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Afghan "train, advise and assist" 1984 style

barbos said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
barbos said:
Yeah, and US lost without another Super Power helping Taliban.
I wonder who will be next to try. Must be China.
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Technically the W Admin surrendered the effort in 2003 for an attempt of murdering Hussein.

A ‘stable’ Afghanistan was then assured to be a long-term project.
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What are you saying? That you won in Afghanistan?

Great Britain tried, then USSR, then USA, next must be China. And I would not bet against them, to be honest.
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I’m saying the Neocons didn’t even try to sustain a victory in Afghanistan. Murder of Hussein got their pants real tight and they followed their blood flow.

Not that a workable Afghanistan was inevitable. There are just so many obstacles with nation building Afghanistan.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
barbos said:
What are you saying? That you won in Afghanistan?

Great Britain tried, then USSR, then USA, next must be China. And I would not bet against them, to be honest.
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I’m saying the Neocons didn’t even try to sustain a victory in Afghanistan. Murder of Hussein got their pants real tight and they followed their blood flow.

Not that a workable Afghanistan was inevitable. There are just so many obstacles with nation building Afghanistan.
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The one characteristic the US invasion in Afghanistan had compared to all the others was the overwhelming amount of foreign support. Watching Bush piss away all that goodwill was depressing.
 
The collapse continues at a rapid pace, with more provincial capitals falling, including the larger Kunduz. Meanwhile, US B-52's return to counter terror operations in Afghanistan...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/9/taliban-captures-more-provincial-capitals-afghanistan
The Taliban has continued to advance on urban centres in Afghanistan after capturing smaller administrative districts in the past weeks, claiming to have taken over a sixth provincial capital in four days.
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Peace is almost at hand in Afghanistan as US tells US Embassy staff to "GTFO" of Afghanistan. I took liberty with the "GTFO". Wait... that wasn't staff... that was to Americans in Afghanistan. What American would foolish enough to be in Afghanistan right now? Short of people with Doctors without Borders.

I was shocked to hear this as I assumed everyone left with the military. Really, we should be shoving as many Afghans who want to go and US staffers in to as many planes we can and head off. Peace through the knife of the Taliban is getting close to the doorstep. Though I did read a report that Russia said the Taliban would slow down due to the lack of infrastructure to hold onto larger cities. Not certain how much tongue in cheek that was.
 
Peace...yeah...6 feet under maybe... Sadly, a not so shocking collapse of our puppet government...even if the timeline is shocking the talking heads.

In other absurdities, we are evidently hoping to get the Taliban to promise not to attack our embassy as they steam roll their country; maybe with a few sugar plums tossed their way if they play nice....somehow we aren't concerned about the optics of bombing them via B-52's at 30,000 feet at the same time. Just in case we are sending in 3,000 troops, to make sure we have a clean escape plan... That billion dollar embassy doesn't look like it will have a good future...
 
Look on a bright side, lots and lots of cheap high quality of heroin for everybody, coming soon!
 
barbos said:
Look on a bright side, lots and lots of cheap high quality of heroin for everybody, coming soon!
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As far as I know, it was the removal of the Taliban from power that caused the surge in Afghani opium production, not the other way around.
 
What a dismal tragedy. And how could U.S. intelligence have been so badly informed as not to realize that Taliban victory would be swift? (Or was theirs all a pretense?) I read that extreme lack of food and lack of ammunition are major reasons that Afghan government soldiers are now unable to fight. The U.S. wasted trillions on this war ... and couldn't even supply its surrogates with basic necessities?

barbos said:
Look on a bright side, lots and lots of cheap high quality of heroin for everybody, coming soon!
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In hindsight, perhaps supporting the illicit drug economy would have been the way for U.S.-led forces to prevail!
 
But if we'd just stayed for another month...or another year...or another decade...
 
J842P said:
barbos said:
Look on a bright side, lots and lots of cheap high quality of heroin for everybody, coming soon!
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As far as I know, it was the removal of the Taliban from power that caused the surge in Afghani opium production, not the other way around.
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I heard people say that, but no evidence to support it.
Taliban has to get money somewhere, and there is only one source of money in Afghanistan.
 
Ford said:
But if we'd just stayed for another month...or another year...or another decade...
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I think that you're probably right. It's just so bad. I mostly feel terrible for all the young girls and women who will be beaten and killed for just wanting a little freedom.
 
Ford said:
But if we'd just stayed for another month...or another year...or another decade...
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Definitely a Pottery Barn state. We couldn’t leave for a couple more decades at least if peace was ever on the table.

We knew this would happen.
 
Orwell's calling

Harry Bosch said:
Ford said:
But if we'd just stayed for another month...or another year...or another decade...
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I think that you're probably right. It's just so bad. I mostly feel terrible for half all the young girls and women who will be beaten and killed for just wanting a little freedom.
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FIFY. I feel bad for ALL of them as well, but then again I felt bad for the other half of the Afghan's that never really had western protection with the miserly protection that was provided. If $50-60 billion a year was worth spending for half of Afghan's, why wasn't $100-120 billion a year worth it for most all Afghans?

