The Arab Spring and "the War on Terror"

[meregreen]

When people say what did we achieve after 20 years in Afghanistan. Well, if you were to ask any woman in Afghanistan, then quite a lot actually. Also the infrastructure of places like Kabul were immeasurably improved. Afghanistan had begun to function in many ways as a viable state. Unfortunately, the endemic corruption that has plagued that poor country was allowed to flourish. Also the Afghan interior forces, in a country where tribalism is very prevalent, was disproportionately made up of non Pashtuns, the largest of Afghanistans numerous tribes. It meant that although Afghanistan had made strides, it was a house of cards. Tragic really. A whole generation of young Afghanistanis have been thrown back to the Middle Ages. 

[PussEKatt]

What about the armed forces personel who lost their lives over there ! this makes their sacrifice useless ( useless is not really the word I am looking for )

[meregreen]

1 minute ago, PussEKatt said:

What about the armed forces personel who lost their lives over there ! this makes their sacrifice useless ( useless is not really the word I am looking for )

If you listen to many of the veterans being interviewed, many of them horribly injured. It’s not going in that they regret, they are quite proud of what they did to help ordinary Afghans. It is the way that they feel their sacrifices have been thrown away by this unseemly scramble to exit this tragic country. I think the word you’re looking for isn’t useless, but wasted.

[Chindie]

4 minutes ago, PussEKatt said:

What about the armed forces personel who lost their lives over there ! this makes their sacrifice useless ( useless is not really the word I am looking for )

Sunk cost fallacy. Why keep throwing men and money at a job with nebulous aims which achieves very little? 

[Mic09]

5 minutes ago, meregreen said:

When people say what did we achieve after 20 years in Afghanistan. Well, if you were to ask any woman in Afghanistan, then quite a lot actually. Also the infrastructure of places like Kabul were immeasurably improved. Afghanistan had begun to function in many ways as a viable state. 

I'm not sure this is a strong return for 20 years of military action, almost a Trillion $ of spending, around 50k of Afghani Civilians dead, about 4k allied soldiers dead, 70k Afghani military dead. 

I imagine a scenario where a TRILLION dollars are spent better and these lives aren't lost. 

[PussEKatt]

15 hours ago, Chindie said:

Sunk cost fallacy. Why keep throwing men and money at a job with nebulous aims which achieves very little? 

We have to do something,otherwise those men/women lost their lives for nothing.

[meregreen]

1 minute ago, Mic09 said:

I'm not sure this is a strong return for 20 years of military action, almost a Trillion $ of spending, around 50k of Afghani Civilians dead, about 4k allied soldiers dead, 70k Afghani military dead. 

I imagine a scenario where a TRILLION dollars are spent better and these lives aren't lost. 

I tend not to measure human suffering from a fiscal point of view. Yes all those lives lost were a terrible price to pay. War is ghastly, there is no argument. And as I have said, those sacrifices do now look wasted. 

[Davkaus]

I was having a look at a breakdown of the total expenditure, and apparently nearly $300,000,000,000 (yes, 300 billion) has been spent on US veterans injury/disability care for Afghanistan veterans. That has the whiff of creative accounting and private industry profiteering, doesn't it. That's nearly 2 years of the entire NHS budget.

Someone's getting rich, and it isn't the veterans.

Edited August 17, 2021 by Davkaus

[Mic09]

8 minutes ago, meregreen said:

I tend not to measure human suffering from a fiscal point of view. 

I agree with you. But people in charge have to before they decide to invade a country. It's really difficult to argue that a trillion dollars wouldn't have helped to prevent a great amount of suffering for a greater number of people.

Looking at statistics (and current events as they unfold), the Afghani operation does not look like a success. 

[Chindie]

16 minutes ago, PussEKatt said:

We have to do something,otherwise those men/women lost their lives for nothing.

So we keep piling the lives up in a forever war with no end in sight?

