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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20922 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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I think that the Afghanistan war/occupation is not discussed enough. Perhaps we are all so used to government failure that we just nod our heads and ignore what happened over there.

The US occupied that entire country for 20 years. It spent an estimated $2.3 trillion. When the US went in there, the place was controlled by authoritarian Islamists who oppress women. Today, the place is controlled by authoritarian Islamists who oppress women.

People's sense of what is important is so delusional sometimes. Here in the US, people often argue over minor issues like who gets to go into what bathroom, or whether there are enough strong women in television shows. Meanwhile, the US taxpayer spent $2.3 trillion on Afghanistan, there was a major opportunity to actually do some real feminism, to actually reshape Afghan culture to make it more liberal, and it just didn't happen. I'm not sure how much it was even attempted.

I get that the original reason for occupying Afghanistan was 9/11, but the US was in there for 20 years. There is no way you can tell me that you can't reshape a society of just 40 million people when you're there for 20 years, you spend $2.3 trillion, and you have overwhelming military force. Societies have been forcefully reshaped in the past and they will be in the future. Take Germany or Japan for example.

Did the US even try over there? Was the whole thing just an excuse to put taxpayer money into rich people's pockets? People just nod and smile about the whole thing, like "of course we spent $2.3 trillion and got nothing for it other than neutralizing Al Qaeda, that's just how the government works". It's kind of weird to me that there isn't more outrage about the whole thing. Neutralizing Al Qaeda did not use up 20 years and $2.3 trillion. One can argue about whether foreign interventionism and nation building is good or bad, and there are good cases to be made for both sides, but that's not really my subject matter. My point is that since there was a supposed attempt at nation building over there, we at least should have gotten something out of it. If the taxpayer supports you to the tune of $2.3 trillion, and you achieve no nation building after 20 years despite having overwhelming military force, then it seems to me that the taxpayer has been massively ripped off.

Copying an old comment of mine (and follow up topic) from a couple years ago on a similar topic:

By 'colonialism' I assume you're referring to style of so-called 'exploitative colonialism' of Africa and Asia during the 19th century, I think a poor name that betrays the ideological perspective the dominates the analysis of colonialism today. I think the style of 'settler colonialism' of the Americas etc. are not possible today for more fairly obvious reasons.

I do think many of the below comments are correct that nationalism has played a significant role in making colonialism extremely difficult to enforce in the present day. In the past, there was not a huge amount of difference whether you paid taxes to or have allegiance to a 'local' lord or king, or a foreign lord or king. For example in India, for the Rajas who existed British rule, pragmatically there was not much difference between allegiance to a 'local' Islamic Persianised ruler (Mughals) or to the British. Indeed, many Rajas willingly switched allegiance to the British, which they saw as preferable. By and large, colonial rule was legitimate - the colonial powers couldn't have governed such large amounts of land with such little Western manpower otherwise. This changed with the development of a national identity in the colonial states, which ironically is a Western import. Anti-colonialism is ironically a Western invention. What you see consistently during the decolonisation period was Western educated local elites picking up Western political philosophy (liberalism and socialism too) often during their travels and education in the West, and using that as a basis for decolonisation and nationalism. It's the case for figures like Kwame Nkrumah, Obafemi Awolowo, even Gandhi. Once nationalism took hold in colonial regions, it became socially and politically untenable for a militant minority of the local population to be administered by a group deemed not part of the new national identity (anti-colonial movements usually did not have majority support), regardless of any material benefits. Indeed, many of these countries collapsed immediately after decolonisation. A matter of national pride as it were. This is really no different to the Springtime of Nations, where Italians, Czechs, Hungarians opposed Austrian rule (no matter how nominal), Poles under German rule etc.

Another major factor is that there is just no political will to do colonialism in modern societies. A major motivating factor behind the 19th Century colonialism was the Civilising Mission. While this is often the subject of contemporary revisionism like the term 'exploitative colonialism', there was a strong altruistic motivation to European colonialism. The 19th Century was a period of great intellectual and economic progress, and many Europeans strongly believed they had a moral, often religious imperative to bring this progress and civilisation to the unfortunate primitive peoples of Africa and Asia. Again, their motivations were primarily altruistic, whether you think those motivations have merit or where legitimate is up to the reader. The reality is that with a handful of exceptions, colonialism was actually incredibly expensive for European powers and largely was a net deficit for the coloniser, not a benefit, mostly motivated by colonial prestige and the moral imperative of civilising. Building infrastructure, schools, hospitals and a functioning bureaucracy all from scratch isn't exactly cheap. Otto von Bismark was famously anti-colonial, not out of any compassion for would-be colonised people, but rather he saw it as a significant waste of resources that could be spent on strengthening Germany. Germany would eventually reluctantly join the colonial race anyway due to international peer pressure and prestige. This ties into my own personal theory for why I think decolonisation took hold in not just the colonial states themselves, but also in the Western academia and elite in the mid-20th Century - postwar Europe had been devastated by WW2 and could not afford to maintain its colonies, but needed a moral justification to abandon the colonies, if at least to save face. The decolonial movement was that justification - Western elites had a genuine motivation to promote or at least passively accept decolonisation to absolve themselves of any responsibility they may have had to colonial states and people they governed. Though, this may have come back to bite them decades later, giving fuel to what would one day become the contemporary critical social justice movement and anti-Western sentiment in academia more generally. Kind of like the CIA funding the Mujahideen.

