From Afghanistan with Love

What is happening on the ground in Afghanistan and why are we still there? The ...

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What is happening on the ground in Afghanistan and why are we still there? The Trump administration has closed five bases, reduced the number of American troops to 9,ooo, and signed a peace deal with the Taliban. But as Thomas Joscelyn points out in today’s podcast, the peace deal is really nothing more than a “pretext for justifying withdrawal.”

While the United States reckons with its military presence in the Middle East, other foreign threats are lurking behind the scenes. From the Russian bounties intelligence leak to recent cyberattacks on coronavirus vaccine-related targets on American soil, Russia is engaging in shadow wars against the United States. And as Thomas reminds us, China’s deep-seated anti-Americanism is also cause for concern. On this week’s foreign policy episode, Sarah, Steve, and Thomas dive into these issues and address Israel’s sabotage efforts in Iran, Trump’s reflexive isolationism and business-minded foreign affairs strategy, and the implications of a Biden presidency for American interests abroad.

Show Notes:

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  1. Avatar photo
    Tracie

    Regarding RT, I shared one of their posts on FB - about the inane toppling of the statue in Wisconsin of the Norwegian-born Union abolitionist.

    Didn't realize who they were til Katie Herzog mentioned on her podcast that she had refused to write for them d/t concerns about her reputation. Only then did I google RT (Russia Today) and realized I'd actually shared anti-American propaganda to all my friends and family. Oops.

    Started following them on Twitter cuz of retweets from one of my local city feeds, run by people who watch/share police scanners who I'd started to monitor in June when the protests/looting got ugly. The "scanner tweeters" tended to be reliable for local info, so I figured anything they'd retweet probably would be.

    Still follow RT to watch their narrative. *Lots* of tweets. The writing isn't necessarily poor quality, so some decent journalists accepted that pay day. Propaganda can be instructive if you're not a clueless target. I was, briefly.

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      James Spiller

      It’s worth knowing that there’s a lot of other Russian owned media outlets putting out propaganda, many of which share genuine journalism with (often well written) hackery about Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, race relations (both extreme positions in favor of and against BLM etc.), third parties, and other issues of concern to the Kremlin.

      The Independent, a UK based newspaper is one of the biggest. There’s a lot of smaller ones. If you find a news source that you’re unfamiliar with and more than 30% of its content is about FSB relevant topics, it’s a good idea to avoid linking to it.

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        Tracie

        The Independent. Who knew?

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    Angie

    Thanks, now I understand all that a bit better, this and economics are weaknesses of mine for understanding ( I always lose Risk too...lol)

    It was always my desire to see all 50 states, and I started out well, and then things I couldn't control just slowed me down quite a bit...I have only managed 30...mostly south and northwest, with a couple of northeast haven't made, then of course, Alaska and Hawaii....barring some miracle, I don't see me being able to finish....though I do have plans to go to CA when it is safer to do so

    Oddly, I have been to a few foreign countries...The Bahama's, Punta Cana...and various parts of Canada...many time ( I am across a great lake from them, so easy to get to...)

    I also always wanted to see Europe and Asia especially too

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    Adicesa14

    Since WW II ended, the US fights to stalemate, not to win. The bad actors of the world know this, so they do not fear elimination, and will not capitulate. Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, and now, Afghanistan are the prime examples. Abandoning the Afghanistan/Pakistan theatre is the only sensible tactic if we won’t fight to win. A peace deal with the Taliban is nonsense. The 52nd parallel, last helicopter from Saigon, and the Iran deal (with the Iraq pullout) are remnants of ’face saving’ efforts. We don’t need another.

    Russia and China working closely together is alarming. These nations behavior toward foreign competitors and their domestic opposition illustrates they are capable of considerable skullduggery. Chinese actions, early in the COVID-19 story are particularly worrisome. Is it true that they allowed flights from Wuhan to foreign nations but not to other Chinese cities? Did they allow flights to Russia? Is it possible the Chinese realized they were going to suffer economically, so they purposely spread the virus elsewhere, to maintain parity?

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  4. WBS

    I'm currently in Afghanistan. I've spent nearly 3 years here on previous deployments: from the village to the national level. I also speak Dari/Pashto.

    I agree with the vast majority of what is discussed here. A few points, however.

    * The US isn't just sitting around twiddling our thumbs. We're still conducting limited strikes and advising the ANSDF. For example, the Taliban spokesmen just accused the US of violating the terms of the Feb deal because of kinetic strikes.