It's terrible that those lives were lost to little concrete gain, beyond a momentary improvement in some lives in Afghanistan and some infrastructure works, but you can't keep chucking resources at it without an endgame.

[chrisp65]

Remember, this was never about nation building.

We didn’t like Russia occupying Afghanistan, so we bank rolled, supplied and trained the local chieftains on how to be an effective guerilla / insurgency type force. How the little guy can have a real impact against a military machine designed to fight military machines.

We were so good at this, the Russians had to leave.

Then some other stuff happened and we occupied Afghanistan, tried to impose our version of what they wanted.

Turned out, they had a very effective guerilla / insurgency network adept at fatiguing giant military machines.

There is no way we could have known.

Anybody that thinks this is about religion has completely and utterly misunderstood the top, middle, and bottom of the problem.

[Mic09]

1 minute ago, chrisp65 said:

Remember, this was never about nation building.

We didn’t like Russia occupying Afghanistan, so we bank rolled, supplied and trained the local chieftains on how to be an effective guerilla / insurgency type force. How the little guy can have a real impact against a military machine designed to fight military machines.

We were so good at this, the Russians had to leave.

Then some other stuff happened and we occupied Afghanistan, tried to impose our version of what they wanted.

Turned out, they had a very effective guerilla / insurgency network adept at fatiguing giant military machines.

There is no way we could have known.

Anybody that thinks this is about religion has completely and utterly misunderstood the top, middle, and bottom of the problem.

It's very 1984. Who knows who the enemy is, and how quickly that will change. 

[desensitized43]

31 minutes ago, PussEKatt said:

We have to do something,otherwise those men/women lost their lives for nothing.

They didn't die for nothing. We went in there to degrade AQ's ability to strike at the west and "get" the people who planned 9/11. We did both of those things.

The other stuff, the "nation building" stuff we did was mission creep. We should never have been doing it in the first place as it was never going to work.

[HanoiVillan]

58 minutes ago, meregreen said:

When people say what did we achieve after 20 years in Afghanistan. Well, if you were to ask any woman in Afghanistan, then quite a lot actually.

It's an appealing argument, because it appeals to the moral codes we live by. I'm sure you and I and everybody reading this believe that girls should be able to have the same educational opportunities as boys, should be able to choose who and at what age they marry, and so on. However, it cannot be the role of the British military to enforce our views on gender roles down the barrel of a gun. States can and will determine these questions for themselves, and if we are honest for even a moment it is very very far from clear that 'girls should go to school' is a popular position in Afghanistan, especially beyond primary age. We can be angry about that, or morally disapprove of it, but in doing so we should remember that it is a rural, agrarian, unindustrialised society in which the median age is 18. When England was at that level of development, kids were working on farms or being deported to Australia for scrumping apples.

[blandy]

There are some intriguing views being posted on this, which go against what I'd have expected various posters to write. Genuinely illuminating. Thanks.

[PussEKatt]

16 hours ago, Chindie said:

So we keep piling the lives up in a forever war with no end in sight?

It's terrible that those lives were lost to little concrete gain, beyond a momentary improvement in some lives in Afghanistan and some infrastructure works, but you can't keep chucking resources at it without an endgame.

I understand what you are saying.I just feel sorry for the kids who have no father now,for nothing.For the wives who have no husband now,for nothing.For brothers,unclescousins etc etc.All for nothing,but as you say,losing even more fathers,husbands etc wont do anything constructive.

[tonyh29]

14 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

It's an appealing argument, because it appeals to the moral codes we live by. I'm sure you and I and everybody reading this believe that girls should be able to have the same educational opportunities as boys, should be able to choose who and at what age they marry, and so on. However, it cannot be the role of the British military to enforce our views on gender roles down the barrel of a gun. States can and will determine these questions for themselves, and if we are honest for even a moment it is very very far from clear that 'girls should go to school' is a popular position in Afghanistan, especially beyond primary age. We can be angry about that, or morally disapprove of it, but in doing so we should remember that it is a rural, agrarian, unindustrialised society in which the median age is 18. When England was at that level of development, kids were working on farms or being deported to Australia for scrumping apples.

