generally along those lines within a couple generations, barring some new international intervention.

That stated, most countries are made up of conglomerations of different groups, even if you ignore Western nations founded as European colonies and populated by immigrants from an array of cultures. Some are more stable than others, and ethnically-based insurgent groups obviously aren't uncommon, but no serious person would argue that, say, India isn't a "real" nation, even though it has borders largely defined by England, dozens of ethnic groups, 400+ languages, and less than half the population actually speaks Hindi. Point being that the aforementioned factors in-and-of themselves don't mean Afghanistan is necessarily terminally deficient in its capacity to exist as a unified state.