There was no way to defeat the Afghan Taliban without Pakistani help. The ideological reservoir from which Taliban recruits is bottomless; and with military and financial support from across the border, quite formidable.
Over the last decade, the US had lost all leverage with Pakistan. Pakistan is now fully allied with China.
> An non-violent alternative, grant permanent U.S. residency to all Afghan women and children. And evacuate anyone who wants out.
Did you live in 2001?
There was severe distrust of "Al Qaeda cells", which were these hypothetical terrorists inside of the USA pretending to be a nice guy. But one phone call from Osama Bin Laden would turn them into a suicide bomber.
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I'm glad that we've built up trust with the Afghan people and are able to accept them into our society today. But that kind of thinking you're talking about would have NOT worked in 2001.
I think the Afghans have also learned to trust us to some extent. My friend had to kill a child girl soldier who fired upon him, hiding an AK47 in her Burka. It turns out that burkas are really good at hiding weapons. I don't think I've heard of any of those stories recently however.
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The US won the hearts of Afghan women and children because we built schools and universities for them. The trust did not exist in 2001, but the trust exists today thanks to literally millions of college-educated Afghan women telling our story and learning our values.
Trump didn't, but Americans as a whole have an accepting culture.
Over 75% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats wish to accept more Afghan refugees in light of the Taliban takeover. When push comes to shove, Americans (Republicans included) are a welcoming bunch.
Question #13, which has Republican / Democrat statistics specific to that question on a later page. Something like 79% of Trump voters think we should help those Afghans come to the USA.
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Question #12, with 59% of respondents saying the US isn't "doing enough" to help the Afghans, is even more bipartisan, with Republican/Democrat splits being negligible in the stats. (59% Democrats / 64% Republicans think Biden is "not doing enough" to help the Afghan people)
It's equally scary how optics rule the conversation, not outcomes.
Whilst killing all life within 1km of any Taliban is ridiculous and absurd, the thought of a true extermination strategy of the Taliban should be on the table. At the very least as a thought.
The Sri Lankan government has managed to permanently wipe out the Tamil Tiger movement by sheer effort, aggression and indiscriminate military approach. Endlessly beating down on them until they gave up, and dissolved their movement, permanently. The human cost of the conflict has been enormous, without question.
Has it been worth it, this permanent solution? I really don't know, and I'm in absolutely no position to tell. The only point I'm making is that total victory is possible, yet at a high price.
China goes even further, it seems even the thought of rebellion makes you end up in a re-education camp, and sometimes not even that. Again, the human cost is enormous. But does it work, if the sole aim is to suppress or wipe out rebellion? Probably yes.
One could at least contemplate what would have happened if the US had directly engaged with the Taliban, and use its full military, diplomatic, intelligence and monetary might to do so.
The West has higher morals, we like to tell ourselves. Hence, an indirect approach. The outcome is 200K casualties, and trillions spent. The grand "prize" of all this suffering is the country firmly back in the hands of the Taliban, under Sharia law. Afghanistan's tiny economy tanking, hence every single citizen suffering. All women rights reversed, back to being cattle.
A telling stat is that roughly 7K US soldiers died, yet another 30K committed suicide back home. Due to the length of the war and multiple exposures to traumatic experiences.
Altogether, I don't believe it is unreasonable to wonder if the "good intentions" approach's outcome isn't just as terrible or worse compared to an actual extermination approach. I won't claim to know the answer, I'm merely raising the question.
Admittedly, based on this article and given the backing of neighboring countries, in this case there simply may not be any winning approach at all. You can't defeat an enemy when they keep switching camps.
It’s probably a sign of the times. We’re very polarized and I feel very strongly about my opinions. I feel like modern feminism is a cancer eating away at American society. I’m very progressive about pretty much every other “politicized” opinion, maybe besides guns.
I absolutely do not support the way the taliban treat women. I think you need to move pretty far to an extreme to move the needle towards the middle though.
> Whilst killing all life within 1km of any Taliban is ridiculous and absurd, the thought of a true extermination strategy of the Taliban should be on the table. At the very least as a thought.
It is neither ridiculous nor absurd.
It plain simply involves killing almost everyone in an area. Which is called genocide. It is doable. Nazi done it. Khmer Rouge done it. Hutu in Rwanda done it.
You want to frame it as attacking Taliban, which is not true. Majority of victims would not be Taliban. It would be quite literally going to Afghan to commit genocide in half of it.
> The grand "prize" of all this suffering is the country firmly back in the hands of the Taliban, under Sharia law.
Anyone including women have better chance under Sharia law then they have under your proposal. Cause your proposal is to plain kill them. You don't get to propose killing people and then saying someone else is cruel.
> Altogether, I don't believe it is unreasonable to wonder if the "good intentions" approach's outcome isn't just as terrible or worse compared to an actual extermination approach
Under Taliban, those people are alive. With your approach, they are all dead. So, they are better off now. I don't think few terrorism victims in USA is good enough excuse for that.
> One could at least contemplate what would have happened if the US had directly engaged with the Taliban, and use its full military, diplomatic, intelligence and monetary might to do so.
A better solution would be to use small drone swarms and create a surveillance state in the rural areas. Each drone can see about 100m2 at 100m height. So 10K drones for 1 km2 = 10 million dollars.
Attach weapons and you have zero risk of life and can maintain a permanent presence, that can essentially be automated by AI and computer vision.