Biden is on record as kinda agreeing with that , when he said " I'm not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of Afghan women's rights... That's not what they're there for".

I'm not sure its a good look for him specifically referring to his own son v the cause of Women's rights in a whole country , but there was almost certainly  more context at the time at the time of that isolated quote .

 

I kinda disagree with you though , Afghanistan women had the right to vote in 1919  ( a year behind some women in the UK )  , their rights were progressing , maybe not at the same speed as other nations mainly due to  some resistance in rural areas , before they regressed as a result of becoming an islamic state  before the the Taliban in effect condemned women to house arrest  ... it's 2021  no woman should have to live as a prisoner in her own home , be forced to marry , be deprived of education  ..our moral code may not be the only code , it may not always be the right code , but in this instance it 100% IS the correct moral code and the rest of the world should hold the Taliban to account through whatever means it can .

I don't have the answer and an Afghanistan solution is way above my paygrade , but somehow I don't think the Taliban are going to suddenly become enlightened and join the 21st century 

[blandy]

1 hour ago, Chindie said:

It's terrible that those lives were lost to little concrete gain, beyond a momentary improvement in some lives in Afghanistan and some infrastructure works, but you can't keep chucking resources at it without an endgame.

The thing is, you can. There are lots and lots of things that get resources chucked at them with no end game.

Leaving aside morality for a moment, anyway, it seems like the Talibans have taken control of the country through not needing to use much force, because the people that were there protecting the nation either ran away or just gave up, rather than defend the country. So now there's a bunch of stone agers in control and they're going to create, and already have created a huge number of refugees. People in genuine fear of their lives from the Talibans. So one end game here is (was) preventing a refugee crisis. I mean we spend money on flood defences, on Fire and Police and Ambulances and Parliament and government - what's the end game with them? to keep things ticking along, to put out fires and prevent crimes and...

So what's wrong with preventing people having to flee their homes in fear of death? Especially when you've also got education (for all), culture and all the rest of it - doesn't some of that both help prevent future terrorists? doesn't it improve health and well being in the country. And tolerance and all that stuff?

 @HanoiVillanposted that "it cannot be the role of the British military to enforce our views on gender roles down the barrel of a gun". Being facetious, the reply to that is "no, that's the Taliban's job". More seriously, the people weren't being forced to be be "free" from gender oppression under the threat of British or US gun barrels. The (in recent times) relatively small number of western forces there were protecting a large population from Stone Age tribes wanting to impose Stone Age values on them, and all the while allowing things to improve for the population.

The USA went in to Afghan to "get" OBL and then the mission creep started. Surely if anything we've learnt over the past 30 years is that if you go in somewhere you can't just have no long terms commitment to what you've undertaken. There is a responsibility to manage the mess invasion creates, to restore stability and maintain it. Doing a runner, 'cus you've lost interest, or think you can get away with it is a bad course of action for the future not just of the place itself, but also the wider world and your own society. Is it better to prevent a refugee crisis, or to (struggle to) manage one when it happens? Never mind the morality, what about the practicality of all those refugees and lives?

There is no ideal solution, but what's been enacted by Biden is ruinously stupid and cowardly. The US leaves, then the nations that clubbed together to support the US after 9/11 essentially have to leave too.  We stood by America, and then America ran away, once it thought it could get away with it.

[Genie]

This is the inside of the US military plane apparently.

Did the just scoop up a lucky few hundred people or are they chosen?

I’d assume by the desperation to get on board they were just the lucky ones offered a ticket out. 

[PussEKatt]

15 hours ago, Genie said:

This is the inside of the US military plane apparently.

Did the just scoop up a lucky few hundred people or are they chosen?

I’d assume by the desperation to get on board they were just the lucky ones offered a ticket out. 

I saw this picture on the 6 o,clock news here in Perth but what is not shown here is Afgan people on top and on the open wheel doors of this same plane.