Frankie99 wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 1:10 am
The choice was to realize there’s no good decision, and make the one that keeps American soldiers (more the contractors, really) out of the nation building game.

Waffles for the fact that he was senator/Vp for a lot of the leading up to this, but I also think that may have informed his decision.

I don’t like what’s happened, and I wish there were a better outcome than this, but man. Just seems like there was no good way to end something that needed ending.

I generally agree that it would have ended badly in almost any scenario, but I don't understand the logistical move of not evacuating non-military personnel prior to the last bulk withdrawal of US forces. That was either a gamble or an oversight. Either way it reflects poorly on the leadership.

Geiginni wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 2:29 pm
Bullshit. How about "Came as naive optimists, left as exhausted realists. Thank you, Joe, for being the one willing to finish off this half-eaten shit sandwich."

The US came into this country with the naive expectation that they were going to remake the place the same way they did Europe and east Asia after WWII.

I would be surprised if more than 20% of anyone involved on the ground or in the war rooms actually believed the US could democratize Afghanistan.

Geiginni wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 2:29 pm

eddymerckx wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 12:53 am Came as bullies, left as cowards. Nice one, Joe.

Bullshit. How about "Came as naive optimists, left as exhausted realists. Thank you, Joe, for being the one willing to finish off this half-eaten shit sandwich."

The US came into this country with the naive expectation that they were going to remake the place the same way they did Europe and east Asia after WWII. The naivete, of course, is that those places were nations, organized by secular rule-of-law and social contract. Easy peasy.

It was just plain stupid to think anyone can bring that to a nation of tribal warlords governed loosely by religious law and inter-tribal relationships. The literacy rate amongst adult men is only something like 5%. How can anyone expect to set up a secular government based upon rule-of-law when 90% of the adult population can't even fucking read? They would have been just as successful trying to train a standing national army of grey squirrels or macaques for fucksakes.

That foreign policy error that big-N 'Nations' need to stop making is to recognize that there are still places on earth that are not quite 'civilized' in the way that allows 'our' governmental systems to be exported with any sliver of success. And 'our' job is to stay the fuck out. Period.

If there is an absolute need to piss away taxpayer money on Sisyphean tasks, we might as well doing it trying to train squirrels and macaques to form secular republics and standing armies. At least it will prevent the tide of human misery that was unleashed over the previous 20 years.

Naivete or hubris?

kicker_of_elves wrote: Wed Sep 01, 2021 10:11 am

Geiginni wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 2:29 pm

eddymerckx wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 12:53 am Came as bullies, left as cowards. Nice one, Joe.

Bullshit. How about "Came as naive optimists, left as exhausted realists. Thank you, Joe, for being the one willing to finish off this half-eaten shit sandwich."

The US came into this country with the naive expectation that they were going to remake the place the same way they did Europe and east Asia after WWII. The naivete, of course, is that those places were nations, organized by secular rule-of-law and social contract. Easy peasy.

It was just plain stupid to think anyone can bring that to a nation of tribal warlords governed loosely by religious law and inter-tribal relationships. The literacy rate amongst adult men is only something like 5%. How can anyone expect to set up a secular government based upon rule-of-law when 90% of the adult population can't even fucking read? They would have been just as successful trying to train a standing national army of grey squirrels or macaques for fucksakes.

That foreign policy error that big-N 'Nations' need to stop making is to recognize that there are still places on earth that are not quite 'civilized' in the way that allows 'our' governmental systems to be exported with any sliver of success. And 'our' job is to stay the fuck out. Period.

If there is an absolute need to piss away taxpayer money on Sisyphean tasks, we might as well doing it trying to train squirrels and macaques to form secular republics and standing armies. At least it will prevent the tide of human misery that was unleashed over the previous 20 years.

Naivete or hubris?

Aren't they both two sides of the same coin?

At some point the contractors are just going to go to war and leave the standing armies at home.

