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I'm not a vet, but I made some effort to follow the war in Afghanistan as closely as possible for much of its duration. My understanding is that the Afghan war was quite bad.
The "winning hearts and minds" aspect appears to have been aimed primarily at American hearts and minds, not Afghani ones. That is, the goal was to persuade Americans that they were winning Afghani hearts and minds so the mission could be sustained, as opposed to actually winning Afghani hearts and minds. When the Afganistan papers leaked following the pullout, my understanding is that this was more or less confirmed by internal documentation; the leadership and administration had no idea how to actually win the war or what that would even look like, and so they defaulted to "what can we do that will look good back home?"
The Taliban appears to have had what amounts to a durable public mandate throughout the war, and there is at least some argument that they were in fact the good guys, to the extent that the term applies to a place as alien as Afganistan. They'd ruthlessly suppressed opium cultivation and the practice of Bacha Bazi, ie organized rape of young boys, to give two examples of concrete moral issues; the factions we sided with were, from the accounts I've heard, enthusiastic proponents of both. I've heard numerous accounts from vets about how they were ordered to not interfere with drug cultivation, and how they were told to ignore what their Afghan "allies" were doing in their barracks on the weekends.
I would argue that the higher-up officers were in no sense "correct". They were essentially running a scam, whereby they ordered the low-level soldiers to do highly dangerous, exceptionally pointless and often quite evil things in pursuit of meaningless bureaucratic objectives, shoulder to shoulder with "allies" who were frequently moral monsters, and not-uncommonly on the enemy's payroll. On top of that, they're soldiers, not policemen, and their entire training and corporate ethos is based around breaking things and killing people. They're a hammer, and most of the things around them are nails, and some of the things that aren't nails probably ought to be... This was not an environment that encourages deep ethical analysis and carefully regulated restraint.
Yet the casualties were light. I'd say it was basically nothing compared to the Ukrainian war, where entire companies in training have been halved by judicious use of tactical ballistic missiles.
The US casualties were light, but danger was real and constant, and the fight was utterly pointless. I'm given to understand that this is a bad combination for soldiers. Everyone knows someone who's been maimed or killed, probably a number of someones. Everyone has to take the threat of sudden death or maiming very seriously on a daily basis. Everyone has to do difficult, miserable, frustrating things on a regular basis, while on high alert for lethal danger, with the common knowledge that no actual purpose is being served and this is all basically for nothing.
Ukraine, by comparison, has a front whose movement tells the tale of the war. And it's entirely possible that Ukraine is actually a whole lot worse, psychologically; certainly it's bloody enough, as you note. My argument is that one should not round the relatively low American casualties suffered in Afghanistan to some form of "it wasn't a real war."
Emotionally it must have been very bad, especially the futility but tactically & casualty wise it was not a real war, more of a relatively sedate counterinsurgency.
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Presumably it would mean something like "set up a new government in Afghanistan that has some sort of stability, and doesn't hate the US, or at least doesn't hate us enough to sponsor terrorists."
Which, sure, is a challenging goal! Especially after we invaded their country and toppled their government. And like you said, the Taliban was (and is now) doing some good things... but then there's that whole "harboring Al-Qaida" thing. In hindsight we probably should just destroyed Al-Qaida but left the Taliban in charge and left. But with them gone we were kinda commited to putting up a new government so it wouldn't just turn into an even worse breeding ground for terrorists.
I can see how the low-level soldiers didn't want to do dangerous things when it would have been much safer and easier to just "shoot first, ask questions later." But the basic logic is sound... if you do that, you're just creating more and more enemies in a never-ending cycle. If you kill 9 insurgents but also accidentally kill 1 civilian, and that 1 civilian has 10 friends... congrats, you've just created 10 more insurgents and made the problem worse.
In the show, the grunts aren't even trying to be careful. They seem quite happy to kill anyone they can, including women, children, and injured prisoners. They have a running competition to see who can kill the most. When their Afghan allies get killed, they just laugh. The main character keeps a collection of body parts as war trophies. At one point he and another character take turns raping the corpse. I realize this is just fiction, but it seems to show what a lot of vets wish they could have done in the war. They really hated the Afghanis... not just the enemies but all of them, in a very racist way, and wish they could have committed genocide. That's pretty disturbing to me.
That very clearly was not their definition of a victory condition from the start. Even your far more limited goal very clearly was not possible to do, and I think the evidence shows that the people in charge clearly knew it wasn't possible to do from fairly early on. Like, even if they could output something like the above as an abstract mission statement, there never were concrete variables in the real world to plug into those abstractions. The Taliban were the best chance by far for stability, there were no significant runners-up. Moreover, long before our involvement there ended, my understanding is that we ourselves were once more providing cash, arms and training to Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria.
I was following along when all this got rolling. I remember that the Taliban sent a last-minute offer to hand over Bin Laden just before the invasion kicked off, but Bush turned them down in favor of invasion. The reason, as I understand it from the events I observed, is that a large part of the theory and strategy behind the GWOT was that we could in fact engineer these Islamist theocracies and dictatorships into modern liberal democracies. That was never going to happen, hence all the lies told over the next twenty years to cover up the fact that it wasn't happening.
If you shoot first and ask questions later, you "create more terrorists", but you live. If you ask questions first and shoot later, you run a significant risk that they shoot you while you're trying to ask questions, and then recruit more terrorists anyway on the grounds that they're national heroes killing the hated infidel occupiers. Spare me the COIN cliches: I'm already quite familiar with them, and I observe that the people promulgating them have not actually delivered a victory to establish the reliability of their model. So if you kill 9 insurgents and one civilian... why are you confident that the 9 insurgents you killed aren't better recruitment material than the one civilian? Why are you confident that the harm those 9 inflicted before they were killed wasn't better recruitment material than the killing of the one civilian? Why are you confident, in short, that the problem was how the soldiers on the ground did things, and not the orders and policies those soldiers were dutifully carrying out?
Sure. This is war as soldiers prefer to wage it, prioritizing their own agency above all, as opposed to war as soldiers actually wage it, with strict discipline and execution of orders from those far away. One of the things I've pointed out before is the madness of our demonization of the idea of "just following orders". Humanity has spent literal millennia trying desperately to get soldiers to "just follow orders", and to their credit, everything I've seen indicates that in Afghanistan, our soldiers did in fact follow orders fairly well. That doesn't mean they have to like it, and their discontent finds expression here.
Again, I emphasize that, based on numerous vet accounts, it was common knowledge for US line troops that the Afghan army units they were training and fighting alongside were routinely conducting the organized rape of children, right there in the camp next door, and it was again common knowledge that they were not supposed to interfere with this conduct. These were the Afghans with whom they could be expected to have the best relationship out of any in the country. I'm given to understand that it was common knowledge that a great many of the rural civilians were openly engaging in poppy cultivation to feed the global heroin market, and that a considerable portion of them were tacitly or enthusiastically supporting the Taliban. These were the people they were expected to fight beside and for, enduring daily misery and constant threat of sudden, violent death, possibly from their own allies, in pursuit of an obviously impossible and pointless mission.
I'm not what you might call a genocide enjoyer. I think genocide is pretty bad, and if anyone reading this is considering genocide, please don't do it. If you wanted to figure out a way to get a person to support the idea of genocide, though, the above seems like a pretty good way to do it. I do not think this is a moral failing of American vets; I think this is how humans naturally respond when you trap them long-term in a deplorable environment.
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I was prepping for deployment when they rolled that "hearts and minds" shit out. We started referring to the Mozambique drill as the "Hearts and Minds" drill. Two in the heart, one in the mind.
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