    * Pakistan is a much bigger thorn in our side than Russia in Afghanistan. In my opinion, the Pakistanis are complicit in nearly every American/Coalition force death here.

    * Just leaving was never going to be politically viable. While TJ might be right in advocating that, it was politically dead in the water.

    * The bigger question is this: Will we continue to fund the ANDSF if/when we leave? Najibullah survived for years and defeated a mujahideen army at the battle of Jalalabad.

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      Steve Hayes

      Sorry, late catching up on this. Thanks for the insights and for your service.

      I agree w/you on Pakistan. (I've said that elsewhere if I didn't make that point here.)

      I don't think Tom was advocating an abrupt withdrawal as his optimal outcome. His point was that given the lack of political will to stay, and given the failure to adequately support/resource troops/diplomats in AFG now, it'd be better to simply walk away than to enter into a deal that strengthens the Taliban as a legitimate actor and further weakens the current Afgh government.

      I suspect we'll fund ANDSF when we leave, but at what levels and with what conditions are open questions. Also: what will ANDSF look like if the Taliban play a role in a new government?

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      1. WBS

        I know TJ wasn't advocating for an abrupt withdrawal as his optimal outcome. I've been reading the LWJ since I was a wee little LT :). However, it's the mechanics of simply walking away that I raise an eyebrow at. You don't think you would need to get into a deal with the TB if you just wanted to simply leave? We're retrograding all over the place and those convoys are juicy targets. If you simply walk away, you increase the odds of Blue-on-Green attacks too.

        Here's another big problem that TJ doesn't discuss (here at least): we still don't have a fully formed government. Abdullah/Ghani haven't formed one yet. Yes, there was a deal in May, but no ministers have been approved by the Wolesi Jirga. Throw on top of that we're seeing significant splits inside of Jamiat-e-Islami (Rabbani, Massoud Jr, Noor). We're seeing a divided "GIRoA" before we even get a whiff of Intra Afghan Talks.

        At the end of the day, all the COIN/CT/etc will not do squat unless you're willing to expend political capital/willpower and tackle Pakistan's complicity in guiding/feeding/equipping/mentoring the Quetta Shura Taliban.

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          Steve Hayes

          On this point -- the most important one -- I'm in strong agreement. "At the end of the day, all the COIN/CT/etc will not do squat unless you're willing to expend political capital/willpower and tackle Pakistan's complicity in guiding/feeding/equipping/mentoring the Quetta Shura Taliban." That's been true for nearly two decades, alas.

          I take your point on Abdullah/Ghani, who are problematic in their own ways. But the deal weakens them, considerably. Heck, even agreeing to the Taliban demand that they be excluded from the talks undermined them.

          Yes, even a quick withdrawal would require some kind of agreement with the Taliban. But that deal wouldn't require us to downplay the ongoing threat from the Taliban and its partners, as this one does, or to pretend that the Taliban would be a partner in defeating al Qaeda, al Pompeo claimed. That kind of deal is bad for Afghanistan, bad for our troops, and bad for the country. I think the long-term repercussions for such concessions will be real.

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          1. WBS

            I agree that excluding GIRoA from "peace talks" was a mistake, though I'm not sure we would've been able to make the Taliban budge. They have all the leverage. Starting these talks at the height of the surge would've been much better, as our leverage would've been much stronger.

            The Taliban will fight ISIS-K. However, I see your point about AQ. The bigger question is this: if the TB regains power (and I'm not convinced they're strong enough to) would they allow AQ a sanctuary to conduct international terrorism again? This is where I disagree with the LWJ. I'm not sure they would. There's been a two decades long debate on the TB's complicity w/9-11 and AQ. There's no doubt they're allies. How strong of allies they are and how much room they're willing to give them is the more important question.

            I will say this about the ANDSF: they're taking the brunt of the punishment and are still fighting. I'm always quick to tell other people that most western soldiers would balk at their conditions: endemic corruption, a lack of quality pay if you're injured, and a certainty that you're likely to be injured/killed. Moreover, your family will likely be targeted for assassination. I'm not excusing all of the enormous issues--many of them we're responsible for--however, I remember watching Afghan police pile into the back of ford ranger while I was in an MRAP and thinking, "You couldn't pay me enough to go down this road in a vehicle like that."

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      Tracie

      "In my opinion, the Pakistanis are complicit in nearly every American/Coalition force death here."

      Hasn't that been known for a while? I'm just an ordinary news junkie, and this has been my impression for at least 15 years. I've also been aware all this time that the governing classes and university students in Pakistan tend to hold deeply anti-American sentiments.