Geiginni wrote: Wed Sep 01, 2021 12:29 pm

kicker_of_elves wrote: Wed Sep 01, 2021 10:11 am

Geiginni wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 2:29 pm

Bullshit. How about "Came as naive optimists, left as exhausted realists. Thank you, Joe, for being the one willing to finish off this half-eaten shit sandwich."

The US came into this country with the naive expectation that they were going to remake the place the same way they did Europe and east Asia after WWII. The naivete, of course, is that those places were nations, organized by secular rule-of-law and social contract. Easy peasy.

It was just plain stupid to think anyone can bring that to a nation of tribal warlords governed loosely by religious law and inter-tribal relationships. The literacy rate amongst adult men is only something like 5%. How can anyone expect to set up a secular government based upon rule-of-law when 90% of the adult population can't even fucking read? They would have been just as successful trying to train a standing national army of grey squirrels or macaques for fucksakes.

That foreign policy error that big-N 'Nations' need to stop making is to recognize that there are still places on earth that are not quite 'civilized' in the way that allows 'our' governmental systems to be exported with any sliver of success. And 'our' job is to stay the fuck out. Period.

If there is an absolute need to piss away taxpayer money on Sisyphean tasks, we might as well doing it trying to train squirrels and macaques to form secular republics and standing armies. At least it will prevent the tide of human misery that was unleashed over the previous 20 years.

Naivete or hubris?

Aren't they both two sides of the same coin?

At some point the contractors are just going to go to war and leave the standing armies at home.

That's fair. I attribute naivete to a more Pollyanna-ish take on things rather than arrogance, but point taken in this case.

If this was Warhammer, the contractors would be the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the standing army the Adeptus Astartes. Nothing good can come out of this.

We shouldn't have invaded in 2001, we shouldn't have abandoned the place after funding warlords throughout the 80s in our attempt to destabilize the Soviet Union, and we shouldn't have destabilized the place in the late 70s in order to goad the Soviets into an unwinnable war.
It is not an act of cowardice to end a war that is unwinnable and deny defense contractors their favorite cash-cow and to stand up to the military industrial complex for once and say "fuck off". If only we can do that with every other war we're indirectly involved in and with our constant robot death plane bombings of civilian targets.
My guess is that Trump, in this situation, would have backed down on pulling the troops after all the bad reporting and hand wringing from every side of the military spectrum of bloodthirsty ghouls because deep down, he only wants to be loved and respected by the elites. Biden, for whatever reason, doesn't give a shit about that at the moment and as much as I don't want to, I gotta hand it to him.

Jimbo wrote: Wed Sep 01, 2021 12:42 pm We shouldn't have invaded in 2001, we shouldn't have abandoned the place after funding warlords throughout the 80s in our attempt to destabilize the Soviet Union, and we shouldn't have destabilized the place in the late 70s in order to goad the Soviets into an unwinnable war.
It is not an act of cowardice to end a war that is unwinnable and deny defense contractors their favorite cash-cow and to stand up to the military industrial complex for once and say "fuck off". If only we can do that with every other war we're indirectly involved in and with our constant robot death plane bombings of civilian targets.
My guess is that Trump, in this situation, would have backed down on pulling the troops after all the bad reporting and hand wringing from every side of the military spectrum of bloodthirsty ghouls because deep down, he only wants to be loved and respected by the elites. Biden, for whatever reason, doesn't give a shit about that at the moment and as much as I don't want to, I gotta hand it to him.

Just quoting. Agree 100%. Saving this in my folder of PRF quotes. Thanks brother

pater_toma wrote: Wed Sep 01, 2021 3:52 am

Frankie99 wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 1:10 am
The choice was to realize there’s no good decision, and make the one that keeps American soldiers (more the contractors, really) out of the nation building game.

Waffles for the fact that he was senator/Vp for a lot of the leading up to this, but I also think that may have informed his decision.

