Someone wanna give me a decent argument against 1.) why we shouldn't have invaded afghanistan or 2.) why we shouldn't be there now?
RIP the several TENS of thousands of Afghan civilians that died because of this fucking retarded war.
And at this rate, the enlistees children will be able to enlist.
It’s a convenient forever war for those that profit from it. What’s a few thousand deaths for regular bumps for the military complex and easy votes in the name of national security?
That's not a very compelling argument, imo. It was written without any actual information about the situation and is only a cynical prediction based on the politics surrounding terrorism from the 1990s
Why should you have invaded afghanistan? Why should you be there now?
The easy answer is to give the fanatics an easy target to attack (That also shoots back) rather than continue trying to kill americans here
A better question is why the fuck did we invade Iraq
because the only reason it was started and continues to this day is to justify funneling billions into the war industry
We went in to get bin Laden. That I understand. We got bin Laden seven fucking years ago. Mission accomplished. You tell me why we should stay.
We invaded because the Taliban regime was sponsoring and harboring the terrorist group which attacked us. 9/11 changed the paradigm from viewing Al Qaeda as a criminal element to viewing them as a military element of the Taliban government. Countries like Sudan and Afghanistan giving aid to AL Qaeda led to 9/11, and so we treated 9/11 as an act of war by the Taliban against the United States. As to why we should be there now, I legitimately don't know if we should or not but I have no problem having invaded in the first place
Because invading a whole country for the purpose of delaying the inevitable catastrophic collapse of your economy and everything else due to your own faulty decisions, a natural process in civilizations, to feed your own military-industrial complex, due to a bullshit reason (muh harboring terrorist is not an argument, if it was, nuke Pakistan with 100% casualties fucking immediately), the real reason being that you need more puppet states for your collection, and that failed miserably, just like every single military operation the US ever undertook since the end of WW2.
Like I said, it's a massive fuckup. Guess what, the fact that the enemy surrendered and now you get to install progressive governments will not make the nation suddenly develop itself to eclipse all it's neighbors and it's all rainbows and sunshine. Maybe if you did that in some western European country it might work, but there is another tenet that everyone is indisputably equal (which you turn into everyone is the fucking same 100%) leads you to think that a bunch of villagers with an IQ of 80 will suddenly support any liberalization you shovel down their throats. Hearts and minds don't work in 90% of the cases. If I myself controlled all aspects of the invasion, then Afghanistan might have improved by now. You can always actually do it right, but then it would require your rulers to actually move their asses.
I think we should pull all of our troops out and just use spies to keep track of possible terrorist threats.
I remember an interesting comment from a senior British officer at the time that they actually made quite a lot of progress in Afghanistan, had the trust of the local people and thought they would be able to achieve their goals. The the Iraq war started and they no longer had the resources or manpower to protect the people they'd been working with - they had to withdraw to more defensible positions. The people who'd helped them were suddenly abandoned to militants who took back the territory and were not kind to anyone who worked with coalition forces. It's easy for the US to go in and invade a country, it's a lot harder to rebuild it - there's rarely the appetite for the years of work required.
If you guys didn't ruin Soviet Union's attempt this whole mess wouldn't even exist in the first place.
That was basically what Germany's foreign minister had to say about the invasion of Iraq. Germany had troops in Afghanistan but refused to follow into Iraq on the grounds that we were leaving an unfinished job in Afghanistan and had a questionable case for moving against Iraq.
Because it was a knee jerk reaction to 9/11 and we basically never had a solid plan to begin with and still don’t? Or at least from what I can tell, there wasn’t any real plan aside from “let the hajis hit the floor”. There was also never an official declaration of war approved by congress.
As previously mentioned, there doesn’t seem to be any real plan. There was no plan going in, and there’s no plan on an exit strategy which won’t leave the area worse off than when we came in. We shouldn’t be there now, but since the damage has already been done, pulling out without seeing things through would be worse, so now we’re stuck there.
At risk of sounding like a conspirators, I’m willing to bet a lot of special interests and defense contractors are comfortable with things staying as they are, so we’re not going to see any end to this conflict for decades if ever.
We had this conversation today at work. Mad to think there's adults who don't don't remember 9/11 happening, they've only ever lived in a post 9/11 world of tiny liquids on planes
Afghanistan (and previously, Sudan) was giving material comfort to Al Qaeda by letting them stay and train in Afghanistan. Saudi arabia should be punished, but that doesn't mean the Taliban were any less culpable
Afghanistan is a center for the global drugs trade and is used as a staging ground for terrorism and narcoterrorism elsewhere in the world. It's just across the border from Pakistan which we definitely DON'T want falling to a terrorist regime given its proximity to India and nuclear arsenal.
Not justifying the war in Afghanistan, just trying to give my two cents as to why people want to continue to try and tame it.
17 years after being invaded, afghanistan has a population that hates the west more than ever, their government is even shittier, there are rapes on a similarly reprehensible scale to that of england, south africa, botswana, or sweden (and just as often covered up)
half the countryside has fallen back into the hands of the terrorists despite the US government maintaining over 10,000 men there (obama lied about taking troops out, and trump has increased them) to do the Sisyphean effort of creating a modern army. the afghanistan government is utterly useless and loathed by the people, its sole charge having been to maintain a basic modicum of infrastructure built by the endless billions poured into the country by clueless westerners (which it has cocked up at spectacularly).
billions of dollars continue to flow into the country, whereupon they purchase the drugs that flow on into the veins of the afghan "army". it is not so much an army as it is a mob of one quarter of a million drug dealers, pushers, rapists, murderers, cowards, deserters, corrupt, and theft (and some i assume are good people). the "grateful" afghans show their appreciation for the USA by literally stealing fuel, munitions, weaponry, and anything else not nailed down that they either take with them as they run to the taliban or sell into the black market.
after 17 fucking YEARS there are still a great number of clueless retards who think that this can be salvaged or even won, a good example those craven drone operators who (on account of being too useless to even pilot an aircraft) do not even have the decency to be within the same airspace as the orphanages and weddings they are shelling in the hopes that it will inspire the afghans not to hate you more, but rather to suddenly accept western norms and values and immediately run home to their wives and goats to proclaim them free to choose their own destinies and have the right to consent to sexual advances
anybody who thinks that the united states should continue sending boys to die in afghanistan so that other boys may continue to be unceasingly raped by afghan officials, then go and join the army and ask to be posted there so you can see for yourself the futility of your idiocy
Are you implying the England and Sweden have 3rd world levels of rape?
fine work on ignoring every other point about how the afghanistan government is terrible and constantly degenerating
ignoring everything else, the afghanistan government (the one that controls half the country and is constantly losing ground) these days routinely executes people without giving them trials.
They already killed 3,000 people by that point I think they felt pretty justified in doing jihad against the United States
After 9/11, the goal was to remove the Taliban from power in Kabul and catch Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. Arguably these are both done but of course the Taliban retains control in Tribal areas, and bin Laden fled from Afghanistan to Pakistan
