Battles have rarely been massive charges from two sides of a flat battlefield, as we see in war movies. Historically, it's been really hard to get soldiers to charge to their deaths, which makes sense if you think for a second. Most armies throughout history were nonprofessionals levied by their lords or seasonal opportunists, who fought for extra income. Sometimes, the leaders would get the soldiers drunk before they went in, and they'd retreat and have to be coaxed into running in again.
Aside from all this, contrary to some sort of received chivalric ideal of loyalty and fighting-unto-death, a great number of military engagements in every part of the world were decided by bribery and deception. People don't want to risk their lives and are often tempted by monetary gain. Countless forts have fallen to people opening the doors from within. There's instances of Sufi leaders being admitted into forts only to open the gates. Hyderabad was conquered by Aurangazeb in great part due to bribery, too.
The calculus changes dramatically if the attacker has a history of lenient behavior toward those who surrender, versus massacre for those who do not. The Mughals regularly incorporated surrendering lords into their feudal system, with honors, income, and opportunities for social advancement. The Mongols razed the Khwarezmia because of their disastrous refusal of their envoys.
>> Battles have rarely been massive charges from two sides of a flat battlefield, as we see in war movies. Historically, it's been really hard to get soldiers to charge to their deaths, which makes sense if you think for a second. Most armies throughout history were nonprofessionals levied by their lords or seasonal opportunists, who fought for extra income. Sometimes, the leaders would get the soldiers drunk before they went in, and they'd retreat and have to be coaxed into running in again.
In some historical periods that was true. In others, not so much. The Zulu at Isandlwana were seasonal warrior-farmers, but they sure charged the British lines with their goat's hide shields and short, thrusting spears, and massacred the British despite the latters' technological superiority. Alexander's army comprised regular professional soldiers and they sure marched in a phalanx (the phalanx didn't quite charge as it was too slow moving to do so) and Alexander himself of course charged at the head of his Hetairoi. The armies of medieval feudal lords were in their majority levies, as you say, but the Crusaders, in the same time period, were for the most part elite knights who fought with unending courage (and commited incredible atrocities) against enemies many times their numbers. And so it goes.
As to bribery, sure, many battles were fought with money or politics rather than swords. Yet again others were not. Think of WWI for example, or WWII. No chivalric ideals there, but the battles were bloody and the corpses piled on high.
Btw, thanks for reminding me to read about the Khwarazmians.
> the battles were bloody and the corpses piled on high.
Quite literally at times. Guadalcanal WWII:
> Enemy bodies were (literally) piling up so rapidly that he — or other Marines, depending on the story — had to vacate their defensive positions to knock over the growing wall of flesh so they could reestablish clear fields of fire.
Conversely the phalanx was practically a superweapon of hand to hand combat against the enemies of the time. As a soldier in Alexander's army's you were in relatively little danger provided the phalanx held - this is also true of the Roman legions.
Battles for a soldier were a few minutes of danger, followed by being pulled to the back of the line to rest and recover in relative safety: which makes sense of course. Anyone who's ever tried boxing knows how exhausting it becomes very quickly.
> Anyone who's ever tried boxing knows how exhausting it becomes very quickly.
True, most people have about 30 seconds of actual fight in them, if that. You really don’t want to go to the ground with someone who does it often, you will not win.
This is true. As someone who has done a lot of sparring, I can go for a long time, but it is only because I have learned how to be perfectly relaxed. Most people tense up their whole body and stay that way. Also breathing is incredibly important. But mostly, it is keeping your body relaxed, which also relaxes the breathing. But that's extremely difficult to do, when one hasn't done it thousands of times.
"anybody" = an office worker that has spent his life behind a desk. We are talking about farmers and craftsmen that has marched on foot for years with their gear. And now days we know that even our fastest runners train 80% of theri weekely training in a low steady state traingins, the kind of conditioning that increases the heart size, lowers the resting pulse and improves your ability to work after rest.
And yet professional boxers regularly gas after 5 rounds of 3 minutes... Now add equipment, particularly armour.
Or look up a Judo match, particularly during tournaments. You can see these guys are often wrecked after a particularly long match, and typically matches last only a few minutes. Just see Judo matches in the last Olympics, guys who typically have 3 to 5 training sessions a day, 7 days a week, for 2 decades.
>units of unmarried females were assigned to each impi to prepare food and perform other domestic duties. However, Shaka insisted on abstinence from sexual activities among his warriors (like some football and soccer coaches today). Any woman who became pregnant, along with her lover, would be immediately put to death. Nor did Shaka allow his warriors to marry until he gave permission, which he did infrequently and only when the regiment was being retired. Then, he would order the entire regiment to marry and would specify the unit among the women that they were to marry (kind of like Rev. Moon).
You're right about Shaka imposing celibacy, but my understanding is that it was only Shaka that did this and subsequent ruleres let their men free to breed as they saw fit. At Isandlwana Shaka was long gone and there was no celibacy rule, as far as I know - but I may be wrong of course.
The Napoleonic wars were full of massive charges, and long violent sieges against fortresses. Armies figured out how to instill enough discipline into soldiers to march straight into enemy fire. Casualties in the front ranks of the French army at Waterloo were horrific, yet they still kept attacking all day long.
"A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon."
Minor but annoying: Napoleon didn't say that and didn't mean it like that. When introducing the Légion d’Honneur (open to civilians too), the first introduction of an honor since the French Revolution, some on the left complained that this reintroduction violated the revolutionary concept of social equality. In 1802 when discussing the creation of it, Théophile Berlier sneered at the concept as merely baubles, and Napoleon replied:
"You tell me that class distinctions are baubles used by monarchs, I defy you to show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which distinctions have not existed. You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led.
I would not say this in public, but in a assembly of wise statesmen it should be said. I don't think that the French love liberty and equality: the French are not changed by ten years of revolution: they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They have one feeling: honour. We must nourish that feeling. The people clamour for distinction. See how the crowd is awed by the medals and orders worn by foreign diplomats. We must recreate these distinctions. There has been too much tearing down; we must rebuild. A government exists, yes and power, but the nation itself - what is it? Scattered grains of sand."
He went on that in order to ameliorate that sand, "We must plant a few masses of granite as anchors in the soil of France."
His phrase "it is with such baubles that men are led" (and your paraphrase) are often quoted out of context as something cynical, but Napoleon was actually commending these things as the physical manifestations of honor. If he's cynical about something, it's the liberty and equality bits.
The line after "We must plant a few masses of granite as anchors in the soil of France" ("Nous sommes maîtres de la faire , mais nous ne l’avons pas, et nous ne l’aurons pas, si nous ne jetons pas, sur le sol de la France, quelques masses de granit.") is perhaps an even more cynical take in light of the French Revolution that directly preceded Napoleon's rise.
> Croyez-vous qu’il faille compter sur le peuple? Il crie indifféremment Vive le roi, vive la ligue! Il faut donc lui donner une direction, et avoir pour cela des instruments.
Exactly, this is my point. Napoleon's professional standing armies are a relatively recent (~200 years) and exceptional compared to the historical norm. Even Napoleon was able to take lots of territory by just negotiating with actors who knew they had no chance. People don't want to just go die; this requires a large amount of training. Not wanting to kill someone is something like a universal.
Yes, that's true. A war machine requires surplus value. One reason why feudalism developed in Europe was for mounted warriors to be able to supply their warhorses. Facing constant violence, only super-appropriation of peasant surplus could give local lords and warriors enough resources to hold their own. And much of the success of many of the empires of history lies in their ability to requisition surplus value and use it to hire enough military labor. Rome could muster more soldiers than Carthage, for example.
I agree about the not wanting to die but "Not wanting to kill someone is something like a universal." is clearly wrong in a lot of cultures. And ignoring this fact is precisely what lead to some recent military disasters as well as bloodshed within Europe.
You get a lot of globalist shills here but the reality is that nationalism is a powerful force.
You can see that in Afghanistan: the Dutch embassy staff waved goodbye to the plebeians down on the Kabul airport when their military flight took off. Being a citizen of a country matters and it is worth fighting for.
Wellington used to say that the presence of Napoleon on a battlefield was worth forty thousand men. Partly due to Napoleon's tactical skill I'm sure, but I think this also speaks to Napoleon's unusual ability to motivate men. They didn't want to disappoint Napoleon so they were more willing to throw their own lives away. I think the defection of the Fifth Infantry Regiment at Grenoble probably corroborates this. There, they had the opportunity to shoot Napoleon dead and slaughter his rag tag forces but instead they chose to join him.
It speaks to the power of belief in something. Napoleon represented something bigger than a person, he was French nationalism.
I think a similar story (this is in Ken Burn's doc, told by Shelby Foote) is when the Union forces at Fredericksburg took the city and then sent wave after wave of soldiers at the Confederate held hills with a wall at the base of them. I don't recall how many waves it was (10+), but it's difficult to imagine being in the sixth or seventh wave, watch man after man before you walk into a "wall of lead" and decide to do it anyway.
How many people today have that kind of conviction? We can't get people to wear masks.
Oh but interestingly isn't that a kind of conviction itself? They've been fed some kind of idea of 'freedom' that they now strongly adhere to until death (I assume a lot of anti-mask are also anti-vaccine and are now the ones dying in the hospitals).
If you look at American politics over the past 5 years, trump has almost become another napoleon in how fervent the support he has, and how the idea of 'freedom' has held.
Excellent point, arguably NOT wearing a mask takes a lot more conviction than wearing it.
if you believe wearing a mask benefits you then there is no need for "conviction", it is just a belief and the person is trying to maximize their own benefit
Or others. Especially the heavy load to hosiptal system if one get sicks. There are two forces in live - self preservation and passion for others. Left and right coexist in one. That is the fundamental issue in life.
It's because we have weak, ineffective, self serving leadership, and have since probably LBJ.
People fight and die for a cause, what in the US is worth fighting and dying for for the average Joe? Constant surveillance, harassment by the state police, corrupt politicians, corrupt justice system, income inequality, shit healthcare, shit schools, shit housing, shit food, shit safety net, regressive taxes, massive debt given to the rich, bailouts for banks, foreclosures for the people, eroded civil rights, eroded constitutional rights? You have the American dream, then you have the American reality. I mean we reap what we've sewn for the last 40+ years. If we really had a serious existential military threat, where we had to reinstate the draft, I'm not sure how strong our response would be because of all this. Who wants to die for Amazon.com or Walmart or AT&T's profit? I mean the American way of life, as it stands today, how would you feel if you had to send your conscripted sons and daughters to die to protect it?
US has plenty of problems, is still better than many countries. Ask all the people who move here, they generally will be a lot more optimistic about the US.
Who the hell wants to kill and die for "still better than many countries?" If you think your country is worth keeping, you need a positive vision for that country.
