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Notes -
An attempt to summarise the decadence discourse
This has been the most interesting debate on the Motte for several months, possibly because it is only tangentially related to the main thrust of the US culture war. Given the messy debate across multiple top-level posts with various allegations of strawmanning, I thought it was worth trying to isolate what we still disagreed on.
Given that this started with a discussion of Brett Devereaux's Fremen Mirage thread I am going to call the sides broadly in favour and broadly against Devereaux's thesis pro-D and anti-D for brevity's sake. I am decidedly pro-D, but my goal in this post is to identify consensus and disagreement, not to engage in the debate.
Things both sides appear to agree on
(At least within the local Overton window)
The disagreement
Things that are peripheral to the disagreement
I disagree with this framing. Can you (or someone anti-D) name a single example? The Roman Empire? The Eastern Roman Empire? The Holy Roman Empire? Song China? Ming China? All of them spent centuries in a gradual and violent decline. Saying hardcore barbarians destroyed them would be like saying pneumocystis jirovecii was the reason so many gays died in the US in the early 90s.
Aztecs and Incas? While the Spanish were super hard men, it feels a bit like cheating to call them virtuous barbarians, given that their opponents were literally Stone Age civilizations. If an alien fleet with vaguely cruciform ships attacked Earth tomorrow, kidnapped Trump with a tractor beam and then shot down 999 ICBMs and tanked the thousandth one, I certainly wouldn't say the problem lay in our moral decadence.
McNamara's Idiots, sending low Iq people to Vietnam while capable people managed to dodge the draft.
Sending mediocrely talented soldiers to Afghanistan for deployments that last a few months while spending exorbitant amounts of money keeping them comfortable instead of having high quality people spend years in Afghanistan and building relations with the locals.
The fringes of the US empire have been nibbled by a lack of conviction by the American elite class.
The rules of engagement coupled with casualty tolerance in Afghanistan prevented any long term victory.
Different interests latch onto different causes but they are all obviously connected. The occupation failed because Wester troops were garrisoned in bases while the Taliban controlled much of the countryside essentially uninterrupted for the period. Many ‘soldiers’ never left base and most who did did so very infrequently for largely choreographed ‘patrols’ that anyone could avoid if they wanted to. Why? Because troops were terrified of IEDs and ambush attacks, which in turn led to a paranoia that was only reinforced by rare trips out of base (psychologically this creates a fortress mindset in a soldier in which every trip outside base is an expedition into a hostile land). This tied into the broader situation that, because the US DoD and (even moreso) European armies had extremely low casualty tolerance to a degree unheard of in almost any historical or other current conflict, fighting a guerrilla enemy that stationed soldiers in houses and villages and schools was essentially impossible.
There were two possible ways out of this situation.
The coalition could have swallowed much higher casualty rates and stationed soldiers and support personnel in town and villages, forced a larger degree of cultural transformation / imperialism on particularly rural natives, and used a form of summary justice (ie simply executing anyone suspected of assisting the Taliban in any capacity and the entire immediate family or tribe, which would involve plenty of false positives, but that’s wartime) to make cooperation with the enemy much less attractive while making cooperating with the occupying forces much more attractive (since it would no longer be about making a deal with the guys in the military base 10 miles away while you deal with the enemy sympathizers in your village alone).
Or, the coalition could have taken the Israeli approach in Gaza which, while likely still higher in terms of casualty rate than the recent Afghan War (depending on how you calculate it), still involved a relatively low tolerance for soldier deaths on the Israeli side. That would preclude a total victory (Hamas still exists and has many soldiers after all) but - by dropping insane volumes of ordinance on any cultural, communal, religious, social, healthcare, educational and other institutions that might possibly house enemy fighters - you can demoralize a population and slowly reduce both the absolute number of and relative quality of enemy fighters (as more experienced soldiers are killed) even in a high fertility population. This plan would have involved probably the deaths of 5% or so of the civilian population as a direct consequence of the coalition campaign but would, coupled with the targeted killing of all major religious and cultural figures, the reinstatement of the King (not doing this was one of the great failures of the war) and a ban on Afghan civilian government for at least 15 years after the invasion, have had a higher chance of success than the plan that was pursued.
I don't know that Gaza is the example you want to bring up here. I'm not even going to get into why it isn't comparable because it's not exactly a rousing success, even when compared to Afghanistan. The US was able to defeat the Taliban militarily in a matter of weeks, and their resurgence was slow and geographically limited. The problem was political not in the sense that the US was too squeamish about inflicting or taking casualties, but that the administration had no idea what to do when it got there and got distracted with attempts to gin up a war in Iraq. Bush wasn't much of a military guy and relied on Cheney and Rumsfeld for his strategy, which unfortunately meant that they were both overly aggressive when it came to starting wars and overly cautious when it came to executing them. Rumsfeld, in particular, wanted to do things as nimbly as possible. This makes sense when you consider that he was never a high ranking military officer and that most of his early experience in dealing with high level military affairs came on on the political side during the Vietnam and post-Vietnam eras, when public opposition to simply throwing troops at the problem developed. Meanwhile, more recent military operations in the 80s and 90s showed that public support would remain high with quick operations with minimal personnel and few casualties.
