Please. The US couldn't even "decapitate" Taliban after 19 years and 1 trillion dollars. Nor could the Soviet Union. Nor could the British before that. You can't win a land war in 21st century without turning the place into a glazed desert, which is not going to happen due to the proximity of South Korea and due to the fact that the American people aren't totally nuts. The US tried this several times and failed every time, including in Korea. Kim Jong Un will get his ICBMs eventually, and there's nothing anybody can do about that. Better plan for that eventuality now.
The US won a land war against Saddam Hussein's Iraqi military, twice, easily.
You can't win a guerrilla war against a motivated foe (which is what the situation in Afghanistan is), without a long-term total occupation and cultural cleansing.
The US could take out the Taliban - it would require a 300,000 to 500,000 occupying force and total cultural change to what Afghanistan is, which would require brutal, horrific crimes against humanity, to strip Afghanistan of many of its current beliefs and culture. The US hasn't primarily been trying to destroy the Taliban (the US can't do it without that mass force and it knows that), it has been primarily trying to hold the Taliban at bay while trying to build up the central government of Afghanistan. This is sort of a replay of the same failed strategy in Vietnam (when the US left Vietnam the south held the extreme majority of territory and population; the south folded rapidly regardless, which is exactly what is going to happen to the government of Afghanistan, unfortunately).
The US could take out the Taliban - it would require a 300,000 to 500,000 occupying force and total cultural change to what Afghanistan is, which would require brutal, horrific crimes against humanity, to strip Afghanistan of many of its current beliefs and culture.
Kabul in the 1970s was a groovy, swinging place with women in miniskirts and men wearing tie-dye (as was Tehran). It's the Taliban who imposed the present culture after ejecting the Soviets (with US help). Western strategy should have been to revert it to that, but instead it was to somehow replace the Taliban with a regime that was equally religiously hardline but just happened to be US friendly, and that was obviously never going to work...
While I certainly agree the ideal would be to revert Afghanistan to the pre Soviet-invasion culture, that's a task impossible for any foreign power to accomplish. It would have to come from within, be organic, to be sustainable. No outside power can afford the cost necessary to give Afghanistan a long-term umbrella required to develop relatively quickly. The US couldn't afford to do it, nobody else is going to be able or willing to try. The reason the US is willing to side with less than ideal groups is because there are no practical alternatives, you need a large pillar to put in place or it'll all just fold that much faster when confronted by the Taliban. There are few large pillars in Afghanistan in terms of power structures. The moment the US is gone, the Taliban will immediately press and crush the central government (regardless of which group is in power at the time), any agreements the Taliban sign will be ignored just as North Vietnam ignored everything they agreed to and immediately resumed their conquest.
The Northern Alliance was able to very rapidly smash the Taliban with the help of the US (the Taliban can't easily hold Afghanistan as a military force, so chaos and civil war is guaranteed in the near future). The challenge now and in the future is how to make any positive progress stick. The various powerful groups there, and their perma foreign sponsors (eg Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, etc), are not going to stop trying to topple eachother. The only thing giving Iraq a shot at being an independent, functional nation is their oil resource providing considerable funding to support a central government; Afghanistan of course lacks anything comparable. I don't know where the economy is going to come from to fund a potent central government in Afghanistan (while the Taliban operates on the cheap in comparison). It obviously takes a very long time to build up an economy from scratch in a location like Afghanistan.
The moment the US is gone, the Taliban will immediately press and crush the central government (regardless of which group is in power at the time), any agreements the Taliban sign will be ignored just as North Vietnam ignored everything they agreed to and immediately resumed their conquest.
The Afghans have a saying, "you have watches, but we have time". No American or Western electorate was or is willing to commit to a permanent presence. So here we are!
Democracy means giving some level of choice to folks, and in countries with lots of non-urban non-groovy folks that means the rural parts get what they want. See voting in modern Iran, Egypt (the Muslim Brotherhood was elected), etc.
Afghanistan is only about 25% urban. The Cold War era led to a couple of decades of countries trying to figure out their alignment and less internal strife, but by the 70s the internal rumblings were becoming clear.
We could keep Cairo, Tehran and Kabul groovy as long as we're comfy keeping the boot on the majorities necks.
> Kabul in the 1970s was a groovy, swinging place with women in miniskirts and men wearing tie-dye (as was Tehran).
Imagine thinking you have a coherent picture of what the culture in Afghanistan and Iran was like in the 1970s just because you saw those half-dozen photos people post over and over on reddit.
Imagine thinking you have a coherent picture of what the culture in Afghanistan and Iran was like in the 1970s just because you saw those half-dozen photos people post over and over on reddit.
Imagine thinking you have something to contribute to this discussion, if you’re not going to enlighten us...?
I'm pointing out your lack of knowledge on the issue, which is an order of magnitude more of a contribution than you spewing your Dunning-Kruger level take on the history of the conflict in Afghanistan.
You seem to think that a small number of photographs showing young people in popular western attire from a largely rural country's capitol in 1970s implies that the country at large had something approaching a liberal western mindset on culture and religion at the time. You also seem to be incorrectly conflating the Afghan Mujahideen, the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance.