>Ask all the people who move here, they generally will be a lot more optimistic about the US.
Here's the top 10 countries of origin for immigration to the US in 2018 (before COVID). We can assume people who immigrate to the US do it for a better life than the country they came from. Notice there aren't any "developed" countries in this list. Care to guess what that says about the US?
Mexico - 161,858,
Cuba - 76,486,
China - 65,214,
India - 59,821,
Dominican Republic - 57,413,
Philippines - 47,238,
Vietnam - 33,834,
El Salvador - 28,326,
Haiti - 21,360,
Jamaica - 20,347
The US has a positive net migration rate with every other major developed country. More people move to the US from Australia, France Germany, Finland, Canada, etc than go the other way. Care to guess what that says about the US?
Tell me what you think it says. I can think a lot of reasons why that would be the case, including unwillingness to learn a foreign language, requirement to pay US taxes as an expatriate, immigration level differences between countries as well as population difference.
Four in those countries are newly industrialized. They may be not "developed" yet, but they are getting there. I hate this **king division of countries into first world, third world, etc. There are certain cities in a "shithole" country that are far richer and better in certain neighborhoods in a "first-world" country around the world. Anyway, people don't immigrate to the U.S. to be happy - they get there to get better money for their skills, and then come back to visit their home countries on vacation to be "happy"
>I hate this *king division of countries into first world, third world, etc.
You're getting your nomenclature discombobulated. During the Cold War, first world was US and her allies. Second world was the USSR and her allies. Third world was all the others. Third world got branded as "shitholes," because they didn't have support from the superpowers and the superpowers tended to intervene in their local politics, or steal resources, etc.
>There are certain cities in a "shithole" country that are far richer and better in certain neighborhoods in a "first-world" country around the world.
Yes, most of the US by land mass would be considered a "shithole," by many people including myself, that was my original point. People in non "shithole" countries come here far less than countries who are worse off than us. That puts us in a pretty low point on the "great countries to live" scale. Somewhere slightly above Cuba and China. In most of the US, the economic prospects are grim and the federal support is near non-existent. The US is ok if you are the top 20-30% of earners, otherwise, it's pretty crappy. It wasn't always like this.
Civil rights in the US have been massively improved since the 1960s and 1970s. Even the prison population has been declining, finally, for about 12 years now. The war on drugs is ending.
You actually think eg black people or gay people are worse off in the US today than they were 30, 50, 70 years ago? It's an absurd premise. Just 30 years ago you couldn't even be publicly gay in Hollywood (left leaning Hollywood) or your career was toast. Gay people were widely culturally oppressed as recently as the 1980s and 1990s. Today Ellen is just about the biggest TV host in the country. Black people in the 1960s had something closer to no civil rights at all. Today the US has widespread protected class status for minorities, which wasn't the case as recently as the 1980s. In 1970 you could fire someone specifically for being a woman, or black, or gay, or just about anything else. You were largely free to mistreat today's protected classes to almost any degree you saw fit. Sexism in the workplace wasn't frowned upon as recently as the 1980s, there was no serious legal recourse, it was the status quo and almost universally tolerated. Try operating an office or business that way today, see what happens.
Or if you want to test things out culturally (litmus test it), go on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and go on a bunch of racist tirades. Use your real name and professional networks. See what happens to you professionally over time. You'll become an instant pariah.
Nearly across the board things are far better from a civil rights standpoint than in decades past. Both culturally and in terms of government. The primary exception remaining is minimum mandatory sentencing laws, which have been around for decades now.
> income inequality
There's absolutely nothing new about that. Go back to 1890 or 1920, income inequality was higher then than it is now. The US had a very brief period of time, lasting roughly only 20 years, where income inequality dropped lower.
> foreclosures for the people
There's absolutely nothing new about that. If you don't pay your mortgage, you get foreclosed on. That was true in 1960. It's true now. It should be true. The opposite is insanity.
> corrupt justice system
Whatever that means.
> harassment by the state police
The police were even worse 50 years ago than they are today. They were more violent, far more oppressive to minorities, and 100% got away with it. Their margin for getting away with abuse has declined considerably, despite propaganda to the contrary.
> corrupt politicians
True in most any nation that has ever existed or will ever exist.
> shit healthcare
US healthcare quality is closer to the OECD median. It's in fact not shit. It is exceptionally expensive for being at the median however. In the US it's the value proposition due to cost that is shit, not the actual quality of the healthcare.
> shit food
A bizarre, empty claim. The US is one of the most diverse nations in world history with one of the most elaborate consumer markets. You can eat whatever food you like.
> shit safety net
The US spends more of its economy on its social safety net than Canada or Australia. It has a lower homelessness rate than many of its prominent peers, precisely because its safety net is not shit (even if it's also not in the top tier).
> regressive taxes
The US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the developed world. It's far more progressive than Scandinavia by comparison. The US middle class pays exceptionally low taxes, which is one of the reasons the US middle class also has among the world's highest disposable income figures - comparable only to nations like Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway.
> massive debt given to the rich
No idea what that's supposed to mean. US households are in good financial condition compared to most of their affluent peers around the world.
> shit schools
Obviously far too comprehensive of a claim. The US has 17 of the top 20 universities in the world, give or take a position. Its top 100 universities are collectively unrivaled by the rest of the world. There is nobody close. The rest of the world has spent the entire post WW2 era trying to catch up to and mimic the US university outcome.
> shit housing
Plain false. US housing remains more affordable than housing in peer nations. Americans are able to buy larger, cheaper housing than their peers can. When it comes to having a ridiculous amount of space at a decent price, only a few developed nations compare to the US.
I would agree with you with the gay and LGBTQ community, but I think you're off base on the rest of it. Also I wouldn't put Hollywood up as a good example as what's good with the US culturally.
I mean we don't lynch black people anymore, so hu-rah USA? We don't use child labor anymore (at least in country) so hu-rah USA? Instead of brutalizing black protestors, the police brutalize protestors in an equal opportunity fashion. Hu-rah USA. We're only as economically inequitable as the 1920's robber baron era, hu-rah USA. I suggest you try to expand your view a little and see what the WHOLE country really is like.
It's one of the things that made the First Crusade so remarkable. Once the Crusaders were in way over their heads, it paradoxically made them far more committed than the warlords they were fighting against. The invaders were nowhere near hospitable lands, fighting for their lives.
Sorry to nitpick, but I wouldn't call the caliphs, sultans, emirs and kings of the muslim world of the 1090's "warlords". Even the Seljuks had essentially ceased being nomads by that time and had settled down.
"Alp Arslan authorized his Turkmen generals to carve their own principalities out of formerly Byzantine Anatolia, as atabegs loyal to him. Within two years the Turkmens had established control as far as the Aegean Sea under numerous beghliks (modern Turkish beyliks): the Saltukids in Northeastern Anatolia, the Shah-Armens and the Mengujekids in Eastern Anatolia, Artuqids in Southeastern Anatolia, Danishmendis in Central Anatolia, Rum Seljuks (Beghlik of Suleyman, which later moved to Central Anatolia) in Western Anatolia, and the Beylik of Tzachas of Smyrna in İzmir (Smyrna)."
I'm def not an expert, but this seems to match my understanding that at least in the recently lost Byzantine lands in Anatolia and northern Syria, it was more of a warlord situation than conquering through a centralized state. To be fair, this is pretty similar to pre-Manzikert Byzantine Anatolia or the Western Europe the crusaders hailed from. My point is that as the Crusaders conquered their way through the Near East, they weren't facing a single Islamic empire, but different local rulers, who weren't always coordinating.
In that case it depends on what you consider a "warlord". Kilij Arslan, the son of Alp Arslan (their second name means "lion"), commanded the Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia and was the first muslim ruler of the Middle East to confront the Crusaders. The Sultanate took up quite a large area of Asia Minor and included many major cities:
The muslim world was certainly fragmented into small kingdoms, more like city states, that constantly fought each other and that for a long time could not find common cause enough to present a united front against the Crusaders - and sometimes even sided with them to fight each other. But I think of them as kingdoms rather than tribes, so I don't think of their rulers as "warlords" but as, well, kings. And sultans, emirs, caliphs, etc. Then of course there was Egypt, that was generally a centralised state (and that also fought the Crusaders with a little more focus than the rulers of Syria and Anatolia).
My source for all this is "Les Croisades Vues par les Arabes" by Amin Maalouf (French title: The Crusades through Arab eyes). So I may well be missing a wider context.
I've read the English translation of that book. Quite simply, the best history of those wars (which could be called the real First World War, if anyone thought to name it as such), period. Hands down.
It helps when you have guys that are so convinced that they have found the lance that pierced the side of Christ that they are willing to walk through fire to prove it.
You mention a lot of points about Indian history. Most are right. One big factor in these things was the Caste system. With regards to the Mughals or other Central Asian cultures that ruled India. Most people in Geographical India just didn't feel the need to fight. Plus Mughals really intermarried and mixed with the local populace.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee(Former Prime Minister of India) said at one point in several key wars, there were more people sitting on the hills watching battles than actually participate in them. Most of it has to do with the Caste system barring participation, but the general point stands. A large section of people don't mind any political master ruling them as long as they are allowed to live in peace. This is why a general amnesty and treating local populations with respect, and just letting them be goes a long way in establishing your legitimacy over them.
In many cases when the political systems bought by an invading political force is better than existing political entity ruling them. Taxes are lower and they bring better ideas. In the case of India's independence. Watching movies and reading popular stories feels like the Independence movement was in peak intensity everywhere. In reality only major urban centers, and a few states saw these peak movements. Everywhere else it was business as usual. In states like Karnataka post the original wars between the Mysore Kingdoms and British, you barely hear any other stories. Even in the those wars, post defeat, the administration of Mysore Kingdoms moved in their entirety to British administrated political systems. The local public didn't really mind anything at all.
>>Aside from all this, contrary to some sort of received chivalric ideal of loyalty and fighting-unto-death, a great number of military engagements in every part of the world were decided by bribery and deception. People don't want to risk their lives and are often tempted by monetary gain. Countless forts have fallen to people opening the doors from within. There's instances of Sufi leaders being admitted into forts only to open the gates. Hyderabad was conquered by Aurangazeb in great part due to bribery, too.
Yup this is what happened in Mysore Kingdom. It is easy to label this treason or whatever. But people like Purnaiah and Mir Sadiq quite literally took money and made the British victory happen. Same thing happened in Bengal with Mir Jafar.
The success of a military system comes from it being able to muster strength in numbers, train and equip them appropriately. And all this depends on the economic system underneath.
