Despite $900 Billion Spent, 173k killed, Afghanistan Continues to Deteriorate - Polidicks

Afghanistan isn't a country that's remotely easy to try and introduce ideas to at all. Maybe the normal center centers it's easier to get across the idea of Democracy, or public works. But when you get away from all of that you realize just how isolated that place is. Famous example of this is that many Afghani villagers thought the US Forces were the Soviets returning or didn't even realize the WTC were destroyed. Example from a book I read called "Out of the Mountains" was that the author when he was in the military or contractor(whichever) they had set up a new water treatment planet. Ya know give clean water to the local villages, and shockingly another village was pretty pissed that THIS VILLAGE got the treatment planet. Because it gave the villagers jobs to do and some money to work for, and they were mad that they didn't get it. You know what they did right? They started assisting the Taliban in that area because they thought they were getting slighted. Numerous other examples are of locals or even the Taliban destroying recently paved roads,medical clinics,etc,etc because they didn't want the US to take away their life blood. Uneducated Afghani farmers who can be used to grow opium so the Taliban can sell it.

Afghanistan is a perfect example of a place where intervening hurts more than it helps (which is often, especially in militarily occupied nations). Too bad the new government isn't much better. Just as corrupt, even more incompetent and full of cowards. Pretty much all that the US intervention has achieved (besides wasting a lot of time, lives, and resources) is to make the Afghan people hate Americans more than the Chinese or Russians.

The current government isn't a radical Islamic state that commits terrorist attacks though right? The problem before was that the government of Afghanistan hated Americans and killed 3,000 of them. Plus, don't women have increasingly more right in Afghanistan today than in 2000?

Well until the invasion, the vast bulk of the Afghan population had little interest in killing Americans or collaborating with terrorists to kill them (since they were overseas). Now Americans have come to their country, kill their wives, sons, husbands, nieces, etc and openly reward corrupt government officials and politicians who the Afghan people hate. The consequence of this has been to teach the Afghans how to hate Americans very effectively and have a direct interest in opposing them however they can. Whereas before the Taliban would find it hard to garner up support to attack an overseas country has doesn't do much in Afghanistan, the modern Moslem insurgent can easily point to the American soldiers urinating on corpses or singing as they cheerily drone strike weddings if he wants to convince people to hate America. Matters continue to worsen as well. If the current government is better, why is it consistently losing support from the population at large? It is propped up almost entirely by the Americans and should the Americans leave it would instantly implode (despite 17 years of attempting to build a stable and functioning government). And are womens rights improving? Given that violence against women is increasing in Afghanistan and that the government is incapable of enforcing the laws which grant women equality in practice this would speak badly by itself. But even worse is that the "official" government is either stalling or rolling back the reforms now anyways, making the entire argument rather shaky. How has Afghanistan improved or gotten better for most people since the fall of the Taliban? Given that the Afghanistan government has lost control of half the country and continues to decline everyday, it's pretty obvious what they think. The rate things are going, it won't be long before we are going to be talking about Kabul falling into insurgent hands once more.

you're right we should've just let the Taliban continue to exist and let them get away with 9/11

You need to stop watching and getting your worldviews from movies dude. The Taliban aren't some network of villains, they are a splintered group of mobsters. When the US went into Afghanistan, the regular people of the country witnessed helicopters, tanks and humvees moving from town to town. If this was your country you would do the same and pick up arms. The Afghans have seen their country invaded countless times and each time they have fought and killed the invaders in such numbers that occupying the land is no longer a viable option. In NATO's time there, we've done nothing but breed more extremism and gained more enemies from the sons of dead fathers. They don't understand our world, they don't know what we are offering them. If you've listened to any Veteran that has come back from this war you would understand this in some part.

Are you saying, however, that the United State should not have retaliated against the Taliban for an attack on US Soil which resulted in 3,000+ dead Americans? What other choices did we have

It's kind of awkward because it was Al-Qaeda that claimed responsibility for that attack.

The Taliban are bad dudes. They terrorize the populace, killing people, extorting them, threatening them, all kinds of heinous shit. If anything, right now what we are doing is just trying to root them out, while maintaining our strategic foothold here. They didn't do 9/11, but our objectives have really changed in 17 years. Now it is just a fight against the Taliban, ISIS-K, and the Haqqani Network.

Okay, but we didn't go into Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. We went in to get bin Laden, which we did. You don't get move the goalposts afterwards and say "hey while we're here let's fight these dudes too." Get approval from Congress to stay in. The Taliban are a guerrilla army that controls almost half the country. You're not going to root them out. Stop wasting lives and money. "Maintain our strategic foothold" what gives us the right to do permanent military occupation?

It turned into a country building project due to a lot of factors, not the least of which was the "you break it, you buy it" mentality where people were upset at the damage the initial invasion caused, and called on us to rebuild it. Then when we were trying to build stuff in the country, it kept getting blown up by the Taliban. It turned into a giant mess where if we just up and leave, people will get bent out of shape that we left without ensuring total stability. If we stay, people will ask what the point is of us staying there. Damned if we do, damned if we don't. I'm not saying we SHOULD stay, I'm just saying why we are still here. I can't change it. That's up to a lot of people that make a hell of a lot more money than I do.

the invasion and subsequent occupation of the country for an entire generation is the best argument in favour of the talibans existence

Listen, I know that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," but the Taliban are legitimately bad people. The local populace doesn't want them around so much. They are pretty tired of being threatened and bombed by them. Don't forget that. We will leave eventually, but I hope the Taliban just don't control the country otherwise we will be right back here, as with Iraq and ISIS.

I mean, if the alternative is to waste 900 billion dollars and 173k people.... yes? The people who died in 9/11 are no closer to being alive as they were the day after.

