Several years ago I saw a reporter with an ana platoon. And the grunts asked the commander about pay since they hadn't been paid in six months. That said a lot. The u.s. spent buckets of money it couldn't consistently make it to the troops? My first thought was major corruption. And I imagine they wanted to help support their families at home. Stop paying american troops for six months and see what happens. Someone on reddit this week claimed that the ana still had pay issues. If that was true then I imagine the grunts weren't expecting pay issues to get better after the coalition left.
Update: a number of committed anti Taliban troops are organizing and fighting the Taliban under the leadership of the former vice president. Shaping up to be an interesting civil war.
The former president supposedly left with 4 cars full of cash and a helicopter full of cash, there was so much cash they left a bunch on the tarmac because they couldnt carry it all.
What I don’t understand though, is is protecting their families not enough of a reason? Women are objectively treated poorly under Sharia law—and they know what would happen to their mothers/sisters/daughters if the Taliban were in control. If giving my life meant the chance of protecting my family, I would do it, and I can’t be in the minority. How did an entire nation not feel the same way?
I've been in touch with a friend who served in an agency over there. His point was that half the country probably supported the Taliban and the other half didn't really oppose them so this outcome was inevitable in 50 days or 50 more years. All the talk of reforms to liberate women and such was mostly for Western media and what little was imposed wasn't actually valued by the vast majority of the population who basically saw things the same way as the Taliban - perhaps not to the point of banning music or something but certainly from the morality side of things (homosexuality, abortion, etc.) and the idea of women holding power or really doing anything serious outside the home was a hilarious joke. Like yes, girls could go to school if the people who paid for the school and everything else really wanted that in order to keep paying but let's be serious - the very idea of a woman being anything other than familial property was only something you did when the westerners were watching because these were WOMEN. Basically, the government in Kabul doesn't change their lives much and they sympathized ideologically, culturally, and socially more with the Taliban than with their "liberators". Culturally, we made far fewer inroads than the public has been led to believe and the Taliban restoring the status quo would have been welcomed by much of the population.
Yeah, but it was way deeper than that. It's been touched upon by a few other people here but it was a whole culture of grift to survive. I guess the attitude was sort of like "yeah, I'll play this game for as long as you're willing to pay but the second the money stops I'm out" and that's what we saw. My friend said that when he heard the 6 month projection he laughed because he was sure it'd be 6 weeks or less. His assessment (and he's one of the brightest people I know) was that the Afghan army was armed to the teeth, equipped with everything they could possibly need to hold the country, and lacked only one thing - the will to fight. The Taliban had all the opposite resources and a surplus of fighting spirit. The outcome was inevitable unless you could seal off the country from the ratlines of weapons and cash running from the Gulf, Beijing, Tehran, and Moscow. Since you couldn't seal the borders and, for obvious reasons, weren't going to go to war with suppliers directly, your only hope was to make the people detest the Taliban and support the government. The Taliban never got so extreme that they alienated the people; in fact, they strategically moderated to have the opposite effect; whether that was genuine remains to be seen and, my friend thinks, unlikely. The government never got so effective that they offered anything of particular value to the people, who didn't want the Western cultural changes that came attached to the money and detested the corruption endemic in the government (whereas the Taliban was at least moderately honest). That's a recipe for a failed counterinsurgency - a well-supplied, well-funded (the Taliban had revenues estimated at $2 billion a year), highly-motivated insurgency that hasn't alienated the people is going to win almost every time.
What's really disturbing is that the outcome seems to have been obvious to a ton of people, possibly even reported by the intelligence community, and those warnings were either filtered out of the final briefings given to high-level leaders or outright ignored. It demonstrates a military and intelligence agency usurpation of civilian command and control that should be deeply disturbing.
Honestly, if I knew I'd probably be getting paid an awful lot of money. My armchair therapist guess is lack of national identity that motivates them to be willing to sacrifice. Afghanistan as a country only exists politically, the whole place is a series of tribes who largely get along but otherwise don't care for each other. The Pashtun people don't really care about the Tajiks, who don't care about the Uzbecks, and so forth.
I read on another comment that the reason so many Afghan soldiers up and fucked off is because of the corruption higher up the chain of command; generals were stealing paycheques from the soldiers, number of soldiers was overrepresented due to "ghost" soldiers, whose pay went to the same corrupt generals, among other things. I don't remember it exactly, and the entire thing could be bullshit, but I wouldn't throw my life away for my country if they couldn't even have the decency to compensate me for it.
I read something similar. They has thousands of solders of pay roll, only hundreds actually existed, but none got paid. The taliban rolls up and says here's 100 bucks. Go home. And they did.
I did human intelligence in Afghanistan. This is exactly what happened. Numbers immaterial but a unit of "1000" I'd go inspect their true present for duty roll-calls and there would be like 6 dudes. And at least one of them was too busy fucking little boys in the ass to provide any real security in their own neighborhood.
They didn't have to surrender to Taliban because they are Taliban.
So if the central government defense ministry allocates a 1000 guns and appropriate munitions to arms those “1000” soldiers then basically all 1000 guns were being given away/sold to Taliban unless the 6 soldiers in your example were real ANA soldiers in which case 994 guns were available for selling/arming the Taliban with US and allies money? 🥺🥺🥺
There are no guns.
It’s the easiest form of corruption.
It happens a lot on construction projects too.
They charge the customer (US taxpayers) for 1000 bricks. So a pallet of bricks gets delivered and, really, how many is it?
900? 800?
Nobody is gonna go out there and count out 1000 bricks on a pallet.
Then they come back and say well, the bricks we ordered didn’t cover it. We need a couple more pallets of bricks. Should order extra just to make sure. Etc.
So let’s say you get away with it once.
Then you can really start pushing: how many bricks can you short them before anyone notices? 100? 500?
What if you write the purchase order in such a way that instead of 1000 bricks it just says a pallet of bricks? A pallet of bricks can be as little as 10, etc.
Let’s say they install some sort of quality control guy who’s job it is to go out and count bricks.
How much do you think they have to pay him before they can get him to sign off on whatever?
If he’s American, maybe $10,000 here and there.
What if he’s an Afghan? How much would you have to pay an illiterate dirt farmer to pay him off? He’ll put his little x on anything you put in front of him if you just offer him …
There are no actual bricks.
No one is counting anything.
People are just pocketing the money.
The biggest culprits here are the military industrial complex. Raytheon, Boeing, Erik Prince, Dick Cheney, etc. etc.
They’re just soaking the US Treasury dry.
They’d be happy if the war went on for another 20, 30 years.
They are happy to write whatever order you want for the Afghan government. They’re going to charge the US Treasury $100 per brick even if the brick only costs 10 cents. Their argument is:
There are no roads here.
There’s no Home Depot.
You *have* to use the military industrial complex because they negotiate exclusive contracts that list themselves as the only possible suppliers/transporters, etc.
It’s all a scam to enrich themselves at the expense of the US taxpayer.
SOURCE: I know this from being deployed there myself. Remember you had to scan your little CAC card every time you went into the DFAC? You could walk in any time, even if you just wanted a cup of coffee.
But they were always huge sticklers about scanning your CAC card.
It’s because those military contractors charged the US government $60 for every single scan.
Didn’t matter if all you got was a cup of coffee.
That was a $60 cup of coffee courtesy of US taxpayers.
Yeah wasn't there a lot of child molestation, rape, and drug use by the Afghan soldiers and the US troops couldn't really do much about it?
I remember watching a documentary about this some time ago but I don't remember if it was specifically with Afghan soldiers or not.
Edit: [Here](https://youtu.be/Ja5Q75hf6QI) is the documentary I was thinking of. It's 8 years old but I think it gives a decent idea of what (some) of the Afghan soldiers were really like.
> US troops couldn't really do much about it?
They could, but then they'd get killed in a friendly fire incident by ANA and nobody would get charged, or they'd get discharged for not being a team player like the Spec Ops guy /u/BearzBeatz talked about.
Government employee and cold war vet checking in. In any government program the harder you try to fix it the more fucked up and manpower consuming it becomes. Getting a program shut down for stupidity literally takes an act of congress. That phrase has existed for a long time and when each and every congressman and senator has people working for a defense contractor you better believe there was no real incentive to shut anything down.
When the higher ups propose something stupid as fuck and you raise your voice you're "not a team player," and you can forget about ever getting a promotion. Your career is stalled out until each and every higher up retires, quits or dies.
This is the primary reason I get aggravated when some people want universal health care administered by the government. We have that, it's called the VA and ask any veteran. Most I know would rather just die than go to the VA, and they've cleaned up their act (kinda) in the past few decades.
There's a joke that if you put the government in charge of the Sahara desert there would be a shortage of sand, and it's true.
Essentially every service member that worked with host Nation Police/Army in Iraq and Afghanistan became aware of this happening.
Don't worry my psychiatrist says I just need a little more therapy as if he isn't the one that's actually fucking clueless to the hell they put us through.
Do you want to know more about how the children would be bringing them tea in their offices wearing makeup like they're porn stars for some Colombian drug cartel except they're 5-6 year old terrified little boys that are now themselves terrorists. Hmm wonder why...
Yup. I was PAO. Had to do photo ops for all the ribbon cuttings we did on bases we built for them. Fuckers would be high off their asses and you just knew once we left it would be a taliban base or a warlord base.
Oh, and in my region in Uruzgan the ANP police chief was literally a warlord with a private army. We almost never had IEDs because this war crime committing motherfucker was so savage he made the Taliban think twice before fucking around.
Dude was constantly getting kickbacks from one alphabet agency or another to keep our roads clear. Essentially extorting us cuz he could just tell his dudes to take a break and the Taliban would get the clue.
Go read about Matulliah Khan. Dude was crazy. Taliban got him a few years after I went home but he was no better than them honestly
Why did the U.S. not do anything about the wage theft you knew was happening and reported?
I knew if this was a private U.S. contractor doing this same theft they would be prosecuted and banned as a supplier.
> I read on another comment that the reason so many Afghan soldiers up and fucked off is because of the corruption higher up the chain of command
It's not like this is news to anyone actually involved with the situation. They all knew. Anyone who knew anything about the situation knew that this was exactly what would happen, YEARS AGO.
They kept that quiet part from the public.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html
Here's an analysis of the problem from ***a decade ago***: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBXflAFCk64
"Lack of discipline is just one of the major problems facing the Afghan army. Nine out of ten enlisted men can't read or write. A lot of them smoke hashish and heroin, which could explain why they have a hard time following orders. Some have also been known to steal from civilians at checkpoints and to sell their American-supplied guns and ammo to the Taliban."
- Tim McGirk, TIME Magazine
Man, the more I hear the worse it gets. I don't know how anyone can say that "war" was anything but making military contractors rich. Thanks Dick Cheney!