As other comments have also mentioned, contemporary Western states just don't do colonialism correctly, in large part caused by ideological and political concerns. To use the common America and Afghanistan (or Iraq) example, the 'correct' or functional way to do colonialism is to copy what the British did, ally with local elites, prop them up, arm them, and help them destroy their enemies, but otherwise keep local governance structures intact (the British were more than happy for local allied chiefs, shieks or rajas to govern their own territory as long as they kept to certain conditions. This is not what the Americans did or tried to do - instead, they tried to completely supplant local government structures by installing a completely foreign, Western style liberal democracy in those states that has no legitimacy and collapses under its own weight. Part of the reason for this is that America is so narcissistic that it thinks that remaking the world into America-style liberal democracies ("spreading democracy/freedom") is just the Greatest Thing Ever, but also because functional British style colonialism would never fly in the ideological waters the West is currently in - human rights, self determination, colonialism creating 'evil' hierarchies and so on. So the Americans have to try and do 'non-colonial colonialism' which obviously doesn't work.

Another thing to consider is that 21st century societies simply don't operate in the same way a 19th century society does, and we shouldn't expect contemporary colonialism to resemble previous colonialism. Obviously, this brings in the neo-colonialism debate. To simplify greatly, modern service economies and financial systems and multinational corporations may have made old boots-on-the-ground colonialism redundant. Why do you need to literally, physically control the governance of states in Africa when you can achieve the same effect from a distance with IMF loans? And it's not just the West - what China is doing could also be called neo-colonialism as well, least of all with the Belt and Road Initiative, where China will indebt half of Africa to China and basically have control of all their finances.

I'm not convinced by the (military) technology arguments put forward by many of the other commenters here. There are several reasons for this. First, the vast majority of European colonialism in the 19th century was not done through military conquest, but primarily through diplomatic means and gaining the allegiance of local elites. This is not to say there was no war, but there was very little compared to the scale we're talking about. You can perhaps make an argument that there was still a lot of indirect military conquest as Western powers would arm and fund elites favorable to them who would then conquer their rivals, but this is both indirect, and negates a lot of the apparent technological advantage by using an intermediary. Secondly, many of the colonised states weren't actually that far behind the Europeans in military technology. India in particular was home to the 'Gunpowder Empire' of the Mughals who were very familiar with advanced firearms long before Crown rule in India. The British defeat in the First Anglo-Afghan war is another good example of this. Third, even when the Europeans had a clear military technology advantage, it still wasn't a clearly decisive factor. The clearest example of this was the Anglo-Zulu War, where the Zulus nearly beat the British despite only having mostly iron-age technology. Fourth, it's not clear to me that the technological disparity between, for example, the British Empire and Iraq in 19th century is larger than it is between the USA and Iraq today. The Americans have a level of military sophistication that is miles ahead of anyone in the Global South. The Americans steamrolled Saddam's forces in 2003. But in my opinion, colonialism was never really a question of military might or technology, but of governance and legitimacy. This is not to say military technology provided no edge for the Europeans, but I think it is generally overstated. Which leads me to my next point:

I might be convinced that technological superiority might be a reason for 19th century colonial success if the technological superiority being described was social, political and economic technology, rather than military technology. Simply put, the Europeans were generally far better administrators, in many cases building a functioning, large-scale administrative system where previously there had only been anarchic tribal and ethnic conflict. The Europeans brought with them engineering, medicine, rule of law and so on, which did wonders for their legitimacy. This gap in social/economic technology between the Europeans and colonial states in the 19th century is still probably larger than the Europeans and even the most dysfunctional post-colonial state (e.g. Somalia) today, though I might be convinced otherwise.

To conclude, I want to link to the article the Case for Colonialism by Bruce Gilley, which I have previously posted on /r/theMotte, rebuts much of the anti-colonialist literature. While not explicitly about the topic at hand, its arguments are highly relevant.

Was the key to colonialism leaving the locals alone as long as they paid up ("otherwise keep local governance structures intact"), or actively trying to change their values ("bring this progress and civilisation to the unfortunate primitive peoples of Africa and Asia")?

As contradictory as it sounds, it was both. The Europeans, and particularly the British, were smart administrators and governors. They knew how to adapt to local political and cultural circumstances while promoting their own political and social goals in a way that contemporary Western states seem to be unable to do. The majority of the British Empire in Africa and Asia was administered via indirect rule. In 1947, even after centuries of British rule (both Company and Crown) and the gradual annexation of many of the Princely States (including the doctrine of lapse), the Princely States still consisted of ~40% of British India by land. But the Princely States weren't just some isolationist islands in the middle of British India, however. They had railways build through them, hospitals and Western schools etc. The difference is that the British worked with the local Rajas who still had a great deal of autonomy and authority. Over decades, many of the Rajas would actually give up significant autonomy and give more authority to the British because it was simply more convenient for them. This general approach was true of other parts of the British Empire, and the European colonisers more generally.

It was not the American approach of storming in to a country, creating a new Western-style liberal democratic government from nothing and expecting everyone to instantly to like it. To use another historical comparison, even when the British (under Company rule) did militarily conquer the Sikh Empire, which was their largest military expansion of the British Rule in India, they did not immediately put the whole region under direct rule, but rather restored many Rajas in the former territory of the Sikh Empire.

Are we saying the Right Way to do Afghanistan would have been to let 'em keep their women in burquas and girls' schools closed and other such things, just pay us some taxes and give up any international terrorists who particularly annoy us? I guess I could buy that, though I'm not sure it's what 19th century Britain would do.

Yes and no. The Right Way to do things would certainly to have have more tacit, been less gung-ho about the whole thing and curb their excessive moralizing. Did you know that the 2004 Constitution of Afghanistan has a provision that 25% of the seats of the Afghan Parliament are to be reserved exclusively for women? Such a provision would be extremely controversial in many Western states, let alone extremely Islamic conservative Afghanistan. The Americans should at the very least not expect to remake Afghanistan overnight, which is seemingly exactly what they thought they could do. To emphasise the point from above, European colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries was a gradual process that involved slow integration and change while using indirect rule and local institutions.

