The Saudis HAVE bombed the Houthis with everything they had (US supplied weapons). They keep popping up, you bomb them they pop up somewhere else.

Well, you obviously can't control a country without boots on the ground. The Saudis and their coalition haven't done that, either because they're unable or because they're too scared. A key difference from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, missions which only fell apart years after the victory on the battlefield.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Oct 6 2024 01:27pm

What are you suggesting, staying in Yemen (a complete shit hole) for a couple decades? I don't think there are countries that have enough appetite for that after Afghanistan.

violence begets more resistance and more violence and so on and so on

ISIS hasnt gone anywhere, neither has Hamas or the Houthis or Hez or any other resistance group

its almost like no one has learned anything post 9/11

The military commitment required to keep Afghanistan under control was actually not that huge. We in the West just lost the appetite for it because there was no end goal and because it was a faraway country we had no real stake in once 9/11 and Al Qaeda were in the rear view mirror.

For the Saudis, the calculus with regard to Yemen would be entirely different. Yemen is a terrorist breeding ground and a potential deployment zone for SA's big regional rival Iran, right in their backyard, literally bordering their own territory and within reach of their oil fields. Preventing all that would easily be worth the permanent deployment of 10-ish thousand soldiers and spending a couple billion per year for the Saudis.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Oct 6 2024 03:00pm

That's because no one has made a proper effort to stamp them out. The US has funded alot of these groups in service of geopolitical goals, of course they'll always be around if you do that.

Eradication means eradication. Carthaginian terrorists don't exist because they were eradicated. German Nazis are gone because they were eradicated, their symbols destroyed root and stem. The US has more than enough power to eradicate them if they so choose, but instead they use them as geopolitical pawns, same with other powers. El Salvador recently demonstrated it is very possible to eradicate a terrorist group you just have to make the effort, as well as destroy all their monuments, graves, symbols.

Wut

Only two Trillion dollars worth (not even mentioning the casualties and that the remaining equipment was left to the Taliban).

It was a complete disaster how can you possibly defend this...

Afghanistan had literally zero return on investment

Typically when an empire conquers a land, it only does so if it can make the investment work, much like buying land.

We didn't colonize it, we didn't enslave them to boost our economy, they didn't commit troops to our host, they didn't do... anything really. We funded them getting high on opium all day. 20 year money pit for nothing.

This works. But you know what is the funniest thing about this propaganda?
The picture in the page is actually drug inmates and drug sellers from Xinjiang ( Mostly Muslim Uyghurs of course ) that was working with the freedom fighters in Afghanistan to push opium back into China.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps

That's including the cost of the initial invasion plus the cost for the nation building efforts, money going to the corrupt Afghan government, and all the military contractors and so on and forth. And that's on top of 20 years of the running cost of the occupation itself.

The Saudis wouldn't need to deploy 100k troops across half the globe to invade Yemen, it's right next door. They don't need to feed their MIC nearly as much as the US. They don't need to pay their soldiers as much. And they could even have skipped on all the development aid and nation building efforts. Just crush the Houthis and then leave enough of a military presence to keep they away. I guess they could have done that for $300 billion if they were actually competent.




For the record: the Western incursion into Afghanistan was ill-conceived because we had no long-term plan; we wasted far too much money and got nothing to show for it in the end. So yes, Afghanistan was a disaster.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Oct 7 2024 10:26am