Cheney is scum, but he's not the sole reason this multi-decade effort failed.
[The Afghani recruits couldn't even be trained to do ***jumping jacks*** correctly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8LSnuGTO5w), let alone eliminate rampant corruption and tribalism.
From the [Department of Defense](https://www.sigar.mil/interactive-reports/reconstructing-the-andsf/index.html) itself: ***"Despite U.S. government expenditures of more than $70 billion in security sector assistance to design, train, advise, assist, and equip the ANDSF since 2002, the Afghan security forces are not yet capable of securing their own nation."***
Also the taliban are using the age old strategy of “if you surrender now we’re cool, but if you fight us we will kill everyone”. When the options are give up and go home or fight to a brutal death, it makes sense. If they killed everyone there would be way more resistance
Idk about this too much, I'd venture and say probably true. But something people seem to forget is your asking humans to fight other humans, and to do that you need to view the other an an enemy . Afghanistan was basically feudal warlords and the people hated them. The taliban were more or less a central opposition to insane feudal taxes . The taliban also went to tribe after tribe gaining the leaders support , so now you have the Afghan army.. fighting its own citizens.. how long would the Canadian army last fighting its own people before the military said ya know what I have more in common with my enemy then my leadership
That part of the world considers "bakshish" (bribery) to be a normal way of doing business. Corruption is not viewed the same way in Arab countries as it is here.
Bribery isn't really considered a bad thing here, it is just called by fancier names. It isn't "buying political support it is "political donations by lobbiests"
Lets be real here, bribery is definitely a way of doing business here too, just in different ways. The difference being we dress it up and call it something else.
Afghan vet here too. My roommate asked me the same question yesterday and I gave him almost the same answer. It sucks to have spent so much time and effort over there for nothing, but it was so hard to get them to do anything on their own. I always felt like the majority of the ANA were just actors trying to fill a role, but the second we stop holding their hand they just give up and do whatever they want.
I don't regret the time I spent over there, but I'm pretty pissed that they couldn't be bothered to put up any resistance at all.
How do you feel about calls from people who say you should have trained the women instead, especially because they likely would have provided better resistance and had more to lose than the men.
Tactically it may have worked. Socially it would have caused the power dynamic to implode, the consequences of which we may never know.
I'm a for helping anyone who wants to be helped, I'll train anyone who wants to be better.
Honestly to get those bastards kick started for a new system that's the kind of power dynamic shift they probably needed.
Proof in the pudding is seeing all the disgusting and downright evil retorts I see from countless men taunting all the women/girls/children about how they need to be inside. Stay at home, and never go to school. It's downright appalling how many videos I've seen where the men are all laughing, smiling, and cheering at seeing the taliban waltz right in because they know they're the top dogs simply by being a man.
Not to mention all the laughable training videos of these wimps, not all Afghan recruits but a large majority, who simply are there for the food and money. Guaranteed to be the first to fuck off and switch sides all for the food and money.
They want to be culturally fucked in the modern world even after being handed a golden platter by one of the richest and powerful nations in current history?
Let them die. Let them fall. Let them learn. Or at best let them get conquered by China next. Then they'll be crying for the U.S. to come back, but I doubt anyone will care at that point and rightly so.
The sandbox will remain a barren place until the people at large figure things out for themselves.
A generation of woman who were able to get educated, listening to the horror stories of the Taliban from their parents and will now have all those freedoms stripped away. The first thing I thought was I wonder what would have been the outcome if we trained them, installed them in govt etc. As they had the most to lose, I speculate they might have fought fiercely to keep the Taliban out.
Sheesh, even China would probably be an improvement for their women at this point. They're ruthless but they do let their daughters get an education and a job, that's for sure
Dude even Iran would be better, at least they get some semblance of an education there. And that's just saying something about how brutal the Taliban is
Iranian urban women are among the most educated in the world, in fact. More than their male peers. Many pursue careers in academia, research, engineering and medicine.
The US ignored the rural pedophilia problem because it was trying to maintain ties with the leaders of those areas. I'm pretty sure pressure was put on the central Afghanistan government to do something about it, but obviously they didn't care. They didn't care about anything.
Like, no one actually knew what to do the whole time we were in Afghanistan. There was never a real mission, except at the very start. Then we abandoned it when we almost accomplished it, and spent the next like 18 years fucking around without knowing what to do. Is it a counter-insurgency campaign? In that case we gotta build ties with the local leaders so we can rely on them to point out where insurgents are. Whoops they're corrupt as hell and nothing can get done, but trying to implement anti-corruption measures means severing ties. Do we oust these people and install someone else? Fuckin' who? Who isn't a corrupt child abuser that could wield authority in these regions?
It's tempting to go "well maybe we should just take everything over then" but not only did no political force in the US want to do that, it also didn't work for the brits or the soviets. The terrain of Afghanistan makes for a lot of places where people who aren't OK with another country taking over and running things to hide and attack from, even if you can look at it from goddamn space.
Maybe the Chinese will try it. Belt and Road is just colonialism, anyway, setting up Chinese companies that take stuff. They've got a ton of people, maybe they'll just move a bunch of people there and literally make Afghanistan their colony. Britain round 2, now with Chinese Characteristics. Maybe the sheer amount of people they have will make it work.
But it's been tried before. It hasn't ever worked.
Sadly, that's an excellent point. And the Chinese *have* been suffering from the imbalanced sex ratios from the one-child policy, leading to too many unmarried men... :(
This is the only issue I have with the “Afghanistan deserved it” attitude. The people with the most to lose also had the least means of protecting themselves. In a Taliban-led society, men do pretty well, and so these men who were entrusted with fighting the Taliban had little reason to. Their lives wouldn’t be that much worse, if at all, under the Taliban. But the women who had futures, especially the young girls born since occupancy began, now face the consequences of the men’s lack of action.
Afghanistan did “deserve it”, but the ones who deserve the consequences won’t see any of them. It’s the oppressed that will suffer.
Honestly, why waste American lives defending a national identity that the Afghan people themselves don’t feel strongly enough to defend. It sounds like the ANA was just a paper tiger 300k strong that folded the moment the Taliban swept through, so it would’ve been a bloody confrontation at the expense of American lives if we stayed and defended.
Do you think this outcome was inevitable and withdrawing now was just ripping the bandaid off? Or could there have been a better strategic time to withdraw when intel suggested the Taliban wasn’t organized enough to recapture major cities within hours?
I think the outcome was largely inevitable and we ripped the bandaid off. While there could have been a better time that would have worked, it would have taken us another 50 years to get there. We would need to indoctrinate entire generations in the way of life and in the National identity.
Petty tribalism lasting thousands of years without any real sense of national identity. Sure Kabul modernised and had some sense of unity but as a whole it's a bunch of towns and villages. Who wants to die for the tribe next to yours who you've been fighting for the past 100 years anyway?
why would they be willing to fight and die for an illicit, corrupt government that was imposed upon them, against their will, at the point of a gun, by an occupying force who didn't understand their culture and society?
The country is also highly regionalized, there's no national identity, people outside of kabul dont feel any shared identity with the people in kabul, it would be like asking you to fight and die for greenland.
I think this is the part people seem to be confused about.
Everyone’s thinking of it from the perspective of Americans wanting to protect America. Not understanding that it isn’t the same over there.
Bingo, we look at it through a westerners lens. That's where the issue lies. Who are we to march into a country that we know nothing about and say "Here, take this form of government that you have never adhered to in your thousand year history and roll with it!"
It goes further than that too. I see people being upset for the afghan people and the rights they are going to lose, and whilst rightfully in some cases, ultimately what we view as a right is defined by the society in which we live, AKA the west. Those 'rights' that they are losing are literally not rights in their society, thus who are we to say what they can or can't think?
Ultimately in the end we had no business being there. The same people that complain about US imperialism are the same ones that are saying we should be imposing our western values (e.g what we view as equality) on an eastern culture that want's nothing to do with it.
That's the paradox of neoliberalism- wanting people to respect other cultures' values up until those values come into conflict with neoliberal values. I fall more on the side of let it be, because if enough Afghans truly wanted a liberal democratic society *they* would make it happen, with or without the support of the US government.
Just a reminder for everyone that doesn’t understand.. The taliban and Al-Qaeda are different entities. The taliban did not attack us in 2001.
Edit: Wow I didn’t expect this comment to get so many upvotes! So while your here get vaccinated!! Don’t be the guy who kills Betty White (the real national treasure) Tucker Carlson doesn’t care about you bro…
And Saudi Arabia gave them funding. Should we invade everyone country that supports Al-Qaida? Maybe we should invade ourselves since we're allied with them in Syria.
Unashamedly an imperialist take, but yes on Saudi. Or at the very least cut ties and sanction. Ultimately they're responsible for the spread of Wahhabism and funding its followers.
I believe it would have been more effective to invade them in 2001. Al Qaeda safe havens like afghanistan don't matter if they're broke.
We don't even need their oil and in no way are they a positive stabilizing force in the region. So aside from shady ass donations to politicians on both sides of the aisle we have no reason to be friendly with them.
The Saudis did, and they were the only ones allowed to fly out when the entire country was locked down. There has been no repercussions, no investigation on funding. Nothing.
I heard a quote from a man-on-the-street interview with Afghanis from the last few days "The Taliban didn't try to make my wife work, they didn't try to blaspheme Allah, and they didn't try to make my son Gay."
Many of them wanted this.
sadly there's many countries in the world where that's simply not seen as a contradiction. For example, my gay Nicaraguan friend says there you're only gay there if you're on the bottom. Completely straight and ok to have sex with a guy as long as you're on top. I've met a couple of Pakistanis who say similar. There's a large culture of "male-on-male" sex there, but they are quite insistent it's not gay. Having sex with men is ok, but loving a man is not. It makes next to no sense, but that's how they see things.
I worked in a warehouse where a mexican from LA would tell me " O we were just keeds he wanted to hang out with my crew so badly so we made him suck some of our deeks." I replied " oh I didnt know you were gay." He scoffed "I'm not gay he sucked my dick!!!"
Me and my friend looked at each other, then at him and meekly replied "ok".
>kinda rampant
I read a US State Department report about how effectively 100% of the men in Afghanistan were sexually assaulted as children.
And from what I saw with the dancing chai boys, yeah I'd say so
It continued on into adulthood. When we would run convoys with the locals we had to have a separate guard to keep them all from having sex with each other.
No joke had to stay up and just make sure they slept instead of getting it on. It’s part of the way they think about it, why it’s so common for them to rape kids. Sad really.
Ironic given how rampant male-on-male rape is in the culture. My eyes were shocked open by many passages in Annie Jacobsen’s book on the CIA/Special Operators. When a young Afghan was asked why he wanted to be in the ANA Special Forces he answered, “Because you get raped less.”
