A problem with criticism of the Afghanistan War:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of legitimate criticisms to make of the US intervention in Afghanistan. Some targets of legitimiate criticism are such things like use of UAVs that end up missing targets and killing innocent people, things like eschewing an offer to co-operate with the Islamic Republic of Iran on an issue (which in hindsight takes on an uglier edge than it did at the time) and to a very real extent bailing out of this war to go fight Iraq a second time. Another reality is that he's risking either war or much greater involvement of Pakistan, and if we go to war with Pakistan it magnifies every disastrous consequence of a war with Iran sixfold or more.

One area that I neither understand nor consider legitimate is to attack the current President over how he's handling things like the (complete lack of leadership on the part of) the government run by Hamid Karzai. Afghanistan's been in one or another war since Leonid Brezhnev approved the Soviet Armed Forces' invasion of it. This was a long and bloody conflict, and once the Soviets withdrew there was a civil war that the Taliban proved the most formidable faction in until we came in. Either way, this will be in December 30 years of war in Afghanistan.

Thirty years of war in Germany were sufficient to level the place and critically weaken it. Germany didn't recover for a matter of centuries. 27 years of war in what is now the People's Republic of China arguably contributed a great deal to why the PRC is what is today. Long periods of war tend to malform societies affected by them, and they tend also to encourage corruption, graft, and to weaken over time desire to participate in or to even bother with the infrastructure of society. Afghanistan's already seen the results of one superpower fighting in it, and in October the USA will have spent eight years there. And if we still have significant number of troops there in October 2011 then we will have been at war there as long as the Soviets were.

President Obama is an average leader. He's capable of more than even his supporters sometimes profess that he is, but he's also capable of seeing through at least enough of a military victory to suppress the Taliban. President Obama has inherited a crisis 30 years in the making, and IMHO, while as noted there are many legitimate criticisms of his war effort there to make, I feel that the President should be given some leg room to fight the war as he wishes, by both his supporters and his critics, to shape up what's not working and to improve what is. Because to expect an average leader to improve on a legacy that started with Premier Brezhnev is frankly to expect him to work miracles. The President is just a man, and he does make mistakes.

I suppose if I were to sum this up in a sentence or two it would be that Afghanistan's been in chaos for 30 years. President Obama as an average leader has more promise to work through the legacy of 30 years of war than his predecessors. Yet it is not fair to blame him for all the mistakes dating back to President Carter and the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev.

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's true, and I already know that. However, my post refers to Afghanistan and the current mess there *is* to a great degree our own damned fault.

And yes, Americans do tend to overlook the theft of Hawaii and the genocide in the Philippines.

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

Yeah but it doesn't actually matter whether we're "responsible" for Afghanistan's status pre-invasion or not (and we had a hell of a lot less to do with that than we do the state of a lot of other hellholes). We'd have gone in there had we had nothing to do with the creation of the Taliban, 'cause Osama bin Laden needed killin' and after 9/11 there was a deep collective national need to destroy some shit. We didn't invade because we're "responsible", though we might wind up occupying the country forever because we are if we're not careful.

I mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but it sounds like you want to keep a hostile foreign occupation force in their country as a way to apologize for keeping a hostile foreign occupation force in their country. Hostile foreign occupation forces? A priori not good for the health of the nation. We can sit around and blow them up every weekend for being too pig-ignorant to know that stoning women for liking sex isn't cool till kingdom come, it's not an effective educational tool. You wanna feel like a nice guy? Sever, maybe afterward think about bribing the Pakistanis to back somebody'll do the same work for them but be a little more liberal on the whole stoning-women front, buying up all their grain or heroin or whatever at inflated prices so they have something resembling an economy, maybe sending an anniversary card in fifty or a hundred years. We'll do none of these of course because, well, America, but at least we can do that first step and in American foreign policy terms that's a thing almost like kindness.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Sigh......you miss the point.

Osama bin Laden was our mess. No Soviet war in Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden ordering planes slammed through buildings. The USSR wrecked the place first, but in giving our technology to him we laid the entire seed of what came when we put troops on Saudi soil.

And no, that's not what I'm saying. What I *am* saying is that the history of war in Afghanistan did not emerge in 2001 like Athena from the head of Zeus. Brezhnev sowed the seed Obama now tends.

[dzlk.livejournal.com]

I'd say the seed was sown at least as much by Carter and Brzezinski as by Brezhnev.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I would say that to think that Ivan needed anyone's help to intervene in Afghanistan is like attributing to Moscow the US decision to intervene in Vietnam. Because Hanoi *was* indisputably a Soviet ally in the war. The USA needed no KGB wizardry to make it intervene, and neither did the USSR require US help to intervene in Afghanistan. Both were illegal wars. And just because we stepped into Vietnam did not make it right, but Vietnam *was* as integral to the Kennedy Administration's geopolitical sense as Afghanistan was to the Soviet Union.