And I've only spent 0.01% of the yearly spend on the war.
Did people all of a sudden lose the ability to read, or what?
"It plain simply involves killing almost everyone in an area."
No, not almost everyone. Only Taliban. Which arguably is complex, but surely if the US would make full effort to infiltrate and map the network, such selective targeting would be possible.
"Cause your proposal is to plain kill them. You don't get to propose killing people and then saying someone else is cruel."
It gets even weirder, I guess. You know the very point of the Afghan military was to kill the Taliban, right? Together with the US backing them up, they managed to kill 52,000 Taliban and other opposition fighters. What exactly do you think happens in a war?
"Under Taliban, those people are alive. With your approach, they are all dead."
All? The Taliban is estimated to have a force some 50,000 strong, 100,000 tops if you include weak allies. That's 0.13% of the total population. So you're saying that the selective targeting of the Taliban, will also wipe out the other 99.87% of the population? Some 38 million people? Get the fuck out of here.
Killing all life within 1km of any Taliban literally involves killing all people there. And it is not even Taliban hiding among civilians. It is them living with their parents in their village.
> Together with the US backing them up, they managed to kill 52,000 Taliban and other opposition fighters. What exactly do you think happens in a war?
Not every war is going on with goal of killing everyone in an area. So while civilians always die, what you propose has that extra step of being genocide.
> The Taliban is estimated to have a force some 50,000 strong, 100,000 tops if you include weak allies. That's 0.13% of the total population.
Yes, because your plan is to not just kill them, but to kill everyone around.
I did not make the "killing all life" remark, it's by another commenter. I specifically said to target an exterminate the Taliban.
"Not every war is going on with goal of killing everyone in an area. So while civilians always die, what you propose has that extra step of being genocide."
No that is the exact opposite of what I propose!
"Yes, because your plan is to not just kill them, but to kill everyone around."
The comment is not advocacy. Had all Taliban been murdered, there would be no Taliban problem today. Instead the dispute would be between the drug lords and the rest of the civilian population.
Various leadership positions of the Taliban have been murdered by drones something like 5x or 6x over. The US never had a problem with killing Taliban per se (or imprisoning / exiling them).
A good chunk of upper-Taliban leadership were former prisoners that were released, leading up to the peace talks of last year. (Its better that we negotiate with moderate Taliban we chose to release from prison, rather than the extremists that come from self-recruitment)
The issue is that the Taliban can continue to recruit more and more leaders from the locals. They're able to recruit in large numbers because the Afghan culture glorifies their resistance across the 1800s against Great Britain (and other world powers with superior tech).
Their entire culture is optimized about fighting against foreigners and rallying locals. The more we kill them, the more they're able to recruit.
> Their entire culture is optimized about fighting against foreigners and rallying locals. The more we kill them, the more they're able to recruit.
Afghanis stopped doing that for the period the Mongols ruled via one demonstration of regional depopulation through municipal-scale genocide [1]. But the Mongols were like that: they were quite progressive and often ran on a benevolent dictator model, but you cross them just once and they salted the earth after they were done wholesale killing everyone, innocents included.
But the Mongols' record in Afghanistan was likely only possible because they established a reputation for carrying out these genocides on various scales (Khwarazmian Empire being a notably bloody example). I suspect China comes closest in the current era to that level of determination; fortunately for Afghanis, China is not demonstrably interested in Afghanistan.
The point I do not see underscored enough: the "graveyard of empires" reputation is built upon an accidental history of said empires the moniker is based upon being relatively benevolent compared to the Mongols. It isn't an intrinsic property of the people or geography of Afghanistan when looking at all available records, but of generally voluntary evolving war conventions.
Never underestimate the horrific wartime capacity our species are capable of unleashing. In the sweep of recorded human history, we happen to live in an era of relative peace, and even most of our worst wars today play by Queensbury Rules compared to the relative scope, scale and ruthlessness our distant ancestors regularly abided by. To give a sense of proportion, Genghis Khan is estimated to have killed 11% of the world population; scaled to today it is 0.84 BILLION. He would have literally erased the entire male population of Afghanistan and hardly noticed by his standards. None of today's relative decrease in bloodthirstiness is enshrined like laws of physics, and is but a thin veneer upon our civilization when push comes to shove.
Should climate change worst-case scenario predictions come to pass, desperation can erase that tenuous progress in decreasing human misery, relative as it is, in the blink of an eye. It is best we all remember that War Is A Racket, and anytime two or more sets of elites clamor for war, we'd all likely be better off they were all the first killed on the front lines, and then we all re-evaluate the "need" for war again with a new elite who want to go to the front lines.
Does your hot take genocide-based solution include "tactical nuking" of Pakistan as well? Because the Afghan Taliban gets plenty of support from them as well.
U.S. foreign policy stated from the outset in 2001 that we would follow terrorists where ever they are, no matter the country. Hunt them down and kill them. That's what we said about terrorists generally and Taliban specifically.
We departed from U.N. Charter article 51 twice, and also disregarded the determination of Nuremberg. The nation is complicit, Bush was reelected subsequent to his foreign policy assertions and actions. There's been no serious consideration to hold him or the U.S. accountable. That makes it tacitly permitted.
Killing all Taliban would not be genocide. It would be consistent with long standing U.S. foreign policy. It's a religious sect, not a group of ethnic or nationals.
Over the last decade, the US had lost all leverage with Pakistan. Pakistan is now fully allied with China.