I'm not going to write a dissertation on the topic on HN, but I'll just say that it's very clear that you don't know as much about it as you think you do, and I implore you and anyone reading the thread to go and read on this 40-year conflict in some detail if they want to gain a meaningful understanding of it.
> The US won a land war against Saddam Hussein's Iraqi military, twice, easily.
That's one way to look at it. Another (and IMO more correct) way to look at it is that the US lost there once (hence the second invasion), and will lose again in 10-20 years as the Iraqi elites wait it out and things revert to the mean. Oh, and we lost in Syria as well, although not funding and not arming ISIS did help to alleviate some of the problems in the last few years. Assad is still right where he was, and he will remain there for decades to come.
This is much like Napoleon "winning" the war against Russia in 1812. Captured Moscow. Pissed on the floor in the Kremlin. And then he got chased back all the way to Paris and exiled.
Except in the Middle East it's even worse than that. The US tends to forget that those folks represent much older civilizations and they live on a different time scale. They can literally sit it out for 20-30 years while we sink trillions of taxpayer dollars there and while our soldiers are torn apart with an occasional IED. They also culturally don't give a flying fuck about "democracy" or whatever. There's really not a hell of a lot that can be done about that, and there's no way to "win" under such circumstances.
If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.
That's why there won't be a permanent "victory" there, in any sense of the word.
> Another (and IMO more correct) way to look at it is that the US lost there once (hence the second invasion)
Your history is badly mixed up. There wasn't a first invasion, so your premise is wrong from the start. The first Iraq war wasn't meant to topple Saddam at all, which is why George HW Bush wisely didn't attempt to invade Iraq with an occupation force. The first Iraq war was to push Iraq out of Kuwait and smash the Iraqi military to reduce them as a regional threat (eg to Saudi Arabia). It was a huge concerted success (the US was joined by a very strong, diverse coalition). Saddam's once vaunted military was left in shambles, their hardware and capabilities were dramatically reduced. And then aggressive sactions prevented Saddam from rebuilding the military effectively.
> Oh, and we lost in Syria as well
The US didn't lose in Syria. From the position of the warmongers in DC, it was a stellar victory. On the cheap Syria was reduced to rubble and is a non-actor now, they've been almost completely destroyed. Russia is still the dominant big political-military ally of Syria, so nothing changed about that. At worst the US neither gained nor lost, at best - again, from the perspective of the hawks in the Pentagon - Syria is crippled as a regional power. Israel and several other regional powers are also thrilled with Syria's situation, to say the least. It'll take decades for Syria to just get back to where they were before. As a player in the Middle East, they got almost entirely neutralized.
But it's not "mixed up" if you start from the premise that a full land war cannot be won. Consider why Saddam was not deposed in the Gulf War. It's because to depose him the coalition would have to go all the way to Baghdad and endure a guerilla war, something that a conventional army just can't really endure. That's why Bush did not go for it - he knew Saddam would not go quietly into the night, but he also knew he could not win the land war against Iraq. So the operation ended in a withdrawal, much like the second gulf war will also end in a withdrawal, allowing the local elites to re-emerge. Epic fail.
That's like saying we "won" in Afghanistan just because the Taliban temporarily moved elsewhere. As long you don't have permanent control of the country, you haven't really "won" anything there. And I don't think you will argue that we have any kind of permanent control there, then or now, or can realistically get it in the future.
At least the Gulf War achieved something worthwhile. Later Iraqi and Afghan wars achieved nothing whatsoever.
There is no clear endgame in Afghanistan, other than "the beatings will continue until moral improves".
In North Korea, on the other hand, the endgame is clear: the downfall of the Kim regime, mostly likely followed by integration into South Korea (if China allows, and that's a mighty big if). You're not going to have ordinary North Koreans head for the hills and turn into partisan guerrillas fighting for Juche.
>You're not going to have ordinary North Koreans head for the hills and turn into partisan guerrillas fighting for Juche.
Maybe, but they might be willing to fight invaders. The Korean War that killed 2-3 million civilians doesn't make the US seem like the good guy. The US will be seen as imperialist invaders by the ordinary citizen of the DPRK.
The key difference here is the existence of South Korea. Sure, if the US were to waltz in alone, they'd be treated as the invaders they are. But every North Korean has been fed a steady diet of "Korea is one!" since birth and they're all well aware that their kinsmen in the South are materially better off in every conceivable way -- so when said kinsmen lead the invasion and form the new government, they're not going to get violently rejected in the same way.
The fall of East Germany is instructive: while that imploded internally instead of being triggered from the outside, there was absolutely zero violent resistance to West Germany coming in and essentially taking over. North Korea isn't going to be same level of cakewalk, but it's closer to this end of the spectrum than Afghanistan or Iraq.
> You're not going to have ordinary North Koreans head for the hills and turn into partisan guerrillas fighting for Juche
Famous last words preceding every single failed US military intervention. In fact, preceding most other military interventions in other countries. Probably what Hitler thought as he was invading the USSR. Or what the USSR thought when invading Afghanistan (where, by the way, one of my uncles served, and got his right arm blown off).
Truly, those who have not studied history are doomed to repeat it.