I don’t like what’s happened, and I wish there were a better outcome than this, but man. Just seems like there was no good way to end something that needed ending.

I generally agree that it would have ended badly in almost any scenario, but I don't understand the logistical move of not evacuating non-military personnel prior to the last bulk withdrawal of US forces. That was either a gamble or an oversight. Either way it reflects poorly on the leadership.

I need to see if I can find the actual source, but there are lots of reports that people had been warned about the withdrawal for a long time - months now. The original plan was to withdraw in May, after all. The reporting makes it seem hasty, but this wasn’t a surprise to anyone in that area.

Geiginni wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 2:29 pm How can anyone expect to set up a secular government based upon rule-of-law when 90% of the adult population can't even fucking read? They would have been just as successful trying to train a standing national army of grey squirrels or macaques for fucksakes.

For a seemingly intelligent poster this sounds shockingly reductive and insensitive. I humbly disagree that the problem with our military foray was that our target were unteachable savages.

zorg wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 9:51 am

Geiginni wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 2:29 pm How can anyone expect to set up a secular government based upon rule-of-law when 90% of the adult population can't even fucking read? They would have been just as successful trying to train a standing national army of grey squirrels or macaques for fucksakes.

For a seemingly intelligent poster this sounds shockingly reductive and insensitive. I humbly disagree that the problem with our military foray was that our target were unteachable savages.

zorg wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 9:51 amunteachable savages.

Your quote, not mine.

The reality is that the paradigms and assumptions that this military based this foray upon were inapplicable to the environment in the most fundamental ways. There is no way that a standing national army and secular government could be established when the vast majority of adults are illiterate and have no concept of allegiance to "nation" or "society" beyond the obligations of inter-familial relationships.

Try to imagine the US Army operating with 90%-95% of personnel unable to read or do basic arithmetic. Try to imagine evangelical Trumpsters operating without any concept of Nationalism or "America" as a unified whole. Not pretty.

When your officer corps is in constant rotation because senior officers are found to be raping young recruits, that's an issue I doubt enthusiastic contractors anticipated. When your officer corps are unreliable because senior members have inter-marraige allegiances to Taliban senior members, that's an untenable conflict of interest I doubt the most optimistic US commanders had anticipated.

My apologies if you found my statement insensitive, but I don't think the assessment is that far off from the reality of the situation. I've come to be a pessimist about humanity. At least 40% of humans seems to be nitwits and bad actors acting in bad-faith. We are all primates governed by millions of years of evolution pushing us between acting in the interests of the group for mutual survival and acting in our selfish interests to ensure individual survival at the expense of the group. To think that humans are these pure bundles of light and goodness that are ruined by society is the kind of quasi-Christian nonsense that needs to go away.

Geiginni wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 10:31 am 90%-95% of personnel unable to read

I was curious about this, so I looked. I didn't find a lot of solid data on literacy rates in Afghanistan. UNESCO only has data for 1979, 2011, and 2018, when the rate was 18, 31, and 43 percent, respectively. No idea on the methodology behind those numbers.

I agree with the spirit of

Jimbo wrote: deny defense contractors their favorite cash-cow and to stand up to the military industrial complex for once and say "fuck off"

I do think the removal of troops will lessen the "cash-cow" aspect, and I do think Biden is taking a hit that few presidents would choose to take here.

I also think it's dangerous to assume that Biden pulling uniformed troops out of Afghanistan will truly say "fuck off" to the military industrial complex or end our military involvement in Afghanistan. We've already demonstrated that we'll continue to do drone strikes. Military contractors or "advisors" can operate from the border or even inside the country and our leaders will still dress the thing as if our involvement were concluded. We have done this exact thing, repeatedly, from Cuba to the Philippines to Vietnam to Iraq.

Frankie99 wrote:The reporting makes it seem hasty

The thing that I took from all the media I've seen as far as hastiness goes was the amount of allies and war materiel left behind. So the logistics were hasty, despite the long-term plan.