I was never a fan of this nor any other war, but 20 years is a long time, and despite all the bloodshed and suffering that has happened while the Americans (and soldiers from my own country) were there, that is 20 years where, amongst other things, many girls received an education that they would not otherwise have.
Things have been bad in Afghanistan since the 70's, but there were bright moments during the occupation, or what you want to call this period that is now coming to an end.
I have some personal ties to the region, and I sincerely hope things clear up somehow. Afghanistan deserves none of this.
> I was never a fan of this nor any other war, but 20 years is a long time, and despite all the bloodshed and suffering that has happened while the Americans (and soldiers from my own country) were there, that is 20 years where, amongst other things, many girls received an education that they would not otherwise have.
True, but the US could have made a dent in that by simply not supporting and financing the Taliban. When they help exterminate all of the secular opposition to administrations they are friendly with, the inevitable results are theocracies that are armed to the teeth.
Could have left a week after we started, after the locals started killing anyone they suspected of being Al-Qaeda, and the remnants had fled to the Pakistan border and Pakistan itself.
It's all hindsight. Iraq was a colossal mistake but the world was in agreement about the Taliban and their war crimes. There was never a right time to bail out; the US and allies have invested hundreds of billions in infrastructure but it's a state of tribes more than a nation.
The US already did this exact thing in the 1980s, and they even made a popular movie about it (Charlie Wilson’s War) that came out in 2007 and spelled out consequences of not investing for the long, long term at the end of the movie.
Politically, invading Afghanistan to get Osama was impossible to avoid since something had to be done. But after Osama was killed, I do not understand what possible motivation the US had for staying there other than enriching players in the military industrial complex.
If they left in 2012 the Taliban would have done then what they re doing now. There's no good leader that was willing to abandon people to that fate until the public exhausted of the war as it has.
> If they left in 2012 the Taliban would have done then what they re doing now.
Yes, that is my point. The options were Taliban (or other tribal groups) take over, or the US spends the next 100 years rebuilding Afghan society and waiting out for all the old people to die.
> There's no good leader that was willing to abandon people to that fate until the public exhausted of the war as it has.
The US public has been exhausted of spending on other nations since the 2008 recession.
The young people are more militant than the old people because of the invasion; so that wouldn't work. The only thing that would work (whatever working means in this context) was a program of mass extermination and colonization.
We invaded a country that was ruled by the Taliban. We installed a puppet government by force. Now that we're leaving, it's going the way of Vichy.
Or, gasp, never invading in the first place. Iraq had their own oil so the pillaging was justified with kindergarten level of blatant lies. Everyone knew what was going on. But why did the US gain by invading Afghanistan? Was it plain old lust for blood?