A European feudal monarch might only have a few thousand men under his direct command, with the rest coming from levies from his vassals. This limits the amount of strength one person can hold on a battlefield, though the issue of lower-level leaders is already solved (this problem will always be present.) Compare this to nation-states being able to field massive armies under the control of one person.
In the same way, not being able to take advantage of all of the people in a society is a problem too. I am unsure to what effect caste inflected military participation. I doubt it was ever so strict as to prevent farmers from taking up arms. I'm unsure how many peasant rebellions happened in India, relative to other areas. China certainly had many. AFAIK, for much of Indian history there was more land than people to till it, so lords had to be careful to induce them to stay, lest they run away to better areas, with lower taxation and such.
>> Battles have rarely been massive charges from two sides of a flat battlefield, as we see in war movies.
Except e.g. WW1, which was just waves of senseless charging into machine-guns. It's hard to convince soldiers to charge into almost certain death but in war on an industrial scale (to which I would also count the napoleonic wars) it's possible. War can be unbelievable cruel, just compare the practice of decimating your army in roman times. You just kill every tenth soldier of your own army, because an army nine tenth its size that follows your orders is more useful than an army in full strength that does not.
WW1 was a lot more dynamic than popular history credits it to be. Over a few years, every practice of warfare evolved to make the charge across no man's land as successful as possible, while the enemy tried its best to thwart it.
Remember that this war started with cavalry charges and ended with tanks and airplanes.
"Our failure to understand [the Taliban's] dynamic has had consequences."
There was no "failure to understand". This narrative that Afghanistan was a well-intentioned strategic/tactical failure is utterly misleading. The dynamic reality was very clear to every one involved (who cared to know), from servicepeople to 4-star generals, but the military's culture of careerism and corruption prevented these truths from being publicly acknowledged [1].
I strongly recommend you listen to the two veterans describe the dynamic (try 1.5x speed). It is worth more than a 1000 hours of the bloviating punditry that crowds the airwaves right now.
The gist:
* On the ground: "rebuilding Afghanistan" was a total farce. Major Sjursen (Ret.) describes handing out bags of money to "local contractors" with virtually no oversight. He suspects that the Taliban were among the "contractors" and were benefiting immensely from the inept American policy.
* The US military/political leadership is entirely motivated by optics and self-interest. Virtually every report had to have a positive outlook; publicly recognizing the reality on the ground was forbidden, including using words like "insurgency".
I'm a vet, so maybe you'll listen to me. I served in 2011-2012 over the course of what amounts to two deployments with a Marine Corps unit in Helmand and Nimroz provinces.
> The US military/political leadership is entirely motivated by optics and self-interest. Virtually every report had to have a positive outlook; publicly recognizing the reality on the ground was forbidden, including using words like "insurgency".
I would say this half-thought out. While it is true to some degree, the military is largely beholden to the DOD, State Department, various intelligence agencies and the President. Senior Leaders self interest is staying employed and that is done by appeasing their bosses. If you're going to blame military leaders it's always a good idea to ask, "Where'd they get their orders from?" That may sound like a trope, but it's not.
When I went to Afghanistan I cannot tell you how many times we ran into bad intel on the ground. This makes operations run inefficiently, it causes accidents, it affects morale, etc... This literally because the military had a very difficult time, even then, understanding multi-celled non-central organizations like terrorist cells who were smart enough to insert bad intel where it needed to be.
I heard the President at the time telling the American citizens that we were training troops in Afghanistan, all the while I kept seeing report after report saying that troops are being shot in the back on patrol. Sure, we're training them but they're smoking hash on post because four years of ANA or AP pay is equivalent to a dowery. Most of those people didn't want to be there to save their country, they were there to have a better life. Very different motivations and they certainly play a distinct difference in how you'll serve. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/11/six-us-soldier...
I don't have any concrete thoughts on who to blame, be it generals, Presidents, or government officials. Maybe there is no blame. There's also room in my mind that the Taliban and other terrorist organizations are just formidable, well-equipped, and well-educated foes who use ideology as a viral weapon in areas that lack the defensive resources of opportunity and education to combat them. In purpose they are no different from cartels -- their main export is heroin (https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/inl/rls/rm/72241.htm). It's not only how they fund themselves, but it's how they get rich and garner more power to enable their ideology.
> When I went to Afghanistan I cannot tell you how many times we ran into bad intel on the ground. This makes operations run inefficiently, it causes accidents, it affects morale, etc... This literally because the military had a very difficult time, even then, understanding multi-celled non-central organizations like terrorist cells who were smart enough to insert bad intel where it needed to be.
> I don't have any concrete thoughts on who to blame, be it generals, Presidents, or government officials. Maybe there is no blame. There's also room in my mind that the Taliban and other terrorist organizations are just formidable, well-equipped, and well-educated foes who use ideology as a viral weapon in areas that lack the defensive resources of opportunity and education to combat them.
This feels like a cop-out. If the wealthiest nation with the most powerful military in the world wasn't able to achieve the outcome they wanted, something's gone wrong somewhere. I'm happy to entertain a theory like, maybe the DoD put yes-men at the top, but that still begs the question of what went wrong and why that didn't happen in previous wars. Is our state capacity actually much weaker than it was in previous decades? Is the real problem that the public wasn't committed to the war? Maybe - but in that case why weren't we able to realise that earlier?
Ultimately this shouldn't have happened the way it did. I'm sure there are multiple causes rather than a neat single reason, but something is rotten in the US.
There certainly are multiple things rotten in the US, but a glance at history shows us that this sort of challenge has always been nearly impossible.
Specifically, I'm talking about the challenges faced by a wealthy, technologically superior nation-state seeking to subdue a remote, decentralized coalition of irregular military forces whose fighters can blend in with the general populace when needed.
The birth of the USA was something somewhat similar, with the colonies' "ragtag" army defeating the British.
It's also something the Roman Empire struggled with. They conquered city-states with relative ease, rolling them into their empire with a combination of carrot and stick. Decentralized peoples were often another story.
It's also not like there's a shortage of writings about how Afghanistan is essentially unconquerable, thanks to geography and culture. "Graveyard of empires," indeed.
The amusing thing about Taliban and heroin production and export is that they used to be against it (on religious grounds), and suppressed it very brutally and efficiently.
That is, until we invaded. Then they needed the money, and suddenly it was okay.
It will be interesting to see what happens now. Apparently the official stance is that they're going to suppress it again, but we'll see how that translates to real actions.
Based on your experience, is there any reason to believe that USA military as it currently exists could ever be more successful at achieving military objectives in any similar conflict?
I am probably not qualified to answer that, but I'll give you my take.
The US Marine Corps can do anything it sets its mind to. Marines are an amazing and rare breed of people with a culture to boot. To this day, outside of SOCOM, they are one of the only fighting forces that I know of that continue the legacy, lifestyle, and traditions of a warrior culture. In this capacity, yes, I think if you cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war they will do exactly what they are meant to do with zeal and tenacity.
On the other hand, I think the Marine Corps is bound by tricky circumstances, including in Afghanistan. When guerrilla warfare becomes the standard a uniformed military is at a strategic disadvantage. We are bound to things like the Law of Land and Warfare and the Geneva Convention while the enemy is not. They'll blow up a truck in the middle of a convoy and start firing on your position as you try to rescue your friends from burning alive. They'll plant multi-decompression IED's which explode after having been stepped on multiple times because they know watching your best friend or squad leader getting blown up is a shattering experience. They'll have you chase them through a town, backlaying IED's in buildings that you fought from because they know when they really bring the heat and you retreat that you'll go places that you think you've already cleared as safe. They'll pick fights in crowded markets because they know that having to assess a crowd of targets and picking the wrong target is damning both personally and in PR. They'll send kids to fuck with you, throw rocks at your helmet so you take your eyes off your surroundings -- and they know because the folks at home will ask questions that you won't do anything.
The Taliban, and other groups like them, know that folks back home in America are always watching and forming opinions -- many of them in their favor. They know that the more frustrating they make the war, and the harder and more drawn out they make it the more frustrated the American people become. They don't really need to do much; blow up a bridge here, destroy some cellphone towers, set off a couple IED's in crowded spaces, etc... It's the epitome of slow and steady wins the race.
Can a war be won against such people? I think so. The British beat the IRA into submission and they used most of the tactics the Taliban/ISIS/Al Queda use. The difference is they had popular support and it was much closer to home.
Thanks for the answer. I confess I don't see why any similarly-situated opponent would eschew any of those problematic tactics. If we can't handle those we can't in good conscience go to war.
Your impression of the Northern Ireland peace process seems wildly at odds with my recollection. The various Republican and Unionist groups killed and injured more people than the government did. The Provos forced the other parties to the negotiating table with the Docklands and Manchester bombings, and the resulting Good Friday agreement was approved by 97% of Catholic voters because it established local government and made it possible for Ireland to be reunited based on future votes. IRA was no more "beaten into submission" than Taliban were.
On 9 February 1996 a statement from the Army Council was delivered to the Irish national broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann announcing the end of the ceasefire, and just over 90 minutes later the Docklands bombing killed two people and caused an estimated £100–150 million damage to some of London's more expensive commercial property.[183][184] Three weeks later the British and Irish governments issued a joint statement announcing multi-party talks would begin on 10 June, with Sinn Féin excluded unless the IRA called a new ceasefire.[185] The IRA's campaign continued with the Manchester bombing on 15 June, which injured over 200 people and caused an estimated £400 million of damage to the city centre.[186] Attacks were mostly in England apart from the Osnabrück mortar attack on a British Army base in Germany.[185][187] The IRA's first attack in Northern Ireland since the end of the ceasefire was not until October 1996, when the Thiepval barracks bombing killed a British soldier.[188] In February 1997 an IRA sniper team killed Lance Bombadier Stephen Restorick, the last British soldier to be killed by the IRA.[189]
Following the May 1997 UK general election Major was replaced as prime minister by Tony Blair of the Labour Party.[190] The new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam, had announced prior to the election she would be willing to include Sinn Féin in multi-party talks without prior decommissioning of weapons within two months of an IRA ceasefire.[190] After the IRA declared a new ceasefire in July 1997, Sinn Féin was admitted into multi-party talks, which produced the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998.[191][192]
I wouldn't call it bad management. It was just realistic management.
We knew by 2002 we weren't going to turn it into a shining pillar of democracy. The next 19yr were just people covering their asses and biding their time while the American public came around to the same conclusion.
It's kind of like letting your direct reports screw off and job hunt on the job because your all getting laid off but the termination date is next quarter. Not great, but doesn't really matter to the big picture.
> prevented these truths from being publicly acknowledged
To be honest, I'm shocked that people are deluding themselves that anybody ever thought otherwise.
