The POTUS decides to be a chicken, pulls out of Afghanistan

I totally agree "we" should use economic pressure more and military pressure less. What does that mean in the context of Afghanistan though? Leave them to starve under the Taliban? That is not going to help the goal of reducing the risk from radicalised individuals to the world in general.
As I said, I believe direct aid to the people now that we've left. But when we were there we should have done a large rebuilding project as I detailed in this reply
At the time of september 11 attacks, Afghanistan was already starving. In the words of Aga Khan " The 9/11 attack on the United States was a direct consequence of the international community ignoring the human tragedy that was Afghanistan at that time" and "The question I have is this: if these breakdowns in governance were predictable, why was the international community powerless to get engaged at the early stages to help arrest the deterioration and avoid the suffering that resulted? Secondly, are there common factors in the majority of these situations which are insufficiently recognized?" This suggests if one, large scale humanitarian aid and two, smaller scale action against reactionary elements were acted on sooner, 9/11 might never have happened. Additionally, the CIA, NSA and FBI already knew that they were planning the attack and did nothing and had many preventative measures they did not do.

My main aim is to build up these areas as much as possible and avoid war in the first place. I was just stating confronted with a threat like the Nazis, malicious action towards them is justified.

That speech by Aga Khan, also includes a lot of thought provoking questions and even suggests earlier action against the dogma of reaction and state-sanctioned violence. It's an interesting read.

Wel let's stick to Afghanistan then, surely an average Afghan that considers any foreign army there an invasion force that should be opposed by all means is morally in the clear - no ?

A good patriot.

I'm sure there are many of those...

Not everyone is a nationalist. Not everyone likes the Taliban. If I lived in Nazi Germany, I would not think automatically that I must resist the allies because they're technically invading my country. No, I'd cheer them on. In the same way technically the USA invaded Syria, but I do not think the Kurds are bad for working with the USA, considering Assad was trying to exterminate them.
 
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That counts us out.
Yes poor impovrished England who loves cutting off their own arm. Probably the site of a coming humanitarian crisis itself, too.

However this wasn't the case when the Afghan started happened and the UK was part of the allies who invaded, so yeah We includes the UcK at this time too.
 
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Not everyone is a nationalist. Not everyone likes the Taliban. If I lived in Nazi Germany, I would not think automatically that I must resist the allies because they're technically invading my country. No, I'd cheer them on. (...)

You'd cheer on the Russians entering Berlin in 1945 for example ?

Good luck with that, when would you stop "cheering" ? In 1961 ? 1989 ?

And how do you think your fellow Germans would look upon that ?
 
However this wasn't the case when the Afghan started happened and the UK was part of the allies who invaded, so yeah We includes the UcK at this time too.


If one discards the fluctuations from 2008 financial crisis and the Covid crisis,
there has been no real change in GDP/capita in the UK in the last 20 years.

Attempts to invest in development in Afghanistan were either precluded by the lack of
security or failed due to corruption. I see no reason to throw good money after bad.
 
If one discards the fluctuations from 2008 financial crisis and the Covid crisis,
there has been no real change in GDP/capita in the UK in the last 20 years.

Attempts to invest in development in Afghanistan were either precluded by the lack of
security or failed due to corruption. I see no reason to throw good money after bad.
I already addressed this point, don't go around in circles. the US spent less than the expenditure of Haiti on Afghanistan's economic developement
 
You'd cheer on the Russians entering Berlin in 1945 for example ?

Good luck with that, when would you stop "cheering" ? In 1961 ? 1989 ?

And how do you think your fellow Germans would look upon that ?
Is this supposed to be a gotcha? I don't like the soviets either. No I'd not support bad things, and support good things. And you keep weirdly treating everyone as one humonguous group with only one perspective, real weird. You realise there exists different beliefs and mindsets within the same country?

I for one, as Brit, despise the British government. You can't expect everyone to love their government, especially, like in Afghanistan - they were starving...

But this is rather irrelevant.
 
Just pointing out that I understand how Afghans might consider other Afghans working for the allies (or the Soviets before that) to be collaborators, and treat them as such,

technically they are correct imho.

"First let's get the foreigners out - then we'll see how we sort out our domestic problems..."

