There's a pretty obvious saying about doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. The initial crisis of 9/11 that sent the US into Afghanistan was about defeating the terrorists that caused that tragedy--yet, we are only leaving ten years after Bin Laden, the mastermind of that event, was killed. A lot has happened in the meanwhile, but what hasn't and won't happen is an end to terror: tactics used by people in conflict, not an entity with a given identity. We haven't reached the end of extremism or militancy. We haven't come to the end of war, just this twenty-years-old war.President Biden: "I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation to achieve a different outcome. The United States cannot afford to remain tethered to policies created in response to a world as it was 20 years ago." pic.twitter.com/JB0bYSFf1B
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 8, 2021
The Taliban remain, but Biden has pledged to help relocate and protect the Afghan interpreters who assisted the US military. That much is entirely correct. The answer to the question "What was achieved?" has to be balanced against the stark realities of what was achievable. If violence occurs in the wake of the US military's pullout, the tension between Taliban and non-Taliban political forces existed before the war. That tension has to be resolved by them; we are in no position to cause a diplomatic resolution, there.
It's anti-climatic, I guess. Climaxes happen in dramas and this is real life.
3 comments:
I said, back when we were rushing to revenge 9/11, that if we went into Afghanistan, then we need a Marshall Plan of some sort, so that we can help bring that country into at least the mid-20th Century, if not quite the 21st.
I realized early on after we went in, that we weren't going to do that.
Because the real goal was Iraq, and its oil.
Hell, the operation's name was OIL: Operation Iraqi Libery.
OIL, sounds so much better than OLIORFI:
Operation Liberate Iraqi Oil Reserves From Iraq - for the benefit of America's corporations, of course.
So I said we need a Marshall Plan for Iraq, too.
But Cheney/Dumbaya had a different plan:
Their PNAC Plan, which was to topple Hussein, and control Iraq's oil.
Just grab the oil, and bug-out ASAP.
But oh, what a horrible, bloody, costly mess we made.
Both storming in, and then bugging out.
And very few conservatives acknowledge the horrors we caused.
THEY caused.
Too often, we prove our enemies are right about how fucking hypocritical and greedy they say America is.
Biden had better get out the Afghans who helped us, ASAP!
LIKE NOW!!
TODAY!!!
We shouldn't want to add even one more to the unconscienable, bloody "body count" we've racked-up there.
You don't say one untrue word. We could have started off better, if the people who started all of this wanted better, but they didn't. They didn't want to invest in these people and inspire a better and more self-determining democracy for people, which could have been our proudest export. They practiced disaster capitalism on these people and wrecked their politics to suit contractor-built solutions. Biden says he's going to help the translators (and I hope he's shipping them out ahead of the announced curve) but I hope a lesson gets learned--the finest example the US has for anyone is the "out" to colonialism is a self-directed bid for autonomy. We can't be the boss of other nations. We just barely accomplish being our own boss all the time.
I remember that, Vic, good to see you.
I'm still confused: is it faith, or insanity?
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