More generally on the whole fiasco: Only during the 2 years of Pres. Obama's short very lived surge did we have enough soldiers there to actually try and make the countryside safe. And after the roughly 2 year surge, we went back to ignoring the situation, but still wasting $50 billion a year on it. And with that, year by year, the Taliban slowly grew stronger and took more territory, as the $50-60 billion and roughly 14,000 soldiers wasn't enough to do the job. The other major issue never dealt with was the very rugged border with Pakistan. Without ever securing that border, the annual summer uptick in warfare was never going to be contained. But securing that border would take tens of billions of dollars. It was pretty much a 20 year lie by our military as wanted by our politicos....pseudo democracy; rampant corruption; bad western support; we never really supported developing a self sufficient Afghan air force as we were too busy making sure US contractors could make big profits; US rotating troops often didn't even know what language the locals spoke, let alone know a few words (I had one nephew who thought they primarily spoke Arabic one month away from deployment...WTF); the generals called this obvious slow decline a stalemate; B-52's were flying counter terror operations; and on and on...
 
Afghan "train, advise and assist" 1984 style

Because it wouldn’t have cost only $50 billion more to secure the remaining 75ish percent. More so the cost in the lives of troops to secure lesser populated areas. A crap compromise to a poorly thought out occupation.

It could have been a fools errand to begin with, but W and the Neocons ensured it was a doomed proposition. We had a coalition that might have been able to balance the cost and responsibilities.

At least the right wing voters got that Iraq war they didn’t know they wanted until they were told so.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Because it wouldn’t have cost only $50 billion more to secure the remaining 75ish percent. More so the cost in the lives of troops to secure lesser populated areas. A crap compromise to a poorly thought out occupation.

It could have been a fools errand to begin with, but W and the Neocons ensured it was a doomed proposition. We had a coalition that might have been able to balance the cost and responsibilities.

At least the right wing voters got that Iraq war they didn’t know they wanted until they were told so.
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And the below still ignored the rugged Pakistani border....
https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/09/25/the-afghan-surge-is-over/
It costs $1 million to keep one American service member in Afghanistan for a year. That meant the annual bill for the war last year was about $100 billion. The surge also exhausted American patience, coming when the war was already in its eighth year. Even though many Americans shared the president’s view that Afghanistan was a “war of necessity,” only a slim majority of Americans supported his decision to send more troops.
<snip>
Still, despite all the misguided assumptions U.S. commanders held going into the surge, U.S. and NATO troops have made remarkable progress in the past three years. Parts of southern Afghanistan that were once teeming with insurgents are now largely peaceful. Schools have reopened, as have bazaars. People in some of those places are living as close to a normal life as possible. But Afghanistan as a whole is not fully secure. Eastern parts of the country are still in the grip of the Haqqani network, a Taliban faction that Mullen has called a “veritable arm” of the ISI. And in the south, a critical question lingers: Will the Afghans — the government, the army and the police force — have the will and the ability to take the baton from American troops? Will the Afghans sustain the gains? Will all of the blood and treasure the United States has expended have been worth it? Or will Afghanistan slip back to chaos?
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funinspace said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
Because it wouldn’t have cost only $50 billion more to secure the remaining 75ish percent. More so the cost in the lives of troops to secure lesser populated areas. A crap compromise to a poorly thought out occupation.

It could have been a fools errand to begin with, but W and the Neocons ensured it was a doomed proposition. We had a coalition that might have been able to balance the cost and responsibilities.

At least the right wing voters got that Iraq war they didn’t know they wanted until they were told so.
Click to expand...
And the below still ignored the rugged Pakistani border....
https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/09/25/the-afghan-surge-is-over/
It costs $1 million to keep one American service member in Afghanistan for a year. That meant the annual bill for the war last year was about $100 billion. The surge also exhausted American patience, coming when the war was already in its eighth year. Even though many Americans shared the president’s view that Afghanistan was a “war of necessity,” only a slim majority of Americans supported his decision to send more troops.
<snip>
Still, despite all the misguided assumptions U.S. commanders held going into the surge, U.S. and NATO troops have made remarkable progress in the past three years. Parts of southern Afghanistan that were once teeming with insurgents are now largely peaceful. Schools have reopened, as have bazaars. People in some of those places are living as close to a normal life as possible. But Afghanistan as a whole is not fully secure. Eastern parts of the country are still in the grip of the Haqqani network, a Taliban faction that Mullen has called a “veritable arm” of the ISI. And in the south, a critical question lingers: Will the Afghans — the government, the army and the police force — have the will and the ability to take the baton from American troops? Will the Afghans sustain the gains? Will all of the blood and treasure the United States has expended have been worth it? Or will Afghanistan slip back to chaos?
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Yes, you are correct. We were never going to secure Afganistan unless we could secure the Pakistan border.
 
Afghan &quot;train, advise and assist&quot; 1984 style

Border? You mean Pakistan, not just the border. Pakistan is the major source of suffering in Afghanistan as that is where the radicalization came/comes from. bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan!

With a strong coalition and money, a very long term project, but with the Neocons, doom.
 
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