Not having to clutter the forum with nonsense posts.

I'd like to see the population get to the point where almost nothing the US military does is supported. — Xtrix

I kinda have to agree with @frank on this one. America's fetish is their military culture. There are few other countries in the world which has a culture so militarized as America's, and it's not surprising given that America's prosperous existence depends on its brutalizing of other countries. They prey on school children and the poor. I'm not even sure Americans can see how fucked up it is until they actual step out from it. And my point is just that materialist one: this is not a war of 'ideas'. No amount of 'war bad!' moralizing is going to effect an iota of change. Until the very structure of American political existence is altered - the structure of material incentives and compulsions - is changed, appealing to 'values' and 'morals' is a lost cause. When Biden's cabinet is filled to the brim with former Lockheed and Raytheon execs, the idea that a bit of tut-tuting will make a difference is indistinguishable from, well, smoking crack.

@1 Brother James has been banned for poor post quality.

Also worth quoting a bit out of Raymond Geuss' essay back in 2004:

"For a brief moment after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in 2001, it seemed as if the shock of these events might bring about a general process of reflection by Americans on the place of the United States in the wider world. Unfortunately, the form this reflection eventually took was self-defeating. One normal way of going about determining why someone did something is to ask the person in question. The question why Al-Qaeda bombed the Pentagon and the World Trade Center has a relatively clear answer: “They say they did it because of U.S. support for the corrupt Saudi monarchy and the garrisoning of American troops in Saudi Arabia.” One might then expect people to start asking why U.S. troops should be in Saudi Arabia anyway, why exactly control of this region is so important, and finally, how much real power the United States has and how it can be best deployed.

Instead public discussion almost immediately began to focus on elaborating various fantasies about Islamic fundamentalism, “their” hatred of “our” values, freedom, and way of life, etc. The creation of imaginary hate figures may give some immediate psychic satisfaction, but in the long run it only spreads and increases confusion and aggression. Troops can in principle be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia, policy toward the Saudi monarchy can change, but how can one deal in a satisfactory way with inherently spectral “Islamic terror”? It no doubt suits some political circles in the United States that the population continue to be fearful, mystified, and frustrated, the better to gain their acquiescence in various further military operations, but it is hard to believe that this kind of emotional and cognitive derangement of the population contributes to increasing U.S. political power."

That was back in 2004. Has the end of the Afghanistan adventure prompted the kinds of questions Geuss asks above? Still no. And where is the vindication of Julian Assange? Where is that conversation? The wrong questions are still being asked. Americans don't learn. They won't. Not until their population is starving and on the edge of utter destitution will any of these questions even begin to be asked.

But you agree, I think, that there are differences between the American invasion of South Vietnam and Gulf/Iraq Wars in terms of popular resistance. There was none whatsoever in the 50s — Xtrix

In the 50s perhaps, but the anti-war sentiment that grew during Vietnam was legendary and historical. Perhaps the filter though which I understand the scale of those movements is through rose colored-glasses, but if there's a difference in popular resistance it strikes me as exactly the opposite today. I'm not sure that one can, in fact, speak of a coherent anti-war movement in the US today at all. It strikes me that the population there is even more, and not less docile than before. Moreover, the anti-war movement back then also had the advantage of linking across class and race issues as well. MLK was as much a beacon of the anti-war movement as he was paragon of civil rights and a socialist.

What dribs and drabs of any anti-war movement in the US today remains cloistered in it's own little issue-hole (most forcefully it seems, by conservative voices who want to 'bring our boys home'), and while everyone is now crawling out of the woodwork when the stakes have evaporated, Afghanistan was more or less a matter of resignation among the population than any sort of resistance, as far as I can tell. And this translates to the fact that the the Afghanistan post-mortem that everyone is conducting has barely been made to bear on America's other existing forever-war in Iraq. Yet if Afghanistan was a wealth transfer and a fuck-up, what does anyone think Iraq is? Where the the voices clamoring to say: now do Iraq next? But business there is still too good.

I'd argue this is the moral component, and has indeed changed -- it's less successful than it was a few generations ago. — Xtrix

Yes, but I also think it's less relevant. I think Americans realize now just how little say they have in anything their state does, and even those who buy the moral argument realize how little purchase it has. It's cynicism all around. Again, the overwhelming affect seems resignation and impotence, not resistance. And especially not compared to the anti-war movement against Vietnam. I still remember the smugness with which Bush assessed the early anti-war demonstrations against Iraq as a 'celebration of America's freedoms' of some such - he may as well have told all the protestors to pound sand for all he gave a shit. And they kind did after that. So I'm really not convinced by this point that popular resistance is more charged. If anything, it seems far less so.