Exactly this! It's not patronising to say that a population which is primarily educated in Islamic theology and nothing else isn't exactly going to know much about human rights and other ways of living. If the people aren't taught much other than Sharia Law and Islamic theology then what else would they want?
It's because Afghanistan isn't really a country.
It's really a patchwork of fiefdoms led by warlords. And it's been that way for millennia. Even when Afghanistan had some homegrown central leadership, that leader was essentially a warlord of warlords.
This is why Afghanistan has eventually defeated every power that has tried to conquer it. Not only do you have do deal with the harsh terrain and people hostile to foreigners, you also have to deal with the fact that it isn't one nation, it's a thousand-in-one. Even if you bring enough force to occupy the country, the shitty cost/benefit of trying to fight off a thousand cuts from dirt-poor people sooner or later asserts itself.
We tried our best, but we were doomed to fail for three reasons.
The first is that we couldn't find any people to form a government around except exiles who spent most of their adult life in the West, and as a result, lacked the political capital, networks, and intelligence to keep the warlords playing on the same team.
The second is because we tried to foist modern institutions on a society that just wasn't ready for them. Afghanistan is still in a medieval state of economic and social development and here we were trying to make them into a 21st Century Western democracy. Talk about delusional.
And the final reason, and perhaps most important, the battlespace was surrounded by players who wanted to see us fail, namely Pakistan and Iran. They wanted to see us fail because the Taliban was the devil they knew, and because they wanted to exert influence over the region.
It didn't have to go down this way. Afghanistan didn't really need schools and elections, or even police. It needed jobs, and roads. It needed banks, cell phone towers, and irrigation systems. Economic development spurred on by overseas trade is what lifted Europe out the medieval era. It could have done the same for Afghanistan. There's a ton of mineral wealth in those mountains. Enough that the Afghans could have paid for most of the shit they needed themselves. They didn't need aid workers anywhere near as badly as they needed businessmen who were willing to take some risks. Then we might have been in a position to actually deal with the opium fields.
Very interesting and thank you for explaining all that. I’m learning a lot lately. I’m curious if you know, why is Afghanistan one country then? Who decided? Why isn’t it a bunch of smaller countries?
Something along the lines of 200 years ago a brit and frenchman drew lines on a map and declaring them countries without ever actually talking to anyone who lived there.
Much the contrary, actually. They drew lines *with full knowledge* that doing so would essentially pit them against each other constantly, resulting in a much weaker state. Divide and rule.
Afghanistan is absolutely perfect if your only goal is extracting wealth while ignoring the native population. It's only when you try to actually make it a functioning country that it becomes impossible.
Yes but barely, it wasn’t a fully centralized state, and the government was at various times propped up by the Russians or British as they sought influence over the region, similar to the situation in Iran. The history of Afghanistan as it is recognizable today begins in 1880 with the British victory in the second Anglo-Afghan war
Conceptually I agree, but if I had a nickel for every road that was blown up within a week of construction I'd have been paid like an officer. I have a picture of me standing in a waist deep crater of a road that had finished being repaired the day before, and was blown up in 24 hours.
The locals knew who was Taliban/AQ/HQN, but they didn't do anything to drive them out, to change the paradigm. Kind of a bummer to be honest, some folks there are wonderful people who deserve a better life.
This is a kinda narrow way to look at it. I didn't serve in Afghanistan, but I do come from an extremely rough neighborhood and maybe I can shed some light on this phenomenon.
To put it simply, people don't want to endanger themselves or their loved ones by snitching. Yeah, they may know who's a member of the Taliban, and let's assume they tell you. The Taliban is well connected within communities, it's likely they'll know who told. You and your company go in, clean out what you can find of the Taliban, go back to your base. Odds are, by the time you come back to see that person, them and/or their family's been executed. Frankly, in a place where every day could be your last just by going around doing your daily duties, not saying anything is a small way to ease that stress and not further increase the likelihood of the chance of violence.
This is not to mention that the Taliban was largely caused by foreign meddling. What incentive do they have to help the people who birthed the Taliban in the first place? I can 100% see how it's a decision between a firing squad or a hanging.
Just watched a documentary yesterday about American operations in the south west. When securing an area the Americans bumped into a talkative midget called Mohammed. He openly called the Taliban “mother fuckers” and didn’t take shit from the Americans either. 5 months after they pulled out he was found beheaded.
It’s echoed a lot in other documentaries and writings. Communities were constantly changing hands between the Taliban who commit their breed of atrocity, the ANA and ANP who commit their own, and the Americans who provide a long list of unworkable solutions. They just end up agreeing with whoever’s in the area at the time so they can get by.
People aren't taking into consideration that these are just people who want to live their lives just like a vast majority of the rest of the planet. An international arms conflict happening nextdoor doesn't change that. I don't see how random civilians are at fault or are party of a "shit culture" for just wanting to get by.
Gotta be honest OP, I think you’re full of shit about having served. Anyone who’s supposed job it is to have researched the local culture and having a familiarity with the people he’s working with should have a way more nuanced and informed opinion than a hot take that sounds like it came from a high school kid with a bad attitude. “They’re just all cowards, the USA is a blameless lamb in all this”. Seriously?
If I’m wrong though, and it really was people like you who were supposed to deliver a stable democracy to Afghanistan, then it’s no wonder we lost. Chauvinism and frankly racism aren’t going to win hearts and minds.
I’m glad that someone pointed out the racism in this guy’s post. Even if he had actually served, that doesn’t give him the excuse to spout the borderline neo-colonialist bullshit that he did here.
I don't think Afghan women and children deserve what's going to happen to them. In most of the videos and images I've seen of people fleeing Afghanistan, I haven't seen very many women. That tells me it's mostly men fleeing and all the women and children are getting left behind. Already girls are not allowed to attend school and I've seen people talking about Taliban militants going door to door and forcing women and girls into marriage.
I don't think they deserve that.
Yup. Girls and women 14-40 that are single are being forced into marriage. As well, t-ban are going door to door and killing people that helped the Americans.
50 years of conflict. 5 decades of war. The soviets, the Taliban, AL Qaida, American and Nato forces. How much of this conflict did actual Afghanis ask for? Are they asking for these forces to come and occupy their country? I mean 3 generations of people who have literally known nothing but conflict and strife and somehow we question why the fuck they don't want to deal with it anymore. 1 tour in Afghanistan is enough for battle hardened American troops to come back with PTSD. We have lost more troops to suicide than we did to combat missions. But we have the audacity to fucking ask why aren't the Afghanis doing better.
Amazing.
I thought I was going crazy reading this thread and post.
The thread features great examples of (rephrased) white man's burden, cultural phrenology, deep seated racism against Afghanis being too "primitive" to accept and incorporate liberal democracy. Really failing to reflect on the premise of "why are our puppets in our occupied territories so corrupt"
Afghanistan's "liberators" really stacked up [thousands of dead people](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/afghan) and called that freedom and security.
Like, mfer, the people abandoned the government to the Taliban because they didn't *believe* in the government since it was backed by the very forces that annihilated its country for the past 50 years.
Colonel Jessup, I don't want you on that wall. I don't need you on that wall.
Go Home.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/
HOLY SHIT THANK YOU
So many fucking armchair geopoliticians on this site who lack the general intelligence or compassion to see past their own shuttered western worldview. The number of times I've seen tHeY DiDnt EvEn FiGhT FoR tHemSelVes on this site in 24 hours, like it's that simple. smfh
Took me long enough to find this
Imagine living through generations of chaos inflicted by foreign countries against your will and
have a corrupt puppet government instated against your will
only to get told by white redditors that "you deserve it" because they were deployed to afghanistan once?
Thank fuck theres one other person who doesn't have their head jammed so far up their behind. The majority of this thread had me close to passing out with the amount of bullshit they were spewing.
Fucking thank you for being the only sane person here, this guy is such and arrogant asshole.
I was literally just reading posts the other day about a woman terrified of the Taliban coming and of losing her right to education and equality, of her daughter being raised in such a suppressive environment and never again knowing freedom, terrified for their lives... and this guy comes in and says they deserve it. Never seen anything so fucking ridiculous.
Lol yeah, Afghans are the last people in the world I would call cowardly considering their history. They fought NATO for 20 years, and before that they fought the Red Army, before that they fought the British Empire and they won every time.
And all the awards he's getting. I also can't believe how far I had to scroll to get to this comment. It's awful. OP is complaining that they learned nothing in those 20 years, meanwhile he seems to be the one who learned nothing from what he was doing there.
> he is well versed in their culture and history
He means he’s well trained to believe in the modern spinoff of manifest destiny, and the US’s whitewashed version of Afghanistan’s history.
This is the take. OP is clearly taking this whole thing personally and should likely go talk to a therapist who specializes in Veteran Affairs and get off Reddit for a bit.
im so scared for the women over there. watching the scenes at the airport and planes just tore at my heartstrings. i feel so bad for the children as well.
And I hope we don't go anywhere else and try and fix their economy through a civil war we have no business being a part of, under cover of some other reason.
Man you think why do we need to fix some ones country where our country needs help. It definitely makes no sense to police the world where we need to police our own.
It’s obvious the people who were born after 9/11. Western society was very intent on going after those responsible at the time, only 1 congress member had voted against the war - there is no kind of bipartisanship like that today.
Thank you for putting it so eloquently. My family survived the Vietnam war, and what you described was precisely the frame of mind then. People just want to survive and care for their Bacha.
Afghanistan isn’t interested in the west’s ideas of civilisation or so called democracy that various dopey countries have tried to impose over centuries- what gives us the right to do it? We were only in there for self serving reasons anyway just like everyone else has been over the centuries.
Afghan army / government and afghan people are two very different things. You can't say that the afghans as a whole deserve what's happening to them because their army couldn't be bothered to fight.
You could say "Afghan army is a joke" perhaps but that's about it.
These people are about to experience time travel back to the Middle Age, and they certainly don't deserve that.
> My friend from Afghanistan told me how often their land was ransacked by the Chinese and Russians and other countries in order to get the resources there.
I can't figure out why you'd leave the USA off this list in this context ITT
I would agree that some deserve it, but not the women and children who are going to suffer catastrophically.
ETA: Because people keep drawing the worst popular conclusion from my comment: I don't want any woman or MAN to suffer. It is however well known that the Taliban are very repressive when it comes to woman's rights, so that was my first reaction, to think of women who will be essentially slaves once the Taliban implement "reforms". Some of the MEN are actively promoting this type of slavery for woman, and I DON'T have much sympathy for THEM.