I can't ever remember reading an article in any mainstream news outlet that suggested nation building in Afghanistan was going well. The "peace deal" that Trump signed with the Taliban last year literally assumed the Taliban would quickly takeover the country once the U.S. withdrew, and I don't remember anybody seriously disputing that basic assumption. At best people just ignored thinking about the issue entirely; any American who gave it any serious consideration would have to fend off some serious cognitive dissonance to believe it was going well.
This has been the state of affairs for 5, maybe 10 years, at least. But we live in an age of outrage culture where hoards of people seem to spontaneously develop amnesia whenever there's something to get upset over.
The withdrawal seems to have been problematic, though because of rage culture and collective amnesia it's rather difficult to judge the magnitude of the logistical errs from the press.
That said, the withdrawals were ongoing for years; the U.S. was down to 2500 personnel as long ago as January. Considering that so-called nation-building is an art that no polity has yet cracked, it's not surprising that the U.S. would also fail to foresee how spectacularly they fell short in their endeavor--i.e. that the Taliban would take mere days or even hours, rather than months, to control the country.
And I fail to see how careerism in the military could be blamed for any of this, at least at a strategic level. Again, who the heck believed Afghanistan wasn't a lost cause? Nobody. The occupation was interminable because nobody had the political guts to pull out completely (especially considering rage culture), even though everybody knew full well that the U.S. could never commit more to get the job done (assuming anybody even knew what or how much it would take to get the job done, which in fact nobody did and there was hardly any pretense otherwise, at least not in the past several years).
From afar what i got out of the afghan withdrawal was about the idea that intervening has failed too many times and it would be wise to leave. The local political aftermath was drowned underneath sadly. I also had a misconception that Taliban became mild and would just become the usual conservative semi dictatorship ala Syria or Turkey. Not gunning in crowds in day one.
The impression I’ve gotten from folks that were “over there” recently - including one person who was a contractor serving as embassy security in Kabul and didn’t get out until the second-to-last military flight - is that there are now effectively “two Talibans”.
There’s the main contingent, which is interested in being recognized as the legitimate government of the country and participating on the global stage. They comprise the leadership of the forces that took the major cities and are mostly interested in organizing a working civil authority at the moment.
Then there’s a hardline group. They’re mostly “tribal” leaders and leaders of smaller bands of fighters specifically in rural areas. They’re more similar to the Taliban from before the US invaded; they care little for how things look to the rest of the world and are enforcing their edicts vigorously.
This aligns with what I’ve seen from the outside. Not much seems to be happening in Kabul or Kandahar, but there are videos coming from the outlying areas of door-to-door raids resulting in the executions of “collaborators”.
The fact that we are willing to even call this “nation-building” speaks volumes to how deeply we are penned. Nation-building? Is that what we were doing in Afghanistan? We were there to build a democracy of institutions? Or were we there to pillage a country?
Why don’t we “nation-build” Saudi Arabia? Oh. We are already extracting the wealth? Right.
It simultaneously delegitimizes the current / former government (not "a nation") and casts the outcome in unimpeachable terms (more democracy, more freedom, more nation).
But in a lot of ways, it's a tautology. Because nation building really means "more like us."
And what country would disagree that the rest of the world would be so lucky as to be made more like it?
This is very much what the UN charter is about. Article 2 has always irked me the wrong way. It's basically saying that any member has to support the UN in any action towards non members if it suits their view of peace and security. Which is obviously very vague.
5. All Members shall give the United Nations every assistance in any action it takes in accordance with the present Charter, and shall refrain from giving assistance to any state against which the United Nations is taking preventive or enforcement action.
6. The Organization shall ensure that states which are not Members of the United Nations act in accordance with these Principles so far as may be necessary for the maintenance of international peace and security.
Is that what we were doing in Afghanistan? We
were there to build a democracy of institutions?
Or were we there to pillage a country?
I'm not a fan of the US' occupation of Afghanistan, and I don't think the US was there for some sort of higher ideal... but, pillage? It's not a country from which there is much wealth to extract.
Of course, the US military-industrial complex profited nicely. That's not quite the same as pillaging, though.
Except of course for the Trillion worth of mineral wealth found in 2010[0], that the Afghan government has been spending $300 million per year on(probably to US contractors)[1].
There’s nothing to pillage in Afghanistan except heroin. If there were things would have probably gone better because at least there would have been a point.
Poppy cultivation was serially outlawed, punished, tolerated, encouraged, etc, start again. Different policies came through on a regular basis, with no more reliance on logic or local circumstances than any other USA military policy in Afghanistan. The only constant was that nobody screwed with fields owned by powerful people e.g. Ahmed Wali Karzai.
> The "peace deal" that Trump signed with the Taliban last year literally assumed the Taliban would quickly takeover the country once the U.S. withdrew
Actually, no. Trump's Doha agreement implied a 14 month staged, gradual, condition based withdrawal, with no people or materiel left behind. Which, on top of that, would be aborted if Taliban tried to pull off what they pulled off over the past couple of weeks.
But Trump's Doha agreement would not allow Biden to take credit "by 9/11", so he scrapped it and withdrew haphazardly, without any conditions, leaving thousands of people and billions in materiel behind enemy lines. He owns this now.
It was a screwed up situation with no right answers brought about by cascading events that started long before 9/11. There was no choice but to invade after 9/11, there was no opportunity for victory for the duration, and there were no easy morally right exits for the duration. Generations of honorable and well meaning Americans fought for what they believed was right.
I have my doubts but I truly hope the taliban somehow came out the other side as a more moderate organization. It would be so incredibly amazing to know that half of their massive population would not be oppressed. I will be keeping my fingers crossed but it seems unlikely to me that a battle hardened group like theirs could be anything but hardline and this seems like the perfect thing to say so that no one gets second thoughts about leaving.
My understanding is that medieval warfare, among the noble class, had similarities to this: specifically, nobles didn't necessarily fight to the death. Capture and ransom was a big thing. The term "parole" comes from the idea of giving one's word, after capture, that you would not return to fighting if you were released. The nobles of Europe, too, had an extended network of kin, some of whom might be on the "other side."
I don't recall learning about switching sides with fluidity (as in Afghanistan), but I do recall learning that this little game got broken up once the common people were enlisted.
War rules are fascinating. They play a large role in the Mahabharata, which has an incredibly long battle sequence at the end, where the events of each day are detailed minutely. Part of the moral complexity of the epic comes from both sides breaking the rules, all of which are broken at some point and lead to pivotal shifts in the battle. These rule violations muddy the moral waters: what's usually seen as a "good guy"/"bad guy" story turns into a vicious tale of deception, violence, and senseless death. This martial epic contains within it both the call to duty, and, therefore, violence, but also a searing critique of where it leads to.
That sounds fascinating and it reminds me I haven't read the Mahabharata (then again I have quite a bit of backlog going all the way back to the epic of Gilgamesh...)
Is there a good English translation? Or a French one maybe?
It's funny that you mention this because one of my fav fight scenes in any movie is at the beginning of Hero, the 2002 movie with Jet Li. When Jet Li and Donnie Yen's characters face off at the beginning of the movie, they imagine the fight in their heads, with a shift to black&white noting the shift to an imagined fight. Their "simulation" leads to both sides recognizing that Jet Li would win, and Jet Li finishes his opponent off with one swift movement. The scene actually takes place at a chess courtyard, with an old man playing music as they "fight".
Of course! "All is fair in love and war", as the saying goes. Stabbing in the back is a tried and true method of winning a conflict.
Rules of war hold up only in certain cases, like:
1. You're so much stronger than your opponent that you can unilaterally uphold rules that disadvantage you in combat.
Example: USA in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. Both sides expect to survive the fighting and possibly engage again in the future, so it makes sense for both sides to play by the rulebook to reduce costs of ongoing conflict.
Example: not shooting at enemy medical transports, and not using yours for combat operations, lest the enemy starts shooting your medics. Extreme example: MAD doctrine - nuclear powers are bound by the ultimate rulebook, breaking which will annihilate them all. That's what kept USA and USSR from engaging in full-scale warfare. That's what keeping China, Russia and USA from direct confrontation today.
3. There are powerful third parties willing to intervene against the side that breaks the rules.
Example: Geneva Conventions, to some extent (I don't think anyone got actually pounded over breaking them). Also sports.
No high-minded rule can overcome the fear of death. So, for a warring party to hold themselves to a standard, the stakes either have to be so low that they can do it out of virtue (or PR considerations), or breaking the rules must be more dangerous than upholding them.
"... what seems to be the case is that, for people like Bertran, the chance of dying in all of that war remained relatively low. In the first case, the style of warfare of the 12th century, oriented around raids and sieges, with relatively few large set-battles and relatively smaller armies – tended towards lower casualties in comparison to the warfare of other eras."
But do keep in mind that this is a particular period of medieval warfare; it's not universal.
The consistent problem with most comments about the conflict in Afghanistan is they fail to fully account for the role of the Pakistan Army and ISI in all of this. They are the most important element in the conflict, not the Afghans, not us and not the Taliban. If they weren’t involved and the conflict were limited to Afghanistan and Afghans things like what Mr. Filkins describes would hold sway and accommodations and arrangements might be made. But that won’t happen because the Pak Army/ISI won’t let it. They have a mad idea of requiring Afghanistan for strategic depth (‘After the Indians beat us we can fall back on the tank factories of Kabul and regroup.’) and they require a compliant regime running the country. So they make it happen. As plucky as the Afghans can be, Afghanistan can’t handle Pakistan, especially a Pakistan that is a conduit for Gulf Arab money being sent to buy the donors a place in heaven.
Handling the Pak Army/ISI was our job and we didn’t do it. We never really even tried to do it. If we had kept the Paks out and the conflict was contained within Afghanistan, the Afghans could have handled what would have been left of the Taliban through means such as those described by Mr. Filkins. But we didn’t. We got had by Pakistan and tales of the Raj and their special knowledge. We gave them money even, lots of it to kill us and Afghans.
We did get something for this though. Hundreds of high ranking officers got their tickets punched. The spec ops community got their budgets and fanfare. Multitudes of State Dept. people got hazard pay and career points. Contracting companies and contractors galore got lots and lots of money over lots and lots of years. Several thousand of our guys died but they were mostly deplorable NASCAR fans and don’t much count. Now the party is over and the Afghans get to pay the final bill.
Nice going Americans! This is the second time in my life where we’ve bugged out on people who trusted us when we told them we wouldn’t bug out on them.
(The above comment was made by someone on the original article, but I think it's 100% accurate.)
Foreign power is foreign. The affairs is internal. Ultimately it has to be decided for people on the ground. Unless you colonise it replacing the beings to be yours as one country did and do, I suspect even Pak or whoever will fail.