Last I checked the only people quibbling about labels were morons who would rather gatekeep their precious little Nouns than postmortem America's closing down of their Afghan business franchise.

Probably some proxy war with China over in Africa or something. But considering US invasions have never been based on facts but only ever sheer opportunism it's basically impossible to say. Reasons will be fabricated from the ground up - as they were in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghaistan - and there is no predictive ability in the world that can work with that.

I hope the American population once again learns a hard lesson. — Xtrix

Anyone who expects America to 'learn a lesson' has not learnt the lesson that Americans don't learn lessons. That the US is having a redo of Vietnam is not an accident. It will take nothing less than the crumbling of US empire for this kind of thing to stop. Imperialism doesn't disappear overnight because people have a change of heart. It disappears when the money making potential dries up, and boy has the money making potential not dried up.

Or put differently: the lessons to be learnt from Afganistan are not moral. They are political and economic.

The only thing I wonder about is why Biden was so confident when it is sure that such remarks would fly in his face only weeks or moths later. — Tobias

Trump proved you could lie about things right in front of everyone's face and have most of the country swallow it there and then. Presidents lie routinely. Biden is simply following a grand tradition. Accountability is simply lacking.

Fun fact: women were allowed to vote in Afghanistan before the US.

https://centralasiainstitute.org/womens-voting-rights/

The Afghan king with his friendly neighbors: — ssu

Indeed. The Afghans appealed to the Soviets for help because the Americans were doing such a good job at helping the reactionary feudal opium growers who were trying to fuck over the nation - and who eventually succeeded, thanks to the US.

It's fun to watch you try and cast about and blame on every other agent but the US - but what else to expect from a bootlicking shill for power.

Not to think of others as important actors with their own agendas. — ssu

Well the Afghan people had modernizing agendas before the US decided that the opium growers and feudal landlords ought not be displaced because the US hates democracy and fucked them. And of course the said opium growers and feudal landlords had their own agendas which found common cause with the US, all too happy to accept their support in fucking over the Afghan people. So you're quite wrong.

For you there all just a bunch of ragheads — ssu

Interesting projection there. You must be confusing me for @frank's overt racism.

But yeah, almost everything that is shit in the Middle East is a direct result of American interference.

I was under the impression that the CIA backed the mujahedeen to battle the Soviets that then became the Taliban. — Shawn

Correct. @ssu is largely talking out of his ass.

Wait till you find out about how America treats its own citizens. Just last year they had enormous, nationwide protests against the local regime over continued state brutality against minorities which were promptly put down with all manner of violence. Now the authorities send their children into schools while forbidding them to take protective measures during a global pandemic. They install rapists and sexual abusers as their heads of state and high judiciary. And the natives are under the impression that they live in a democracy. It's wild over there.

But I'm a big tent kinda guy - Taliban, Americans, rubbish one and all. Although only one of these is running a world empire that continually props up dictators and genocidal states all across the globe. Which includes, of course, the very Taliban whom the US helped to usher into existence, with great fanfare.

But as there will be a debate — ssu

Among morons, sure.

Sure, it's granted that far more Afghanis died for American colonial designs than Americans. America's trail of dead is multicultural. A rainbow coalition of dead. Par for the course for the most murderous nation on the planet. I'm pretty sure not even the Taliban could have matched the number of Afghan deaths attributable to American violence had they not been temporarily put in the sin bin for the last 20 years.

Yet another excellent point comrade. Keep 'em coming.

Do notice that during that time the DJIA has gone up well over 400% during that time and the Nasdaq 900%. So basically Raytheon has been a shitty investment, General Dynamics and Boeing average. Nothing close to Internet companies. — ssu

OK sure, dead American soldiers died for not just defense stocks but incredibly shitty defense stocks. Excellent point comrade. Didn't think they could have died in more vain than they already have, but there you go.

A good recruitment slogan, no? Join the military! Die for below-average ROI.

Joe Biden too, especially because of his unfounded optimism regarding the Afghan military. — Tobias

Biden did not have 'optimism' regarding the Afghan military. He simply lied, outright.

Which to be fair is nothing new considering they have been lying since day 1.

Dead American soldiers - most of whom were probably poor and optionless - gave their lives for this and nothing else:

Pls America kindly fuck off from the face of the Earth outside of America kthx.

Afghanistan was not a waste or a loss or failure.

