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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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During the campaign he said US shouldn't have left Bagram, Bagram is in Afghanistan, by transitive property that means remaining in Afghanistan.

This has far more to do with Trump monday-morning quarterbacking than anything else.

I think the whole idea, and I’m sort of on the fence about how true this is, was that you didn’t have to give Bagram back and we could just have kept it as essentially imperial property, like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Apparently it would have been extremely easy to defend basically indefinitely with minimal manpower. Bagram is (was) absolutely a huge airbase and was a massive strategic asset to the US & Allies in the region.

This isn’t as strange as it might first appear, this was a live issue in the whole “counterinsurgency vs counterterrorism” debate on the fate of Afghanistan. The counterterrorism camp basically said sod the afghans internal politics, they were unimportant and not worth any nation building effort, and that they should just use Bagram as an operational base to hunt Al Qaeda.

They do see kind of right in retrospect.