I could see Iraq as being a "Civilising Mission" thing - the word at the time was, we knock off Saddam and bring 'em Democracy, Whiskey, and Sexy and they'll just love us right away and it'll go great. Was the problem the lack of widespread and long-lasting zeal about that mission, or that it just plain didn't work?

A while back, I saw an interview that Condoleezza Rice gave to the Hoover Institution in which they discussed the Iraq War. In the interview, Rice basically just straight out admitted that the Bush administration and the US military has no idea what they were getting themselves into in terms of local politics. They had very little knowledge of local power dynamics, local tribal conflicts and alliances, or any kind of understanding of the local Iraqi political and social circumstances in general. The attitude of the Americans seem to literally have been more or less exactly what you describe - 'the Iraqis are just like Americans, crying out for American democracy, if we topple the Saddam and install a democratic government everything will just kind of work itself out'. I doubt the British even in the height of their power were ever so naive and arrogant. Again, you can't change a country and its culture overnight.

Did the US even try over there? Was the whole thing just an excuse to put taxpayer money into rich people's pockets? People just nod and smile about the whole thing, like "of course we spent $2.3 trillion and got nothing for it other than neutralizing Al Qaeda, that's just how the government works". It's kind of weird to me that there isn't more outrage about the whole thing.

We still underestimate the scale of the ineptitude and negligence in the military apparatus. There was no strategic thought going on at all, there wasn't even a goal.

At one point a new commander for ISAF (they were switching people around every 6-18 months like CEOs of a failing corporation) gets appointed and he wonders what he's supposed to do. Nobody tells him, so he goes 'huh, well I guess I'll try pushing Afghanistan up a few ranks on the tables of illiteracy and malnutrition'. When somebody asked Bush whether he wanted to speak to the general in charge of forces in Afghanistan at an earlier time, Bush said no, why would I need to see him? There was a total absence of strategy. There were officials who had their own ideas about what the US ought to do but they all flailed around like crabs in a bucket, before eventually consolidating on a kind of phoney-war to kick the can down the road.

It was a strategy-free war.

People's sense of what is important is so delusional sometimes. Here in the US, people often argue over minor issues like who gets to go into what bathroom, or whether there are enough strong women in television shows. Meanwhile, the US taxpayer spent $2.3 trillion on Afghanistan, there was a major opportunity to actually do some real feminism, to actually reshape Afghan culture to make it more liberal, and it just didn't happen. I'm not sure how much it was even attempted.

It was certainly attempted, early and often.

The issue is it wasn't attempted in any way that had any chance of working. The reason is obvious, effective occupations are always Draconian, at least at the start. You needed parties of Americans on trucks beheading anyone exercising a semblance of backwardness in the spirit of Sir Charles Napier,

Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs

This is a just a starting point if you wanted to engage in such a reform. The British never maintained a heavy enough hand for long enough to weed out all the clannishness etc that pervades Indian society. You'd need to govern like an 1850s Brit for 2 decades to start seeing results in Afghanistan. And obviously that was not on the table with GWB and Obama at the helm. They were feckless and obsessed with not offending Muslim sensibilities.

Forcefully reshaping Afghanistan was completely possible, it just required a competent administrator with a deeply seated superiority complex. A hundred years ago every other British colonial administrator would've qualified, the last suitable American I can think of is probably MacArthur.

It would've required something like Highland Clearances: raze all mountain villages and relocate their residents to the Sistan Basin or to the valleys of the major rivers.

We (the Brits) held it for nigh-on 100 years and couldn’t make much headway. Not that we really tried, I suppose, there’s nothing there that anyone wants. We just needed to make sure the Russians weren’t moving through it.

I think the problem here is that this isn’t the 1940s and you aren’t your grandfather. There’s a reason why 19th and early 20th century Western leaders could change cultures and we can’t. They believed in their own civilization. They hadn’t yet been demoralized into tge pathetic people we are today. They still believed in the rightness of their ideas, their way of life, their culture. As such they’d have no problem in saying “no, you will not rape boys and if we find out you did, we have a gallows waiting.” They had no problem saying “no, you cannot teac( your kids that because it’s morally wrong to believe that.” Today, most people have been given enough sensitivity training that they’d never actually believe that kind of thing.

There are entire chapters in the Qu’ran about war, killing the infidels, etc. there are Hadith’s about the end of days that suggest that the rocks and trees will betray the Jews to slaughter by Muslims. We’ve been taught not to notice this stuff. We’ve been taught to not notice that Muslims treat women pretty badly. Or that being gay is a capital offense in almost all Muslim countries. If we’ve been taught not to notice, let alone criticize bad ideas and practices, the result is inevitable. We can’t say our practice of allowing women to drive cars and speak outside of their own home is better than their treatment of women. We can’t say our tolerance for people of other religions is superior to their theocracy.

Given that, I don’t understand how anyone believes it could have really gone differently if nobody in the position to run the country was willing to impose on them. Creating a culture that would be peaceful and not fall to fundamentalist Islam immediately would have required a colonial government willing to do what is necessary to remake the cultures. They can’t insist that people adopt better farming methods, or more efficient technology. All they can do is hold the country until they leave it.

The things you point to as being superior about western culture are features of modernity, not inherent to the west. The Spanish empire was arguably the most successful western society; it ran on a theocratic ethnic hierarchy. Likewise women being allowed to vote was new in the forties, and not yet universal even in the west.

Likewise women being allowed to vote was new in the forties, and not yet universal even in the west.

Men (as a group) hadn't had the right to vote for particularly long by that point either. Pre-21st century western society was obviously not completely equal with regard to gender, but it does seem to have been generally more gender-equal than Muslim countries.

Incidentally, I'm curious that you chose the Spanish empire (rather than British empire, or the USA) as the most successful western society?

