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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   26856 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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From my understanding, the US was willing to use drones to attack weddings to kill a few Taliban along with dozens of civilians. Are you arguing that they should have done more of that?

A classical counter-insurgency strategy is to figure out (or guess) where an insurgent was coming from, and then simply kill all of the people in their home village. Roughly since WW2, strategies of this kind are universally recognized as war crimes, however.

Besides, while this might deter secular insurgents, religious insurgents are often indifferent towards the life of their countrymen. See Hamas. So the way this strategy would have made peace in Afghanistan would have been through genocide.

The US had the technical capabilities to turn Afghanistan into a desert and call it "peace", but they thankfully did not have the political capabilities to do that.

Yes. I do think the US military should have been more ruthless. The British conquered Afghanistan and held it for a long time, at a time of far less technological disparity. A lump sum of competent ultraviolence often adds up to less net violence than a prolonged quagmire where you're desperately trying to use the bare minimum, below which you would straight up lose. And in the end, the US did lose.

The British successfully invaded Afghanistan multiple times, but never held it for prolonged periods. Which is probably what the US should have done.

There's this book, No Good Men Among the Living, which argues that the US successfully destroyed the Taliban in the invasion, but then stupid governance and our taking sides in the vast web of tribal politics brought it back.

So in every district Jan Muhammad appointed a Popalzai governor and police chief, or figures from closely related tribes. The trouble was, many of these communities had already chosen their own leaders during the waning days of the Taliban. In Khas Uruzgan, elders had elected as district governor an anti-Taliban personage from the mujahedeen era, a former school janitor named Tawildar Yunis (“Groundskeeper Yunis”). He was working out of the governor’s house, along with a locally elected police chief and other officials, collecting weapons from surrendering Talibs. But they were not Popalzais and, even worse, maintained political links to one of Jan Muhammad’s rivals from the civil war years. So Muhammad appointed a local Popalzai elder and friend of the Karzais, Abdul Qudus, as his governor. But Yunis refused to budge, the imprimatur of Khas Uruzgan elders lending his claims an undeniable air of legitimacy. Unswayed, Abdul Qudus then requisitioned the local school for himself and his coterie of followers, declaring that it was now the rightful governor’s residence and that it was his job to collect Taliban weapons. In response, Yunis appealed to everyone from Gul Agha Sherzai to President Karzai himself, but none were willing to wade into the growing mess. Tensions rose by the day. Jan Muhammad’s side began openly questioning Yunis’s anti-Taliban bona fides, throwing him into fits of rage. He returned the favor by declaring Jan Muhammad’s men soft on the Taliban.

The actual Taliban were perplexed. During the standoff, a trio of senior Taliban officials made their way to Khas Uruzgan to surrender to the new government: Tayeb Agha, an erudite, well-spoken twentysomething who had served as Mullah Omar’s personal secretary and adviser; former finance minister Agha Jan Mutassim, who had publicly rejected calls from Pakistani clerics to wage jihad against the Americans; and Health Minister Mullah Abbas, the official who had been responsible for recruiting Heela and other women to study as nurses and midwives. All three had been members of the Taliban since the movement’s inception. Their surrender should have been a political coup for the young Karzai government. But surrender to whom? Who was actually in charge?

And then the Americans, acting on bad information, stormed both 'government' offices in a nighttime raid, killing Abdul Qudus and his fellow officials (Yunis managed to escape and was never seen again). The three former Taliban guys decided that surrendering didn't seem like such a good idea and went back to Pakistan where they helped lead the new Taliban insurgency.

I don't really know anything about the history of Britain in Afghanistan, but it's worth noting that the Empire tended to operate on the Roman model - the incoming Brits put and keep an appropriate member of the local royal caste on the throne, we help keep things orderly, we invest to some extent and we make various rather one-sided trade deals.

The Americans (and probably the USSR) were hamstrung by being explicit regime-changers rather than 'you can keep things basically the same as they were, with us technically on top but generally hands-off'.

That's not a good comparison though. USSR also invaded it, and they lost. And then USA lost too. Like sure they could have won if they went full scorched earth, and decimated any civilian areas. But at that point it's a slaughter, it's not a war. There wouldn't be anything left to conquer.

And I think that if they were more ruthless, there would be far more attacks on the West too.

I'm think USA could've actually won if they were far more aggressive and stern handed, and focused into making it into a new state of USA, and not the half-assed version they did. But ultraviolence wouldn't be the answer.

The US didn't lose for lack of violence. If they'd chimp out, the Taliban could just hide, wait until it blows over, at atart taking shots once the guard is lowered again. The technological disparity is an American diaadvatage there, because the costs of mobilizing a modern army are higher than leaving some IEDs on the road.

The reason why they lost is that they got high on their own supply about muh freedom, democracy, and whatnot. In some inverse of "magical dirt theory" they thought that if you give Afghans and Iraqis a few western institutions, they will become westerners, and neglected basics like teaching them that they should fight for their own country.

The US probably could have destroyed the Taliban, but it would have involved getting into a war with a (supposedly friendly, though that comes with more caveats than Trump's Mar-a-Lago files) nuclear power. Still, suppose the US actually wins. Fighters killed, all remaining people too cowed to put up armed resistance. What does the US get out of it? Some land halfway across the world. Sure, it's not worth NOTHING; it would certainly make Russia and Iran nervous. But it wouldn't be worth the squeeze.

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