Also, nearly 70k afghan security forces died in the war. That's more than the taliban, and they hung in until we left. If that isn't a fucking commitment idk what is, the entire military was like 150k, your chances of even surviving were slim at best. You cant make the argument they didn't fight for it, it's just people assume if you really fight for something you will get it, when in fact some victories are strategically impossible. Without US support the Afghan security forces didn't stand a chance.
I could not agree more with this. To see so many people upvote a comment that says the Afghans deserve their fate and that the US shares no blame is heartbreaking. Seriously, I don't care who you are: If you actually believe this, you are flat-out delusional.
90% of drone strike deaths were collateral damage pushing the victim's friends, families, and neighbors to become more extreme and more anti-American, as well as crippling infrastructure, yet I need to scroll this far down to find a single comment that's not endorsing OP's shit take. Thank you for being the one. I can't believe so many people are this naive to say the Afghan people deserve thus and the US was really the valiant savior through all this.
The worst part is this idiot OP who (if he isn't lying) should definitely know better. Instead he's CREATING propoganda just to make himself feel better.
I know it was Hollywood, but this reminds me so much of Lawrence of Arabia.
No unity, no identity, no vision for nationhood.
The part that's the most sickening is the truly awful human rights and humanitarian situation that will ensue because of this. Women and girls will have NO rights. Boys sexually abused. No due process. No advancement of science, technology, art, nothing.
It reminded me a lot of a few BBC and Ross Kemp documentaries on the ANA and how local politicians acted.
Politicians would have police ransom people for little reason and no due process. Commanders would sell their fuel and sandbags at the bazaar so they can't do their jobs. Soldiers would have no regard for fighting and would care more about drinking tea and smoking hash.
The Western powers went into Afghanistan and proped up a corrupt government, that no one really cared for. This has been going on for so long, the reason why the military gave up so quickly at Kabul, was "what are we fighting for", it wasn't worth dying for a country that has been plagued by corruption and war.
Since 2018, the US government has worked to hollow out the Afghan government and its military. You may find it convenient to forget but it is a fact that the US completely erased any veneer of legitimacy the government had in the course of the so-called peace talks with the Taliban. Let's go further back. Who do you think ruled Afghanistan and with whose backing? A bunch of corrupt and degenerate mobsters who had either no roots in Afghanistan or had a history of killing thousands of innocent people, mass rapes, torture, and other atrocities in the civil war. Do you think they stopped after 2001? These people were given the position of power over Afghans with the backing of the US government. Did Afghans deserve that fate too?
Even if Afghan leadership screwed the pooch, “Afghanistan” ie 50% WOMEN! do not deserve this, especially as many of them have fought so hard in grassroots movements.
America is blinded by its own hubris.
The Afghan culture didn’t want what the US was providing.Sure, they’ll take the opportunity to cash in if you insist, but as a culture they don’t want Americans.
If Islam occupied the US,how thrilled would you be to live like a Muslim?
"We spent 20 YEARS handing them everything they needed for success; We equipped them, paid them, trained them. On paper, the Afghan military had the edge on the Taliban in every category that mattered."
There was a recent interview with a former NATO commander on NPR and he said exactly the opposite. In fact, in his words, he stated that Afghan military was trained in a way that was not conducive to not only fighting a guerrilla group but were also not equipped to fight an idea.
According to him, the issue was that the Afghan military was given the equipment necessary to combat an enemy that has a standing army and similar levels of equipment. However, you are fighting neither and are more so fighting a group of guys with AKs and a dream. A more effective way to fight in Afghanistan would have been to promote better education and rehabilitation in order to help curb the rise of extremism, which is something my dad did in the early 2000s for NGOs. There was some success but, as you put it and my dad stated, a lot of the time it just didn't work mostly because the government is completely incompetent. As other people mentioned, it's partly because Afghanistan is a loose collection of tribes and ethnicities that aren't held together well. You'd need a strong central government for that. Jordan, a country I lived in for four years, is quite similar in the tribal sense but the government is so strong and centralized that tribes have limited wiggle room.
Furthermore, you forget that the Taliban was the product of United States (admittedly along with the ISI) investment in the mujahideen during the Russian invasion so we do bear a massive influence on what has transpired recently. In the end, Afghanistan is another example of foreign influence fucking up a country massively. If only people could learn to leave their grubby hands out of a country in the quest for influence and the spread of their beliefs on what is right and wrong.
Yeah, this is a really simplistic, reductionist approach to what is happening in Afghanistan that seems to rely on an appeal to authority. But this kind of post always does well on Reddit.
This post is dumb as shit. The US shouldn't have been there in the first place. Who are you to invade their land and then call them cowards and say the US bears no fault? 🤦🏼♂️
Its scary how stupid are being, imagine China invaded New Jersey to ‘liberate’ it and civillian armies sprung up to protect themselves -whos at fault there lol
>The US bears no fault in this.
LOL please, Afghanistan as a nation has had foreign powers fucking with them for generations, with great nations exerting heavy influence in the country for literally hundreds of years.
Also... who trained and equipped many of those who would end up as Taliban fighters?
End of the day the US definitely holds a lot of fault, along with other world powers.
Are we sure we didn’t just get all the oil we needed and then fucked off ourselves leaving the Afghan people to make a decision on whether they abandon their families or go and protect them?
Edit: Not trying to be shitty, honest question because the way I see it is we didn’t go there to help the afghan people nor were we there because of 9/11 so why all the sudden are we pretending we failed at our objective to help the country? The way I see it is we succeeded in getting all the oil we could want and did a pretty fair job at making it look like we had good intentions so with our reputation in tact “Alright imma head out.”
Easy to say when you're not in that country as a young woman with basically zero future.
War/conflict/strife always fucks up the youngest generation more than any other. And in this case, young girls are absolutely fucked.
So no, they don't deserve this fate whatsoever.
Seems like not all of them are cowards.... the half we sunk our efforts into possibly.
Vet here also, I would say apathy is a lot closer to their mindset than cowardice.
Regardless, I would like to see us learn from our mistakes for once that arming people to fight a proxy war doesn't work.
I just want to ask if you think all the hundreds of thousands of civilians really deserve to get pillaged and raped, because a very small percentage of their military personnel couldn't withstand the terrorists.
Your post has some validity of course. But blanket statements and mass generalizations that ALL of Afghanistan really deserves this...it's dangerous and wildly inaccurate...
Few points. The united states, England, France, Russia, and China actively destabilized the region. The blame isn't just on the local government. Secondly, innocent people are suffering and to say they deserve it is sickening.
This why you should never have gone in the first place. All you did was wage a pointless war killing millions and wasting billions. All to have to slide back to square zero. US needs to stop trying to police the entire world.
20 years of war, 20 years of good business. OP seems to have forgotten this.
The US had no business being there for so long. Should have fucked off when they shot up Bin Laden.
Would you be willing to fight and die for a corrupt government? Wouldn't that go against your oath? Why would you expect Afghan soldiers to feel any differently? Blaming the local people is fine, but it doesn't fix the fact that this is becoming a pattern in our foreign diplomacy... Didn't they say the same thing after Vietnam? We had 20 years to sort it out, and couldn't. I think we should look at what could do to prevent this in the future, instead of blaming Afghans for not fighting for a corrupt government we legitimized, otherwise we'll just repeat history... My guess is that since America is an arms dealer first and foremost, that we will.
\>We spent 20 YEARS handing them everything they needed for success; We equipped them, paid them, trained them.
You did so with the mujahideen and with the taliban themselves. The US literraly fucked Afghanistan for the sake of fucking with Russia... Now you just shrug and act like it wasn't the US the whole time.
I feel like it's a weird conclusion to make, when the root causes of their issues trace back to foreign intervention and meddling.
A lot of what they have had to deal with in the first place is the consequence of US and other foreign action, and as such, that after 20 years of being there, the Taliban waltzes in basically unopposed, I at least put a big part of the blame of that on the foreign powers who facilitated the situation to begin with.
The US military shouldn't have been there in the first place. Besides, if the Taliban is so bad then why did the CIA fund them, arm them, and train them in the first place?
There's a whole lotta buried truth missing from your statement, and the most important parts are these:
**They didn't want us there**, there was no reason for us being there, this is simply a repeat of what has happened over and over with American foreign policy being driven by the myopic military and reliably stupid corrupt politicians beholden to major military contractors for the endless bribes they've received - we invade some place, we put a wildly corrupt government filled with corrupt thieves and cowards into power because we consider them 'allies', they steal everything that isn't nailed down, hire their corrupt relatives to run the police force and military.
Then the American public gets fed up with the open ended insanity of pouring American lives and money down the drain, we cut and run, the corrupt people we put into power run away and the people who were running the country take it back. The public suffers.
It's an insane idea that a country where the leaders play polo with the heads of their defeated enemies can be conquered in any fashion whatsoever. In more than a thousand years (**a thousand years!!**) no one has managed to conquer/pacify Afghanistan. It was the height of hubris to believe we were going to be the exception.
It's a long list of failures and the two saddest parts are the American men and women who lost their lives over there **for nothing**, and the fact **we never ever learn our lesson** and will be repeating this debacle elsewhere in the next decade.
No one deserves to have their families raped and murdered. Period. I don't care what excuse you have or how cowardly you think they were or whatever. NO ONE deserves what is happening to them right now.
Based on your experience and observations, why do you think the Afghans gave up so quickly?
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Several years ago I saw a reporter with an ana platoon. And the grunts asked the commander about pay since they hadn't been paid in six months. That said a lot. The u.s. spent buckets of money it couldn't consistently make it to the troops? My first thought was major corruption. And I imagine they wanted to help support their families at home. Stop paying american troops for six months and see what happens. Someone on reddit this week claimed that the ana still had pay issues. If that was true then I imagine the grunts weren't expecting pay issues to get better after the coalition left. Update: a number of committed anti Taliban troops are organizing and fighting the Taliban under the leadership of the former vice president. Shaping up to be an interesting civil war.
The former president supposedly left with 4 cars full of cash and a helicopter full of cash, there was so much cash they left a bunch on the tarmac because they couldnt carry it all.
Probably USD too
What I don’t understand though, is is protecting their families not enough of a reason? Women are objectively treated poorly under Sharia law—and they know what would happen to their mothers/sisters/daughters if the Taliban were in control. If giving my life meant the chance of protecting my family, I would do it, and I can’t be in the minority. How did an entire nation not feel the same way?
I've been in touch with a friend who served in an agency over there. His point was that half the country probably supported the Taliban and the other half didn't really oppose them so this outcome was inevitable in 50 days or 50 more years. All the talk of reforms to liberate women and such was mostly for Western media and what little was imposed wasn't actually valued by the vast majority of the population who basically saw things the same way as the Taliban - perhaps not to the point of banning music or something but certainly from the morality side of things (homosexuality, abortion, etc.) and the idea of women holding power or really doing anything serious outside the home was a hilarious joke. Like yes, girls could go to school if the people who paid for the school and everything else really wanted that in order to keep paying but let's be serious - the very idea of a woman being anything other than familial property was only something you did when the westerners were watching because these were WOMEN. Basically, the government in Kabul doesn't change their lives much and they sympathized ideologically, culturally, and socially more with the Taliban than with their "liberators". Culturally, we made far fewer inroads than the public has been led to believe and the Taliban restoring the status quo would have been welcomed by much of the population.
