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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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