An entire hemisphere speaks Spanish. Mexico and South America saw yamnaya expansion level gene replacement. Spain ruled the Atlantic for 300 years(Britain did it for 150), elites in Latin America brag about pro-Spanish sentiment and ties to Spain to this day(compare the conspicuous anti-Englishness of Indians). Spanish culture was replicated in Latin America in a way that English culture was replicated in Anglosphere countries with few natives left around.

Britain and America are its only real competition, but Spain edges it out.

People just nod and smile about the whole thing, like "of course we spent $2.3 trillion and got nothing for it...It's kind of weird to me that there isn't more outrage about the whole thing.

I've personally been arguing for decades that 9-11 killed the United States and the $2.3 trillion (pretty sure that's a low-ball number, like we blew past that in 2005) was the price we paid for our own funeral. Every disaster after that -- 2008 collapse, various infrastructure disasters caused by natural events, Covid Authoritarianism, drug and homelessness crises, race and culture wars, political intransigence and overall cultural atomization, are downstream effects of the US obliterating its wealth, military and moral clarity on two unwinnable wars that didn't even relate to the initial injury. My outrage kicked off, in steering-wheel-pounding-earnestness, during Colin Powell's testimony to the UN security Council in 2003. It was the moment I knew we were completely screwed. By (NDAA) 2012 I had completely given up on any hope we'd ever revert to sanity.

As for why isn't there more outrage...well, the same reasons as always: people are mostly level-1 NPCs who can't remember (or don't know) history and are distracted by whatever the latest water-cooler-MSNBC/FOX outrage is. NPCs can't connect dots, they consume slop and regurgitate the opinions they've been handed. "We slit our own throat on the altar of 9-11" is not an opinion I see too much in the wild and not at all in mass media spaces.

I wonder how things would have gone if Dave Barry had been President and had just told 'a couple of guys named Victor' that "It would be such a shame if UBL were to fatally cut his throat while shaving."

I've personally been arguing for decades that 9-11 killed the United States and the $2.3 trillion (pretty sure that's a low-ball number, like we blew past that in 2005) was the price we paid for our own funeral.

Eh, you guys are fine. Not to downplay the damaging aftermath of the War on Terror, but from the perspective of someone living in a Europe, your problems are far more temporary.

I would use the word 'protracted.'

I've wondered for a while whether bin Laden realized the sheer magnitude of his own success. From what I can tell he didn't talk about it much.

Depends on what he considered a success. From his original letter to America, his goal was to get us to fuck off.

(5) We also advise you to pack your luggage and get out of our lands. We desire for your goodness, guidance, and righteousness, so do not force us to send you back as cargo in coffins.

(6) Sixthly, we call upon you to end your support of the corrupt leaders in our countries. Do not interfere in our politics and method of education. Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington.

Sixthly

I love it!

No mention of Bacha Barzai?

In 2011, an Afghan mother in Kunduz Province reported that her 12-year-old son had been chained to a bed and raped for two weeks by an Afghan Local Police (ALP) commander named Abdul Rahman. When confronted, Rahman laughed and confessed. He was subsequently severely beaten by two U.S. Special Forces soldiers and thrown off the base.[41] The soldiers were involuntarily separated from the military, but later reinstated after a lengthy legal case.[42] As a direct result of this incident, legislation was created called the "Mandating America's Responsibility to Limit Abuse, Negligence and Depravity", or "Martland Act" named after Special Forces Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland.[43]

...

In a 2013 documentary by Vice Media titled This Is What Winning Looks Like, British independent film-maker Ben Anderson describes the systematic kidnapping, sexual enslavement and murder of young men and boys by local security forces in the Afghan city of Sangin. The film depicts several scenes of Anderson along with American military personnel describing how difficult it is to work with the Afghan police considering the blatant molestation and rape of local youth. The documentary also contains footage of an American military advisor confronting the then-acting police chief about the abuse after a young boy is shot in the leg after trying to escape a police barracks. When the Marine suggests that the barracks be searched for children, and that any policeman found to be engaged in pedophilia be arrested and jailed, the high-ranking officer insists what occurs between the security forces and the boys is consensual, saying "[the boys] like being there and giving their asses at night". He went on to claim that this practice was historic and necessary, rhetorically asking: "If [my commanders] don't fuck the asses of those boys, what should they fuck? The pussies of their own grandmothers?"[45]

In 2015, The New York Times reported that U.S. soldiers serving in Afghanistan were instructed by their commanders to ignore child sexual abuse being carried out by Afghan security forces, except "when rape is being used as a weapon of war". American soldiers have been instructed not to intervene—in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records. But the U.S. soldiers have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the U.S. military was arming them against the Taliban and placing them as the police commanders of villages—and doing little when they began abusing children.[46][47]

According to a report published in June 2017 by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the DOD had received 5,753 vetting requests of Afghan security forces, some of which related to sexual abuse. The DOD was investigating 75 reports of gross human rights violations, including 7 involving child sexual assault.[48] According to The New York Times, discussing that report, American law required military aid to be cut off to the offending unit, but that never happened. US Special Forces officer, Capt. Dan Quinn, was relieved of his command in Afghanistan after fighting an Afghan militia commander who had been responsible for keeping a boy as a sex slave.[49]

Far be it from me to imply that there isn't a certain amount of logic here. Fighting child-rape is part of the founding myth of the Taliban, so obviously if we're fighting the Taliban child-rapists are natural allies. The same logic applies to drug dealers, clearly, which was why we spent twenty years just never quite getting around to any serious effort to crimp opium production, something the Taliban was also quite good at, and why Afghanistan had four times more land being used to cultivate poppies at the end of the war as it had at the start.

...where's Charles James Napier when you need him?

A friend of a friend was a rather naive female Air Force engineer. Her CIA handler had to literally pull her away from the group of Afghan army men she was talking to because ‘if you get in that car they will gangrape you’. And these were allies.