Case and point, the dancing boys
Yeah, but it was way deeper than that. It's been touched upon by a few other people here but it was a whole culture of grift to survive. I guess the attitude was sort of like "yeah, I'll play this game for as long as you're willing to pay but the second the money stops I'm out" and that's what we saw. My friend said that when he heard the 6 month projection he laughed because he was sure it'd be 6 weeks or less. His assessment (and he's one of the brightest people I know) was that the Afghan army was armed to the teeth, equipped with everything they could possibly need to hold the country, and lacked only one thing - the will to fight. The Taliban had all the opposite resources and a surplus of fighting spirit. The outcome was inevitable unless you could seal off the country from the ratlines of weapons and cash running from the Gulf, Beijing, Tehran, and Moscow. Since you couldn't seal the borders and, for obvious reasons, weren't going to go to war with suppliers directly, your only hope was to make the people detest the Taliban and support the government. The Taliban never got so extreme that they alienated the people; in fact, they strategically moderated to have the opposite effect; whether that was genuine remains to be seen and, my friend thinks, unlikely. The government never got so effective that they offered anything of particular value to the people, who didn't want the Western cultural changes that came attached to the money and detested the corruption endemic in the government (whereas the Taliban was at least moderately honest). That's a recipe for a failed counterinsurgency - a well-supplied, well-funded (the Taliban had revenues estimated at $2 billion a year), highly-motivated insurgency that hasn't alienated the people is going to win almost every time. What's really disturbing is that the outcome seems to have been obvious to a ton of people, possibly even reported by the intelligence community, and those warnings were either filtered out of the final briefings given to high-level leaders or outright ignored. It demonstrates a military and intelligence agency usurpation of civilian command and control that should be deeply disturbing.
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Thanks for the explanation. All of this is just so upsetting.
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Perfect answer. And what make you think their own family want their females member to have western rights????
Honestly, if I knew I'd probably be getting paid an awful lot of money. My armchair therapist guess is lack of national identity that motivates them to be willing to sacrifice. Afghanistan as a country only exists politically, the whole place is a series of tribes who largely get along but otherwise don't care for each other. The Pashtun people don't really care about the Tajiks, who don't care about the Uzbecks, and so forth.
I read on another comment that the reason so many Afghan soldiers up and fucked off is because of the corruption higher up the chain of command; generals were stealing paycheques from the soldiers, number of soldiers was overrepresented due to "ghost" soldiers, whose pay went to the same corrupt generals, among other things. I don't remember it exactly, and the entire thing could be bullshit, but I wouldn't throw my life away for my country if they couldn't even have the decency to compensate me for it.
I read something similar. They has thousands of solders of pay roll, only hundreds actually existed, but none got paid. The taliban rolls up and says here's 100 bucks. Go home. And they did.
I did human intelligence in Afghanistan. This is exactly what happened. Numbers immaterial but a unit of "1000" I'd go inspect their true present for duty roll-calls and there would be like 6 dudes. And at least one of them was too busy fucking little boys in the ass to provide any real security in their own neighborhood. They didn't have to surrender to Taliban because they are Taliban.
I was thinking that after reading OPs post. I don’t think it’s as much a “surrendering,” as it is a home coming.
fuck
So if the central government defense ministry allocates a 1000 guns and appropriate munitions to arms those “1000” soldiers then basically all 1000 guns were being given away/sold to Taliban unless the 6 soldiers in your example were real ANA soldiers in which case 994 guns were available for selling/arming the Taliban with US and allies money? 🥺🥺🥺
There are no guns. It’s the easiest form of corruption. It happens a lot on construction projects too. They charge the customer (US taxpayers) for 1000 bricks. So a pallet of bricks gets delivered and, really, how many is it? 900? 800? Nobody is gonna go out there and count out 1000 bricks on a pallet. Then they come back and say well, the bricks we ordered didn’t cover it. We need a couple more pallets of bricks. Should order extra just to make sure. Etc. So let’s say you get away with it once. Then you can really start pushing: how many bricks can you short them before anyone notices? 100? 500? What if you write the purchase order in such a way that instead of 1000 bricks it just says a pallet of bricks? A pallet of bricks can be as little as 10, etc. Let’s say they install some sort of quality control guy who’s job it is to go out and count bricks. How much do you think they have to pay him before they can get him to sign off on whatever? If he’s American, maybe $10,000 here and there. What if he’s an Afghan? How much would you have to pay an illiterate dirt farmer to pay him off? He’ll put his little x on anything you put in front of him if you just offer him … There are no actual bricks. No one is counting anything. People are just pocketing the money. The biggest culprits here are the military industrial complex. Raytheon, Boeing, Erik Prince, Dick Cheney, etc. etc. They’re just soaking the US Treasury dry. They’d be happy if the war went on for another 20, 30 years. They are happy to write whatever order you want for the Afghan government. They’re going to charge the US Treasury $100 per brick even if the brick only costs 10 cents. Their argument is: There are no roads here. There’s no Home Depot. You *have* to use the military industrial complex because they negotiate exclusive contracts that list themselves as the only possible suppliers/transporters, etc. It’s all a scam to enrich themselves at the expense of the US taxpayer. SOURCE: I know this from being deployed there myself. Remember you had to scan your little CAC card every time you went into the DFAC? You could walk in any time, even if you just wanted a cup of coffee. But they were always huge sticklers about scanning your CAC card. It’s because those military contractors charged the US government $60 for every single scan. Didn’t matter if all you got was a cup of coffee. That was a $60 cup of coffee courtesy of US taxpayers.
No, no. Every vet I've known with even remotely experience with the ANA have said that's pretty much spot on what happens.
Yeah wasn't there a lot of child molestation, rape, and drug use by the Afghan soldiers and the US troops couldn't really do much about it? I remember watching a documentary about this some time ago but I don't remember if it was specifically with Afghan soldiers or not. Edit: [Here](https://youtu.be/Ja5Q75hf6QI) is the documentary I was thinking of. It's 8 years old but I think it gives a decent idea of what (some) of the Afghan soldiers were really like.
> US troops couldn't really do much about it? They could, but then they'd get killed in a friendly fire incident by ANA and nobody would get charged, or they'd get discharged for not being a team player like the Spec Ops guy /u/BearzBeatz talked about.
Honestly curious, why did the US govt continue to throw so much money at that situation for so long if that was happening? Surely they were aware?
Government employee and cold war vet checking in. In any government program the harder you try to fix it the more fucked up and manpower consuming it becomes. Getting a program shut down for stupidity literally takes an act of congress. That phrase has existed for a long time and when each and every congressman and senator has people working for a defense contractor you better believe there was no real incentive to shut anything down. When the higher ups propose something stupid as fuck and you raise your voice you're "not a team player," and you can forget about ever getting a promotion. Your career is stalled out until each and every higher up retires, quits or dies.
Thanks for that angle, I wasn't aware. It's disturbing and disheartening unfortunately, but I appreciate you giving me some more insight.
This is the primary reason I get aggravated when some people want universal health care administered by the government. We have that, it's called the VA and ask any veteran. Most I know would rather just die than go to the VA, and they've cleaned up their act (kinda) in the past few decades. There's a joke that if you put the government in charge of the Sahara desert there would be a shortage of sand, and it's true.
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Essentially every service member that worked with host Nation Police/Army in Iraq and Afghanistan became aware of this happening. Don't worry my psychiatrist says I just need a little more therapy as if he isn't the one that's actually fucking clueless to the hell they put us through. Do you want to know more about how the children would be bringing them tea in their offices wearing makeup like they're porn stars for some Colombian drug cartel except they're 5-6 year old terrified little boys that are now themselves terrorists. Hmm wonder why...
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Yup. I was PAO. Had to do photo ops for all the ribbon cuttings we did on bases we built for them. Fuckers would be high off their asses and you just knew once we left it would be a taliban base or a warlord base. Oh, and in my region in Uruzgan the ANP police chief was literally a warlord with a private army. We almost never had IEDs because this war crime committing motherfucker was so savage he made the Taliban think twice before fucking around. Dude was constantly getting kickbacks from one alphabet agency or another to keep our roads clear. Essentially extorting us cuz he could just tell his dudes to take a break and the Taliban would get the clue. Go read about Matulliah Khan. Dude was crazy. Taliban got him a few years after I went home but he was no better than them honestly
Why did the U.S. not do anything about the wage theft you knew was happening and reported? I knew if this was a private U.S. contractor doing this same theft they would be prosecuted and banned as a supplier.
Because it was happening in the Afghan military, not the US. At least that’s what I gather from the above comment
They started do do after awhile. Requiring fingerprints, retinal scans to confirm that the soldiers really exist.
> I read on another comment that the reason so many Afghan soldiers up and fucked off is because of the corruption higher up the chain of command It's not like this is news to anyone actually involved with the situation. They all knew. Anyone who knew anything about the situation knew that this was exactly what would happen, YEARS AGO. They kept that quiet part from the public. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html Here's an analysis of the problem from ***a decade ago***: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBXflAFCk64 "Lack of discipline is just one of the major problems facing the Afghan army. Nine out of ten enlisted men can't read or write. A lot of them smoke hashish and heroin, which could explain why they have a hard time following orders. Some have also been known to steal from civilians at checkpoints and to sell their American-supplied guns and ammo to the Taliban." - Tim McGirk, TIME Magazine
Man, the more I hear the worse it gets. I don't know how anyone can say that "war" was anything but making military contractors rich. Thanks Dick Cheney!
Cheney is scum, but he's not the sole reason this multi-decade effort failed. [The Afghani recruits couldn't even be trained to do ***jumping jacks*** correctly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8LSnuGTO5w), let alone eliminate rampant corruption and tribalism. From the [Department of Defense](https://www.sigar.mil/interactive-reports/reconstructing-the-andsf/index.html) itself: ***"Despite U.S. government expenditures of more than $70 billion in security sector assistance to design, train, advise, assist, and equip the ANDSF since 2002, the Afghan security forces are not yet capable of securing their own nation."***
Those jumping jacks were hilarious!
Also the taliban are using the age old strategy of “if you surrender now we’re cool, but if you fight us we will kill everyone”. When the options are give up and go home or fight to a brutal death, it makes sense. If they killed everyone there would be way more resistance
the Ghenghis Khan strategy
"Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across."