      Some expert Charlie Sykes had on compared the US's relationship to Pakistan to China's relationship to North Korea: a necessary but completely unreliable and troublesome ally.

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      Victor Clairmont

      So, we pull out but keep a security force but still continue to fund ANDSF? (Afghan National Security Forces) That's fine, what is the cost and long term analysis of such project? And if we pull out a year from now, will they be able to sustain their own defense and if not, when will they?

      And yes, many have to concluded that Pakistan is a much bigger sponsor of terrorism and problem. Happy to hear that detail thrown in as confirmation from someone on the ground. I agree also, that just up and leaving is a bad idea that Trump is advocating. But we do need to withdraw because our money and economy is in tatters at the moment, and the time frame I have seen tossed around is 9-14 months (late next year).

      Thanks for the input and points!

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      1. WBS

        Afghan National Defense Security Forces. It's about $3-4 billion a year. Yeah. Not cheap. We're financing their entire security apparatus. One of the gravest mistakes we made was to build an Army in our image but that is completely unsustainable. Separately, in my opinion, there's just too many different type of security forces: Afghan Army, Afghan Police, Afghan SOF, Afghan Special Police, Criminal Police, Afghan Air Force, Afghan Local Police (which is being disbanded), Afghan Anti-Corruption Police, Afghan Civil Order Police - now an Army unit, Afghan Border Forces, Afghan Territorial Forces, etc. Once the money stops flowing, then the warlords return and then we're probably back in 1996.

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          Tracie

          And girls don't go to school again. That'll be hard to watch.

          Educating girls is no reason on it's own to stay in Afghanistan, but it's the sort of thing that I have to believe has long term benefits. Literate mothers tend to raise literate children, who are perhaps more difficult to radicalize, and certainly more able to build a modern economy.

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          1. WBS

            Maybe. Maybe not. I'm of the opinion that the TB isn't as strong as it was in the mid 90s. The question is if it comes to that, will the old Northern Alliance stick together?

            Separately, it's important to remember that there are plenty of females in Afghanistan in high profile positions. The Afghan Ambassador to the US is a woman.

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          Victor Clairmont

          Damn, not good either way. Thank you for your honesty.

          Crap.

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      James Spiller

      Thank you, sincerely, for your service. For what it’s worth, I strongly agree with all of your points.

      I’m curious about whether you share my view, though, that although the Afghans properly supported by the State Department (a concern in itself; in Iraq we certainly found DoD funding to be more effectively administered than State), there is an independent value to American presence.

      America’s chief enemies in the world today are Russia, China, and Iran. Afghanistan has borders with two of them and with countries that face domination by the third and need American support. Having a decent democracy with an American presence seems likely to be a meaningful deterrent to excessive cruelty to nearby Uighurs, and to provide intelligence opportunities unlike any location on Earth.

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      1. WBS

        3-4 billion a year just for the Afghan Security Forces Fund. Are Americans willing to pay that every year in perpetuity? I don't know. That might be a heavy lift in the time of corona.

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          James Spiller

          During the 2008 recession, Americans were willing to pay quite a lot more than that for Korean security. Afghanistan provides a better spot for monitoring the Chinese (the Pacific Rim already has other available vantage points, and allies keen to do intelligence work for us). Korea provides us with good access to the Norks, which is valuable, but not necessarily much more valuable than to Iran.

          Why do you think that Korean security would be more acceptable than Afghan security?

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          1. WBS

            Because there's not constant bloodshed in Korea. There's nearly zero Americans being killed/dying in Korea. It's not usually in the headlines. I'm not disagreeing with you about the importance of Afghanistan. Will the US continue to support the ANDSF is the crucial question. The Koreans also have a very capable military. The Afghans are nowhere near being able to stand up on their own. There are no headlines of Korean corruption. There are no headlines of Korean soldiers turning their weapons and killing Americans.

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    Butch Earl

    Thanks to our Dispatch national security team for a terrific briefing!!!

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    BrettH

    Thoroughly enjoyed the listen as a student of international relations. I’ll say this, I spent roughly a decade calling Hawaii home (Oahu for ~3.5 years, Maui for ~6 years, and touched’em all except for Niihau) and lived a pretty solid middle class lifestyle there...for Hawaii. The cost of living is absolutely insane and I priced myself right off the islands when I sold my townhouse in Wailuku. If you earn well over $100k/year, sure, go for it. If not, stick to an overpriced vacation experience.

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    Victor Clairmont

    Thanks for the podcast!

