Afghanistan was always doomed

[mahnmut]

A really good piece about how the US involvement in Afghanistan was futile from the start:

The Ides of August

This paragraph I found particularly disturbing:

"And what did we stand for? What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules."

That is a very good piece by someone who has no reason to bullshit anyone. It seems to me that it was about a small number of people making a lot of money, as usual. I feel so bad for the Afghan people. They never had a chance.

The US government is who pumped all the money into the corrupt system starting from day one of the Afhgan invasion. 20 years, four presidents, and the US consistently fed the beast. What right do they have to feel that it isn't their fault?

Comments

[dewline]

So...in addition to the issues cited by Sarah Chayes, one more question that may or may not be a distraction: was the NATO force actually fighting the Pakistan ISI by proxy the whole time?

I've suspected off and on for years that the answer to this question was "yes".

[dancesofthelight]

I see the bigger case for that futility in that the USA's nominal ally, Pakistan, provided the bodies and the bullets and the money for the Taliban and gave it more bodies to throw at the war than the USA could provide bodies, bullets, and willpower to sustain it. The Taliban have been and remain Pakistan's greatest foreign policy focus not zeroed in on India. The USA funded the manpower and financial and logistical base of its enemy and aside from some tepid clashes in Waziristan under Obama refused to acknowledge the contradiction here, let alone face it.