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It's not about giving up on them. It's about being willing to accept that you haven't lived up to those values and make the changes necessary to uphold them.

While still in the wrong, how seriously should China or Russia take the country that lead the invasion and occupation of Iraq/Afghanistan for 20 odd years when it offers it's condemnation of their own ambitions?

To be frank, how can we expect anyone to take our condemnation seriously when we are currently doing the same things or have let the same things go unpunished in recent memory. We refuse to hold our own torturers and war criminals to proper account.



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My feeling is that we tried. We tried for 20 years. It didn't work.

At some point, you have to throw in the towel and cut your losses—even when those losses are really, unimaginably terrible.

There's a lot of good we could do in the world with the resources we put into Afghanistan.


The US media may bemoan the end of our occupation of Afghanistan, but most Americans are sick of military deployments. It’s one of the main reasons we pulled back.

We are far from perfect, but unlike the CCP, we have the courage to address our shortcomings directly. We even record them in our history books for future generations to learn. Things have gotten better over time because of it. We don’t suffer from cowardice nor do we hide from our mistakes.


I disagree. Fixing the mistreatment of Afghanistan requires voting for politicians committed to changing US foreign policy. Changing China's policy involves staying the current course of using military and financial pressure to force countries into doing what we want.

China, at least, is not limited by public perception, and will have no qualms about doing war crimes, and they will call it conquering.

On the other hand, it seems a lot of Afghan soldiers deserted to the other side. They see no upside to the new Afghan regime.


Counterpoint: Afghanistan.

It's become a rite of passage for empires to try and fail there. Next up, China?


The best rebuttal I've heard to this line of thinking is: "Some say we lost Afghanistan because we weren't willing to be brutal enough. Well, the Russians were willing to be brutal enough, yet they also lost Afghanistan."

> Afghanistan would beg to differ.

You're not looking at this from the Afghan perspective. From the American and Russian perspective, yes, occupying Afghanistan is a painful deathtrap. But for the Afghans their occupation is...also a painful deathtrap. Eventually winning (or even sort of winning) a war of low-tech attrition involves sacrificing a lot of lives, losing political control, and having foreign soldiers soldiers patrol your territory imposing their own laws. Afghanistan has to go through all this because they don't have a credible way to deter an invasion. That's why they keep getting invaded!


If there's something that Russians don't like, they need to fix it themselves.

You should Google Afghanistan, or pretty much any Middle-Eastern country that was liberated by the Americans. See how well it ended.


If they did it in Afghanistan, utterly losing and achieving nothing (at least good for them), they can do it again. Especially if its all their fault and incompetence and self-caused harm. Why should rest of the world babysit some mobster maniac's ego so his feelings are not hurt when he is killing around is beyond me.

You understand he will do it again and again, until he cannot or he is dead. Lets work on the former part for now by draining his military of any capabilities.


When people said the same thing about Iraq and Afghanistan, what did you do?

> it cured the losers of glorifying war. Maybe Afghanistan can do the same?

Afghanistan hasn't glorified any wars. Did you forget that the US invaded Afghanistan, not the other way around?


Some Saudis that we betrayed in Iraq flew some planes into some buildings in America so we spend two decades in Afghanistan, kicking in doors and blowing up weddings, mosques and schools as we attempt to install a pedophile government unsuccessfully.

If Americans wanted the moral high ground here we shouldn't have traded it for Raytheon's bottom line.

We have no leg to stand on and weak leadership so Russia made it's move.


The Russians also thought victory in Afghanistan was possible. Their humiliation was absolute.

The US' mistake was not capitalizing on Russia's failure, choosing instead to make exactly the same mistake.


Are you still drinking the Kool aid? Officers tend to have an existential crisis whenever their missions don't work out.

Afghanistan has rotten substrate - with all of its absurd "green on blue" attacks, the panicky morale of its military, the corruption and kickbacks, its lack of education and religious fundamentalism, it's misogyny and pederasty, and it's general incompetence. They are hopeless but we couldn't let go. We had 20 years of Afghanistan showing its worth - and it was not $2T.

Look at Ukraine and how effective their citizenry is when they are given NATO training and equipment. When Russia invaded did you see Ukrainian men fleeing and falling off of airplane landing gear? Ukraine is worth $2T and 20 years.


> IMO, "nation building" is always an impossible mission. The objective should have been to attack, destroy the enemy, and leave - immediately.

They should never do anything that makes the lives of ordinary Afghans worse who suffered more from the Taliban than the US. You can’t just bomb a country, create a power vacuum, and nope out of there. Moral cowardice in the extreme.

As a counter example see Japan and Iraq.


You don't have to neglect that no country is invaded to spread democracy. And people learn from that. Not from what you say, they learn from what you do and that is defending your interests. The spite will be larger than the love for freedom and democracy, hell, the US doesn't currently make the impression that they like freedom very much.

That is not a clear cut in Afghanistan. Perhaps the US just invaded because the Russian tried and it was believed that its hub location could enact control on neighboring countries. Terrorism netted the needed excuse, but it continued after Bin Laden was out of the picture.


Instead of demonizing them, think a little, inform yourself and try to understand why they are doing.

Afghanistan was at the center of multiple proxy wars between America and Russia, all because of America feeling threatened by communism. The US then helped fundamentalists get into leader positions which further threw the country into disarray. Then to top it all off they started another beautiful war to look for Bin Laden.

I haven't looked into it in a while, but maybe the US still isn't out of there because of a lacking exit strategy.

Imagine living in a country that has continuously been in the crosshairs of foreign fundamentalist, political and capitalist interests for the better part of half a century. Do you really think they know or even care about the effects of their actions? Do you vote caring about Afghanistan? Are you outraged when another cultural site is destroyed by foreign or local terrorism?

We have the luxury of lying back in a comfy bed with a roof above our heads, some form of stable income and not worrying that tomorrow a market square close by will be rubble. Our women can go to schools (and so can we) and we aren't at the mercy of crazy people who want to violently, actively overthrow our government.


The cynicism in the commentary or justifications regarding how Afghanistan was handled is really extraordinary. They can be summarized basically as such: "We've spent $x trillion and what did we! get in return?" "Do you expect our troops to stay for another 20 years?"

The country was invaded without much competent planning or regard for the consequences, it was then dominated and shaped by its occupiers for two decades, but somehow it's Afghanistan's own fault for being left with a heavily corrupt and untrustworthy government and military.

Just as with the Kurds, the US abandoned a hassle once the opportunity arrived.


Ignoring morality entirely for a moment, it is rather remarkable that the US watched the Russian experience in Afghanistan and said, "yes, we'd like that for us."1
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