    So, this happened to be one of the more frustrating podcasts to listen to as someone in which, the war on terror has been going on for over half of my literal lifetime (I was born in 1986. I’m an older millennial). Not because of the hosts by the way, just the overall analysis when it comes to the Middle East and Afghanistan.

    So, Sarah, Steve, and Thomas seemed to want out (I say seem), which honestly I am fine with, but the argument is don’t do a peace deal with the Taliban. Ok, I get that, but the extra information about why we are there, needing to have a force to kill terrorists, etc., I understand that too (which is an argument for staying) but if you want to withdraw, that means we won’t have a presence regardless. So that means, we will take a risk regardless, and the CIA and FBI and Department of Homeland Security have to step up their game more to defend America from attempted terrorist attacks. Withdraw funding from the army to boost up those agencies after they get cleaned up after all their recent scandals if necessary.

    Look, everyone, we have been in the Middle East for almost 20 years now. 7 to 8 trillion taxpayer dollars has gone into this, as well as lives. No matter what we do, it is the nature of terrorists to claim victory. We stay? “It’s a victory, we can kill American soldiers and drain The Great Satan’s finances”. We leave? “Ah, the American’s capitulated. We were always right to kill them.”

    The last 3 presidents have been in there. And more than likely we are not withdrawing fully by the end of the year, so that means if Biden wins, he is stuck in the Middle East. So that’s 4 presidents (unless Trump wins). I mean, I guess a bright side is that we haven’t started another war with the current administration, but this podcast sure highlights his counterproductively.

    Unless we decide to (which we will not) sow the earth with salt and leave the whole region a nuclear waste, or take all the land and make Afghanistan the new 51st state and conquer or kick out all the residence, there’s nothing more we can do there. You can’t nation build a democracy that does not want it and was fine with how things were before we arrived.

    We have bases at the northern tip of Africa in Djibouti Africa to project air power in the region. Yes, we won’t have troops on the ground, but listening to all 3 speakers from this podcast, they are as fed up with the situation. There are trade offs and risks to any options we take here. And honestly, we really don’t have the money to keep spending at the moment.

    The other thing I hope people noticed, is in the Russian Bounty Issue, which, understandably many of us were upset by. Yes, Steven is right that it’s good intelligence. But then Thomas Josecyln confirms a massive detail that made me do a double take: he said, “They (intelligence) haven’t completed the chain of evidence....” and “...they could not point to a single attack for sure that the Russian bounties lead too...”.

    If there’s no confirmation of the events happening, then what are we angry about? If I am Putin, and I paid millions of dollars to Taliban leaders to kill American’s, but then the Taliban take the money and do nothing or don’t kill any American’s....then that’s a loss for Russia. Did I hear the exchange wrong? So (thank goodness I waited for more facts to come out after this story broke) in other words, if there’s been not a single linked attack...what was the point of the original leak?

    We need an administration that is going to be strong on China, which after this podcast again reinforces that Biden does not seem to be that guy, and neither is Trump at the moment (this could change in the next administration for either). But it looks like the foreign policy front is just bad here. Not as bad as the Obama administration, but yikes.

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      James Spiller

      Why do you think that things were fine before? Whether it’s the deliberate destruction of the education system, the oppression of women, the oppression of essentially everyone else, the destruction of the historical culture in one of the great birthplaces of civilization, or the training and organizing of Saudis to fly into the twin towers, I’d say there was plenty wrong with it.

      Why do you say that the Afghans don’t want democracy? Their election turnout has been known to exceed America’s ( http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/5/afghan-election.html ), despite the fact that AQ and the Taliban consistently murder people for voting and that they have less early voting/ etc. than we do.

      Why do you think the Afghan economy hasn’t been transformed? I’d encourage you to read up on it and come to understand the value of teaching kids to read.

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        Victor Clairmont

        If you want to make the argument for staying, I am all ears. But if we leave today, is the government under the security forces will collapsed and is not capable of defending itself. It is not self sustainable. So how long do you wish the US to stay to make it sustainable?

        I'm fine with the points you raised, about Afghan's wanting democracy, but you can't just also want it, you have to be able to keep it yourself as a population.

        Will they keep it when we are gone, and if not, how long is the argument for staying until they do?

        Also, the brooking institute rightly says that there's a divide in Afghanistan's own people in rural area's, "Many young urban Afghans are not reassured, and fear the change in power distribution and political dispensation that negotiations with the Taliban are likely to produce. In contrast, in rural areas of Afghanistan, many Afghans want peace above all: They may have experienced little economic improvement and political and social freedoms over the past two decades. What they experience daily is the war and the loss of male breadwinners to fighting."