What he failed to realize is that 9/11 basically gave him a blank check. Political support was nearly unanimous (and Barbara Lee said she would have voted for the resolution had it been limited to Afghanistan), nation-building wasn't yet a dirty word, and he could have sent a half million troops in to garrison the place and nobody would have cared. Then they compounded the error by excluding the Taliban from participation in any future government and by neglecting to rebuild the Afghan military, similar to what they would do in Iraq. While it seems stupid to give defeated terrorists a seat at the table, the political reality is that they ruled the country for years and had some level of popular support. If they were truly popular enough to control the Afghan government, you'd find that out quickly and be able to act accordingly. If there support was low but they were operating on strength and fear, you could rest assured that the legitimate government could keep them under control. If they had just enough support to be a factor in government then they would have an escape valve. By blackballing them entirely, they ensured that the level of support would never be known and that the only way their supporters could influence government would be through armed rebellion, setting up the perfect conditions for an insurgency that they couldn't control.
And they'd still have had a chance at success if they had simply sent enough troops to patrol the countryside and stop Taliban reformation before it started, largely by just having enough of a presence to form relationships with the locals. Instead, they sat on their bases while everyone's attention turned to Iraq and the Taliban slowly gained traction in large parts of the country. When they figured this out they tried to stamp it out, but at this point they were being reactive rather than proactive, and they were slowly increasing troop counts Vietnam-style. By the time Obama took office Iraq had become so unpopular that Afghanistan had become the Good War and he increased troop counts to 100,000, but by this time the situation was out of control.
I'm not saying any of this would have necessarily worked, just that it had a better chance of working than your proposal that they just needed to kill more people and take more casualties. People seem to forget that things were relatively quiet in Afghanistan for a few years after the initial invasion, and it looked like a stable government might form. All the while, though, the Taliban was reforming under the Coalition's noses, because they simply didn't have the necessary coverage. Whether this kind of coverage was even possible is an open question. This is like trying to patrol Texas if the biggest city is Houston minus a couple million people and the second-biggest city is El Paso, and everyone from Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, plus the 2 million taken from Houston, are scattered across the rural parts of the state. And the groups I described comprise half the population. If they're truly determined to resist your rule, then there's nothing you can do to stop them. I don't even know what kinds of numbers would be involved for this. I remembered Rumsfeld nearly having a heart attack after one of the generals told congress it would take over 400,000 troops to occupy Iraq, but Iraq is significantly more urbanized than Afghanistan, so I'd expect it to take quite a few more than that.
There seems to be a theme among conservatives here—and I'm not accusing you of this personally, since I can't tell if you're actually advocating for the options you proposed—of calling out the alleged "squeamishness" of the American public in terms of inflicting casualties on foreigners, taking casualties ourselves, and engaging in behavior that would generally be classified as atrocities. The upshot of this is that they blame American military and foreign policy failures on such a squeamishness. But there's another kind of political squeamishness that they don't talk about, which is when the policies required to win would be ones they themselves oppose on principle. Were we too squeamish about allowing Islamic terrorists a seat at the table, even if doing so may have served as a litmus test of their popular support and offered a relief valve for their political aims? Were we too squeamish in our reluctance to spend money? If Bush had said at the outset that he expected a minimum of 500,000 troops would be stationed across Afghanistan for the next 20 years minimum and would be slowly drawn down over the following 30, that all troops serving in Afghanistan would be expected to learn the local language of the area where they were serving, and that we would send hundreds of billions of dollars in economic development funds annually with absolutely no expectation of there being any kind of payoff, because this afforded Afghanistan the best chance of stability, what do you think the raction would have been? Even in the wake of 9/11, this would have been too much. But would it have meant we were too squeamish to want to win?
I'll never understand why people think monarchical restorations are a good idea. I can't think of any examples of this ever working, and it gets worse the closer you get in history. The Stuart Restoration is probably the most successful, but it only lasted 28 years, and they had only been out of power for about a decade. The Bourbon Restoration lasted 15 years. And honestly those are the only two examples I can think of because the rest aren't true restorations of exiled kings returning. I don't see how a guy who was nearly 90 and hadn't set foot in the country in 30 years was going to be the man of the hour to save Afghanistan from the Taliban. Yes, he was well-liked among all ethnic groups. This is what happens when half the population can't remember your being in power and the other half is looking through nostalgia-tinted glasses. That kind of goodwill is burned quickly when you're actually in power and have to make real decisions, and you haven't done anything remotely resembling statecraft in decades. It also would have seriously pissed off Pakistan to the point that it would have jeopardized the US's ability to use the land corridor, which would have made matters significantly worse than having Karzai, who was also popular at the time of his election.
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