In this context the Taliban would be the equivalent of a resistance movement, and a rather successful one at that.
 
Investing (i.e. giving Afghans money and helping to rebuild their infrastructure) is fair point, it could improve the situation IMO.
It's rarely done for charity reasons though, everybody understands the investor usually wants to get something in return.
Another moment which is easily forgotten is that Western way of life and values are not perceived as something superior outside of the West.
People value their own culture and traditions much more than abstract "freedom" and "democracy".
 
Investing (i.e. giving Afghans money and helping to rebuild their infrastructure) is fair point, it could improve the situation IMO.
It's rarely done for charity reasons though, everybody understands the investor usually wants to get something in return.
Another moment which is easily forgotten is that Western way of life and values are not perceived as something superior outside of the West.
People value their own culture and traditions much more than abstract "freedom" and "democracy".
I agree its not always motivated by humanitarianism, though I do believe the West holds an immeasurable debt to the third world which we do not pay. It would be nice to see more less-strings attached aid. However regardless of motive, US aid to Afghanistan is described as being drenched in money, 46 billion, but like 99% of that went to weapons. They were already giving aid, give more economic development aid.

I'm not even mentioning freedom and democracy - stopping genocide and making sure people don't starve is enough. (for now)
And besides, those refugees seem to care a whole lot about whether the Taliban are in charge, probably shouldn't generalise about what they value.
 
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(source: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-doubles-aid-to-afghanistan )
Oh gee golly, please sir... can I have some more?
This is laughably limp. This 280 million is less than the yearly public expenditure of Gambia and marginally more than Samoa and Somalia.

Do you want a failed state? because this is how you get failed states.
And another way to give it context, "The total audited cost of operations in Afghanistan for 2001/2002 to 2013/2014, inclusive of non-recoverable VAT at current prices is £21,315.7 million", ie. 7 times that spent on aid even though it only covers about 2/3rds of the war.
 

(source: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-doubles-aid-to-afghanistan )
Oh gee golly, please sir... can I have some more?
This is laughably limp. This 280 million is less than the yearly public expenditure of Gambia and marginally more than Samoa and Somalia.

Do you want a failed state? because this is how you get failed states.


Many people consider that Afghanistan was already a failed state long before the USA and the UK intervened.

The military intervention and non military foreign aid did not change that.

There is no evidence that more aid will change it.

Dominic Raab's announcement, dated 19 August 2021, doubling it; makes no sense to me.
 
Their country being the people of Afghanistan. There's a reason why the puppet government collapsed. Why the occupation never managed to control the country. The occupying armies kept bombing marriages and murdering people left and right throughout the country. Supposedly "mistakes were made". How many times were these local collaborators the ones pointing out the targets for the killing? I mean, someone provided the "intelligence". So imo among these "translators" and helpers of the occupying armies you'll be hard pressed to find innocent people.

The government Afghanistan now has is the one their actions ended up placing in power. It wasn't just the foreigners who invaded, it was the locals also who played their parts in causing power to eventually fall back into the Taliban's hands.

Actually, my impression from other reporting I've read (e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/us-military-drone-strikes-civilian-deaths/620308/) is that the drone strikes substantially relied on signals intelligence rather than human intelligence, and that this is part of why the strikes were often wrongly targeted.

In any case, there is no doubt that there is some truth to what you're saying. I would guess that a lot of people who worked for the puppet government in some capacity are bad hombres. But, and again this is mostly just my impression, I think people who directly worked with the US military in Afghanistan are probably in a lot of cases guilty of nothing more than being caught in the middle of the US invasion and the Taliban. And I've seen plenty of photos of children among the Afghans being resettled out of the country (mostly in the context of State Department and Pentagon propaganda they post on their respective social media pages, but still- the photos aren't just fabrications).
 
