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TheRealMafoo said:
Mr Khan said:
TheRealMafoo said:
Mr Khan said:

We can't just let Afghanistan backslide. It's irresponsible


Umm... sorry, but the two most powerful militaries in the world (US and Russa) could not defeat them. I think they can take care of themselves.

It's fallacious to look at Afghanistan with this "graveyard of Empires" mindset. The Soviet Union tackled them when their country was rotting from the inside. We were doing a pretty good job until we decided to sidetrack our attention a few thousand miles away. If Afghanistan had been the priority from the beginning, the picture would be much more pleasant.

 

And we can do something the Soviets (and British, back in the day) wouldn't have been willing to do: focus on infrastructure development. The Afghan people have to be aware that if the Taliban come back, that $1 trillion of rare earth metals is going to sit there forever. If the current Afghan regime focuses on human development, they can buy off the anger against them, and marginalize the extremists.

The Soviet Union was never built to fight a smart war (they never really got to fight the conventional war, or even the nuclear war, that they were ready for), and we simply haven't been focusing like we should have. The British were good at counterinsurgency in their time, but they left the Afghan mission to incompetents, and like us now, didn't focus.


They don't want infrastructure development. We build roads, and they destroy them. Afganistan is not a country in the traditional sense. It's a collection of independent tribes run by individual warlords. These tribal leaders know that infrastructure means  centralized control, and they want nothing of it.

To win a war in Afganistan, is to fight 100 independent wars. It's not worth it. It's time to just come home.

I agree on Afghanistan's makeup, but i'm saying that these warlords are not necessarily intractible, committed foes. Generally they're looking out for number one, and the Taliban isn't necessarily going to provide that.



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.