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