Afghanistan was a war of attrition that the locals felt the most of. Likely one of those wars that your dad and granddad fought (if you trace it back from the Soviet invasion) and somehow you also ended up fighting in. After a while everyone gets tired and they want to live in peace and not die in a war.
It wasn't anywhere near close to a war of attrition. It was a war of different value systems, and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war. For Taliban it was not a problem to hide among the civil population, and for the Americans it was problematic to commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas, to actually win this war.
War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers, it means the goal of the war is to wear down the enemy so that their will to fight collapses which both the Taliban and the US tried to do, see: https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-tal...
War of attrition almost certainly requires high continual casualty numbers, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article:
> Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel.
Much like the Napoleonic invasion of Moscow, the key was home field advantage. Not in the classic Russian winter sense.
Once Napoleon's army arrived in Moscow, there was a "what now" aspect to the war. They'd accomplished the goal that was set out and defeated Russia, but they didn't actually want to live in Moscow. So, they eventually left to go fight the Russian army, which had seemingly and unbelievably abandoned its crown city to the invaders. But they hadn't. Because Moscow was home, whether it was filled with these unseemly visitors or not. There was no way Napoleon's forces could win unless the Russians actually decided to sign a piece of paper and let them.
That works if you want to win the land. China only wants the land in Xinjiang, they would be ecstatic if the whole place was Han Chinese.
The US by contrast has enough territory already, they don't want or need Afghan soil. Instead they went to war so that Afghanistan would have their chosen government. The only way to do that is to colonize it and exert direct control. They never committed to that (it's kind of frowned upon internationally), so it was a failure.
I don't believe these measures contrary to our values would be something that helps us "win" the war, especially not in way that we would have liked.
But I do believe that the American people's heart were not into the fight, especially when it became a "forgotten" war. If we commit our full effort and our mind, we might have won the way we would stomach.
In the end, if this is not the kind of war the American people are willing to fight, then we shouldn't entered them.
The goal was never to "win". It was to build up an army (the afghan army) that could eventually stand by itself and defend the government in place.
This was a largely failing effort even years ago, considering that most of the afghan army were made up of people from the north of Afghanistan and previous geopolitics (north/south) play a role. The people in the south would at times trust the taliban over sympathisers for the previous northern warlords which had influence over members of the afghan army.
Speaking of north/south divisions... I once spoke with a young adult Afghan refugee who got naturalized in New Zealand - this was a couple years after the Taliban fell. I asked him how he felt about that. I certainly didn't expect the response.
He said that Taliban were dangerous religious fanatics, but at least they were predictable fanatics - they had a set of laws, some very harsh, that you had to follow, or else. On the other hand, the Northern Alliance forces, in his telling, were basically just looters - they didn't bring better laws so much so as no laws, just a free-for-all where the guy with the gun takes whatever he wants. So his solution to that dilemma was to emigrate, but he told me that if he couldn't do that, he'd prefer Taliban.
> The goal was never to "win". It was to build up an army (the afghan army) that could eventually stand by itself and defend the government in place.
And we've done just that.
We're just not willing to admit that at the 11th hour we threw up our hands, said fuck it and decided that army would be the Taliban.
We literally handed them a country and all the shit they need to not be somebody's puppet.
If we had accepted that we'd just be turning over the country to the same old bunch of hard line jerks 10yr ago we could have better prepped for this moment but leaving the place on unstable footing is simply the price of deluding ourselves. I hope for everyone's sake it doesn't turn into a war torn shithole again.
The problem is the real goals are not revealed to the public, so all the wishywashy stuff about unclear goals is just to fool onlookers while the real goals were accomplished. Anybody who bought into the whole "no such thing as the deep state" in the anti-Trump furor of the moment is foolishly naive in contrast with the reality behind both Afghaniatan but also Iraq and the GWOT generally.
In a land were so many self-appointed technocrats clamor for censorship, soon discussion of the real hefty topics at play will become badspeak and premptively banned, removed, silenced.
For example,have fun trying to say one thing about how Israel and Suadi Arabia both had more involvement in 9/11 than Afghanistan did without immediatedly being attacked.
Its easier to talk about 3-letter motivations like continued drug, gun money going into black book coffers so they dont have to account to congress only because its something more in the mainstream mind.
Another topic thats generally forbidden? Analysis of the media machine that pushed us into war(s) in the first place.
I could go on. The point is the real goals are not the presented goals. If you understand that you have a much better chance at real insight.
I disagree, in the beginning the Americans were hopeful they could impose a puppet state with permanent US military bases. Look at a map and you can see the allure.
Nobody in the region was particularly enthusiastic with that idea.
Nobody was particularly enthusiastic about the Taliban, either. Except perhaps the Pakistanis, who wanted a relatively friendly, stable country on their border (IIRC, there was an oil/gas pipeline involved.)
Afghanistan has always been poor and its people fractured because it was cut off from the world by its topography, but topography can be overcome.
If the US had spent the last 20 years building infrastructure, railroads, highways, mining operations, schools to train engineers, managers, and professionals, Afghanistan would likely look a lot different.
But the US missed even low hanging fruit like making poppies a legitimate crop by giving Afghanistan a cut of the legal opioid market.
60% of Afghanistan is illiterate. An improvement from when NATO forces invaded 20 years ago, but not too much better. I don’t think your infrastructure dreams would have had any efficacy.
What does someone working in a primitive mine need with literacy? It would be a job that paid a lot better than subsistence farming and might allow that person to send their kids to school to become engineers.
Without railroads and highways, Afghanistan will never move forward. It should have been the first thing we did, and not only to link up cities, but to locations with large amounts of natural resources to build up some wealth and industry.
It was making training army difficult for American troops for example. Soldiers complained about it.
Such high illiteracy rates will make it impossible to build enough of management and general bureaucracy needed to build anything large. It will make it hard to train workers in technology. You won't build railroads nor roads, you won't mainten them either.
Primitive mines are not competitive. They are not producing enough to feed you. And hungry people won't save money for school. You need technology.
> 20 years building infrastructure, railroads, highways, mining operations, schools to train engineers, managers, and professionals
20 years? Zahir Shah tried this for 40 years. Amanullah Khan also tried, as did several others. Numerous would-be reformers have thought as you do and tried to impose change on Afghanistan, and all their efforts have culminated in the situation we have now. It's been approached from a number of ideological/political directions. Some were monarchs, others proponents of republics. The PDPA/Soviets tried it from a Marxist/Leninist angle with lots of bloodshed, while Zahir Shah tried to create a constitutional monarchy and refrained from murdering his political opponents. Neither succeeded in the end.
What would you bring to the table that hasn't been tried before?
Keep in mind that, whether or not the initial invasion of Afghanistan was justified, it immediately became a football in the US political game. George W. Bush was elected on a platform that included "no nation building", and he certainly didn't. (I have a personal theory that the invasion of Iraq was solely due to the fact that the war in Afghanistan as of 2002-3 was not going to get Bush re-elected. Bush also failed to include the costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in his 2005 budget (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/03/us/president-s-budget-pro...).)
The war in Afghanistan was started badly, continued thoughtlessly, and, naturally, ended poorly. As it was originally destined to do.
> and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war.
You are suggesting that it is the US's gentlemanly morals that puts it at such a disadvantage as to make "winning" impossible. But what is "winning" absent those values? More dead Taliban at the cost of more dead civilians? If that is "winning" for the US, it is almost certainly not "winning" for the Afghans who live in the country and would prefer to be alive.
But say you kill more Taliban while generally tolerating civilian casualties, then what? The US is no longer a force protecting Afghans from the Taliban, but a force bent on conquering the land of Afghanistan. The Taliban will increasingly look like liberators against a bloodthirsty invader whose raison d'etre for occupying the country is not the livelihood of Afghans but to install a puppet government. The Taliban will regrow, resupplied by the friends and family of civilian dead, and emboldened with a moral mandate.
The more you "win", the more enemies you create for tomorrow. At the strategic level, there is no winning, only various ways to lose more slowly. But eventually the outcome is the same, as it has been in all Western colonies. The difference is that in the old days, the goal was just to extract wealth from a place, not to reconstitute its population (though the French did try).
Then why did the Americans not accept the Taliban surrender? No, this was not a war of value systems, this is just proof of how hard someone can fight if you do not allow them to surrender.
I can recommend 21st Century Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic Prophecy for the Modern Era, edited by B. A. Friedman. It is a collection of articles written by Ellis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Hancock_Ellis) starting with one on the Philippine-American War, an early example of a loose manual on how to handle counter-insurgency.
It also contains his "Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia" which was essentially the US Marines portion of the Navy's plans for WWII in the Pacific.
> commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas
The PDPA and Soviets tried this, and it didn't work. Together they killed tens of thousands of combatants and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians. Millions more were displaced. And what did they get for that bloodshed? Certainly not the reform they sought.
After reading this article, Afghanistan doesn't seem inherently like a war of attrition at all.
"Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends"
It seems more like renaissance Europe, where armies of Condottiero would parade against eachother, and the smaller or less extravagant side would back down.
This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'.
"The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war"
- Julian Assange, 2011
Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of dragged out death and destruction is a fair outcome for the country.
>> This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'.
The role of the US went from hunting and killing Taliban to not allowing them a permanent base from which to launch terror attacks to "nation building" where the military was then building schools and gas stations. The US never wanted a "bloody war". If they did, they could end the Taliban in the span of a few weeks, just like they did ISIS. It wouldn't be a war, it would be a rampage for which many in the US population and politicians wouldn't have the stomach for. Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties.
>> Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of death and destruction is actually the best possible outcome for the country.
I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country."
> If they did, they could end the Taliban in the span of a few weeks, just like they did ISIS. It wouldn't be a war, it would be a rampage...
This whole paragraph seems utterly bizarre.
US did NOT "end" ISIS, certainly not alone. Most of the fighting and dying was done by Shia and Kurdi forces inside Iraq whose lives literally depended on stopping ISIS. US failed in Afghanistan precisely because no such ally existed.
And, what exactly do you mean by "rampage"? There seems to be an awful implication- "if US forces didn't bother about civilian casualties, Taliban could be surely defeated". Which I suppose is true, there can't be any Taliban if there isn't any more afghan.
You're oversimplifying. It took the US a full decade, with countless military intelligence resources, to find and kill their #1 target, OBL. But somehow if we were just more aggressive, all the enemies could have been quickly swept up?
These are soldiers who don't wear uniforms. There is no standing army or targets to "rampage" through, unless you mean entire villages. You're saying if the US had just been less tolerant of civilians, more Taliban would be dead. And what of the relatives of the civilian dead? Now they are your enemy, and the Taliban regrows like a hydra. Keep killing without regard, and now whole tribes side with the Taliban against the clear enemy. Provinces flip, and eventually the whole country is filled with an enemy you created.