It was an absolute success.

Every time someone calls it a failure, they have no fucking clue what the purpose of the colonial occupation of Afghanistan was for.

From a former US Vet:

"I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment. ... The overwhelming impression I got — it didn’t occur to me that we were purposefully delivering this equipment into the hands of al Qaeda, or whatever. But the sense that I got was: Oh, well, the purpose of us being here is to justify pouring mountains of cash into the pockets of contractors — the manufacturers of this equipment. The incentive structure was, “Lose shit, because then it’ll have to be replaced. We’ll have to send more out there.”

I would sit in staff meetings where we would talk about, OK, this month we sent 14 armored Humvees down to Helmand Province for the Border Patrol. And 12 of those 14 Humvees along the way went missing — or, quote unquote, broke down — and were disabled. And that was a regular thing. Like the majority of shit we were adding to the inventory of these Border Patrol units, just wasn’t even making it there. I mean, it seemed like the whole thing was just a big setup for contractors to be given license to fleece us. As far as the US military presence there — I just viewed it as a big money funneling operation."

https://mtracey.substack.com/p/a-big-money-funneling-operation-afghanistan

All of this seems wildly off topic. My point is simply that America has been responsible for making Afghanistan the hell hole it is today, and while its withdrawal is a good thing in the long run, the 'madness' taking place right now is one more twist of the knife long held into the belly of the Afghan state by American maleficence.

People praising Biden for finally putting an end to the game of Afghan hot potato are like those praising Jeffrey Dahmer for promising to finally stop dismemebering young boys; except Biden was responsible for deaths on an order of magnitude worse, and far more horrific. Along with the rest of the US state.

Or maybe I make snide remarks like that because the democratic party is one half of a right-wing ratchet mechanism that is dragging your miserable nation into fascism.

, what should instead be done is to find, among its members, a person who is willing to engage in their role as an executive or legislator as if they were on a mission from God — thewonder

The democratic party is the graveyard of Left politics in the US. It exists to coopt, diffuse, and suck-in any viable left energy. It's a black hole. It can rot for all I care.

What might you have done with it? — Banno

I'm not sure it would matter other than a game of speculative fantasy.

The US has never given a shit about international law and squabbling about this or that internal agent is a game for idiots.

I also just simply don't quite know if it was the actual Carter administration, as Jimmy Carter had changed much of our Cold War policy as well as to have established the Church Committee, or our intelligence service who had initiated our involvement with the mujahedeen. That could have been an administrative decision on the part of Carter, himself, or something that the CIA just kind of did without any real oversight whatsoever. — thewonder

I don't particularly think the distinction is of any import. Weather the CIA or Carter himself, if not one than the other, as has always been the murderous nature of US foreign policy. Petty bureaucratic squabbling about the internal mechanics of empire make no difference to those dead and immiserated as a result of it. No one particularly gives a shit about assigning more or less blame to the SS or the Wehrmacht.

So what else might you have been able to do with 5.6 trillion dollars...? — Banno

I'll bite, kinda. The problem with this is that you assume that that money didn't go exactly where it was supposed to go. Straight into the hands of military contractors and pharmaceutical execs for whom the war has been a financial bonanza, paid for by tax dollars. People keep talking about this money as though it was a waste, or misallocated. It wasn't. It went precisely where it was designed to go. People asking 'where else could it have gone?' miss the point. Why anyone would even think it could have gone anywhere else, is the mystery.

Or for those less Tweet inclined:

Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers. ... National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country--that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.

In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.

The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2008/12/02/afghanistan-another-untold-story

The best thing America can do for Afghanistan right now is to continue to stay fucked right off and continue staying fucked right off forever until the US sinks into the sea.

Was the US responsible for the USSR being there for 10 years? — Bitter Crank

Quite literally yes.

(I can't figure out how to quote Tweet the Afghanistan stuff alone without the Somalia stuff, but consider the Somalia stuff bonus content for how shit the US is):

the Taleban was a military objective to defeat for the Bush idiots. So simply just taking out Osama wouldn't do. Besides, there is still doctor Aiman Al-Zawahiri around. — ssu

There's always someone with a scary exotic name around. The US doesn't need an excuse to be shitty, murderous nation. They will find one regardless.

But I think that the collapse of Afghanistan will encourage muslim insurgents everywhere and IS will also reappear. And that is the last thing the Biden administration wants to admit. — ssu

US intervention anywhere has always perpetuated cycles of violence and end up coming home to roost. It's an iron law of the universe no different to e=mc2. The tragedy is not that the US is pulling out now but that it didn't do it a decade earlier when they found Osama in *check notes* Pakistan.

