Democrats face rocky road ahead of midterms.

W set the tone and didn't immediately subdue the taliban, or set up a functional afghan government that would train a functional afghan army that we would equip. Instead, the taliban were allowed to **** off to caves we didn't bomb them out of though we have various bunker buster missiles and bombs that could've collapsed the exits if nothing else. There they ran a guerilla war which we were not equipped to prosecute and made very few steps to bridge that gap or put a stop to it. Instead we ran around pissing out fires here and there.
Obama doubled down on this, and added some pretty questionable drone strikes that further drove a wedge between the afghan gov and the populace they needed to win the support of, furthering the guerilla conflict.
They didn't keep the faith, they ****ed it up from the jump.

We are not occupying Germany as an invading force and haven't been for decades and decades. We didn't spend 20 years there on a full on war footing, even the cold war tensions between east and west germany don't rise to that level. We were not fighting a constant guerilla campaign street by ****ing street, town by ****ing town for 20 ****ing years, and equipping an army that was trained in the same corrupt and incompetent manner as it had been previously making it worse than feckless as it was apparently filled with a generous number of traitors and thieves.
You are comparing apples and stones when you're talking about American/British/French post ww2 and later Nato troops in Germany vs the Afghan war: they're not even made of most of the same elements ffs.

If we were going to go there and ask our men and women to die, or be crippled physically or mentally, waste a truly embarrassing amount of money besides, and give away high tech weaponry to a nation a generous portion of the populace of which wanted us dead, then we should've done it right and fought a total war not a ****ing police action.

 

As you wish. We disagree. Our forces in Germany facing the Warsaw Pact at the Fulda Gap were every bit as threatened as our forces in Afghanistan. The first position in Afghanistan to collapse was the US White House.

 

Tell me how many troops died in the many conflicts during the cold war which occurred in the Fulda Gap? How many bombs went off in the Fulda Gap? How many tanks got blown the **** up? How many convoys attacked? How many troops maimed, physically or mentally, in these Fulda Gap battles?

O wait........ we didn't fight in the Fulda Gap.... we only feared it might eventually occur when really any conflict would've just been full nuclear from the jump and that would've been the end of the human race, no tank fighting required.
We didn't have to fight a guerilla war in west germany either. Nor did the west germans take our **** and remain corrupt and incompetent and in cooperation with the enemy.

What we disagree on is when the white house collapsed: I say during W's reign, you say after.

 

W had the appropriate vision but was distracted by Iraq. None of his successors has been strong, but Obama at least stayed the course.
As for the Fulda Gap, the most likely scenario had both sides trying to avoid a full nuclear exchange.
The Third World War: August 1985 - Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com › book › show › 1375759....

It's fiction, but was an attempt by General John Hackett and other military advisors and generals to predict, realistically, how the Third World War might ...

 

W did not have the appropriate vision, or if he did he did not take the steps to see it to fruition. He fought a police action not a total war, and he did nothing to secure the most crucial resource in a generational conflict: The hearts and minds of the future populace through indoctrination of their young. Admittedly Iraq complicated things, but he just doubled down on his mistakes in Afghanistan in Iraq. Instead of one ****ed up problem, he made two.

Obama didn't stay the course, he escalated the worst parts of the conflict (the indiscriminate drone striking of random wedding parties and us citizens who talked alot of **** undermining the palatability of the war effort to both the US and Afghani populi) and truly began the loss of ground on all fronts, economic, political, and security/war, both at home and abroad, in earnest. He basically took a flamethrower to help W's fire along.

We made Davey Crockett's for the Fulda Gap: Tanks were not how WW3 would be fought and those generals were huffing paint just as surely as the geniuses in the Ordnance department who cheaped out and didn't buy the proper method for plating M16 bolt carrier groups and barrels initially causing needless malfunctions that got our men killed.

Besides: We. Didn't. Have. Any. Fighting. There. In. The. Real. World.
It wasn't a full war footing, full stop.

 

I'll go with BG Hackett's view, thanks.
Same mission in Germany & Afghanistan: transform a former enemy tyranny into an allied democracy. We stayed in Germany long enough to do the job. We abandoned the mission in Afghanistan.

 

Sure just name all those battles we had in the Fulda Gap, particularly the ones where the war came down to tank fighting in a choke point we would've nuked rather than send troops at.

The missions were quite different in that the Germans already had a culture that valued the same things we did and so winning their hearts and minds back from a ruthlessly authoritarian regime whose ass we had just handed to them was a fairly straight forward exercise. They'd been crazy for about 2 decades only at that point. We had to deal with the 'werewolves' guerilla bullshit for a few years only.

Contrast that with Afghanistan, the so called Graveyard of Empires. They had been invaded and subjugated numerous times by cultures that didn't care to try to understand them and didn't care to try to remold them either. Their actual forces folded almost immediately and they set about doing what they had done for literally over a thousand years: harass invaders that didn't handle the climate and terrain as well as they did and didn't understand how to fight a guerilla war. And they did it long enough that we did what every other empire did: We got fed up with it and left.

 

The difference between courage and dishonor.

 

If we weren't going to go total war with it, it was a waste of our men and women's lives and health, and our treasure, and we were arming and training the enemy.