The mission changes character once a critical mass of the country supports the other side. Certainly it would not be "nation building", just outright occupation, which works exactly as long as an overwhelming force is present. The conclusion would have been the same in the end.
It took the US a full decade, with countless military intelligence resources, to find and kill their #1 target, OBL.
ObL might have been at "Tora Bora" at some point in 2001. After that, he wasn't even in Afghanistan. How hard could they really have been looking, if they didn't even look in the right country?
> Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties.
While US army is significantly better then Taliban, the surgical strikes killed civilians fairly regularly and wish to protect civilians is not exactly "above and beyond".
> I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country."
I think that OP meant "compare to 2 years long war after which Taliban takes power anyway". That was the estimation as America was leaving - that ANA will be able to hold off for two years. They were not expected to win, but they were not expected to fold that fast.
US advisors were delusional, that seem to be sure now.
I mean, I agree with that logic, theoretically. Theoretically, if you know you will loose in 2 years, it is better to not fight and hope your treatment will be better as result.
But, groups did hold up and fought lost or seemingly lost wars. It is not just that they logically concluded it is all helpless and gave up. That does not seem to be the only or primary factor here.
>> US advisors were delusional, that seem to be sure now.
The numbers the military were giving them were completely inaccurate.
Biden said the Afghan army was 400K strong. It was not. It wasn't even close. The most recent figures put the Afghan army conservatively at 170K. Imagine touting a 4:1 advantage and then realizing, it's more like a 1:1 contest.
The Taliban numbers were way off too. The media and politicians were saying they had 50-75K, when in reality their numbers are closer to 100K if not more. Even back in 2018 they were saying they were 85K+.
The military chiefs saying they had trained that many Afghans was also wildly inaccurate. One of my family members was part of the Marines who were tasked with training the Afghans. He said it was nearly impossible to train them because they never took it seriously. They never expected the US to leave them. For many, it was a cushy paycheck that put them on easy street - it was never about defending their country, or having a sense of patriotism or duty. He repeatedly called them "clowns" and after a year, he asked to be reassigned and told his superiors the training was useless and there was no way these men would fight anybody, even with the best equipment and training they provided.
The assessments being made were incredibly off base and not even close to being accurate. The information that should've been coming out of there was the Afghan force was very small, barely trainable, and would never fight the Taliban or any other group regardless of how much you pay them or equip them or train them. Instead, politicians were repeatedly fed a fantasy about how the Afghans had a huge force, were trained by the best and fully capable to defend their country when the draw down or withdrawal happened.
When you talk to people who were over there and ask them what they saw and experienced? None of them are surprised by what happened. When you ask the Joint Chiefs and politicians in Washington? Total confusion and shock.
>> They never expected the US to leave them. For many, it was a cushy paycheck that put them on easy street - it was never about defending their country, or having a sense of patriotism or duty.
To be fair, it's hard to imagine any person with a sense of patriotism or duty accepting to be trained by the invaders of their country to become a kind of native garrison for them.
Although I don't pretend to understand how Afghans saw the war, the US, their allies, or the Taliban, or anything else. It can't have been simple.
All that amounts to evidently delusional US advisors, for years.
And on US side, it resembles corporations in a way. The more optimistic report you give, the more you are rewarded. If you talk about issues, you are sidelined. So people down on hierarchy know there are issues and high on hierarchy get to pretend how good everything is.
On afghan side, it amounts to organization capable people who have choice won't join. You join it to get free meal, to steal a thing or two. You join it if you don't have much perspective otherwise.
Patriotism can't be motivation either, because Afghan would be joining American led army. And expectations that US will be there forever was fairly reasonable too. It is atypical for US to leave I they can have influence.
One statistic I think gets overlooked is the Afghan population almost doubled from 20M to 38M in the last 20 years. The massive young demographics growing up under occupation was going to come home to roost sooner or later. There's also the geographic reality that Afghanistan is a land locked country and US tenuous access via Pakisan or the even more perilous northern routes meant taming Afganistan was always going to be a long term losing proposition.
The other war that comes to mind that doesn't fit the standard model of black hat vs white hat is the Vietnam war. It was impossible to defeat the Viet Cong because they blended in with the citizenry. And so, despite superior technology and enormous wealth, America and its allies were unable to prevail in Vietnam.
And yet, today, the socialist republic of Vietnam is hardly a pariah, or a communist menace, or a backwater or a threat to anyone. It is a rapidly developing economic power in South East Asia, with a dispersed diaspora that has integrated well with diverse cultures in Europe, North America, Australia and South America.
Have you ever heard of a Vietnamese terrorist shooting up or bombing a public place in the west over the last 40 years?
What does that tell you about the paradigm of us vs them?
That the Vietnamese don't follow a religion which they interpret as mandating the conversion or death of all non believers?
The Taliban have moral clarity and that's a huge advantage against the relativist post-modern muddle brained thinking that characterizes most of western leadership these days.
And yet, today, the socialist republic of Vietnam is hardly a pariah, or a communist menace, or a backwater or a threat to anyone.
If it turns out that Afghanistan has substantial mineral resources, as some claim, that could happen to Afghanistan. With substantial help from China.
Perhaps China will build a road and rail link to Afghanistan. There's a narrow corridor that connects the two nations. No roads. No rail. Mountains. But it's a shortcut for the Belt and Road Initiative, so it might happen.
I've been on the Pamir highway, which is so close to Afghanistan that you can wave at them across the river. That same road is taken by Chinese trucks headed to CIS countries. You have to remember that those countries are next to each other.
A Chinese investment in the region seems pretty reasonable in my uneducated opinion.
I dislike CCP ideology, but its clear to me that if anyone can "fix" Afghanistan, its China. They accept ground realities and pursue their goals without taking up stupid challenges such as "bring democracy to Afghanistan".
I almost died laughing at your comment. You have to understand the ethnic divisions that exist in the region before arriving at opinions. Taliban (Pashtuns) don't give a damn about "others" such as Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras (in Afghanistan - read about how they slaughtered Hazaras around Bamiyan during 1996-1999 when they were in power). Do you seriously think they bother about Uighurs? Even if they do bother, China is unfortunately not stupid - they are capable of making deals with anyone if it benefits them. China also doesn't care about democracy, nation-building, and other impossible to attain goals in Afghanistan. You (and I) may dislike the authoritarian policies of CCP, but they know how to deal with religious authoritarians.
There was no way to defeat the Afghan Taliban without Pakistani help. The ideological reservoir from which Taliban recruits is bottomless; and with military and financial support from across the border, quite formidable.
Over the last decade, the US had lost all leverage with Pakistan. Pakistan is now fully allied with China.
> An non-violent alternative, grant permanent U.S. residency to all Afghan women and children. And evacuate anyone who wants out.
Did you live in 2001?
There was severe distrust of "Al Qaeda cells", which were these hypothetical terrorists inside of the USA pretending to be a nice guy. But one phone call from Osama Bin Laden would turn them into a suicide bomber.
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I'm glad that we've built up trust with the Afghan people and are able to accept them into our society today. But that kind of thinking you're talking about would have NOT worked in 2001.
I think the Afghans have also learned to trust us to some extent. My friend had to kill a child girl soldier who fired upon him, hiding an AK47 in her Burka. It turns out that burkas are really good at hiding weapons. I don't think I've heard of any of those stories recently however.
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The US won the hearts of Afghan women and children because we built schools and universities for them. The trust did not exist in 2001, but the trust exists today thanks to literally millions of college-educated Afghan women telling our story and learning our values.
Trump didn't, but Americans as a whole have an accepting culture.
Over 75% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats wish to accept more Afghan refugees in light of the Taliban takeover. When push comes to shove, Americans (Republicans included) are a welcoming bunch.
Question #13, which has Republican / Democrat statistics specific to that question on a later page. Something like 79% of Trump voters think we should help those Afghans come to the USA.
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Question #12, with 59% of respondents saying the US isn't "doing enough" to help the Afghans, is even more bipartisan, with Republican/Democrat splits being negligible in the stats. (59% Democrats / 64% Republicans think Biden is "not doing enough" to help the Afghan people)
It's equally scary how optics rule the conversation, not outcomes.
Whilst killing all life within 1km of any Taliban is ridiculous and absurd, the thought of a true extermination strategy of the Taliban should be on the table. At the very least as a thought.
The Sri Lankan government has managed to permanently wipe out the Tamil Tiger movement by sheer effort, aggression and indiscriminate military approach. Endlessly beating down on them until they gave up, and dissolved their movement, permanently. The human cost of the conflict has been enormous, without question.
Has it been worth it, this permanent solution? I really don't know, and I'm in absolutely no position to tell. The only point I'm making is that total victory is possible, yet at a high price.
China goes even further, it seems even the thought of rebellion makes you end up in a re-education camp, and sometimes not even that. Again, the human cost is enormous. But does it work, if the sole aim is to suppress or wipe out rebellion? Probably yes.
One could at least contemplate what would have happened if the US had directly engaged with the Taliban, and use its full military, diplomatic, intelligence and monetary might to do so.
The West has higher morals, we like to tell ourselves. Hence, an indirect approach. The outcome is 200K casualties, and trillions spent. The grand "prize" of all this suffering is the country firmly back in the hands of the Taliban, under Sharia law. Afghanistan's tiny economy tanking, hence every single citizen suffering. All women rights reversed, back to being cattle.
A telling stat is that roughly 7K US soldiers died, yet another 30K committed suicide back home. Due to the length of the war and multiple exposures to traumatic experiences.
Altogether, I don't believe it is unreasonable to wonder if the "good intentions" approach's outcome isn't just as terrible or worse compared to an actual extermination approach. I won't claim to know the answer, I'm merely raising the question.
Admittedly, based on this article and given the backing of neighboring countries, in this case there simply may not be any winning approach at all. You can't defeat an enemy when they keep switching camps.
It’s probably a sign of the times. We’re very polarized and I feel very strongly about my opinions. I feel like modern feminism is a cancer eating away at American society. I’m very progressive about pretty much every other “politicized” opinion, maybe besides guns.
I absolutely do not support the way the taliban treat women. I think you need to move pretty far to an extreme to move the needle towards the middle though.
> Whilst killing all life within 1km of any Taliban is ridiculous and absurd, the thought of a true extermination strategy of the Taliban should be on the table. At the very least as a thought.
It is neither ridiculous nor absurd.
It plain simply involves killing almost everyone in an area. Which is called genocide. It is doable. Nazi done it. Khmer Rouge done it. Hutu in Rwanda done it.
You want to frame it as attacking Taliban, which is not true. Majority of victims would not be Taliban. It would be quite literally going to Afghan to commit genocide in half of it.