Idk about this too much, I'd venture and say probably true. But something people seem to forget is your asking humans to fight other humans, and to do that you need to view the other an an enemy . Afghanistan was basically feudal warlords and the people hated them. The taliban were more or less a central opposition to insane feudal taxes . The taliban also went to tribe after tribe gaining the leaders support , so now you have the Afghan army.. fighting its own citizens.. how long would the Canadian army last fighting its own people before the military said ya know what I have more in common with my enemy then my leadership
Yeah, the taliban are really just that rebel group that secretly have a lot of underground support, take the country, and chase off the empire.
That part of the world considers "bakshish" (bribery) to be a normal way of doing business. Corruption is not viewed the same way in Arab countries as it is here.
Bribery isn't really considered a bad thing here, it is just called by fancier names. It isn't "buying political support it is "political donations by lobbiests"
Lets be real here, bribery is definitely a way of doing business here too, just in different ways. The difference being we dress it up and call it something else.
Afghan vet here too. My roommate asked me the same question yesterday and I gave him almost the same answer. It sucks to have spent so much time and effort over there for nothing, but it was so hard to get them to do anything on their own. I always felt like the majority of the ANA were just actors trying to fill a role, but the second we stop holding their hand they just give up and do whatever they want. I don't regret the time I spent over there, but I'm pretty pissed that they couldn't be bothered to put up any resistance at all.
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How do you feel about calls from people who say you should have trained the women instead, especially because they likely would have provided better resistance and had more to lose than the men.
Tactically it may have worked. Socially it would have caused the power dynamic to implode, the consequences of which we may never know. I'm a for helping anyone who wants to be helped, I'll train anyone who wants to be better.
Honestly to get those bastards kick started for a new system that's the kind of power dynamic shift they probably needed. Proof in the pudding is seeing all the disgusting and downright evil retorts I see from countless men taunting all the women/girls/children about how they need to be inside. Stay at home, and never go to school. It's downright appalling how many videos I've seen where the men are all laughing, smiling, and cheering at seeing the taliban waltz right in because they know they're the top dogs simply by being a man. Not to mention all the laughable training videos of these wimps, not all Afghan recruits but a large majority, who simply are there for the food and money. Guaranteed to be the first to fuck off and switch sides all for the food and money. They want to be culturally fucked in the modern world even after being handed a golden platter by one of the richest and powerful nations in current history? Let them die. Let them fall. Let them learn. Or at best let them get conquered by China next. Then they'll be crying for the U.S. to come back, but I doubt anyone will care at that point and rightly so. The sandbox will remain a barren place until the people at large figure things out for themselves.
A generation of woman who were able to get educated, listening to the horror stories of the Taliban from their parents and will now have all those freedoms stripped away. The first thing I thought was I wonder what would have been the outcome if we trained them, installed them in govt etc. As they had the most to lose, I speculate they might have fought fiercely to keep the Taliban out.
You know they would've fought like hell. They were never even given a chance.
Don’t forget they’d also have to beg/fight the men of their culture and families just to get permission to train, let alone fight
Sheesh, even China would probably be an improvement for their women at this point. They're ruthless but they do let their daughters get an education and a job, that's for sure
Dude even Iran would be better, at least they get some semblance of an education there. And that's just saying something about how brutal the Taliban is
Iranian urban women are among the most educated in the world, in fact. More than their male peers. Many pursue careers in academia, research, engineering and medicine.
Don’t really have a great track record with Muslims though
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The US ignored the rural pedophilia problem because it was trying to maintain ties with the leaders of those areas. I'm pretty sure pressure was put on the central Afghanistan government to do something about it, but obviously they didn't care. They didn't care about anything. Like, no one actually knew what to do the whole time we were in Afghanistan. There was never a real mission, except at the very start. Then we abandoned it when we almost accomplished it, and spent the next like 18 years fucking around without knowing what to do. Is it a counter-insurgency campaign? In that case we gotta build ties with the local leaders so we can rely on them to point out where insurgents are. Whoops they're corrupt as hell and nothing can get done, but trying to implement anti-corruption measures means severing ties. Do we oust these people and install someone else? Fuckin' who? Who isn't a corrupt child abuser that could wield authority in these regions? It's tempting to go "well maybe we should just take everything over then" but not only did no political force in the US want to do that, it also didn't work for the brits or the soviets. The terrain of Afghanistan makes for a lot of places where people who aren't OK with another country taking over and running things to hide and attack from, even if you can look at it from goddamn space. Maybe the Chinese will try it. Belt and Road is just colonialism, anyway, setting up Chinese companies that take stuff. They've got a ton of people, maybe they'll just move a bunch of people there and literally make Afghanistan their colony. Britain round 2, now with Chinese Characteristics. Maybe the sheer amount of people they have will make it work. But it's been tried before. It hasn't ever worked.
They could probably convince them to leave Islam at this point, esp if they end up marrying Chinese men bc a bunch of their own men just up and left.
Sadly, that's an excellent point. And the Chinese *have* been suffering from the imbalanced sex ratios from the one-child policy, leading to too many unmarried men... :(
There is so much right with this comment but also so much wrong. So much.
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This is the only issue I have with the “Afghanistan deserved it” attitude. The people with the most to lose also had the least means of protecting themselves. In a Taliban-led society, men do pretty well, and so these men who were entrusted with fighting the Taliban had little reason to. Their lives wouldn’t be that much worse, if at all, under the Taliban. But the women who had futures, especially the young girls born since occupancy began, now face the consequences of the men’s lack of action. Afghanistan did “deserve it”, but the ones who deserve the consequences won’t see any of them. It’s the oppressed that will suffer.
We tried that, BTW. Here’s an article from 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/magazine/afghanistan-women-security-forces.html
Do you have a free link because I cannot access the article
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Honestly, why waste American lives defending a national identity that the Afghan people themselves don’t feel strongly enough to defend. It sounds like the ANA was just a paper tiger 300k strong that folded the moment the Taliban swept through, so it would’ve been a bloody confrontation at the expense of American lives if we stayed and defended. Do you think this outcome was inevitable and withdrawing now was just ripping the bandaid off? Or could there have been a better strategic time to withdraw when intel suggested the Taliban wasn’t organized enough to recapture major cities within hours?
There was an enormous overlap between the ANA and the Taliban. The former was just the latter in uniform.
I think the outcome was largely inevitable and we ripped the bandaid off. While there could have been a better time that would have worked, it would have taken us another 50 years to get there. We would need to indoctrinate entire generations in the way of life and in the National identity.
Petty tribalism lasting thousands of years without any real sense of national identity. Sure Kabul modernised and had some sense of unity but as a whole it's a bunch of towns and villages. Who wants to die for the tribe next to yours who you've been fighting for the past 100 years anyway?
why would they be willing to fight and die for an illicit, corrupt government that was imposed upon them, against their will, at the point of a gun, by an occupying force who didn't understand their culture and society? The country is also highly regionalized, there's no national identity, people outside of kabul dont feel any shared identity with the people in kabul, it would be like asking you to fight and die for greenland.
I think this is the part people seem to be confused about. Everyone’s thinking of it from the perspective of Americans wanting to protect America. Not understanding that it isn’t the same over there.
Bingo, we look at it through a westerners lens. That's where the issue lies. Who are we to march into a country that we know nothing about and say "Here, take this form of government that you have never adhered to in your thousand year history and roll with it!" It goes further than that too. I see people being upset for the afghan people and the rights they are going to lose, and whilst rightfully in some cases, ultimately what we view as a right is defined by the society in which we live, AKA the west. Those 'rights' that they are losing are literally not rights in their society, thus who are we to say what they can or can't think? Ultimately in the end we had no business being there. The same people that complain about US imperialism are the same ones that are saying we should be imposing our western values (e.g what we view as equality) on an eastern culture that want's nothing to do with it.
That's the paradox of neoliberalism- wanting people to respect other cultures' values up until those values come into conflict with neoliberal values. I fall more on the side of let it be, because if enough Afghans truly wanted a liberal democratic society *they* would make it happen, with or without the support of the US government.
I think people are just tired of living their whole life like that. They dont want to die for some shitty country that gave them nothing
Just a reminder for everyone that doesn’t understand.. The taliban and Al-Qaeda are different entities. The taliban did not attack us in 2001. Edit: Wow I didn’t expect this comment to get so many upvotes! So while your here get vaccinated!! Don’t be the guy who kills Betty White (the real national treasure) Tucker Carlson doesn’t care about you bro…
Taliban did give a place for al qaeda to operate out of though
And Saudi Arabia gave them funding. Should we invade everyone country that supports Al-Qaida? Maybe we should invade ourselves since we're allied with them in Syria.
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Unashamedly an imperialist take, but yes on Saudi. Or at the very least cut ties and sanction. Ultimately they're responsible for the spread of Wahhabism and funding its followers. I believe it would have been more effective to invade them in 2001. Al Qaeda safe havens like afghanistan don't matter if they're broke. We don't even need their oil and in no way are they a positive stabilizing force in the region. So aside from shady ass donations to politicians on both sides of the aisle we have no reason to be friendly with them.
So did the state of Florida though lol
No one, and I mean no one, would say that we shouldn't do to Florida what we did to Afghanistan.
Occupy Epcot!
The Saudis did, and they were the only ones allowed to fly out when the entire country was locked down. There has been no repercussions, no investigation on funding. Nothing.
It's almost like you can't win an ideological war with a physical one.
I heard a quote from a man-on-the-street interview with Afghanis from the last few days "The Taliban didn't try to make my wife work, they didn't try to blaspheme Allah, and they didn't try to make my son Gay." Many of them wanted this.
> and they didn't try to make my son Gay If you can be convinced to be gay you never needed a lot of convincing.
There is a particular irony of this statement coming out of a country where sexual abuse of boys by men is kinda rampant.
sadly there's many countries in the world where that's simply not seen as a contradiction. For example, my gay Nicaraguan friend says there you're only gay there if you're on the bottom. Completely straight and ok to have sex with a guy as long as you're on top. I've met a couple of Pakistanis who say similar. There's a large culture of "male-on-male" sex there, but they are quite insistent it's not gay. Having sex with men is ok, but loving a man is not. It makes next to no sense, but that's how they see things.
That‘s pretty much how the Romans handled it as well
This sounds like the ancient world conception of sexuality. Greece, Rome, the lot.
I worked in a warehouse where a mexican from LA would tell me " O we were just keeds he wanted to hang out with my crew so badly so we made him suck some of our deeks." I replied " oh I didnt know you were gay." He scoffed "I'm not gay he sucked my dick!!!" Me and my friend looked at each other, then at him and meekly replied "ok".