Why she had a CIA handler I don’t know but presumably because of her distressing propensity to become a front page news story.

I mean, say what you will about the US elite, they’re pretty good at pretending CSA of boys is normal and acceptable behavior. No doubt the official story was that the boys were dancers or some such(does anyone doubt what dancers giving private performances in quarters actually are) fulfilling the diversity of gender roles in rural Afghanistan.

What I find interesting about this is that it wasn't exactly quiet at the time: The Kite Runner was a pretty popular book at the time and featured the practice pretty prominently, albeit set at a time other than the US occupation.

Did the US even try over there?

Yes, through stupid shit like dada-ist art classes for afghan women. This did not work, obviously, and I don’t think anybody expected it to.

there was a major opportunity to actually do some real feminism, to actually reshape Afghan culture to make it more liberal, and it just didn't happen. I'm not sure how much it was even attempted.

The Soviet-installed government had originally tried this back in the 1970s. From Wikipedia

Once in power, the PDPA implemented a socialist agenda. It moved to promote state atheism.[5] Men were obliged to cut beards, women were banned from wearing the burqa, and mosques were placed off limits. The government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan moved to prohibit traditional practices which were deemed feudal in nature, including banning bride price and forced marriage. The minimum age for marriage was also raised. Education was stressed for both men and women and widespread literacy programmes were set up.

...

Between April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979, Afghan Communists executed an estimated 27,000 political prisoners at Pul-i-Charki prison six miles east of Kabul. Many of the victims were village mullahs and headmen who were obstructing the modernization and secularization of the intensely religious Afghan countryside.

...

The Soviet Union, which had initially supported the PDPA government, became increasingly concerned about the scale of violence and the destabilizing effects of these repressive measures. Soviet leaders were particularly alarmed by the PDPA’s brutal tactics, which they feared would alienate the Afghan populace and strengthen the insurgency.

To be clear, the attempts to repress the reactionary violence against modernization was brutal enough that even the freaking Soviets thought it was too much.

The Soviet backed government lasted much longer than the American backed government did, the Soviet puppet survived Soviet withdrawal and actually outlasted the Soviet Union itself, albeit only by a few months.

Meanwhile the American backed government disintegrated before the US even completed its withdrawal.

Between April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979, Afghan Communists executed an estimated 27,000 political prisoners at Pul-i-Charki prison six miles east of Kabul. Many of the victims were village mullahs and headmen who were obstructing the modernization and secularization of the intensely religious Afghan countryside.

You cut off "Some claim that" from the begining of the sentence, and the only source is a book by an American journalist written twenty years after the event is said to have taken place. Far from me being some Soviet fan, but a mass murder of such enormity requires a bit more evidence.

even the freaking Soviets thought it was too much.

"The freaking Soviets" would go on to enact Loudness, Perestroika, and agree to dissolve in just a couple of years. The stereotype of ruthless invaders, who destroy everything and anyone whom they see as a threat, is based on Stalin, not every General Secretary. Hard to imagine Gorby ordering the Katyn Executions.

I do wonder how the Soviets of the latter-era Union felt about these kinds of extreme measures compared to the Soviets of Lenin and Stalin. This was the era of the Gerontocracy, men like Andropov were most likely alive to witness Stalin's regime. Then again, perhaps the gerontocrats were soft by comparison precisely because they were alive to witness Stalin's regime.

"The freaking Soviets" would go on to enact Loudness

Incorrect, Loudness was a Japanese project.

The Soviet experience (and practices) in Afghanistan have always been my go-to thought when someone makes an argument about how the US could have won Afghanistan if it had just been willing to be tougher.

Say what you will about the Soviet intervention, but a lack of brutality was not the issue.

Nobody discusses it anymore because it 's widely understood to have been a bad decision - there's no friction. The problems of Afghanistan and Iraq didn't disappear from US domestic politics. Obama arguably ran because he was untainted by Iraq, Hillary suffered because her selling point was foreign policy experience ("bad experience" as Trump said) when the entire US populace was angry or tired of dealing with these adventures and the lies their own governments spun about them for no gain.

Remember the GOP foreign policy establishment bashing their heads against Trump and being the ones who were dismissed by their voters? What do you think all of that was about? Both sides had challengers to the establishment on this but the GOP was utterly unable to fend them off because it was seen as the most guilty.

Societies have been forcefully reshaped in the past and they will be in the future. Take Germany or Japan for example.

These were advanced modern nations that had already done most of the work to build state capacity and a national identity (and the Soviets were around to play bad cop). We're talking about Afghanistan.

Did the US even try over there?

Yes. The Afghanistan Papers goes through the omnishambles that was the attempted development. Turns out, ancient problems of legibility and legitimacy don't disappear, even for the most powerful nation on Earth. There's a reason empires just didn't bother trying for effective control of some regions.

The US was dealing with a poor and alien culture with a weak central government and a limited view into things. There's all sorts of weird stories of money or the US military's efforts being wasted because the US government just had limited visibility (especially early on) into Afghanistan and its politics. No amount of money can help if it isn't being directly properly or the new institutions aren't accepted by the people.

We should expect this no? We see all sorts of corrupt countries being showered with oil or aid money and failing - even when they make real efforts - to reach developed world status. This hurts even major nations like Russia with an autochthonous elite that isn't living thousands of miles away. Rampant lying and corruption gave the central government a false view of its military readiness.

There's also probably just unavoidable tradeoffs between beating the Taliban and building a minimally viable state and attempting massive social engineering you wouldn't dare pull on your own people (like having a quota for female legislators). The US was at war with an apparently ineradicable insurgency and was trying to prop up a weak state and give it legitimacy but was also offending people and providing an incentive for corruption and nepotism in the name of feminism. Even America can't do everything at the same time.

(like having a quota for female legislators).