        So there's a mix narrative here, even among the own populace.

        Also, you make the argument that I already asked about: If we have staved off 9-11 attacks, show me the proof that what we are doing in the middle east has stopped 9-11 terror plots on the scale, and we can reconsider the issue. But this hot bed of terrorism, from Iran funding it to even the radicals in Saudi Arabia, does not get solved because we are in Afghanistan. So, if it's not getting solved anyways, what is the policy to stay?

        Also, the article you linked is 6 years ago. Kharzai has been historically a pain in the ass, vacillating back and forth between the US and supporting the Taliban. Now he has been replaced by President Ashraf Ghani. But if 6 years later, we are still struggling to give sovereignty to the country, that needs us more than us needing them, what is the reason for staying?

        But the thing that makes it ludicrous, is that even with the "transformation" Afghanistan is going through economically? Do you know who it's top 3 trade partners are?

        Iran, Pakistan, and China. I kid you not.

        Top 3 Trade Partners (2018): Pakistan, Iran, and China
        Top 3 Exported Goods (2018): Fruit & Nuts, Gums & Resins, and Oil & Mineral Fuels

        And 79% is still agrarian, farming when it comes to business. Does that mean we have to wait until what measure of it is producing materials like iphones to leave?

        https://globaledge.msu.edu/countries/afghanistan/economy

        I'm all for helping people. But as a policy, you have to weigh and balance odds. I am looking at it, and I am not seeing a good reason for staying. If you're reason is for helping the kids, I get it, but why not help the kids in Nigeria and their regional War Problems with an actual offshoot of ISIS, Boko Haram? We are not nation building there at the moment.

        It's not enough to give counter questions, but you need some counter solutions here. So far, I'm just not seeing them.

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          James Spiller

          In West Germany, we definitely needed to stay for about fifty years. Perhaps we still need to stay. In Korea, likewise. Taiwan has some differences, but also similarities. Elsewhere someone raised WWII, so it’s on my mind; my (English) Grandfather was glad to go to war to force Hitler to disgorge Poland. Chamberlain, too, desperately wanted to avoid another World War, but he felt like the invasion of Poland gave him no choice. There were a lot of dishonorable arguments against him, but I don’t recall a prominent voice saying that if the Poles didn’t want to be run by Hitler they should defeat him militarily.

          Likewise with the West Berliners; they genuinely desired democracy and capitalism (of a sort; there were a lot of Social Democrats), but it was nonetheless important that America fed them when they would otherwise have starved. Likewise with the Koreans. We asked the Koreans to undertake enormous suffering, which they did, but we did not ask that they undertook impossible tasks.

          Of course Afghanistan’s trade is mostly with its neighbors. In the last couple of decades, we’ve set up a lot of schools, but it takes time to set schools up, time to train teachers, and then time for the kids who first get into school to come out and graduate. Until then, you have an almost entirely unskilled workforce. As Mark Steyn used to say, if they were 30% wealthier they’d have been Haiti. Getting to Denmark is the famous goal for development, but they needed to get to Haiti first. Which they did, and surpassed it, but they’re not going to have the skills to take on Silicon Valley any time soon. Even the mining is made more difficult by a well funded enemy that focuses on destroying capital assets and other institutional goods; low capital mining is difficult to do efficiently.

          If you compare growth to the growth in Korea from 1950-1969, you’ll find that it’s pretty similar to what we’ve got in Afghanistan today. What we don’t have, regrettably, is nearly as much intermarriage between Afghans and Americans as we got between Koreans and Americans; those relationships were a powerful tool in building the Korea we have today. But there are advantages, too; Americans started learning Pashtun and such much faster than we learned Korean, the internet makes life a lot easier, and so on. People often use “exponential growth” to mean “a lot of growth”, but when you start from serious poverty, as Korea and Afghanistan did, it means that twenty years of growth is still unrecognizably poor from an American perspective.

          But American efforts in Korea were invaluable. When Hollywood wanted to say that the Vietnam War lacked moral content, they set MASH in Korea, because they could be easily recognized as the same sort of war, and everyone knew that there was no moral or humanitarian value in making South Korea a separate entity to the North (the Soviets provided a lot of aid, and by some estimates the North actually grew more in the first two decades). Today, it is hard to find people who claim that the Korean War did not preserve or create something of genuine value to the world and to America. You get people who argue the cost, but you couldn’t make MASH today and have the same feeling of a conflict without purpose. What Ike and LBJ and Nixon did there was incredibly valuable, but it isn’t until Bush 41 that you start to see a really widespread recognition of that value (there were elections under Reagan, but it’s a durable democracy that’s the real achievement). Today there is no clearer demonstration that we were on the right side of the Cold War than the DMZ’s asymmetry.

