Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Iraq & Afghanistan Leaving Afghanistan

There is a lot of our leaving Afghanistan being talked, and argued about. I am for getting the hell out of there and have been for years. We have now spent, we are told, TWO TRILLION DOLLARS! That has got is zip, nada, nuttin. the Taliban currently runs more of the nation than the government we support. The government that we support is known to be one of the most corrupt in the world. Gosh, I wonder why we are not loved by the Afghans. The current president was appointed by Bush and used to be an oil guy. Boy, that's really want to admire, an oil guy!

Then there is the Mideast. As far as I can tell nobody over there has ever kept their word about anything. Any of our own stuff, in that region, has failed. We have, in other words, spent literal years failing. We get the news and the news is one of failure just about every day. I think getting out of that entire region would do us a lot more good than what we are doing now and we would, along the way, save A LOT of money!.

Our adventures, abandonment of allies, lying and being lied to, etc., etc. isn't even the worst of it. Our adventures, for instance, has proven that if the United States comes to help be prepared for us to kill hundreds of thousands of your citizens. We don't mean to, way say we meant well, we were 'helping'! What stuns me that some of the people over there actually believe that stuff! Hell, most of us do too! But, facts remain. We helped Iraq and killed something over 200,000 of them. I haven't even bothered to look at what we have done in Afghanistan but I have friends who have done time over there and say its in the thousands. Then, again, there is that 2 trillion dollars! We also tend to abandon many who have sacrificed their lives to help us. We did it with whole tribes in Vietnam and that's just for starters. In other words, we are not the nice group of Christian folks out there doing good, that some would have us believe.

There are a lot of our own military leaders who are beating their breasts with concern that getting out of there is a terrible thing. I think that's two fold. Generals all say they hate war but the generals also always support a good war. I think the problem with leaving Afghanistan is that they haven't 'won'. My problem with that one is that they have never, in 20 years, even bothered to define, exactly, what 'winning' might mean. They only know that they are losing and I am not even convinced that they can define that one either. Biden has promised to leave and I sincerely hope he pulls that one off.

Oh, If we leave, and we have problems we have the capability to watch what, exactly is going on and where the bad guys are from what we can see from space. In addition to the over 30% of our current air power are drones. I suspect that if somebody in Afghanistan were to threaten us, and we knew who they were, we could send it any number of armed drones and blow the hell out of them. We are VERY good a blowing the hell out of just about anything you might think of.

Anyway.....

We only have around 2,500 troops left in Afghanistan, a token force, mostly symbolic. We have more troops in D.C., National Guard types 4,300 to protect the capital than in Afghanistan. I would imagine most of what;s left in Afghanistan are trainers.

I don't think there should be a big whoopee do about pulling or leaving that small force. We'll still send a ton of money and other supplies to the present Afghan government. We fought a very smart war there in the beginning, letting the 13 tribe Northern Alliance doing the ground fighting, we providing a few SF and paramilitary advisors and lots of air power. That worked, they, we drove the Taliban out of the country.

Then came the big mistake in my opinion, nation building. There really wasn't a nation there. You had sections of Afghanistan ruled over by the different tribes and no central government to speak of. The Afghani or at least the Northern alliance didn't want to be ruled over by a member of another tribe. That's why they were fighting the Taliban in the first place. We went in to get UBL.

All the tribes of the Northern Alliance wanted after they drove the Taliban out was to go back to their home, their tribes portion of Afghanistan and be ruled over by their tribal leaders and elders. Our nation building put a halt to that, we installed a government to rule over them which meant another tribal leader ruling over their tribe which is what they were fighting against in the first place. We didn't respect the wants of the Afghans.

It's a long story which would take a book. A quick synopsis, we screwed up in national building and forcing democracy on a people, the different tribes that didn't want it. We always seems to know whats best for others and always seem to force our ideals on them even when they don't want our ideals or form of government.

I think the end result is the Taliban will return and there will be a very long war as other tribes go into the mountains to fight them. It will be a return to where Afghanistan was prior to us setting foot in that country. There was a much better way to ensure the Taliban never regained their control after the Northern alliance drove them out without getting involved in nation building. No need for any nation building and or to insert more than a 100,000 troops and let the Afghani themselves choose the type of government they wanted.

I never understood why we thought sending a large military force into Afghanistan to root out a handful of renegade terrorists was a good idea in the first place. It seemed like a superficial excuse to do something else that was such a bad idea that they couldn't talk about it.

A better bad idea would have simply put a team of Black Ops assassins after Al Qaida while keeping mum.

I'm guessing the "nation-building" was a bad idea intended to try to control oil and strategic minerals in the region - 911 was the excuse.

I think the USSR had similar plans back in the day.

Occupations, for whatever the reason, seldom work out in the long term.

People tend to forget. Afghanistan is called the Destroyer of Empires for reason. They beat Alexander the Great, the UK, the Russians, AND the Americans (and most in between). They won because they got rid of the invaders and they are expert at that. We lost because we were determined to help them (whilst slaughtering thousands) Some, like China, understand this. Others, convinced of their greatness, just keep trying. The smart ones get out, the stubborn, ignorant and greedy just take a little more time. We have stayed twice as long as Russia because we had two trillion dollars to spend on 'helping' rather than, for instance, our infrastructure as well as the lives of the soldiers spent in this little endeavor.

I think our qualifications were stubbornness and ignorance.

The "purpose" of the Afghani Conflict was to blow up ordnance and munitions created by the Military Industrial Complex so that more would need to be ordered and stockpiled.

The war industry requires constant war. If not there, then someplace else.

For me, the idea was to go get UBL in Afghanistan and since the Taliban were protecting and giving UBL safe haven, we sided with the Northern Alliance. I firmly believe had the Taliban handed over UBL, we never would have got involved in Afghanistan. Backing the Northern Alliance against the Taliban was the quickest way to get at UBL.

But UBL fled to the Pakistani Mountains with the Pakistani ISI protecting and helping him.

I suspect that the last two posting on this makes the case that American simply had no plan going in and no definition of success. We just wanted to kill the people for 9/11. We did that one in spades and then wanted to 'help' them using our military. What I really don't understand is why other nations will let us in when we are there to help with our military. When we help, with our military, a LOT of people die!

I think their problem is that they want our money and don't understand that, in some instances, that money comes with troops. When that happens disaster follows.

Yes. Lots of Taliban, and ISIS fighters, for example.

In Afghanistan, we made an incredibly bad deal, and we are going to get attacked anyway. Huzzah.

Leaving Afghanistan...