re: #33 Dangerman

true as long as it ignores all the tribal and relational dynamics

afghanistan wasnt for those 20 years, isnt now, and never was a single monolithic unified thing (house) that just needed to clean up its act, as it were

Yeah.

Those 20 years are contextualized by a 40 year proxy war punctuated by three invasions (Soviet, Pakistani Taliban US). And in a longer arc, about another 100 years
of proxy wars and the British invading.

Defense experts doing this whole “the Afghans won’t eat their nationhood vegetables” is identical to the language used about post-colonial Africa: ignore where the money went, ignore where the infrastructure of nation isn’t because there’s no money, ignore the team-up of local rich folks and international rich folks to make local money leave the country.

The other thing going on here is the assumption of good faith by the coalition…which is not a good assumption.

1. The history of Afghanistan has been there the entire time, and scholars on the region have been expounding on “Graveyard of Empires” for a century. That Americans—as they consistently do—are indifferent to history and culture as a thing that other people have and attempted the thing that Afghanistan is famous for resisting…they’re not the idiots. But even if we discard the pat British imagine of Pathans and jezails…these are people that have been traumatized by a century of war and a million of them died fighting the Soviets—is that context also not important if you’re planning as invasion

2. Lying continually about civilian casualties from air strikes should be a pile of flags on fire, because it means that a key component of occupied-people morale—not being randomly killed for no reason—is also suspect. The thing about insurgency is that it snowballs as the occupied people are wounded by the process of struggle…people with a grudge fight just as well as ideologues.

3. success has been measured by the worst possible metrics: how many people were killed, what dude got assassinated, what strip of land did a firefight happen over. As in Vietnam, none of these things is meaningful: insurgencies pop new units like mushrooms, leadership is lose and not based on formal training so there’s high replacablility, and Afghanistan is very large with vast gaps of wild space and mostly porous borders.

4. Britain and the USA have done exactly the same thing they’ve done in past military adventures—find some strongmen and some oligarchs and dump money on them. This never, ever works at creating a nation that can stabilize itself and delivers basic life and liberty to people, because the people at the top of society may have some kind of loyalty to nation, but they like living well and being in charge more. A bunch of money we gave to counterinsurgent allies just immediately was thrown down a hole.

5. The military industrial grift in Afghanistan and Iraq was next-level in it’s transmutation of public money into private profit. We as taxpayers paid premium prices for inferior goods because DoD officials get job as lobbyists at the DoD and manage to get no-bid contracts where there’s no oversite or penalties…which is always shameful, but in this case meant that the critical work to be done was being done poorly, cheaply, or not at all. We are absolute, 100% watching people that profited from this cycle offload that guilt onto Afghans…just like the equivalent in the BoIA did with the allotment system.

6. We have a direct comparison available in Iraq that strongly suggests that the core premises of the operation were always flawed and the guys who got us into the situation with command decisions did not know what they were talking about. Pulling these people back to the microphone to comment isn’t going to produce insight, it’s going to produce pathetic and greedy men looking to shift blame away from themselves and onto a target that your average American is willing to view as more guilty than a powerful white guy.

7. There’s the larger milieu of the US consistently making bad decisions with tinkering with the politics of countries and creating the conditions that lead to the worst possible actors being able to grasp power. If we apply the same continuity of substance to the USA as is being applied to the Afghans, then how is it not relevant that we have a terrible track record that strongly suggests we’re only willing to put in time and money to create dictators that sell their country off?

8. There’s a US cultural milieu in which we don’t ever fucking admit we fucked up. Half the country thinks we won Vietnam and a good chunk thinks we lost because hippies and pansies wouldn’t “let” the military win. Most Americans just don’t know about the Banana Wars or the Dulles Brothers, but have strong feelings about how awful and backward all those Central American countries are and why can’t they get it together. How is this different?