          It’s true that the effort and cash that went into preserving Korea could have been put into having various African commies being put back in their box. I’m not sure that that would have been particularly helpful; building a wonder like Korea takes pretty intensive effort. If we’d taken somewhere in Africa and developed that like Korea, I don’t know that it would have had a comparable impact. Korea provides a key bastion for democracy across the Pacific Rim. I’m not sure that there’s an African country that would serve a similar function if it was much wealthier and more democratic.

          The closest thing we have is Nigeria, a regional power that works pretty hard to build institutions that help its neighbors to develop. I agree with you that there is a strong case for helping them today. I don’t think that there’s a choice between having a couple hundred more American troops there and keeping a few thousand in Afghanistan; so long as we’re not talking about as much as 0.002% of Americans between the two missions combined, I feel like the 99.998% of us should be able to cover their costs.

          If Nigeria looked like it might fall, I’d strongly support very strong efforts to prevent that. If Boko Haram were able to provide the kind of secure and stable environment for Al Qaida that the Taliban was, I’d support strong efforts to fix that, too. But although Boko Haram still exists, Nigeria’s efforts against it have been pretty darn effective and the functioning of the Nigerian state has not been radically impaired. Your suggestion that Boko Haram is really ISIS whereas ISIS’ Khorasan Province is not really ISIS does not agree with my understanding of either entity; there’s a lot more shared personnel and resources between the Middle East and Afghanistan than between the Middle East and Nigeria.

          Lastly, we do engage in nation building in Nigeria; there’s a little under half a billion dollars going out a year, roughly the same as we’re spending on nation building in Afghanistan. I feel like we get pretty good value for our work in Nigeria, and hope we can expect to see Afghanistan looking more like Nigeria in a couple of decade’s time. If Biden sticks it out even to a minimal degree, I have high hopes that violence would peter out to the degree that it did in Iraq during Obama’s first term, and that President Haley might have a similar relationship to Afghanistan that Reagan did with Korea. Obviously, we can’t have the drama of a first election, because Afghanistan is well ahead of where Korea was on human rights issues, but we may be able to see clear signs of Afghanistan becoming an economic peer of our allies.

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            Victor Clairmont

            Thanks for the response.

            A few counterpoints.

            Germany is not a good example to compare to Afghanistan. Germany, was protestant, has massive ties to Christianity even with the absurdity of the Third Reich, and in general, historically had a philosophy and religious founding/conversion that is tied for hundreds of years through the protestant reformation.

            Afghanistan is a Muslim territory, and many people there, religious wise, still see us as the great Shaitan (Demon or Satan). Now that doesn't mean all Afghanistan people see us this way, but a hot bed of extremism does mean the populace has to deal with this when they meet with families that are anti-western powers. Two, it was a part of India, before the partition of India between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India today. (Since the 10th century, almost a thousand years ago) The roots, histories and religion is completely different. The people do not have a tie to the west as deeply as Germany did. This is the argument that was made for nation building when we went in by the Bush administration 19 years ago. It has not come to fruition, and seems like it still will not, and 50 years is a hard sell to Americans when we are especially, 30 million unemployed.

            The Korean example, is closer and yet still worse. Korea is not unified. There is North and South Korea. South Korea has actually taken care of it own military parts, but more importantly, the people did not want to be a part of communism as time moved on, sooner rather than later. Also, the people have a general aversion to China (who got involved during the Korean War) due to past history of invasions, and also Japan, that has invaded them and conquered them. Also, religious wise, Korea is christian now, primarily protestant. (There was a great article about how Catholicism was rejected and Protestantism was accepted in Korea, because the protestants stood with those against the Empire of Japan in the early 1900's and Catholics did not in Christianity today. If interested ((it might be locked)) here:

            https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/2019/august/march-1st-movement-korean-japanese-missionaries.html

            And unless you want to completely pacify and nuke a nation (no not advocating nuking Afghanistan), Japan is not a good idea to show as an example of nation building either compared to Afghanistan. The starting points are radically apart, and we practically went into Japan, rewrote the constitution, and said, "You're religion is crap. You're emperor is not a god. Here this is how democracy works. Bushido stinks. You're gonna take it and you're gonna like it." We are not willing to go that far in Afghanistan.

