Man. Blood, boiling.
A great summary of what happened from a civilian pov:
It seems to be a variation on the old “we had to destroy the village to save it.” Better dead by US drones than alive and tainted by Taliban.
Cue the inevitable “if only we had tried harder we would have won!” takes.
I had a professor in my first stint in graduate school at Virginia. He was a US Army veteran, retired as a light colonel I think, and had fought in Vietnam. The course was on Vietnam, and one of the things he emphasized was the absurdity of many of the arguments that were then common in the military and security community about our loss in Southeast Asia. He specifically called out the claims that we lost because our bombing campaigns were hindered by political considerations. He pointed out that we not only dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we dropped in all of WWII, but that by 1972 or so there was literally almost nothing left to bomb. Not to mention that the majority of casualties from these bombing raids were Vietnamese civilians.
Awful news about Panjshir. There were a lot of good fighters up there.
A lot of it is already in the press, but this should make for some interesting reading:
So how will anyone negotiate women’s rights issues with these people?
Thrag
1600
This really represents how the two sides fundamentally misunderstand each other. This guy can’t even conceive of buying pre-sliced melon.
We’ve all had that experience when you get a new melon home, and it looks fine on the outside but turns out to be bitter and no good on the inside. I have a recycle bin full of the husks now.
Better to just get a melon ball variety pack occasionally when you get hungry.
Isn’t Hijab just the head scarf? I thought these guys wanted women out in public in full-on Burkas?
If this guy went to Whole Foods and saw women in their Lulu Lemon yoga outfits buying pre-sliced melon, he’d have a conniption fit.
(Of course, the plastic containers that hold our pre-sliced melon are definitely killing the planet so there’s that angle…)
That was a really good read. Definitely worth the time.
A good insight into Afghan society and how it works is here. Eye opening stuff…
Matt_W
1606
This article is a surprisingly good one from Vox. A Problem From Hell has had probably the largest influence on my own foreign policy views of any book… and the post-9/11 Bush fiascos have had the largest influence on my own foreign policy views of any real world events. I have the author’s exact nostalgia for the promise of humanitarian intervention mixed with the realist pragmatism of fortress liberalism.
In her 2002 book A Problem From Hell , Power asserts that Rwanda and Srebrenica were part of a pattern; America’s problem historically has not been its capacity to stop genocide, but its will. “No US president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no US president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence,” she wrote. “It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on.”
This was the essence of post-Cold War liberal interventionism: the notion that an absent America was a complicit America.
It was a vision of a superpower embracing its moral calling, protecting human rights wherever they needed defense, and it was a doctrine that became influential among liberal intellectuals and pundits after Rwanda and Bosnia.
The shock of far-right populism did not just undermine the sense of destiny that motivated liberal global ambitions in the 1990s. It also made liberals acutely aware that the great ideological battle of today would not be waged abroad but at home. Liberalism, on the offensive since the Cold War, has been backfooted by far-right populism.
“How can a country that has January 6 fix Afghanistan?” Rhodes asks, referring to the insurrection at the US Capitol.
While the door may still be open to future liberal interventions, it is clear that liberal interventionism as a doctrine — that American military policy should be oriented around stopping genocide and spreading liberal values — has been supplanted.
But for all its errors — and they were myriad and massive — liberal interventionism did contain a core insight worth preserving: that a life is no less valuable because it is lived outside America’s borders.
The greatest sins of American foreign policy have not been the result of an excess of concern for foreign life but a lack of it. From the genocide of Indigenous peoples to the transatlantic slave trade to imperialism in Latin America to Cold War-era support for mass murders and torturers, America has a long and horrifying track record of sacrificing people on the altar of its own economic and strategic interests.
Liberal interventionists were right to recoil from this past and seek something better. But they were too quick to conclude that the solution was moralized militarism — to see the use of American might against manifestly bad actors as righteous rather than dangerous.
Preserving the moral outlook of ’90s liberal interventionism while abandoning its militarism means discharging our moral duties to non-Americans through nonviolent means: leading the world in the fight against climate change, opening America’s doors to many more refugees, and sending humanitarian aid to the world’s impoverished.
It also means recognizing the toll that any war, however just-seeming, has on civilians — and, as a result, opposing the use of force as anything but a last resort under truly desperate circumstances.
It was depressing as hell, and a pretty good argument for not using the military for anything but blowing up stuff.
When General Sami Sadat enters the story, I was actually cheering for the Taliban to take over as soon as possible before the General could randomly kill more civilians. Jesus Christ.
It also requires, I think, that we address our own problems at home as well. The vast inequities and outright violent oppression of American citizens by local and state governments in particular is creating our own set of humanitarian crises that need intervention.
Strollen
1610
I bought it and read the first chapter. Too early to judge yet.
Strollen
1611
Hard to believe that well researched, well written and thoughtful article appeared in Vox.
Ms. Power has long been one of my favorite liberals, although I never got around to reading her book.
That disaster that is the Syrian civil war, as well as numerous conflicts from Sudan, Ethiopia, Burma, Yemen etc. all say to me that as fucked up as many US military interventions are, the alternative where groups of strongmen abuse the population are generally worse. Just because there are inevitably atrocity on both sides, it is not that hard to side with the better folks.
The presence of US forces made the Iraqi civil war less bloody and quicker and the bad guys (the Baathist party) is going to win the war in Syria, unlike Iraq. That said, I don’t have an answer to Rhodes’s question.
“How can a country that has January 6 fix Afghanistan?” Rhodes asks
So I can certainly understand why liberal intervention is nearly extinct.
tomchick
1612
For some reason the Los Angeles Public Library got only a single copy. I’m 14th on the waiting list. Meanwhile, they’ve got 90 copies of whatever dumb sci-fi thing Andy Weir recently wrote.
-Tom
I’ve got great news for you. We have been intervening in Yemen! So we are doing our part to change that area of the world.