> The grand "prize" of all this suffering is the country firmly back in the hands of the Taliban, under Sharia law.
Anyone including women have better chance under Sharia law then they have under your proposal. Cause your proposal is to plain kill them. You don't get to propose killing people and then saying someone else is cruel.
> Altogether, I don't believe it is unreasonable to wonder if the "good intentions" approach's outcome isn't just as terrible or worse compared to an actual extermination approach
Under Taliban, those people are alive. With your approach, they are all dead. So, they are better off now. I don't think few terrorism victims in USA is good enough excuse for that.
> One could at least contemplate what would have happened if the US had directly engaged with the Taliban, and use its full military, diplomatic, intelligence and monetary might to do so.
A better solution would be to use small drone swarms and create a surveillance state in the rural areas. Each drone can see about 100m2 at 100m height. So 10K drones for 1 km2 = 10 million dollars.
Attach weapons and you have zero risk of life and can maintain a permanent presence, that can essentially be automated by AI and computer vision.
And I've only spent 0.01% of the yearly spend on the war.
Did people all of a sudden lose the ability to read, or what?
"It plain simply involves killing almost everyone in an area."
No, not almost everyone. Only Taliban. Which arguably is complex, but surely if the US would make full effort to infiltrate and map the network, such selective targeting would be possible.
"Cause your proposal is to plain kill them. You don't get to propose killing people and then saying someone else is cruel."
It gets even weirder, I guess. You know the very point of the Afghan military was to kill the Taliban, right? Together with the US backing them up, they managed to kill 52,000 Taliban and other opposition fighters. What exactly do you think happens in a war?
"Under Taliban, those people are alive. With your approach, they are all dead."
All? The Taliban is estimated to have a force some 50,000 strong, 100,000 tops if you include weak allies. That's 0.13% of the total population. So you're saying that the selective targeting of the Taliban, will also wipe out the other 99.87% of the population? Some 38 million people? Get the fuck out of here.
Killing all life within 1km of any Taliban literally involves killing all people there. And it is not even Taliban hiding among civilians. It is them living with their parents in their village.
> Together with the US backing them up, they managed to kill 52,000 Taliban and other opposition fighters. What exactly do you think happens in a war?
Not every war is going on with goal of killing everyone in an area. So while civilians always die, what you propose has that extra step of being genocide.
> The Taliban is estimated to have a force some 50,000 strong, 100,000 tops if you include weak allies. That's 0.13% of the total population.
Yes, because your plan is to not just kill them, but to kill everyone around.
I did not make the "killing all life" remark, it's by another commenter. I specifically said to target an exterminate the Taliban.
"Not every war is going on with goal of killing everyone in an area. So while civilians always die, what you propose has that extra step of being genocide."
No that is the exact opposite of what I propose!
"Yes, because your plan is to not just kill them, but to kill everyone around."
The comment is not advocacy. Had all Taliban been murdered, there would be no Taliban problem today. Instead the dispute would be between the drug lords and the rest of the civilian population.
Various leadership positions of the Taliban have been murdered by drones something like 5x or 6x over. The US never had a problem with killing Taliban per se (or imprisoning / exiling them).
A good chunk of upper-Taliban leadership were former prisoners that were released, leading up to the peace talks of last year. (Its better that we negotiate with moderate Taliban we chose to release from prison, rather than the extremists that come from self-recruitment)
The issue is that the Taliban can continue to recruit more and more leaders from the locals. They're able to recruit in large numbers because the Afghan culture glorifies their resistance across the 1800s against Great Britain (and other world powers with superior tech).
Their entire culture is optimized about fighting against foreigners and rallying locals. The more we kill them, the more they're able to recruit.
> Their entire culture is optimized about fighting against foreigners and rallying locals. The more we kill them, the more they're able to recruit.
Afghanis stopped doing that for the period the Mongols ruled via one demonstration of regional depopulation through municipal-scale genocide [1]. But the Mongols were like that: they were quite progressive and often ran on a benevolent dictator model, but you cross them just once and they salted the earth after they were done wholesale killing everyone, innocents included.
But the Mongols' record in Afghanistan was likely only possible because they established a reputation for carrying out these genocides on various scales (Khwarazmian Empire being a notably bloody example). I suspect China comes closest in the current era to that level of determination; fortunately for Afghanis, China is not demonstrably interested in Afghanistan.
The point I do not see underscored enough: the "graveyard of empires" reputation is built upon an accidental history of said empires the moniker is based upon being relatively benevolent compared to the Mongols. It isn't an intrinsic property of the people or geography of Afghanistan when looking at all available records, but of generally voluntary evolving war conventions.
Never underestimate the horrific wartime capacity our species are capable of unleashing. In the sweep of recorded human history, we happen to live in an era of relative peace, and even most of our worst wars today play by Queensbury Rules compared to the relative scope, scale and ruthlessness our distant ancestors regularly abided by. To give a sense of proportion, Genghis Khan is estimated to have killed 11% of the world population; scaled to today it is 0.84 BILLION. He would have literally erased the entire male population of Afghanistan and hardly noticed by his standards. None of today's relative decrease in bloodthirstiness is enshrined like laws of physics, and is but a thin veneer upon our civilization when push comes to shove.
Should climate change worst-case scenario predictions come to pass, desperation can erase that tenuous progress in decreasing human misery, relative as it is, in the blink of an eye. It is best we all remember that War Is A Racket, and anytime two or more sets of elites clamor for war, we'd all likely be better off they were all the first killed on the front lines, and then we all re-evaluate the "need" for war again with a new elite who want to go to the front lines.
Does your hot take genocide-based solution include "tactical nuking" of Pakistan as well? Because the Afghan Taliban gets plenty of support from them as well.
U.S. foreign policy stated from the outset in 2001 that we would follow terrorists where ever they are, no matter the country. Hunt them down and kill them. That's what we said about terrorists generally and Taliban specifically.
We departed from U.N. Charter article 51 twice, and also disregarded the determination of Nuremberg. The nation is complicit, Bush was reelected subsequent to his foreign policy assertions and actions. There's been no serious consideration to hold him or the U.S. accountable. That makes it tacitly permitted.
Killing all Taliban would not be genocide. It would be consistent with long standing U.S. foreign policy. It's a religious sect, not a group of ethnic or nationals.
The US image as the "brave" superpower has been heavily exposed. The US despite having the latest tech hardware and all these images of muscle pumped up soldiers in Hollywood movies were seen as fleeing the battlefield. It took the US 20 years to push Taliban to outer cities and the Taliban took 20 days to come back. It shows for me, the US is not a superpower when it comes to warfare, as we saw in Vietnam too. They are good when it comes to aerial combat where they do not engage on ground level but they are not trained or built for guerrilla warfare which many Asian countries employ. They would lost in most terrains like this.
No way to impose any sort of external order there.
Russia was there, US/UK and half NATO have been there, the insurgent groups have financing via drugs and God knows what else(look at Colombia how much drug financed groups can hold back progress).
All the foreign forces have done plenty of damage and lost credibility.
Looking back, what in the world made Russia go there in the first place and then the USA? Why is this matter not settled yet?
This has gone past many administrations and advisors, and yielded nothing.
Does anyone know if the Taliban actually have some sort of popular support there or only by fringe groups?
It's obviously an islamic dominated country, and by the fact that the military and government fell so quickly, it's as if everyone knew the US would leave and everyone secretly actually wanted the Taliban. Us westerners like to look at "The Taliban" as some evil anti-women hate group but what most woke westerners are too scared to bring up is that this is Islam in it's barest of forms. Especially among illiterate peoples. The Taliban has ridiculous support and has had it for the longest time primarily because many people want the sort of religious regime. While us enlightened democratic types like to think democracy is so great, it actually makes change very difficult. Especially essential change such as controlling the local petty lords that essentially enslave people in perpetual bondage like serfs. The only way you can do away with that is an even more powerful authority higher than them that people can support. If some man with a turban and thousands of men with AK-74's need to tell you Allah does not approve of enslaving Muslims, guess what, you're gonna be hard pressed to fight back when all other lords are gonna be fearing for themselves too.
Too many pampered Americans like to think we can solve all problems by petitioning the government and talking. Vocal ignorant influencers love to believe we can solve all problems peacefully at all times and all situations are the same because they grew up in a nice little suburb. In reality globally, it only uniquely works in cultures where that has been integral to the establishment of the actual nation. I mean South Korea and much of Central and South America has been governed by Military Juntas for decades and they have become far more freer than any place that was given democracy outright like Afghanistan and Iraq. The tight grip and control on people is meant to get them adjusted to the new way of life. As time progresses, reforms occur to ensure stability and people don't go rioting in the streets to establish another government that totally undermines all the work done to ensure the system continues.
You don't have to say it in such culture war-y terms, or to sound so reactionary. It stands to reason that the average Afghan may hate and fear the Taliban, but hate and fear the invading Westerners even more.
Besides, it's a repeating leitmotif of history that whenever a foreign power invades a far-away land, they find the locals more preoccupied with their internecine power struggle. It happened in the Crusades and in the conquest of Peru and Mexico by the Conquistadores. It has probably happened in every major empire-building campaign before and since. The locals fight the invaders only to the extent that the foreigners interfere with the locals' plans, and often the locals attempt to use the invaders as pawns (often only to find to their great dismay that the "pawns" then turn around and take their king- as famously happened with Moctezuma and Atahualpa).
> the average Afghan may hate and fear the Taliban, but hate and fear the invading Westerners even more.
It's more that they hate the corrupt Afghan government the U.S. was propping up. From what I've read, the Taliban is predictably corrupt and somewhat fair, provided you aren't a woman or gay and they don't find a reason to kill you. You pay one bribe for whatever you want to achieve at that moment and get a receipt that other Taliban people honor.
The U.S.-supported Afghan government was unpredictably corrupt and very greedy—you had to bribe every policeman, soldier, checkpoint guard, and official you came into contact with. Both options suck but one sucks less, and, for most Afghans trying to live their lives, that matters more than airy ideals about democratic liberalism and sexual equality.
> Us westerners like to look at > "The Taliban" as some evil anti-women hate group but what most woke westerners are too scared to bring up is that this is Islam in it's barest of forms. Especially among illiterate peoples. The Taliban has ridiculous support and has had it for the longest time primarily because many people want the sort of religious regime
Those are not mutually exclusive. You write about it as if there was contradiction and they somehow were not women hating as proven by them being religious.
They are exactly that. Besides, misogyny and authoritarianism/violence are related almost everywhere.
The world may be 2021, but their lifestyle is still that of hundreds of years earlier. If western ideology is correct, why not let them sort it themselves out and get to the point where we are? My problem is most westerners love to criticize anything less free than themselves, but don't take a step back and realize we shouldn't be criticizing. What we consider unjust they may not. We tried banning dolphin fishing internationally even though many asian countries have eaten them for centuries. All because we think dolphins are nice animals. But who the hell are we to tell some other cultures, their value system is inferior to ours?