In fact, while the USSR *did* wage an ugly war, the situation was such that if I were the premier of the USSR I'dve still authorized it. A spread of Islamism to more of the USSR's borders would have been very dangerous.

[dzlk.livejournal.com]

I don'know — The problem I have with that interpretation is that in March '79 Taraki went to Moscow with a formal request for ground troops and was turned down because Moscow's position as put to the Afghan gov't was that intervening would be ... well ... a big mistake.

After things really started going to hell under Amin, I'dve authorized intervention too, sure. Still I have to question whether that stage would have been reached without US assistance. (To the muj, I mean. I'm not of the opinion that Amin was a CIA asset.)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It's worth noting the difference between March and December was that by December Brezhnev was effectively incapable of running anything and the decision to invade was made in his name, but from a USSR that while at the height of its power was completely leaderless.

I would note that the fall of the DPRA government was effectively putting the USSR at a risk of having not only something like the Islamic Republic of Iran, which had as much hatred for the Soviets as for the Americans, but an Islamist government which by virtue of having Uzbeks and Tajiks in it might well start trying to bring the Islamist Revolution into the USSR itself. The decision to invade had a very clear geopolitical logic, and is one of the lesser moments of Kicking the Dog by the Soviet Union in the Cold War (as compared to say, Czechoslovakia in 1968).

And as noted, the USSR was winning until the USA intervened because something with that much risk was not a prospect taken lightly by the Soviet leadership.

[dzlk.livejournal.com]

The decision to invade had a very clear geopolitical logic, and is one of the lesser moments of Kicking the Dog by the Soviet Union in the Cold War

Oh, certainly. Just to clarify, I'm not saying the USSR were "tricked" or that the decision was in any way irrational. Rather that the Brzezinski saw the Afghan situation developing into one to which invasion would be the rational response and made a conscious decision to help it along.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

My personal feeling is that a Carter Administration that could have pulled *that* off would have been a Carter Administration that would have rescued the Hostages by military force as well. Reagan's Administration has the worst fault of any US Administration with the mess currently happening.

[dzlk.livejournal.com]

Mm, making a big mess even bigger doesn't seem that hard to pull off — Just distribute guns and money more or less indiscriminately.

Agreed completely about Reagan, tho'.

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

So what? He, specifically, was our mess, but there'd be an international Islamic terror front with or without our intervention in Afghanistan. We never laid a finger on Chechnya, they're like the global jihad clearinghouse. The Chinese never fucked around in the Middle East at all, they've got domestic Muslim problems now. Egypt and the Saudis might not have thrown support behind the Muslim Brotherhood, to later make al Quaeda Wahhab out, had we not supported Israel in its political idiocy, but given that pan-Arabism was obviously never going to last even if we hadn't fucked it up for them some kind of bid to restore the Caliphate was the predictable unifying ideal to fill that regional power vacuum. They've got damn little else in common, short a survival need to stick together. It'd be silly to imagine that, say, the Pakistanis would never try to ride that train, or that Afghanistan wouldn't go more or less the way it did in the post-Warsaw Pact era just like Chechnya did had we let the Soviets occupy it, so it'd be pretty hard to argue we wouldn't be facing the same basic situation in Afghanistan no matter what. We might have been slightly less of an immediate target for the jihadis had we never ever done any meddling in the Middle East (yeah, right), but as a big obvious global empire with trade interests everywhere we'd still have been a target. Maybe our wacky alt-universe al Quaeda (with jetpacks!) would have been based in Yemen or Egypt, but I don't see how that matters.

So, yes, sure, you're right, without our involvement al Qaeda specifically as one terror group among many would never have become the force it did with the agenda it did. So what?

I guess if we go far enough back, imagine that the United States never made the Louisiana Purchase or something and had never participated in the Russian Revolution or either World War or done anything of any political significance whatsoever, the Soviets would never have been so totally paranoid about us and would have been happy with their buffer states in Eastern Europe, the Middle East oilfields could have been divided up by post-imperial powers and the backlash would have been entirely against them instead of against a US nobody had ever heard of. Again, not really seeing the point here.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

We never laid a finger on Chechnya, no. But the place has been through enough lengthy, protacted, brutal, and genocidal wars with Russia through the Imperial, Soviet, and Federation periods that like Afghanistan it's a criminal hellhole because any other possibilities have been obliterated.

My point is that removing Bin Laden was necessary. When George W. Bush invaded Iraq and then changed the mission from hunting Bin Laden to kill him to nation-building he (and the USA) got what he (and we) deserved for it.

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

Okay, I agree.