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so the issue wasn't murdering a million Iraqis, wrecking the country for generations and level the countries infrastructure. The great crime would have been giving them two senators, social the protection provided by the US constitution? If anything the crime was not giving them some form of citizenship. The British empires had tiers of citizenship which granted colonials some basic rights and a basic status. Why aren't people in occupied parts of eastern Syria given any recognition by the US government?
Afghanistan was colonized for 20 years yet no Afghan had access to the US legal system or bill of rights. Veterans of a de facto US military can't get access to the VA.
Typically, when a state annexes some territory, they do not give full citizenship to the people they conquered. At best, the conquered are second class citizens, at worst they are driven off the land or outright murdered. Also, the states that tend to favor imperialistic expansion are often not the states that put a lot of stock on citizen rights. If Hitler had extended German citizenship to the French, that would have improved their situation somewhat, but not greatly. Being treated by the Nazis as they treated e.g. German socialists would not have been a great improvement.
If Afghanistan is an example of colonization, it is a non-central example.
Normally, colonizers extract resources from their colony, their motivations are fundamentally economic.
We could debate if that was the case for Iraq (which has oil), but the occupation of Afghanistan was a net loss for the US taxpayer. I am sure that some PMCs and military industrial companies made a killing, but for the US as a whole it was a very expensive misadventure, which is why Biden pulled out.
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The British Empire allowed any colonial the right to move to the UK and even to vote in British elections (a right commonwealth citizens still have), but because travel was very expensive, there was no welfare state, and the condition of the domestic poor in the UK was very poor (by 1870ish perhaps somewhat better than for the Indian urban poor, but not enough to be a huge pull factor) very few made the move until after WW2, and those who did were usually rich aristocrats and some merchants and academics.
Today, the only result of granting the Afghans citizenship would have been that all of them moved to the US. The same thing can’t really work. The crime in Iraq, by the way, was siding with the Shias, something many intelligent analysts warned Cheney and Rumsfeld about. It was possible to purge the Baathists and yet maintain a minority-rule Sunni power structure (they tend to be more competent than Shiites in Iraq, certainly militarily) with some token Shiite representation, and that’s what should have been done. (Not that I supported that war, but if it had to happen…)
Siding with the Shia turned out to be necessary to create an Iraq that would not tolerate Al-Quaeda (or ISIS) operating in its territory. Baathism was living on borrowed time by 2001 (it was originally a product of the Cold War) and even if you could have found a more compliant Baathist strongman to replace Saddam, the US lacked the skills to do so. The only other Sunni-aligned political faction that was able and willing to violently suppress the Shia were the jihadis.
The fundamental strategic stupidity of the Iraq war was that there were three anti-American factions in the Middle East (Baathism, Salafi jihadism, and the Shia fundamentalism of Iran). But they weren't an Axis of Evil - they hated (and still hate) each other more than they hated America (but not as much as they hated Israel). Invading Iraq involved taking on all three simultaneously instead of defeating them in detail.
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The idea that this would have been some great injustice towards the Iraqis and Afghans doesn't make sense. There is no moral superiority in not annexing territory and granting citizenship.
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