For legislators that’s not possible but our elites have tried to do it to private companies. NASDAQ board diversity quotas was just shot down by a federal appeals court: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-appeals-court-tosses-nasdaq-board-diversity-rules-2024-12-11/

The US was dealing with a poor and alien culture with a weak central government and a limited view into things.

And just to riff off my previous post, the Afghans had within-living-memory ejected the Soviet-backed-then-Soviet-direct government that had attempted to do the same thing.

There are echoes here of the US involvement of Vietnam. The Vietnamese had fought off the Chinese for centuries. Resistance to foreign occupation is a learned skill -- once enough nations have tried and failed to occupy/pacify a country, it becomes harder and harder.

I’ve always said this about the approach: we never wanted to act like we were in control or had any right to be in control. This is in contrast to the occupation of Japan in the aftermath of WWII. In Japan, we took control of everything: the media, schools, government, banned weapons, etc. we even banned aspects of culture that we decided were too militaristic. We almost banned Shogi which is a Japanese form of chess, but the arguments that it was pro democracy was convincing so it wasn’t banned. After a generation, Japan went from a militaristic dictatorship and empire to a parliamentary democracy in which the emperor hides in his palace and gives a couple of speeches a year. It went from being the land of Samurai and death before dishonor that didn’t believe in human rights to a country that is only recently considering rebuilding a serious military in response to China. It went from military to kawaii, from swords to anime.

Why? We had the will to do so. We decided to be in charge, we decided we had the right to dictate what parts of their culture they could keep and what had to change. We decided to take over the schools and decide what they learned. We decided how things would change. And after a generation, they did. In Afghanistan, we did no such thing. We didn’t ban child brides, we didn’t mandate a modern secular education system, we didn’t ban head coverings for women. We allowed girls to attend the same schools as the boys. That seems to be about it. Everything else stayed the same. And so it’s not really that surprising that a country that was never forced to accept the ideas of liberal democracy, secular education, human rights, or a de-Islam-ified culture went right back to the Taliban. They had no ideals to fight for, no model of justice and democracy that they thought worth the effort.

In short, we were too liberal and culturally sensitive to win the occupation. Too multicultural to believe that our own ideas were superior to those of medieval Muslims who saw women as property to be covered head to toe and not allowed any agency in their own lives. Too multicultural to believe in modern secular democracy as superior to rule by theocracy. As such imposing on them, even when their ideas are primitive and frankly horrifying was not allowed. They went for the Takiban because the Taliban was willing to create order by imposing its ideals.

Seems like the story needs to include geographic facts about the difference of what was happening in Japan vs. Afghanistan. Aside from being orders of magnitude smaller, Japan also has a highly centralized population and is much much closer to the US. Afghanistan has to be one of the most difficult places to manage in the entire world. I agree with everything else.

Why? We had the will to do so. We decided to be in charge, we decided we had the right to dictate what parts of their culture they could keep and what had to change.

And look at what we explicitly chose to let them keep.

The US was concerned about the Soviets and global communism when it got elbows deep in Japan. The US had no similar rival to fear that justified staying in Afghanistan.

It wasn't just a lack of will born out of some anti-colonial impulse, there was no interest. Americans would have been totally satisfied with a Germanicus-style punitive campaign.

This whole thing seems to have just been mission creep. If America had managed to corner and kill Bin Laden early on , would the US have insisted on bringing feminism and all that good shit?

Americans would have been totally satisfied with a Germanicus-style punitive campaign.

Which, in hindsight, is I think all we should have done. Wipe out Al Queda. Wipe out the Taliban who protected them. Leave. The remaining Taliban, or at least whatever faction came out on top, would likely think twice before protecting terrorists from the US again. The US has an image of itself that we don't DO that sort of thing. But what we actually did was worse for nearly all concerned.

Most modern conflicts are caused by pride/patriotism.

The pride of the afghans who could not admit that their ancestral culture and religion was not conductive to human flourishing.

The pride of the americans who after going on a revenge rampage had to pretend it was really a civilizing mission, so stayed for 20 years and destabilized the region even more.

The pride of the africans who kicked out their colonial masters who could have kept the civil wars dormant and the economy running.

The pride of the russians who went chasing a revanchist dream instead of letting the gasoeuros flow.

What strikes me the most is that I don’t know for certain that the Taliban ever learned the lesson: don’t harbor terrorist. The state department seems to think that they’ll be satisfied as the rulers of their little domain and we appear to be paying them millions of dollars a week to keep them mollified.

If Sarah Adams is to be believed, the taliban is actively working with AQ again right now. They (AQ) have been using Bagram, and all our infrastructure to train up a group of fedayeen that have already been inserted to the west.

Did the US even try over there? Was the whole thing just an excuse to put taxpayer money into rich people's pockets?

Morally, no; de facto, yes.

See, the way to make a great business in #currentyear isn’t to sell a product to consumers. That’s hard, and risky, and requires a lot of work. Instead, make a moral crisis and sell it to the government via social activism! Now, your endeavor is freed from annoying constraints like grounding in economic reality.

Note that it is entirely possible—and perhaps even optimal!—for participants in this myopic charade to not realize they are just engaging in parasitism with extra steps.

Did the US even try over there?

Yes.

Was the whole thing just an excuse to put taxpayer money into rich people's pockets?

No.

People just nod and smile about the whole thing, like "of course we spent $2.3 trillion and got nothing for it other than neutralizing Al Qaeda, that's just how the government works".

The only people I've personally met who would nod and smile at that characterization were not supporters of the ISAF coalition.

It's kind of weird to me that there isn't more outrage about the whole thing.

Why? The level of weirdness would be consistent with the weirdness of your preceeding three questions.

Ultimately, outrage is not an inherent response to policy failure. Outrage is not the same as anger, but even anger is not only response- disappointment, shame, disgust, contempt, mockery, and more are additional options, and there was (and still is) plenty of that to be found.