Agreed. Every single country that cheerled and participated in the US colonization of Afghanistan now owes its refugees not only legal asylum, but housing, social security, language-training, educational resources, and job guarantees, at the least. The US most of all, followed closely by the UK and Australia. That's the conversation that needs to be happening. Not "oh look at these terrible savage Taliban taking over the country oh how terrible". Like, please. The fact that the Taliban were going to take over the country was a fact as immovable as the sun being hot. Anyone surprised by that fact has not been paying attention. It's like being horrified at gravity.

Anyone who actually gives a shit about 'women and children' needs to ask about the sway of the arms industrial complex in the US. Its status as the No#1 weapon exporter in the world. The fact that it spends half its budget on wars that are not won, but end up in the hands of corporations and warlords. The US leaves a trail of death everywhere it goes. Anyone who knows anything about anything knows this. Even now, its only response has been to continue to bomb the shit out of Afghanistan, because well, the money spent on those bombs may as well go somewhere, considering everyone knows they will be entirely ineffective - apart from probably killing more civilians and further radicalizing more locals:

"But what of the United States? Its deployment of B-52 bombers, Reaper drones and AC-130 gunships are a brutal response by a failing, flailing imperial power to a historic, humiliating defeat. The United States does not flinch from committing mass murder against its enemies. Just look at the U.S.-led destruction of Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria. How many Americans even know about the officially-sanctioned massacre of civilians that Iraqi forces committed when the U.S.-led coalition finally took control of Mosul in 2017, after President Trump said it should “take out the families” of Islamic State fighters?

Twenty years after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld committed a full range of war crimes, from torture and the deliberate killing of civilians to the “supreme international crime” of aggression, Biden is clearly no more concerned than they were with criminal accountability or the judgment of history. But even from the most pragmatic and callous point of view, what can continued aerial bombardment of Afghan cities accomplish, besides a final but futile climax to the 20-year-long U.S. slaughter of Afghans by over 80,000 American bombs and missiles?".

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/13/biden-must-call-off-the-b-52s-bombing-afghan-cities/

It's really tiring to see all these sad liberal readings of the siutation as a 'lack of foresight' or 'waste of resources' or 'tragedy'. All this discourse does it frame the situation in terms of some kind of accident or 'absence' that could been remedied if only such and such happened or something. It retains an utterly naive faith that in general, things were going the right way or some such.

But the conversaion needs to be changed from any sense of 'lack' or 'absence' into a positive one: the US does not, and never has, given a shit about what happens to Afghanistan. The US had twenty years, two decades, to make plans. The fact that any semblence of Afghan government all but evaporated in under a week tell you all you need to know. The descent into disorder was something that was allowed to happen. It was, if not planned for, then at least expected and totally foreseeable.

As for the 'waste of trillions of dollars' and/or 'time', again, you have to be a totally propagandized moron to think a single dollar was wasted. All of it went straight out of the pockets of US citizens to American arms manufacturers and opiate producers - or else the local warlords with whom deals were cut to prolong the madness. It's not an accident that in every photo of the Taliban now circulating, their weapon of choice is no longer the AK-47 but the m4. Look at the guns these people are holding:.



That will be the lasting US legacy in Afghanistan. Just as it was the last time around, when US intervention created the same terrorist groups that flew planes straight into the heart of downtown NY. Every time some naive idiot bleets about or sheds crocodile tears about 'saving woman and children' without at the same time pointing the finger straight at the toxic and malevolent complicity of the US in creating the situation in which those precious women and children will be subject to inhumanity, they can be safely ignored. They do not, and have never, given a shit about Afghani women and children.

To think that one can speak of 'madness rolling over Afghanistan' - as if it hasn't been twenty years of madness of which this is simply the culmination - is political moronism in the extreme.

Imagine citing war criminal George fucking Bush as an authoratative source on anything whatsoever.

It was fantastic. I love how so many of the book's 'protagonists' were not human - fire, waterways, rats, plagues, walls, food etc. It really puts nature front and center of politics in a way that I often take too for granted. He's also a very engaging writer in general.

He does have a few years to recover — thewonder

The democrats recently rolled over on letting Republicans basically pick their voters, so they will lose the senate next year. After which the dems will be useless not by choice but by necessity. After which the Republicans will win again, and the US will continue down the shitter that the election of Joe Biden more or less guaranteed.