Hey, I don’t think anyone was invading Afghanistan on behalf of Israel, nor would anyone consider Afghanistan a significant security risk to Israel. This is a poor read of the situation
Something that we did get was better positioning to launch intelligence operations in Iran. Afghanistan and Iran share a considerable border. It would presume that if the United States felt Iran was a threat, building some type of forward intelligence operation Afghanistan might be beneficial.
There's a huge difference. With Afghanistan, Americans living in Chicago or New York or Houston were halfway across the world. This is here. Gaza is 35 miles from Tel Aviv and 40 miles from Jerusalem.
I don't know what the goals were in Afghanistan. Short of ICBMs, I don't see how Afghanistan could ever threaten the US. The threat against us is local and immediate and has already proven to be real.
I hear your point. I agree we have been completely unsuccessful in Afghanistan. My point is that the commenter is naive in making this about Israel. American support for invading after 9/11 was foolish, but it was also extremely high. We did not invade or occupy to support Israeli security interests, we did it in support of our own and we were wrong.
Afghanistan had to be dealt with to avoid having a stateless state where actors like OBL could operate with impunity. US presence there is a thorn in the side of Iran, Russia, China, India and Pakistan.
It sucks to be an Afghan, sandwiched between these sparring great powers.
I've always wondered if the big unspoken reason for establishing American bases in Afghanistan and Iraq was to surround Iran. They perfectly sandwich Iran in from the east and west. Maybe with that clash seeming less imminent it was time to pull out. Geographical advantage is behind most military decisions but it's never enough of a reason to get public support for invading countries. Hence, the need to defeat terrorism and get Bin Laden.
That’s perhaps not the best example because the US was deeply involved in Afghani politics from the early 1970s and at least indirectly responsible for fucking up countless of Afghani lives prior to 9/11.
But that said, I agree with your general point: The relationship between the US and Afghanistan is and was very different to the relationship between Israel and Palestine.
There’s a whole lot of (literally) nothing between Afghanistan and anything worth bombing in Russia or China, and the US has military presence much, much closer to the important parts of those countries.
Afghanistan would be good to have in a war with Iran, but I honestly think that the opportunity for that is gone. AFAIK Iraq has gone from being a US client state to nominally independent, and Russia’s plan to prop up the Assad regime worked out very well for them.
Because the US government is a) strong and b) doesn't think there's one.
Neither of those is true of Afghanistan. The Taliban is quite capable of at least holding on, and the non-Taliban Afghani government isn't opposed to US support.
As evidence of this, President Ghani's reaction was to promise check and balances to reduce casualties, not kick the US out of the country.
Afghanistan is different from Iran. Even today, Iranians are highly educated and they have historically been highly educated. Most of Afghanistan that the US was trying to mobilized was uneducated and living in tiny villages with no real stake as to who won or lost. With Iran's highly educated population and militarized, they have a much better chance of standing up to the fascist government and enacting change.
I think this is forgetting a few things: The US benefits immensely by no longer being in Afghanistan, its a landlocked nation with limited accessible resources. For the first time in 20 years the US will not be bogged down in an active warzone. This doesnt benefit China or Russia. It might even get the US to finally realize their biggest risk is cyberwarfare/sabotage instead of blindly spending the equivalent construction cost of a high school on an Abrams tank
I think your point is pretty cogent, the comparison is not bad. But it suffers from a pretty big flaw in that the US hadn't spent the preceding several decades subjugating Afghanis or encroaching upon their land; didn't have a government whose members and officials openly issued bigoted and racist statements against Afghanis (though I am sure there were a few Congressional Republicans who may have bucked that trend, I don't remember), etc.
US foreign policy isn't nice or morally sound, but one thing it was not doing in the run-up to 9/11 and its subsequent invasion of Afghanistan was directly fucking up Afghani lives and killing Afghani children. Same can't be said for Israel in its relationship to the Palestinians.
There is virtually no benefit for Americans to be in Afghanistan.
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