We did though... we had this debate for the entire 20 years. It went and on, it was miserable and depressing and no one seemed to offer any good solution until finally Biden pulled the plug on the whole ordeal.

No one originally wanted to invade Afghanistan or reshape it into a modern western ally. We just wanted to capture/kill Bin Laden and other Al Qaida leaders, and stop Afghanistan from being used as a terrorist training center. That was accomplished.

Unfortunately, in doing so we also removed their government and created a power vacuum in one of the most violent and unstable countries in the world. Everyone kind of felt bad about that, as well as worried that this would lead to more recruitment of terrorists in the future, so there was a great deal of effort expended to try and keep the country peaceful and stable.

Turns out it's very difficult to change a culture! The people there are really, really religious, so a religious government like the Taliban had a lot of popular support. They're also very poor, so often there were no good options for local allies. If you shut down their money from Pakistan and bin Laden, that pretty much leaves Opium as their only source of money, which was controlled by the Taliban.

On the plus side, after retaking power the Taliban has started to act a little bit more like a real government and less like a terrorist organization. They're doing formal diplomacy with other countries, fighting the Islamic State, and seem to be cracking down on Opium production.

I think if one is under 50, one might be forgiven for not realizing the US had been itching to go to war with the Taliban for years prior to 9-11. The minute the second plane hit I knew we were going into Afghanistan. I wasn't a geo-politics genius, I'd simply been paying attention, maybe more than most because I was also in the military during the Clinton years. The Taliban rule prior to 9-11 was a massive improvement from what had been there before but we hated them for all the things we still hate about them now, plus they were destroying world heritage sites! Nothing has really changed except the US is poorer and totally demoralized. We utterly lost the war on terror.

No one originally wanted to invade Afghanistan or reshape it into a modern western ally.

16 year old me had been exposed to what the Taliban was all about and thought the world would be better off without it. A just punishment for the Taliban for cooperating with the group that struck at America, and a nice side effect of liberating the people of Afghanistan.

40 year old me sees this as a fool’s errand. To think this would work requires an ignorance of how the Taliban gained power in the first place. The documentaries I’d consumed at sixteen weren’t at all concerned with that question.

No one originally wanted to invade Afghanistan or reshape it into a modern western ally. We just wanted to capture/kill Bin Laden and other Al Qaida leaders, and stop Afghanistan from being used as a terrorist training center. That was accomplished.

Occupying a country to find one person or even a handfull of Saudis and Egyptians is absurd overkill. Besides, the taliban were willing to cooperate to hand them over.

The issue is neocons and globalists can't really accept that there isn't a part of the world without feminism, hollywood movies and American imperialism. They rather spend 20 years bombing a meaningless plot of land than accept that there is a realm outside of the liberal paradigm.

Turns out it's very difficult to change a culture!

They managed to make the west woke. Admittedly it took a century but they assumed they could speed up the process with more advanced tech and military superiority. What was underestimated was the resolve and bravery of the Afghan people, who put up a 20 year long heroic defence.

the taliban were willing to cooperate to hand them over.

That's not how I remember it. I seem to recall that they were giving us a bunch of guff about them being entitled to a say in where and under what legal system he was tried.

no one seemed to offer any good solution

No, it's that the establishment was fanatically devoted to really bad ideas and refused to try anything different, @Dean outlined some of it. The bar was so low it was lying on the ground, they failed at literally the first step of nation building - have an army that will defend your nation. If they succeeded at that, none of what is happening would be happening, and the culture would be completely different relative to what the Taliban is imposing.

No, it's that the establishment was fanatically devoted to really bad ideas and refused to try anything different, @Dean outlined some of it.

Huh. I didn't even remember that post. Did you save it, or just go hunting for it?

I went hunting. When a post makes an impression I tend to remember some turn of phrase that helps me find it later, though in this case it was luck. Where you kept repeating "choice" I remembered you saying "decision", but luckily it popped up anyway on the second page of search results.

Rhetorical repetition theory works again!

Thanks for answering. I sometimes do that for the effect, and it's good to know it worked / was appreciated.

There is no way you can tell me that you can't reshape a society of just 40 million people when you're there for 20 years, you spend $2.3 trillion, and you have overwhelming military force. Societies have been forcefully reshaped in the past and they will be in the future. Take Germany or Japan for example.

Yes you can. There is a pretty big difference between forcing a country to change it's foreign policy (and in Germany's case roll back internal politics by 15 years) and changing pretty fundamental parts of 1400+ of years of culture.

Could America have changed Afghan culture in 20 years anyway? Sure, but that would probably have required heavy-handedness to the point of genocide, which i doubt Pakistan would have agreed to act as a staging ground for.

Consider how long it took for islam to really take hold in the middle east.

Could America have changed Afghan culture in 20 years anyway? Sure, but that would probably have required heavy-handedness to the point of genocide, which i doubt Pakistan would have agreed to act as a staging ground for.

At the very least, it would have required taking over the education system by both controlling the curriculum and forcing children to attend it, to which your point still applies.

As a 'rule', you can force significant culture change in as little as a generation, but that also doesn't mean that you make the changes you intended to / wanted.

(A campaign of forced schooling under western tutelage would have likely both significantly negatively impacted the rural farmers who depended on their children for labor, causing major economic issues, and would have led to the Taliban/insurgents deliberately targetting schools for mass casualty attacks, with all the cultural impacts that normalized / endured school bombings might have.)

(A campaign of forced schooling under western tutelage would have likely both significantly negatively impacted the rural farmers who depended on their children for labor, causing major economic issues, and would have led to the Taliban/insurgents deliberately targetting schools for mass casualty attacks, with all the cultural impacts that normalized / endured school bombings might have.)

There's ways to do that on the cheap and ensure safety. Literally pay families to send young boys to military boarding schools as the first step.

