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Notes -
Have you seen the Afghanistan papers? Or even Hanania's thread on the Afghanistan papers? The whole war was a massive farce, absolutely staggering waste and corruption. Soldiers on the ground knew this, they were grinding their teeth at our Afghan 'allies' raping children in the barracks. The Soviet Union had all kinds of problems but their puppet state had 1000x the integrity of our puppet state, theirs actually outlasted the Soviet Union, ours disintegrated before we even finished leaving.
It was barely even a war, there was no goal behind it. The revolving door of commanders (16 commanders of ISAF in about 12 years) had no idea what they were supposed to do. One guy arrived and went 'well, I may as well try and raise Afghanistan a few places on child mortality indices'. We were fighting a war based on vibes like being democratic and humanitarian, on looking good in the media.
Armies are tasked with achieving political goals, not implementing vibes. It's not as though Johnny Taliban was better trained or equipped - Coalition forces won all the firefights, they had all the firepower. The political front was even more lopsided, in the opposite direction. Our people had no idea what the goal was, they pointlessly shovelled money into the hands of the worst people on earth without any kind of coherent plan. They were given a budget and told to spend it. This made war profitable for the enemy (which became everyone who wanted our money) - blow up a bridge so you're paid to provide security and get the contract to rebuild it!
I have.
I Am The Very Model Of A Culture-Warring Partisan, but the one good thing that has come from Biden's presidency is him slamming the door shut on the Afghanistan war. I credit him greatly with having the guts to do it, and I am pretty sure the disaster in the pullout was deliberate insubordination on the part of the Pentagon. For everything I've read about the incompetence of the occupation, I cannot bring myself to believe that they are actually incapable of executing an orderly pullout. To my knowledge, no one has ever been held accountable for the mess, and I'd really like to see that happen.
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