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."
> "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 was not "lost", it was given up on. The US et al held the Taliban at bay for twenty years and allowed many areas of the country to thrive† (for their definition of "thrive", like women going to school).
After many years it was decided (first by Trump, and then by Biden) that it wasn't worth it any more and left.
There was no dire need to leave, they were not loosing battles, or lost any ground.
It is similar with Vietnam: the US won every major engagement they were in, and were able to support an independent South Vietnam. It continued up to 1973 where a North and South Vietnam were formed (kind of like the Koreas):
IMHO there is no reason why a South Vietnam could not have continued to exist if the US stay in, just like a South Korea still exists due to continued support.
† Of course folks like the Taliban did not consider many things 'thriving', but rather something along the lines of 'corruption of society'. AFAICT, there was/is a large cultural divide urban and rural areas, with different views in how the country should run (tribal, democratic) and go in.
> Is it because the US isn't willing to go total war and massacre civilians until they give up Mongolian style or what?
Home field advantage and the ability to use guerrilla tactics have always been a tremendous advantage, and often it's enough to make it prohibitively expensive to conquer or subjugate a given population rather than just leaving them alone. This, combined with terrain, is what makes Afghanistan in particular so defensible in parts.
For the US in particular, there are also levels of brutality that we're not willing to resort to, which only helps to tip the scale towards "too expensive to be worth it". Russia had much better luck with their counterinsurgency efforts in Chechnya, but then again, Russia is willing to resort to measures that the US is not. Though even then, the desire to maintain Russian territorial integrity probably justified higher costs than the desire, in the 70's and 80's, to maintain communist domination of Afghanistan.
Lol. The US is far from that powerful. You don't win wars by annihilation, you win wars by achieving political goals. The US wasn't able to reach these goals in no small part because of too much collateral damage.
If you want to know what a more sucessful campaign in Afghanistan looked like, the USSR invaded Afghanistan and their allied regime lasted over a year until Yeltsin caused the to fall and gave Afghanistan to the Taliban by imposing sanctions.
You'll note that it's not increased brutality that was successful. It was having actually effective allies on the ground that made and broke the Soviet campaign.
What's more, the campaign of shock in the initial stages of invasion was brutal, and did a lot of collateral damage, and didn't work and actually was counterproductive.
It was only when the Soviets and their allies managed to actually get a competent and motivated Afghan military towards the later stages of the war that the war started turning in their favour.
The US was never able to achieve their political goals and the US-backed government was never competent and motivated even after twenty years. It was a failure of the US military to achieve its goals. No amount of additional collateral damage would have done anything, it was simply a failure. In fact, less morals would have made things worse.
Also, see Iraq which was even more brutal and still completely unsuccessful with Iraq veering under Iranian control.
You can certainly argue the afghani's won against both the russians and the united states tactically, that being said you wouldn't argue that afghanistan is doing better than russia or the united states as a consequence of "winning" said wars.
> The US + Allies lost because they didn't have the will to obliterate everything.
The Soviet Union did that and also lost. The only way to win in Afghanistan is by fighting in Pakistan. And that means a full invasion, not a half-measure as was tried and failed in Laos and Cambodia.
Both the US and the Soviets lost because Afghanistan isn't a country in a traditional sense; it's just an area of land with _lots_ of regions countrolled by war lords that doesn't have allegiance to anything central (i.e. "the country Afghanistan").
It's impossible to win a war against something like that, unless - as you correctly points out - you obliterate everything.
I mean the US clearly had the military capability to "win" against anything in Afghanistan. But effective occupations and regime change are brutal. It's not the 1940s - the US public of today would not stand for something as intensive as the occupation of Germany after WW2, for example.
Afghanistan won because they literally lived in caves and herded goats; they had nothing to lose but their lives. Modern adversaries to Russia have plenty to lose.
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!
Russia doesn't care about pacifying Ukraine. If the US had approached Afghanistan with a mindset similar to Russia, there would be no Afghans left, except the few that swore loyalty out of fear. Any dissent would mean death. The US clearly had different goals. Ones that are much much harder to achieve than just killing everyone.
Afghanistan succeeded in getting the Soviets out in the end. With the US they made the mistake of badly provoking a powerful nation. It may not be the best example, but it works.
I think there is nuance there but it may derail the intent of my comment: It is not a foregone conclusion that an invasion with intent of regime change and control is actually a viable strategy. The point of the Afghanistan inclusion is that the relative miltary strengths were even more lopsided yet it was not enough for Russia nor the US to maintain control. Insurgencies are devastating and the more legitimate they are, the more likely they are to maintain support.
Interesting reading. A comparison of the situations in Afghanistan just before and after the American withdrawal, and Ukraine just before and after the Russian invasion, would be interesting. From my outside, uninformed perspective, the Taliban had a lot fewer resources than Russia, and the U.S. had been helping, equipping, and training Afghanistan's military for a lot longer. Clearly, the Afghanistan people have a history of warfare which refutes any idea that they cannot fight, so it would be interesting to see an informed analysis of why the Afghan government did so much worse at fighting an enemy that was not nearly so powerful.
Afghans eventually withered down close Soviet air support. Soviet strategy seemed to be winning with new air and infantry tactics. Until they started losing hundreds of aircraft. If I remember correctly it was mostly heavy guns and not US Stingers that did the trick.
The enemy is well aware that all they have to do is win an endurance war against an inflexible bureaucracy that bleeds money and outlast the patience of a fickle populace. This was demonstrated recently enough in Vietnam. US strategy was losing, even though they won almost every fight in both wars.
It would take a lot more than this one cheap fighter to outlast the Afghans. At least body count was better this time.
Russia invaded Afghanistan for the same reason the US invaded Vietnam - an imperative to spread their ideology. Both failed for the same reason too. But natural resources weren’t even in the frame.
How about Russia in Afghanistan? Surely they had much less accountability and a similar technology gap (yes, I know the US supplied the fighters with some advanced weaponry). Yet, the had the same outcome as the US.
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