Might work but that’s how you get the residential schools everyone complains about. Especially once you factor in the discipline problems from children who don’t want to be there and adults who think they need to kill the Afghan and save the man.

Keep in mind I'm not talking about reshaping the entire Afghan society this way, I'm talking about teaching enough young boys to fight for their country when they become men. You don't need to enroll all children there, and you don't need to make it mandatory. Just pay the parents enough that they line up to send the children there themselves, and just expel any kids too undisciplined to work with. The rest will come under pressure from their families to be on their best behavior.

This is child slavery with extra steps.

Not any more than any other boarding school. I'm not sure if it's even different from mandatory public schooling in general.

There is a pretty big difference between forcing a country to change it's foreign policy and (and in Germany's case roll back internal politics by 15 years) and changing pretty fundamental parts of 1400+ of years of culture.

I'm not sure that Japan only got rolled back 15 years.

Could America have changed Afghan culture in 20 years anyway? Sure, but that would probably have required heavy-handedness to the point of genocide.

Why would inculcating some semblance of patriotism, such that the Afghan army doesn't immediately collapse, require genocide?

I'm not sure that Japan only got rolled back 15 years.

It's been discussed before, but Japan had been modernising rapidly since the Meiji era. They wanted what the Americans had. Not all of it, but enough of it, and the Americans were careful to leave enough of Japanese culture intact that they could spin it as reform with American aid rather than straightforward subjugation.

Why would inculcating some semblance of patriotism, such that the Afghan army doesn't immediately collapse, require genocide?

At a guess, because the area called 'Afghanistan' is made up of different tribal groups who hate each other, and are only prevented from doing anything about it by tyrants with sufficient ruthlessness and firepower. Making Afghans pretend to be a country requires you to act like a Taliban warlord; making them actually patriotic would require ethnic cleansing of all the groups except the ones you've decided to support.

Making Afghans pretend to be a country requires you to act like a Taliban warlord; making them actually patriotic would require ethnic cleansing of all the groups except the ones you've decided to support.

I doubt it. Americans had control over the education system for 20 years, that's a whole generation, and we're not talking about implanting some galaxy-brained fourth-wave feminism, just basic nationalism that most other countries managed to move on to by similar means. Not to mention that you don't even need to do this to the entire country, you just need enough young men to hold the line against a bunch of angry goat herders.

If there was evidence that the US actually gave that an honest try, I might consider tribalism running in Afghan blood, but as it stands it looks like pure cope.

Afghan nationalism wasn’t a desirable solution because the available rallying points were… Sunni Islam and Persian ness. I suppose if you want to get really cynical there’s also drug dealing.

Afghan nationalism wasn’t a desirable solution because the available rallying points were… Sunni Islam and Persian ness.

When you operate on a scale of 20 years, you can scoop up kids when they're young and come up with any rallying point you want.

Americans had control over the education system for 20 years

What's even "the education system" in a notoriously poor and fractured country? It's not like everyone was going to some full K12 thing paid for by the US.

The US could totally win over everyone in a large circle around Kabul and still end up losing the war.

What's even "the education system" in a notoriously poor and fractured country?

When you've pushed 2 trillion dollars into it? It's whatever you want it to be.

"Money = outcomes" isn't even true in the American educational system. Not sure why it would be true in Afghanistan.

I think that fits better with my argument than yours. The reason money doesn't translate into results in America is because the elites are following terrible ideas. The reason why it didn't translate into result in Afghanistan is because the American elites in charge of it were following terrible ideas.

I thought you brought up Afghanistan's poverty to point out some material limit to what they could to, my point was that with the amount of resources that the US actually pulled there, there were no such material limits.

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you just need enough young men to hold the line against a bunch of angry goat herders

Don't forget that the 'angry goat herders' i.e. the Taliban are the last group of young men that the US armed, organised and trained (to fight Russia).

I'll grant that it's possible to get, say, all the French or all the Germans to act like one country most of the time, but it's very difficult, especially when you have genocidal religious hatred and no history of deference to a state. Bismark managed it eventually, but it took a while and the Germans mostly got on all right already, and same with the French. The Brits and Americans managed it, but only at the cost of a very destructive civil war in each country, and both countries were at least somewhat used to accepting the existence of a central authority (I know the Confederacy were trying to leave, but they still accepted Federal government as real and relevant).

If there was evidence that the US actually gave that an honest try, I might consider tribalism running in Afghan blood, but as it stands it looks like pure cope.

Split the difference? I think the US strategy was bonkers from the start, but I also think it would be very difficult to do even if you tried properly.

Don't forget that the 'angry goat herders' i.e. the Taliban are the last group of young men that the US armed, organised and trained (to fight Russia).

So? As you say they were armed to fight the Soviets, and they were trained to fight as well - not trained to hold a western belief system.

Bismark managed it eventually, but it took a while and the Germans mostly got on all right already, and same with the French

Sure, but I'll repeat, it was 20 years, and with the amount of money that was spent, they could literally start buying young boys to propagandize them 24/7 in boarding schools.

Split the difference? I think the US strategy was bonkers from the start, but I also think it would be very difficult to do even if you tried properly.

Sure, that seems fair.

Re: angry goat herders, what I mean is that they’re not pushovers. They’re American-trained and equipped, either directly or once removed. It’s not a matter of just propagandising a few boys to stand around looking tough, you need serious fighters.

The afghan army did not need more patriotism. They needed less. They were american stooges. They could promise their people a good life by submitting to the international liberal order like germany and japan. Of course on the patriotism scale the taliban would always have them beat.

Build compounds with little America inside for soldiers and their families to live in- globally people seem to like suburban lifestyles, you can make this appealing.

But you’ve also created a closed caste of cleruchs to oppress the people in your name, which the US didn’t want to do.

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