as a propellerhead , ı must comment on the proposal to airlift food to Ukraine . The word Holodomor presumably requires this lift to be against Soviet will ... Techwise DC-3 should be just over the horizon and it was a giant of a plane , though not really in terms of physical size . Was licence produced in Russia and Japan including the wartime and Germa Lufthansa did everthing possible to keep theirs in operation into 1944 or thereabouts . It has a total lift of 2700 kilograms ; real life project aimed it to make a glider , so that max pzylosd could go up to 4500 kilograms . And the Berlin Airlift would have failed , if it was down to C-47s , the military version of the DC ... C-54s , much bigger and much later planes and they were made available after stripping the US Airforce and deploying them to Europe . Which needed paved runways , aerial navigation support and a total commitment and Germanic efficiency in loading and offloading so that more flights could be flown .

and all of this in peaceful conditions . Demyanks(?) as a success and Stalingrad as a failure would be more ljke what could have happened , even with considerable less power of the Red Army . And we are still ignoring the distance from likely bases , say across the Black Sea , with total lack of infrastructure in place anyhow . It would have been much easier to airland a couple of parachute divisions to invade Moscow and continue from there .
 
Berlin airlift used a lot of bombers repurposed as cargo planes, Soviets didn't oppose it directly and they had airports.

It was also more or less unprecedented by scale.
 
And I've seen plenty of photos of children among the Afghans being resettled out of the country (mostly in the context of State Department and Pentagon propaganda they post on their respective social media pages, but still- the photos aren't just fabrications).

There were people taken out of there who were not collaborators with the occupation military. I0m not attacking those here. Even if among them odds are there are many corrupt individuals, it will be a mixed bag. It's the "military translators left behind" being published and republished in media that irks me. Those were working for the armies or intelligence.
 
Japan had no real history of democracy before the end of the second world war, and this months election is shaping up to be the most competitive yet. Taiwan is another example, no real history of democracy, progressive democracy today, thriving and with low poverty levels.

Japan had democracy before WW2, it was just largely destroyed by waves of far-right violence and assassinations of democratic leadership, and the out-of-control Army forcing the state into escalating conflict in China. The Japanese army in WW1 by contrast was by the standard of an army in that era, fully civilized and treated prisoners of war properly. It just became feral, because of fascism.

I agree that there are terrible things going on, but to make the decision to invade requires a lot more balacing than that. Should we start WW3 over Xinjang? What about Kristalknacht like behaviour by today's nations, is that enough to invade?

The US has classified it as genocide but has taken in 0 Uyghur refugees this fiscal year.

Some of that is the US still trying to fix the issues of the Trump refugee process, but it's largely just a lack of doing anything. Nobody but the most insane hawks are urging WW3, and they'd by urging that based on any reason. But taking refugees should absolutely be done, which is why all those refugee international agreements were made post WW2, and why it's so terrible, they are now being effectively ripped up.

But international politics is always a power game. Of course, China can do whatever it wants within its borders, and get away with it.

But Rwanda or Serbia trying to genocide should absolutely be whacked hard.


Anyway, the mega dumb Afghanistan traitor debate. The Taliban weren't in control of the county in 2001. They wouldn't win a Democratic election either. A lack of resistance, is not in fact, support.

Blind Nationalism is very dumb. Resisting Nazism or the Taliban is the right thing to do.

The problem with Afghanistan is that you can't build a society on a throne of bayonets, and liberalism doesn't come from the barrel of a gun. The US didn't even really try to do that either, it just created a local protection ring around Kabul and varying skeleton forces elsewhere that waxed and waned. The US was never going to do the deep building of society with buy-in from local leaders, required to actually build up Afghanistan, so the best option was to leave. But it shouldn't be a total washing of hands. The US should support gradual liberalisation. And peace and growth will bring demand for liberalisation. Its happened with every human society of every race and creed, the US's role should be preventing extreme heavy-handed crackdown, which is the natural response of Authoritarian regimes.

Refugees are a pool of people free of the regime, that can return and be a ready-made pool of civic leadership, and advocates for Afghanistan in foreign countries. While also promoting economic links and remittances to relatives.

The scaremongering about refugees is dumb. Refugees commit less crime than the native-born population, and when actually allowed to integrate, do so. Some Euro countries have dumb policies that don't let them work, so of course, they have issues.

The problem is that all the corrupt people that America encouraged, slipped out easily, while all the good lower-level people, the civic and military people who actually did the hard and dangerous work, have largely been left behind.
 
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Taliban seems to expect the west to keep paying.

It's like governing is hard.
 
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