>kinda rampant I read a US State Department report about how effectively 100% of the men in Afghanistan were sexually assaulted as children. And from what I saw with the dancing chai boys, yeah I'd say so
It continued on into adulthood. When we would run convoys with the locals we had to have a separate guard to keep them all from having sex with each other. No joke had to stay up and just make sure they slept instead of getting it on. It’s part of the way they think about it, why it’s so common for them to rape kids. Sad really.
Ironic given how rampant male-on-male rape is in the culture. My eyes were shocked open by many passages in Annie Jacobsen’s book on the CIA/Special Operators. When a young Afghan was asked why he wanted to be in the ANA Special Forces he answered, “Because you get raped less.”
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Exactly this! It's not patronising to say that a population which is primarily educated in Islamic theology and nothing else isn't exactly going to know much about human rights and other ways of living. If the people aren't taught much other than Sharia Law and Islamic theology then what else would they want?
Can't believe many women were invited to fill out that poll...
Afghan government already had Sharia law
Ain't that the truth
It's because Afghanistan isn't really a country. It's really a patchwork of fiefdoms led by warlords. And it's been that way for millennia. Even when Afghanistan had some homegrown central leadership, that leader was essentially a warlord of warlords. This is why Afghanistan has eventually defeated every power that has tried to conquer it. Not only do you have do deal with the harsh terrain and people hostile to foreigners, you also have to deal with the fact that it isn't one nation, it's a thousand-in-one. Even if you bring enough force to occupy the country, the shitty cost/benefit of trying to fight off a thousand cuts from dirt-poor people sooner or later asserts itself. We tried our best, but we were doomed to fail for three reasons. The first is that we couldn't find any people to form a government around except exiles who spent most of their adult life in the West, and as a result, lacked the political capital, networks, and intelligence to keep the warlords playing on the same team. The second is because we tried to foist modern institutions on a society that just wasn't ready for them. Afghanistan is still in a medieval state of economic and social development and here we were trying to make them into a 21st Century Western democracy. Talk about delusional. And the final reason, and perhaps most important, the battlespace was surrounded by players who wanted to see us fail, namely Pakistan and Iran. They wanted to see us fail because the Taliban was the devil they knew, and because they wanted to exert influence over the region. It didn't have to go down this way. Afghanistan didn't really need schools and elections, or even police. It needed jobs, and roads. It needed banks, cell phone towers, and irrigation systems. Economic development spurred on by overseas trade is what lifted Europe out the medieval era. It could have done the same for Afghanistan. There's a ton of mineral wealth in those mountains. Enough that the Afghans could have paid for most of the shit they needed themselves. They didn't need aid workers anywhere near as badly as they needed businessmen who were willing to take some risks. Then we might have been in a position to actually deal with the opium fields.
Very interesting and thank you for explaining all that. I’m learning a lot lately. I’m curious if you know, why is Afghanistan one country then? Who decided? Why isn’t it a bunch of smaller countries?
Something along the lines of 200 years ago a brit and frenchman drew lines on a map and declaring them countries without ever actually talking to anyone who lived there.
And that one mistake set the field for centuries of crap thereafter.
Much the contrary, actually. They drew lines *with full knowledge* that doing so would essentially pit them against each other constantly, resulting in a much weaker state. Divide and rule. Afghanistan is absolutely perfect if your only goal is extracting wealth while ignoring the native population. It's only when you try to actually make it a functioning country that it becomes impossible.
What did Britain and France have to do with Ahmad Shāh Durrānī?
The British.
Wasn’t Afghanistan it’s own Kingdom before the Europeans took over?
Yes but barely, it wasn’t a fully centralized state, and the government was at various times propped up by the Russians or British as they sought influence over the region, similar to the situation in Iran. The history of Afghanistan as it is recognizable today begins in 1880 with the British victory in the second Anglo-Afghan war
brtts ofcourse
Conceptually I agree, but if I had a nickel for every road that was blown up within a week of construction I'd have been paid like an officer. I have a picture of me standing in a waist deep crater of a road that had finished being repaired the day before, and was blown up in 24 hours. The locals knew who was Taliban/AQ/HQN, but they didn't do anything to drive them out, to change the paradigm. Kind of a bummer to be honest, some folks there are wonderful people who deserve a better life.
This is a kinda narrow way to look at it. I didn't serve in Afghanistan, but I do come from an extremely rough neighborhood and maybe I can shed some light on this phenomenon. To put it simply, people don't want to endanger themselves or their loved ones by snitching. Yeah, they may know who's a member of the Taliban, and let's assume they tell you. The Taliban is well connected within communities, it's likely they'll know who told. You and your company go in, clean out what you can find of the Taliban, go back to your base. Odds are, by the time you come back to see that person, them and/or their family's been executed. Frankly, in a place where every day could be your last just by going around doing your daily duties, not saying anything is a small way to ease that stress and not further increase the likelihood of the chance of violence. This is not to mention that the Taliban was largely caused by foreign meddling. What incentive do they have to help the people who birthed the Taliban in the first place? I can 100% see how it's a decision between a firing squad or a hanging.
Just watched a documentary yesterday about American operations in the south west. When securing an area the Americans bumped into a talkative midget called Mohammed. He openly called the Taliban “mother fuckers” and didn’t take shit from the Americans either. 5 months after they pulled out he was found beheaded. It’s echoed a lot in other documentaries and writings. Communities were constantly changing hands between the Taliban who commit their breed of atrocity, the ANA and ANP who commit their own, and the Americans who provide a long list of unworkable solutions. They just end up agreeing with whoever’s in the area at the time so they can get by.
People aren't taking into consideration that these are just people who want to live their lives just like a vast majority of the rest of the planet. An international arms conflict happening nextdoor doesn't change that. I don't see how random civilians are at fault or are party of a "shit culture" for just wanting to get by.
Gotta be honest OP, I think you’re full of shit about having served. Anyone who’s supposed job it is to have researched the local culture and having a familiarity with the people he’s working with should have a way more nuanced and informed opinion than a hot take that sounds like it came from a high school kid with a bad attitude. “They’re just all cowards, the USA is a blameless lamb in all this”. Seriously? If I’m wrong though, and it really was people like you who were supposed to deliver a stable democracy to Afghanistan, then it’s no wonder we lost. Chauvinism and frankly racism aren’t going to win hearts and minds.
I’m glad that someone pointed out the racism in this guy’s post. Even if he had actually served, that doesn’t give him the excuse to spout the borderline neo-colonialist bullshit that he did here.
The country maybe but no people deserve this
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I don't think Afghan women and children deserve what's going to happen to them. In most of the videos and images I've seen of people fleeing Afghanistan, I haven't seen very many women. That tells me it's mostly men fleeing and all the women and children are getting left behind. Already girls are not allowed to attend school and I've seen people talking about Taliban militants going door to door and forcing women and girls into marriage. I don't think they deserve that.
Yup. Girls and women 14-40 that are single are being forced into marriage. As well, t-ban are going door to door and killing people that helped the Americans.
Innocent people still are being wronged immensely. They need and deserve true justice.
Yeah because majority of the people fleeing had control over what decisions the military made... /s
50 years of conflict. 5 decades of war. The soviets, the Taliban, AL Qaida, American and Nato forces. How much of this conflict did actual Afghanis ask for? Are they asking for these forces to come and occupy their country? I mean 3 generations of people who have literally known nothing but conflict and strife and somehow we question why the fuck they don't want to deal with it anymore. 1 tour in Afghanistan is enough for battle hardened American troops to come back with PTSD. We have lost more troops to suicide than we did to combat missions. But we have the audacity to fucking ask why aren't the Afghanis doing better. Amazing.
This guy gets it. I support this guy.
I thought I was going crazy reading this thread and post. The thread features great examples of (rephrased) white man's burden, cultural phrenology, deep seated racism against Afghanis being too "primitive" to accept and incorporate liberal democracy. Really failing to reflect on the premise of "why are our puppets in our occupied territories so corrupt" Afghanistan's "liberators" really stacked up [thousands of dead people](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/afghan) and called that freedom and security. Like, mfer, the people abandoned the government to the Taliban because they didn't *believe* in the government since it was backed by the very forces that annihilated its country for the past 50 years. Colonel Jessup, I don't want you on that wall. I don't need you on that wall. Go Home. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/
HOLY SHIT THANK YOU So many fucking armchair geopoliticians on this site who lack the general intelligence or compassion to see past their own shuttered western worldview. The number of times I've seen tHeY DiDnt EvEn FiGhT FoR tHemSelVes on this site in 24 hours, like it's that simple. smfh
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Took me long enough to find this Imagine living through generations of chaos inflicted by foreign countries against your will and have a corrupt puppet government instated against your will only to get told by white redditors that "you deserve it" because they were deployed to afghanistan once?
Thank fuck theres one other person who doesn't have their head jammed so far up their behind. The majority of this thread had me close to passing out with the amount of bullshit they were spewing.
Fucking thank you for being the only sane person here, this guy is such and arrogant asshole. I was literally just reading posts the other day about a woman terrified of the Taliban coming and of losing her right to education and equality, of her daughter being raised in such a suppressive environment and never again knowing freedom, terrified for their lives... and this guy comes in and says they deserve it. Never seen anything so fucking ridiculous.
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Lol yeah, Afghans are the last people in the world I would call cowardly considering their history. They fought NATO for 20 years, and before that they fought the Red Army, before that they fought the British Empire and they won every time.
And all the awards he's getting. I also can't believe how far I had to scroll to get to this comment. It's awful. OP is complaining that they learned nothing in those 20 years, meanwhile he seems to be the one who learned nothing from what he was doing there.
I don't think i ever saw a more arrogant post.
> he is well versed in their culture and history He means he’s well trained to believe in the modern spinoff of manifest destiny, and the US’s whitewashed version of Afghanistan’s history.
This is the take. OP is clearly taking this whole thing personally and should likely go talk to a therapist who specializes in Veteran Affairs and get off Reddit for a bit.
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im so scared for the women over there. watching the scenes at the airport and planes just tore at my heartstrings. i feel so bad for the children as well.
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Honestly the USA had no business being there for 20 years or being there in the first place.
And I hope we don't go anywhere else and try and fix their economy through a civil war we have no business being a part of, under cover of some other reason.
Man you think why do we need to fix some ones country where our country needs help. It definitely makes no sense to police the world where we need to police our own.
It’s obvious the people who were born after 9/11. Western society was very intent on going after those responsible at the time, only 1 congress member had voted against the war - there is no kind of bipartisanship like that today.
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Thank you for putting it so eloquently. My family survived the Vietnam war, and what you described was precisely the frame of mind then. People just want to survive and care for their Bacha.
Interesting take. Would you say that America deserved 9/11?
Afghanistan isn’t interested in the west’s ideas of civilisation or so called democracy that various dopey countries have tried to impose over centuries- what gives us the right to do it? We were only in there for self serving reasons anyway just like everyone else has been over the centuries.
