Afghanistan already was a piss poor, extremely backwards shithole long before the Soviet invasion. Their islamistic faith, their tribalism and their ferocity are not a product of foreign intervention, it's the nature of the Afghan people and the very reason why every foreign occupation of the country failed.


No amount of foreign investment or effort can create a sense of national unity across ethnic and tribal lines.


This is a very deep, fundamental disagreement between the two of us, and between leftists and conservatives in general: you, and most leftists, seem to believe that material well-being and freedom breed social progress, liberalization and sustainable state structures.
I, along with most conservatives, believe that the causality predominantly goes the other way round, that social progress and strong structures breed (and precondition) prosperity and liberty.


tldr: some places and people just want to live in the Middle Ages, and there's simply no way to lift them into the modern world against their will.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 15 2021 12:02pm

If you are a proud citizen of an Islamic Theocracy, would you rather fight the Islamic government that was cast down by infidel outsiders, or would you rather fight the infidel government established by the infidel outsiders?

The Afghanis are not to "blame". We were invaders, and had we stuck to killing Al Qaeda cells and hunting down Bin Laden, rather than attempting to collapse a sovereign government, we wouldn't be in this mess.

This is the direct fault of the bleeding heart shitbags who believe that you can enforce women's rights on Islamic Theocracies by killing the husbands of the women you pretend to care about.

The demand of "no more endless wars" is perfectly compatible with competent, level-headed planning of the withdrawal from the remaining missions.
Blaming the incompetent execution of the withdrawal on those who correctly were against the war to begin with is grotesque.

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This so much.

as was a lot of the world that wasn't occupied for 60 years and as a result had the opportunity to advance.

"They were bad before" isn't something that matters when they've been prevented from improving because of occupation and continual destruction.

The European enlightenment required 200 years of genomic preening through conservative culture in addition to the germ theory of disease. Afghanistan genuinely enjoys stone age life and isn't anywhere close to changing. The best we could ever do is make one modern city over there and allow the smarter ones to immigrate in.

This post was edited by EndlessSky on Aug 15 2021 12:42pm

What could have been done differently a month ago? Once we made a commitment to leave, the Taliban was emboldened and the Afghans lost the will to fight.



Pretty much this.

A large part of the reason why we were there is opium supply through poppy plantations. Synthetics like Fentanyl make it much less lucrative nowadays.

Now China is going to get all of it.

Big oof