That is what I'm getting at. These systems have been around longer than westerners have been able to argue about them. And they will definitely be here to stay. Also, in a decentralized and failing state that is Afghanistan, a theological junta wouldn't be so bad for them now seeing as it's a structure many know. Injustices happen everywhere worldwide. The system the Taliban is reinforcing (yet again...) is hardly something as unethical as a corrupt and failing democracy where women can't even trust the law to protect them.
> The world may be 2021, but their lifestyle is still that of hundreds of years earlier.
First of all, Afghanistan was not always Taliban country. There was huge amount of people living completely different lifestyle - women in miniskirts were normal. Until invasion of Russian armies in the process of exporting communism and eventual victory of Taliban via arms.
> If western ideology is correct, why not let them sort it themselves out and get to the point where we are?
This is not fight of ideologies, but of violence. Second, this is an odd theory of history in which "right" ideology wins and nothing in history confirms that. As good feel this theory is, it is not how world works.
> Also, in a decentralized and failing state that is Afghanistan, a theological junta wouldn't be so bad for them now seeing as it's a structure many know.
This is not theological junta tho.
> Injustices happen everywhere worldwide. The system the Taliban is reinforcing (yet again...) is hardly something as unethical as a corrupt and failing democracy where women can't even trust the law to protect them.
It is hard to parse this. Injustices happen everywhere, some places more then others. Some places are more cruel and unjust than others. Taliban is among those more oppressive and unjust.
> where women can't even trust the law to protect them.
Women have better protection ... pretty much everywhere else. For instance, forced marriages to taliban fighters are still a thing, for instance. It is absurd how you minimize level of violence and basically slavery half population is subject of.
Just because Americans failed to achieve goals does not mean that Taliban is not as cruel, injust or oppressive toward half of population as it is. Pretending otherwise might make you feel better, but it does not make it reality.
I'm no expert, but I'm fairly sure power there is fragmented, hierarchical, and transactional. Popular support does not figure in. According to Wikipedia, "As estimated by the CIA World Factbook, 26% of the population was urbanized as of 2020. This is one of the lowest figures in the world."
It's probably a fair bet that the urbanized population does not support the Taliban, but they can't stand alone. The warlords and Taliban want control over the largest city, and Kabul depends on the countryside. Think about the urban-rural cultural divide in the US, but imagine that rural people vastly outnumbered urban and that there was no central monopoly on violent force.
Another interesting question is why should the Taliban be stronger than any other potential leadership group? I suspect this comes down to their past success, their connections to Pakistan, and their appeal to international fighters.
There is an argument that the ‘stay and tolerate the corruption for another generation’ strategy would eventually outlast native “Taliban” resistance - this is the path the U.S. was on, fairly explicitly since 2010 or so. In a realist framing, this is something that deserved more careful consideration before, and also now, in the aftermath.
Look at the outcomes for Karzai and Ghani as an indicator - I don’t know that ‘popular support’ is something to attribute to the Taliban but we ought to entertain the notion that the framing of Afghanistan for domestic consumption in the U.S. distorts a useful, realist analysis. How could we arrive at the current state of things if, outside of Kabul, the dynamics were as simple as painting a target on the Taliban?
The Taliban are power-hungry and ruthless, while their external (Pakistan/ISI & China) supporters don't mind it.
In an battle between kindness and ruthlessness, (especially where the former is less committed than the latter,) the ruthless will always win. Put another way, if you had one side giving you aid (food/medicine) in exchange for support, and the other (credibly) threatening to kill you for disloyalty, what would you do? You'd probably feign support for the former, and never betray the latter.
I've left out a lot of detail, because I was writing a comment, not a treatise. I also left out how the Taliban fighters routinely raped the widows and children of their opponents, as well as the Taliban's horrific history of brutality.
In addition to all of these atrocities, there are a number of outliers, such as those you pointed out.
"It was in the waning days of November 2001 that Taliban leaders began to reach out to Hamid Karzai, who would soon become the interim president of Afghanistan: They wanted to make a deal.
“The Taliban were completely defeated, they had no demands, except amnesty,” recalled Barnett Rubin, who worked with the United Nations’ political team in Afghanistan at the time.
Messengers shuttled back and forth between Mr. Karzai and the headquarters of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Kandahar. Mr. Karzai envisioned a Taliban surrender that would keep the militants from playing any significant role in the country’s future.
But Washington, confident that the Taliban would be wiped out forever, was in no mood for a deal.
“The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders,” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a news conference at the time, adding that the Americans had no interest in leaving Mullah Omar to live out his days anywhere in Afghanistan. The United States wanted him captured or dead."
To play Devil's Advocate, didn't the US have to label the Taliban as terrorists at that time? I think given their association with Bin Laden, and the 9/11 attacks, most people in the US considered the Taliban to be terrorists, and it would have completely destroyed the credibility of the Pentagon or Bush administration to be negotiating with them a mere 60 days after 9/11.
The first ~thirty days after 9/11 were full of negotiations with the Taliban as they weren't terrorists but harboring terrorists. Even after the invasion, they could have labeled it as the Taliban agreeing to help bring Bin Laden to justice and they would have been able to save face.
Hell, it might have helped prevent Bin Laden's flight into Pakistan, and have been a tremendous PR victory.
You make a good point, but it leaves the Taliban of late 2001 with a very narrow path to successfully complete negotiations: give up Bin Laden in cooperation with the US and then hope the ramifications from Bin Laden's people are minimal and the US is satisfied to then leave you alone. Might have worked, but they succeeded in the waiting game.
"Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait. There is nothing stronger than those two: patience and time, they will do it all." - Tolstoy, War and Peace
>Bin Laden in cooperation with the US and then hope the ramifications from Bin Laden's people are minimal and the US is satisfied to then leave you alone.
They could have negotiated the kinds of overt military support CIA installed South American despots could only dream of for the low, low price of treating Al Qaeda the way western democracies who are accountable to western voters could never treat them.
With the US's "aid" they could have consolidated power over the nation and legitimized themselves on the world stage. All they had to do was say "we'll turn over the terrorists but we need your help". We'd have gladly held our noses and given them training and equipment so long as they rooted out Al Qaeda. Of course the Taliban didn't want to be a puppet state or a client state. But we didn't want to engage in nation building. It would have been a perfect one night stand.
Being a movement in stark opposition to the current authority can be a powerful rallying force. Resentments are tremendously motivating. We see plenty of recent examples of that in the US itself.
Therefore it's not so surprising that the Taliban regained a lot of popular support, especially given the oft mentioned corruption of the prior government.
Of course now the boot is on the other foot, and the Taliban must provide the security and economic guarantees of a civil society, and the jury is out on both their willingness and ability to do so.
If they fail because they are too fixated on waging a puritanical religious war both within and without Afghanistan, financed by wealthy outside countries with their own agendas, they will be overthrown again, either from within, or from outside.
> If they fail because they are too fixated on waging a puritanical religious war both within and without Afghanistan, financed by wealthy outside countries with their own agendas, they will be overthrown again, either from within, or from outside.
Violent oppressive dictatorships can last very long tho.
Even still, those authoritarian governments have to serve the needs of a large subset of the population, often biased on ethnicity, and have an overwhelming monopoly of force. Neither of those is likely in Afghanistan.
The Taliban themselves are motivated by the rather modern goal of uniting the country's fractious and diverse ethnic landscape ... albeit under the banner of their extreme interpretation of Islam.
As per the opinion of the author, the Afghanistanis have no permanent affiliation. There is no ideological or ethical adherence to a particular side.
Sure, the top leaders might be so, but ground level fighters consider it a job. So, having a large number of fighters given amnesty and absorbed into the govt. would have, it is speculated, reduced a lot of expenses of running the country.
Apparently, there is also no retribution for ground level soldiers if they switch sides and switch back and what not.
Personally I suspect that ethnic and tribal lines are the ones not to be crossed.
I'm skeptical that the Taliban leadership in 2001 would have actually followed any agreement in the long term. I'm envisioning them getting amnesty and then fleeing to Pakistan to start up the same insurgency they did anyway--just with less of their leadership killed by US bombs.
It's certainly not a risk I'd have taken without the hindsight that we have now.
> After the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on September 27, 1996, Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abdul Rashid Dostum, two former enemies, created the United Front (Northern Alliance) against the Taliban, who were preparing offensives against the remaining areas under the control of Massoud and Dostum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan
Amazing how it's almost an exact repeat of 25 years ago.
For a (much longer) exploration of this idea, I recommend reading the book The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks [0] by Joshua Cooper Ramo.
One side is an occupation force that despite all the propaganda understands that it kills people for power and mineral resources. Propaganda is strong, but it's hard to fool people completely, some intuition for truth remains.
On another side there're people defending their homes from foreign neo-colonial occupation.
Doesn't it explain why the comprador forces working for the occupational administration failed so quickly?.. "Democracy" on bayonets doesn't work.
You consider South Korea a success? They have been separated from the other half of the country for 70 years now. I wouldn't consider South Korea as an example of success. Remove the money that the US has pushed to South Korea and I'm not sure they'd get the same results.
As for Japan, I remind you that they still have an emperor for example and they were a super power during WWII definitely not comparable to Afghanistan, Cuba or Vietnam
To be fair, a number of countries might not have ended up as functioning democracies with free speech, backed by high tech economies, if it hadn’t been for US financial aids. Germany, for example.
After US withdrawal the Taliban probably had a massive financial advantage. They probably used the last years to save up billions which they used to buy them a "critical mass" of fighters that would steamroll the country with no chance of resistance.
Even when factoring out corruption, the government's ability to muster up funds for keeping it's own military is severely hindered by them having to upkeep basic services throughout the country and having to go through the usual government bureaucracy.
Now the tables have turned somewhat and being faced with the cost of occupying the country, the Taliban will have trouble keeping their freckle allies.
Aside from all this, contrary to some sort of received chivalric ideal of loyalty and fighting-unto-death, a great number of military engagements in every part of the world were decided by bribery and deception. People don't want to risk their lives and are often tempted by monetary gain. Countless forts have fallen to people opening the doors from within. There's instances of Sufi leaders being admitted into forts only to open the gates. Hyderabad was conquered by Aurangazeb in great part due to bribery, too.
The calculus changes dramatically if the attacker has a history of lenient behavior toward those who surrender, versus massacre for those who do not. The Mughals regularly incorporated surrendering lords into their feudal system, with honors, income, and opportunities for social advancement. The Mongols razed the Khwarezmia because of their disastrous refusal of their envoys.