Fucking lol you have LITERALLY no idea what you're talking about in any way at all ever anywhere. No-one's objective is to "root out" an organization that essentially has most of the country's backing thanks mostly due to your own actions.

I mean, it's not like I'm fighting them right now and know what the current disposition towards the US forces is from the locals or anything. Plus that statistic is overall deaths in the entire war, not strictly US caused casualties. You don't know as much as you think you do, your thoughts just colored from vague perceptions of the conflict. Believe what you want, but trust me when I say that the Afghanis don't hate us nearly as much as you think they do. The Taliban victimize the populace, beating, killing, raping, stealing, and exploiting them. The Taliban\Haqqani Network control perhaps 8% of the country. They aren't supported to the scale in which you believe. Calm down a moment, and think critically instead of flying off the handle like that.

This. Americans, Brits, Estonians and other NATO forces that were in the region all to recognize that their actions in both Iraq & Afghanistan were illegal unsanctioned wars. We were in Iraq because Saddam was going to ditch the Petrodollar and use gold bullion as the trading currency, same with Libya. This would have had disastrous consequences on the west for many economic reasons. Mainly because the US doesn't have any gold left, they sold it all, and Iraq and Libya are absolutely full of it. They wouldn't have been playing by the same rules and start a trend that would ruin the US economy. Iran is the same at the moment, why do you think there is such hatred for them when our allies Saudi Arabia are measurably alot more immoral? All of this stuff is well documented by the better journalists of our time. If you think you went into Afghanistan looking for Bin Laden, you are grossly mistaken. One man was needed to up recruitment and support for this war, it's why you see all the Hollywood propaganda movies on the subject. It's hard to admit that this stuff happens in the West, but we are not the good guys and have not been for some time, there are no good guys.

You uh, you guys know the CIA historically traded arms to Afghan rebels for heroin right? That was a big part of the US's interference in the Sov-Afghan conflict. Granted I don't think it's much of a concern now but he at least has historical basis to make assumptions. Granted they're unrealistic assumptions but it's not illogical.

The Invasion of Afghanistan was a UN sanctioned-war, though. The invasion of Iraq was not.

The Afghan government didn't do shit lol, Al Queada was just hiding there (But they were also hiding in Pakistan.) Saudis bear more responsibility than Afghan government, considering they were the the ones who funded Al Queada in the first place.

You're right about Afghanistan, my bad, getting carried away with my podium level preaching there. I'd love to back it up, it's all really great reading material and the fact people don't know this shit just shines a light on how our media operates. Hillary Emails Reveal True Motive for Libya Intervention | Forei.. (Libya, gold standard) Baghdad booms as Saddam turns sanctions into gold | World news |.. (not related to gold standard but a wonderful article to read about Saddams success pre invasion 2001) http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512,00.html (Saddam moves from USD to Euro, gold standard was going to be adopted after this because Europe wasn't playing ball, year 2000) I'll dig around for the information Sadam was moving to gold standard because obviously the EU and US were so tied globally that it wasn't going to go down how he wanted it to. He wanted to get away from the USD prior to invasion. It's why there was such a large stockpile of gold accruing in the years leading up to invasion, and why Iraq had a boom of wealth before the USA came in like a wrecking ball. I

You're both wrong; the Taliban were giving aid to Al Qaeda. The legal paradigm shifted after 9/11 from seeing terrorism as a criminal justice issue to a military issue; terrorism became a weapon which the Taliban government used against us.

if the taliban are legitimately bad for killing afghans and oppressing the people, what does that make the afghan government (which does both on a bigger scale) and the american government (which explicitly supports and props up the afghan government)? if the local population doesn't want them around, why do they support them more than the "official" government which they expressly hate? if they are tired of being threatened and bombed, i can imagine they are probably tired of americans sending drones to bomb them too "we will leave eventually" the united states has been in afghanistan twice as long as the soviet union. it has been 17 years and not a single step forwards has been made in regards to ending the conflict, restoring peace and order, and having a functioning government. how much longer should americans send their children to go die there? 20 years? 30? 40? how long are you willing to keep this pointless endeavor going for?

The vast majority of opioids are synthetic and not based on opium at all. Vicodin (hydrocodone), Oxycontin (Oxycodone) and many other opioids are not necessarily the same things as opiates. Morphine, Heroin (diamorphine) and things like codeine do derive from opium, and there may be some corruption with certain officials in Afghanistan profiting from the trade in some clandestine way, but I find it extremely unlikely that this is mandated at a governmental level in the states, and you can trust that I have very little confidence in the US to not be dicks, so I'm not just defending them for the sake of it. TL;DR: opioid crisis is almost all due to synthetic drugs that don't use opium at all.

Did you listen to the diplomat I posted where he states the UK and Oil companies tried to hire the Taliban before the invasion of Afghanistan to secure the pipelines, which they refused? Do you not believe him or do you think this is unrelated?

Like I said, I personally don't care about the UK's motivations for entering Afghanistan, since I know there's a long history there. Additionally, I think its importance to the United States motivations is dwarfed substantially by 9/11

With that logic you'd be happy to say that the UK government would have been working with, and in the knowledge of the 9/11 attackers to further western oil and gas security the attackers of Sept 11th. We would be hiring security guards the USA wished to kill, when we were working bilaterally the entire way through the operation of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

I'm almost certainly sure that the UK has no ethical issues working with murderers, just like the USA

That wasn't quite my point, but we'll leave it there I guess.

A wise man once told me that 9/11 couldn't have happened the way it did due to how gravity works, so my strong conviction is that oil and gas couldn't actually ever leave the ground due to how it would need to push through hundreds of metres of air with no energy. Pressure isn't real either. But seriously, let's move this conversation away from 9/11 because the last thread where that happened turned into a complete disaster.