            On Nigeria, right we put resources there, but we do not have an occupied presence like we have in Afghanistan military wise. We put resources into a lot of countries for geopolitical interests, and half a billion is an easy pill to swallow. We pumped resources into the Caribbean to try and stifle the ties of communism there. But that's not what we are doing in Afghanistan, we are pumping troops, resources, and a military strategy that the American public does have a say in which to deem it effective of ineffective.

            One final point: For Afghanistan to become an economic peer, it has to have real natural resources. Oil, rare minerals, etc. We don't know if it does and it may not. (I would actually assume it does but I would have to do a dive into it's geographic history and see if India used a lot of materials from there. Oh course, things like coal, oil, etc. could still be) This is actually one of the reasons Jamaica has such a hard time stepping out onto the world stage, the island has no natural resources worth shipping out beyond certain food and tourism. So even if it gets developed, it may not be able to be like Korea trade wise. Also, if we do find resources, we may run into a situation where western corporations run in, and then the populace regrets us even more. This happened in Haiti, which had gold mines and resources that made the French (and other colonial powers) occupy it. Haiti of course historically, kicked out the foreign powers in its revolution in 1802. But it has not been able to step out onto the world stage due to massive government corruption, but when you talk to our good Haitian brothers and sisters, they blame the West for a lot of woes and plundering of it's resources. One can debate it but there is a sentiment there among many in the local population.

            Thank you for the response by the way. If you want to continue, I will hit the sack and recheck the thread in the afternoon tomorrow.

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          Victor Clairmont

          Forgot to link the Brooking's institute article I quote from sorry:

          https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/03/04/whats-in-store-after-the-us-taliban-deal/

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    Pastorfbt

    Why does Afghanistan feel like Vietnam all over again? Except that Vietnam is now a "friend", a long term result I don't expect from the jihadists.

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      James Spiller

      Like Vietnam, we have a serious fifth column issue with Afghanistan. As with Vietnam in 73 we have reduced American investment in Afghanistan to low levels, but as in Vietnam we may abandon our allies for the mostly symbolic benefit of washing our hands of the consequent bloodshed.

      If we do so, then just as Vietnam encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait (and Biden to let him), our surrender will likely cost many lives in conflicts far from Afghanistan, as well as depriving us of a valuable ally in a critical space; with a trivial amount of effort in 73, we could have let South Vietnam become another Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea.

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        DougAz

        Umm, No sir. Vietnam was an American Tragedy. Let me be CLEAR. I for ONE, and I'm sure 99% of Americans living then and now, NEVER blamed and never would blame any individual soldier.

        No. We objected to the entire Vietnam War. It was a lost cause. It is established that
        A. You win for Unconditional Surrender - Lincoln/Grant; FDR/Marshall/Ike/Nimitz or
        B. You fight proxy wars to kill American men and women, shed blood, and shed trillions of Taxpayers dollars for the Oil companies and Defense companies.
        C. I supported the Iraq invasion to come to the aid of Kuwait.
        D. George Bush Sr, Cheny, Rummy, et al - made a huge blunder in not winning Iraq 100% - in 1992, and LEAVING immediately thus
        E. Iraq - Was Bush-Cheny's misbegotten make-up mulligan do-over for Daddy and Halliburton. - Horrible.
        F. Afghanistan - Complete Military strategic failure of courage, thinking and committment.
        G. - My father and uncles went to war with Japan IMMEDIATELY. With WW1 Springfields, doughboy helmets and WW1 20 year old rations. They fought in Guadalcanal, North Africa, Buna, Kasserine Pass - and lost some but bloodied the Japs and Germans.
        E. Why didn't the US Military on Oct 10th, put 250,000 troops into Afganastan ? Bush was a coward and Cheney wanted a long war to stimulate the Bush reelection as War Stimulus does that...

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          James Spiller

          I agree that Vietnam was an American tragedy. But in 1973, it was a won cause. An expensively won cause. A cause that needed continued support, as did the South Koreans and the West Berliners, the Taiwanese and the pro-Democracy forces in Greece and Italy.

          A/ B: Which of these categories does Ike’s only major conflict as President fall into? Did we get unconditional surrender, or surrender of any kind, in Korea? Has Korean history since Ike’s peace been one of unending bailouts for oil companies? It seems pretty clear to me that you can fight and leave your enemy standing, as in 1812, as in the wars with the Barbary Pirates, as in Korea, as in the Quasi War, as in the Arikara War, the Second Opium War, the Sumatran Expeditions, and in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya, and not have it become a long term source of money for Oil or defense.
          In board games, there’s some sense to what you say, but it’s not the way that the real world works. Reality is messier.