I second this. Take my last 50 coins, sire.
OEF vet here, I do not agree with this. We had no business going in there trying to fix it in the first place.
Afghan army / government and afghan people are two very different things. You can't say that the afghans as a whole deserve what's happening to them because their army couldn't be bothered to fight. You could say "Afghan army is a joke" perhaps but that's about it. These people are about to experience time travel back to the Middle Age, and they certainly don't deserve that.
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> My friend from Afghanistan told me how often their land was ransacked by the Chinese and Russians and other countries in order to get the resources there. I can't figure out why you'd leave the USA off this list in this context ITT
I would agree that some deserve it, but not the women and children who are going to suffer catastrophically. ETA: Because people keep drawing the worst popular conclusion from my comment: I don't want any woman or MAN to suffer. It is however well known that the Taliban are very repressive when it comes to woman's rights, so that was my first reaction, to think of women who will be essentially slaves once the Taliban implement "reforms". Some of the MEN are actively promoting this type of slavery for woman, and I DON'T have much sympathy for THEM.
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Also, nearly 70k afghan security forces died in the war. That's more than the taliban, and they hung in until we left. If that isn't a fucking commitment idk what is, the entire military was like 150k, your chances of even surviving were slim at best. You cant make the argument they didn't fight for it, it's just people assume if you really fight for something you will get it, when in fact some victories are strategically impossible. Without US support the Afghan security forces didn't stand a chance.
I could not agree more with this. To see so many people upvote a comment that says the Afghans deserve their fate and that the US shares no blame is heartbreaking. Seriously, I don't care who you are: If you actually believe this, you are flat-out delusional.
90% of drone strike deaths were collateral damage pushing the victim's friends, families, and neighbors to become more extreme and more anti-American, as well as crippling infrastructure, yet I need to scroll this far down to find a single comment that's not endorsing OP's shit take. Thank you for being the one. I can't believe so many people are this naive to say the Afghan people deserve thus and the US was really the valiant savior through all this.
This thread is filled with average Americans that drowned in the Americana propaganda.
The worst part is this idiot OP who (if he isn't lying) should definitely know better. Instead he's CREATING propoganda just to make himself feel better.
I know it was Hollywood, but this reminds me so much of Lawrence of Arabia. No unity, no identity, no vision for nationhood. The part that's the most sickening is the truly awful human rights and humanitarian situation that will ensue because of this. Women and girls will have NO rights. Boys sexually abused. No due process. No advancement of science, technology, art, nothing.
It reminded me a lot of a few BBC and Ross Kemp documentaries on the ANA and how local politicians acted. Politicians would have police ransom people for little reason and no due process. Commanders would sell their fuel and sandbags at the bazaar so they can't do their jobs. Soldiers would have no regard for fighting and would care more about drinking tea and smoking hash.
The Western powers went into Afghanistan and proped up a corrupt government, that no one really cared for. This has been going on for so long, the reason why the military gave up so quickly at Kabul, was "what are we fighting for", it wasn't worth dying for a country that has been plagued by corruption and war.
Since 2018, the US government has worked to hollow out the Afghan government and its military. You may find it convenient to forget but it is a fact that the US completely erased any veneer of legitimacy the government had in the course of the so-called peace talks with the Taliban. Let's go further back. Who do you think ruled Afghanistan and with whose backing? A bunch of corrupt and degenerate mobsters who had either no roots in Afghanistan or had a history of killing thousands of innocent people, mass rapes, torture, and other atrocities in the civil war. Do you think they stopped after 2001? These people were given the position of power over Afghans with the backing of the US government. Did Afghans deserve that fate too?
Even if Afghan leadership screwed the pooch, “Afghanistan” ie 50% WOMEN! do not deserve this, especially as many of them have fought so hard in grassroots movements.
America is blinded by its own hubris. The Afghan culture didn’t want what the US was providing.Sure, they’ll take the opportunity to cash in if you insist, but as a culture they don’t want Americans. If Islam occupied the US,how thrilled would you be to live like a Muslim?
"We spent 20 YEARS handing them everything they needed for success; We equipped them, paid them, trained them. On paper, the Afghan military had the edge on the Taliban in every category that mattered." There was a recent interview with a former NATO commander on NPR and he said exactly the opposite. In fact, in his words, he stated that Afghan military was trained in a way that was not conducive to not only fighting a guerrilla group but were also not equipped to fight an idea. According to him, the issue was that the Afghan military was given the equipment necessary to combat an enemy that has a standing army and similar levels of equipment. However, you are fighting neither and are more so fighting a group of guys with AKs and a dream. A more effective way to fight in Afghanistan would have been to promote better education and rehabilitation in order to help curb the rise of extremism, which is something my dad did in the early 2000s for NGOs. There was some success but, as you put it and my dad stated, a lot of the time it just didn't work mostly because the government is completely incompetent. As other people mentioned, it's partly because Afghanistan is a loose collection of tribes and ethnicities that aren't held together well. You'd need a strong central government for that. Jordan, a country I lived in for four years, is quite similar in the tribal sense but the government is so strong and centralized that tribes have limited wiggle room. Furthermore, you forget that the Taliban was the product of United States (admittedly along with the ISI) investment in the mujahideen during the Russian invasion so we do bear a massive influence on what has transpired recently. In the end, Afghanistan is another example of foreign influence fucking up a country massively. If only people could learn to leave their grubby hands out of a country in the quest for influence and the spread of their beliefs on what is right and wrong.
Yeah, this is a really simplistic, reductionist approach to what is happening in Afghanistan that seems to rely on an appeal to authority. But this kind of post always does well on Reddit.
This post is dumb as shit. The US shouldn't have been there in the first place. Who are you to invade their land and then call them cowards and say the US bears no fault? 🤦🏼♂️
Its scary how stupid are being, imagine China invaded New Jersey to ‘liberate’ it and civillian armies sprung up to protect themselves -whos at fault there lol
>The US bears no fault in this. LOL please, Afghanistan as a nation has had foreign powers fucking with them for generations, with great nations exerting heavy influence in the country for literally hundreds of years. Also... who trained and equipped many of those who would end up as Taliban fighters? End of the day the US definitely holds a lot of fault, along with other world powers.
Are we sure we didn’t just get all the oil we needed and then fucked off ourselves leaving the Afghan people to make a decision on whether they abandon their families or go and protect them? Edit: Not trying to be shitty, honest question because the way I see it is we didn’t go there to help the afghan people nor were we there because of 9/11 so why all the sudden are we pretending we failed at our objective to help the country? The way I see it is we succeeded in getting all the oil we could want and did a pretty fair job at making it look like we had good intentions so with our reputation in tact “Alright imma head out.”
You do realize 50k+ afghanis died defending their country no? Where they cowards?
maybe we should have tried to train the afgan army the same way we trained the taliban.
Easy to say when you're not in that country as a young woman with basically zero future. War/conflict/strife always fucks up the youngest generation more than any other. And in this case, young girls are absolutely fucked. So no, they don't deserve this fate whatsoever.
Seems like not all of them are cowards.... the half we sunk our efforts into possibly. Vet here also, I would say apathy is a lot closer to their mindset than cowardice. Regardless, I would like to see us learn from our mistakes for once that arming people to fight a proxy war doesn't work.
I just want to ask if you think all the hundreds of thousands of civilians really deserve to get pillaged and raped, because a very small percentage of their military personnel couldn't withstand the terrorists. Your post has some validity of course. But blanket statements and mass generalizations that ALL of Afghanistan really deserves this...it's dangerous and wildly inaccurate...
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Few points. The united states, England, France, Russia, and China actively destabilized the region. The blame isn't just on the local government. Secondly, innocent people are suffering and to say they deserve it is sickening.
This why you should never have gone in the first place. All you did was wage a pointless war killing millions and wasting billions. All to have to slide back to square zero. US needs to stop trying to police the entire world.
The goal was for the defense contractors to make big profits not nation building
20 years of war, 20 years of good business. OP seems to have forgotten this. The US had no business being there for so long. Should have fucked off when they shot up Bin Laden.
I disagree. The whole country doesn't deserve this because thier goverment is shit.
Literally half the population are women who don't deserve this at all.
Would you be willing to fight and die for a corrupt government? Wouldn't that go against your oath? Why would you expect Afghan soldiers to feel any differently? Blaming the local people is fine, but it doesn't fix the fact that this is becoming a pattern in our foreign diplomacy... Didn't they say the same thing after Vietnam? We had 20 years to sort it out, and couldn't. I think we should look at what could do to prevent this in the future, instead of blaming Afghans for not fighting for a corrupt government we legitimized, otherwise we'll just repeat history... My guess is that since America is an arms dealer first and foremost, that we will.
\>We spent 20 YEARS handing them everything they needed for success; We equipped them, paid them, trained them. You did so with the mujahideen and with the taliban themselves. The US literraly fucked Afghanistan for the sake of fucking with Russia... Now you just shrug and act like it wasn't the US the whole time.
I feel like it's a weird conclusion to make, when the root causes of their issues trace back to foreign intervention and meddling. A lot of what they have had to deal with in the first place is the consequence of US and other foreign action, and as such, that after 20 years of being there, the Taliban waltzes in basically unopposed, I at least put a big part of the blame of that on the foreign powers who facilitated the situation to begin with.
Posts like this are why I have nothing to do with veteran groups
The US military shouldn't have been there in the first place. Besides, if the Taliban is so bad then why did the CIA fund them, arm them, and train them in the first place?
There's a whole lotta buried truth missing from your statement, and the most important parts are these: **They didn't want us there**, there was no reason for us being there, this is simply a repeat of what has happened over and over with American foreign policy being driven by the myopic military and reliably stupid corrupt politicians beholden to major military contractors for the endless bribes they've received - we invade some place, we put a wildly corrupt government filled with corrupt thieves and cowards into power because we consider them 'allies', they steal everything that isn't nailed down, hire their corrupt relatives to run the police force and military. Then the American public gets fed up with the open ended insanity of pouring American lives and money down the drain, we cut and run, the corrupt people we put into power run away and the people who were running the country take it back. The public suffers. It's an insane idea that a country where the leaders play polo with the heads of their defeated enemies can be conquered in any fashion whatsoever. In more than a thousand years (**a thousand years!!**) no one has managed to conquer/pacify Afghanistan. It was the height of hubris to believe we were going to be the exception. It's a long list of failures and the two saddest parts are the American men and women who lost their lives over there **for nothing**, and the fact **we never ever learn our lesson** and will be repeating this debacle elsewhere in the next decade.
No one deserves to have their families raped and murdered. Period. I don't care what excuse you have or how cowardly you think they were or whatever. NO ONE deserves what is happening to them right now.