We weren't going to go total war with it, ergo leaving was a good idea. Leaving how they did was a clusterfuck, but staying if you're not going to do the job right is a waste.

 

We disagree.

 

So you're saying you find we were receiving what we were paying for with blood and treasure? If so, how do you explain the Afghans folding like a cheap ****ing suit after we'd trained and equipped them for 20 ****ing years?

Our leadership did not give our soldiery the correct direction and permissions, and so the honest and valiant efforts of our soldiery were wasted. That does not make those efforts unworthy or take away from the sacrifice involved. All it does it render it wasted because the goal can't be achieved by the means the leadership chose to employ.
That's on the leadership, and just prolonging their time giving the wrong directions would not have cured anything.
They could've continued on as they had been for a century entire and then pulled out to the exact same results.

We weren't willing to wipe the taliban and their adherents out, nor were we willing to annex Afghanistan as a new state. Without either or both of those options on the table, we had no business doing anything but bombing every structure controlled by a hostile power and the land for a half mile around it to glass and embargoeing the entire nation of any and all imports until they coughed up the heads of those responsible complete with genitalia in the mouths of the dead.

 

The success of our joint enterprise depended on our continued commitment. We knew that and so did the Afghans. When we abandoned them they saved themselves.

 

It was not a joint enterprise. A joint enterprise requires the other party to put forth similar effort, and that clearly was not in existence. Baksheesh was not eliminated. A generous portion of the people we trained were in point of fact the enemy. We made deals with warlords. We allowed abhorrent practices like the tea boys to continue and imprisoned one of our soldiers who wouldn't allow it to occur around him and took steps to stop it.
We put forth effort, in the wrong ****ing direction 90% of the time but at least it was effort. They simply dealt with yet another oppressor/invader in the mix until we got tired of it and left, which is Afghanistan's MO and has been since prior to imperial Rome.

 

The Afghans were part of the effort, often at great sacrifice.

 

Some were certainly. The rest were engaging in baksheesh, ****ing little boys, working with the enemy as much as with us, demanding what amounts to bribes not to go full OPFOR, and generally being as bad as the taliban.
If we had brutally punished every person who engaged in these practices which are detrimental to the mission, which was to transform Afghanistan into a westernized nation that was no longer amenable to the warlord style barbarism which allowed the taliban to thrive, we would not have had this problem.
Instead of winning the hearts and minds of the populace, we won the hearts and minds of a few warlords only so long as we did most of the work and paid them off.
20 years is a long ****ing time, plenty long to weed out practices like that if we were ever going to. We weren't, and in fact punished any of our soldiers who tried to put a stop to it, forcing them to deal with literal scumbag bandits who literally stabbed the entire nation in the back literally just as soon as our back was turned.

 

Twenty years is nothing. Impatience like that is why we lost.

 

20 years for them to fold to forces without air power, mostly by letting the ****ers in the front gate and joining up or surrendering? That means we had nothing to show for 20 years, which is time to train an entire generation of the populace from birth, and several others for statistically significant periods. 20 years and they folded mostly in a day with very few shots fired but for a single province that was ALWAYS like that even during the taliban's hayday.
If they'd held for a month I'd have a different opinion. If there were not mass instances of turning traitor I'd have a different opinion.

 

They folded because we folded. Some of our units remained cohesive and active right through to the end of the evacuation.

 

They folded because even with 20 years to hammer them in to shape, we hadn't done the work to hammer them in to shape and had instead compromised and dealt with warlords, allowed practices that made the populace view us as just as bad or worse as the warlords, allowed practices like baksheesh which compromised combat effectiveness and led to infiltration etc.
If we'd pulled out in a century we would've had the same result

 

We disagree.

 

Obviously. It seems you're unwilling to provide any real reasoning as to why we were actually succeeding when we had been losing ground for awhile, hadn't reshaped the populace to be amenable to western style democracy rather than strong man style dictatorship, enabled warlords to flourish and dealt with them giving them legitimacy, stopped our soldiers from putting an end to large scale public child pimping practices, a good portion of the forces we trained turned traitor, another good portion surrendered without a fight, and they folded basically in a day but for one province that had always given the Taliban trouble anyway.
You just stand on 'we disagree'. It makes your argument essentially non-existent.

 

There is a reason why success would have taken many decades and generations. You're actually making my point.

 

Yes, because we weren't doing **** but bargaining with warlords and maintaining their status quo at the cost of our soldiers lives, sanity, wholeness of body, and our money.
We prevented our soldiers from halting things like baksheesh and things like tea boys. Punished them for it.
We could've continued doing that for generations and the result would've been the same.

 

The weakening of our resolve began with Trump and was completed by Biden. Regardless of what may not have been optimal, the fact of our presence and the creation of opportunities was having an impact on the evolution of Afghan society.

 

Our resolve was nil with W. He started the let's deal with the warlords and let the tea boys and baksheesh and other ****ery continue line, the rest simply followed his example. Obama made things a bit worse, but its hard to tell whether or not that's the momentum of the cluster **** or his adding some spin to it. Trump did nothing but run his mouth and then cave. Biden followed his lead and truly botched the pull out.
Our impact was not significant, a goodly number of them were traitors, still more went right back to it when faced with adversity.
Our impact could have been significant, but we didn't direct our efforts correctly, and worse directed our efforts in a way that harmed our end goal.

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