          C: Jolly good.

          D: I think there’s value to following through on commitments to one’s allies, but there are smart people on both sides of the issue of stopping once Kuwait was liberated. I don’t know what your position is on Iraq thereafter; do you think it should have been handed over to the Iranians (aside from a Turkish North)? I feel like we should be glad this did not happen, like it would have been implausible for it to have happened, but I’m not going to spend words discussing a scenario without knowing that it’s your position. I assume 1992 is a typo, but if you intended to say that we should have hung around for two years before leaving I’m happy to give you points for novelty.

          E. It seems worth noting that Iraq was a war in which your condition A applied; Saddam’s government surrendered unconditionally. I don’t know how much you know about the surrender that Lincoln and Grant got, but it didn’t end terrorism in the South, nor abuse of African Americans. President Grant made a lot of progress, to be fair, but emancipation was more of a process than a moment. Anyway, it seems eccentric that with the conditions you apply you’re upset about Iraq; surely after a miss, a mulligan was exactly the correct approach to take and the arrived at the result that you call for.

          F. I feel like the failures in Afghanistan are mostly political; each new Congress has sent clear messages to the Taliban that they only have to hang on briefly and they’ll prevail. Plus, the State Department has been genuinely terrible at doing the sort of things I was doing in Iraq; modernizing the banking system (you can’t track funding for counterterrorism purposes if everything is being done with cash, you can’t effectively build institutions if you can’t get accounting done at the grassroots level, and so on). The money spent on kinetic action seems mostly to have done what it could, and a very limited budget for continued support seems likely to let Afghanistan rise onto its own two feet over time, much as happened in Korea etc.

          G. My father was a little young for the War, but my paternal Grandfather fought from ‘39, initially in Europe (he left slightly *after* Dunkirk), then in Madagascar, until he finally pushed up through Burma. The Phony War was also fought with some fairly rickety gear, but I think he found that less of a hardship than the conditions he was fighting under at the end of the war. Supply chains can struggle in a variety of ways.

          H. (I assume you meant H). As in G, supply chains are genuinely hard. Afghanistan is not a super accessible place, we didn’t have a whole lot of people who spoke Pashtun or Urdu, and there were no plans in place for a massive deployment to a country surrounded by powers hostile to us. The deployment is a complicated thing.

          But, more importantly, what would have been gained? We might have got Bin Laden personally (although that’s obviously unclear; he’d have been likely to have left faster if we’d delivered that sort of a force). The rest of Operation Anaconda would have gone much the same; our Afghan allies, with our help, really did a pretty good job taking over by the end of June 2002. For the rest of that year, the Taliban scored a total of five American kills. Having five times as many American soldiers would have meant that we could have done... what? Would they have been useful in building Afghan society? Getting them out in that kind of a hurry would have been a trillion dollar operation if it was possible at all, they’d have left when their tour was over, and we’d then have suffered the exact same thing that happened historically from 2005-2013.

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            DougAz

            You do make a number of good points. My thoughts

            Korea was really a War between the United Nations and South Korea vs North Korea and China. There was, fortunately a convenient boundary to separate, and as I've done a lot of business over the decades in S. Korea, they are quickly adopted many Western things, especially US Engineering education - and made great companies over time. Also I believe the Korean peoples, having been subjugated by both the Chinese and the Japanese were ready for this evolution. A great country, industrial power and people.

            There is absolutely nothing similar in Iraq or Afghanastan either culturally, or geographically.

            Buna, Guadalcanal, Iwo JIma, Okinawa, Chosun, should have taught, but did not the US Military leadership that Western conventional warfare doctrinaire, based on our (Good - but soiled by Cheney) Judeo-Christian value systems, morality of war, that it is greatly handicapped vs a MEDIEVAL culture - such as exists in the Middle East, like Iraq, and especially Afghanastan. While there is modernity - ISIS, the Taliban, Al Queda were all foretold on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

            I do know quite a bit about Lincoln and Grant - been reading about that for maybe 60 years.

            I mean Bush I should have left immediately, as practicable after the 1991 end, but I really really mean - he failed there to win. He didn't get Saddam, and didnt' bring Iraq truly to account, obviously. The Redo by Bush Jr was atrocious and unnecessary. I really don't care about Iraq, then or Iran then, or now. And certainly not Afghanastan - "where Empires go to die.."

            Glad your grandpa made it through WW2 and those battles - hard times -
            Cheers - thanks for you good writing -

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      Victor Clairmont

      Still communist too but they hate China.

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