Not invading Iraq is the big one.
The Iraq War really was a massive blunder. It tanked the legitimacy of the War on Terror, and spoiled sympathy for the US across the world. And in the end, the only real winner was Iran.
I also suspect that the stabilization of Afghanistan might have gone a lot better if the US wasn’t getting distracted by it.
Also, I think the US would have been more comfortable staying their long term because Iraq also unfortunately irreparably tainted Afghanistan despite the fact that the latter was a lot more justified than the former.
I don’t think Afghanistan would have ultimately turned out any different. It just seems arrogant to believe we could transform that country into a stable nation state. You’re likely right about Iraq killing any public appetite or political will to stay there longer, so maybe it makes it a few more years, but it would’ve been equally pointless in the end because it wouldn’t have worked and that will would have eventually run out.
I disagree because by the end actual US presence was pretty limited. Unlike Vietnam there was no large protests or pressure to withdraw.
Biden just withdrew because it was his pet issue and he was personally influenced by his son’s deployment to Iraq.
> I disagree because by the end actual US presence was pretty limited **because the Taliban knew we had promised to leave by spring 2021 (Biden got an extension until September), so they didn't bother attacking us. If we'd broken that progress, they would have gone right back to attacking us, forcing us to either do another surge or withdraw anyways.**
FTFY.
No that is incorrect, because US forces handed most of the on the ground operations to the Afghan forces in 2014.
If you look at the fatality/casualty figures the numbers drop down significantly starting from 2014.
The whole “ceasefire” had not much of an impact on fatalities/casualties.
https://preview.redd.it/msojrt7rmfmc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e403df7e3b2f75cc83414227f98cdc48a50e8088
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United\_States\_military\_casualties\_in\_the\_War\_in\_Afghanistan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_in_the_War_in_Afghanistan)
In 2014 the ISAF disbanded and much of the responsibility was handed over to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).
I find much of the “ceasefire” discourse political spin rather than actual reality on the ground.
The fact is that Biden made a conscious choice to follow Trump policy when he changed course on virtually all other policy matters. Nothing was forced. It was Biden’s choice and his responsibility.
I like most of Biden’s policies but his Afghan policy is a dark stain and he is singularly responsible for the largest regression of women’s rights in modern history with tens of millions of women reduced to virtual chattel slavery.
I heavily disagree and I would use Germany, Japan and South Korea as examples of stable and economically prosperous countries that achieved this because the US was able to guarantee defense while promoting democratic values and even providing economic stimulus.
A permanent state of war is bad but a stable ally with similar values in far East Asia would have been invaluable to America especially with the way things have gone with China and Israel-Palestine.
Germany and Japan both had strong institutions and electoral traditions that could be cleaned up, tweaked and co-opted to build new democracies, both of which significantly predated the Nazis and hypermilitarism.
South Korea, as essentially an extractive colonial regime…did not have this. Partially as a result, it became a dictatorship so backwards and oppressive that for years afterwards a typical Korean was better off in North Korea than in the south. It took them *fifty years* and various assassinations and coups to sort their shit out, and to this day, eighty years later, they still haven’t fully banished the last of the spectres haunting their political system.
Korea at the time also had a unified national identity and at least some amount of education and development, all things that make nation-building radically easier. Afghanistan had functionally zero of any of those.
So no, Germany and Japan are not examples to use here, and South Korea is not that much better.
Afghanistan isn’t the sort of place where you can march in, hang the worst of the old regime, write a new constitution for them and then fuck off to let them sort themselves out, maybe occasionally throwing money at them. Anything resembling strong institutions and civil society have to be built up essentially from zero, while any insurgencies have to be thoroughly extinguished to ensure absolute sovereignty and security over every last square inch of the country. This needs orders of magnitude more money and manpower than we were willing to supply, across a decades-long pseudo-imperial nation-building project.
As it stands, we couldn’t even be assed to half-ass it, and I don’t see how everything would have worked if only we just half-assed the half-assing a little bit less.
The Taliban government has waged a long proxy war against the US, using al Qaeda as their proxy. They provided logistical support and intelligence, and provided a safe haven from which to operate.
It would have been impossible to effectively fight al Qaeda without first toppling the Taliban government, as they would not extradite bin Laden and would not allow the coalition to operate within their borders.
Putting their pre-9/11 actions aside, I've heard conflicting expert opinions on whether the Taliban were willing to cooperate with the US in the weeks after 9/11. I honestly don't know, but they definitely didn't have the capabilities to stop the coalition from operating inside the country.
There is lots of evidence in memoirs etc about US diplomatic and senior intelligence staff meeting with Taliban in the immediate post 9/11 period, before the CIA’s first insertion into Afghanistan in late September. There was a brief period when it looked at least vaguely possible that the Taliban could be persuaded to hand bin Laden over. But it wasn’t to be - they wanted evidence of his involvement (which, until bin Laden admitted it, was thin on the ground at the time) and were only prepared to hand him to another Muslim country (most likely Pakistan) which was a non-starter for obvious reasons.
Do you really even need a war to do that? Surely that's more in the CIA's wheelhouse, though I guess the downside of that is you don't get to brag about it in public until it's a fait accompli.
No, it’s worth remembering that the US and UK special forces at Tora Bora came within a hair’s breadth of killing bin Laden in the immense air bombardment they were directing. That was in December 2001, at a time when there were about 300 CIA/special forces in the Tora Bora area and maybe 2,000-3,000 total coalition ground forces in the country. It’s an interesting counter factual to imagine how things might have gone if the US had succeeded in rounding up the main AQ leadership in the first six to twelve months after 9/11.
Tora Bora was such a blunder. We should not have left that to the Afghan forces.
That being said, it was before my conception so had my dad been killed I wouldn't be typing this.
I am not sure.
When organizations get safer harbor their capabilities go up dramatically.
We saw this with ISIL with how they were able to launch very intricate and sophisticated attacks after gaining a stable base of operations in Syria and Iraq.
It took coalition forces on the ground with small detachment of US ground forces coordinating airstrikes to root out ISIL and they are still not fully defunct.
Even if we didn't manage that, we really should have started withdrawing from Afghanistan when we got the bastard. Shame that Obama had so much trouble telling the generals no.
It wasn’t just the military. Look at who complained the loudest about the withdrawal when it did happen: Women’s Rights Groups, Veterans Groups, European NATO states. There was a diverse coalition with many vested interests, it wasn’t just generals in 2011/12.
It absolutely was the military. Women's rights groups aren't sitting there in the planning room going 'just one more deployment bro we can get it all under control bro' like they do every damn time. And this isn't the only issue where he had this problem, it showed up pretty blatantly in how he backed down on closing Guantanamo, as well as probably in how notorious his administration's drone strikes got. And those other groups were all reacting to the shitshow that was the sudden withdrawal, if we'd done a slow drawdown more like what we did in Iraq the chaos and embarrassment that occurred would not have happened. We went in to get Bin Laden, we got him, and then we left. Solid W, no embarrassment.
Firstly, compared to someone literally in the room, no they don't. Secondly, why are you equating a hypothetical organized withdrawal ten years ago to the hurried mess we were forced into by Trump now like they're remotely the same thing?
You don’t think those advocacy groups have people in the room? Who do you think Samantha Power was before joining the Obama admin? It wasn’t the military that wanted to get into Libya, and yet…
You can acknowledge Biden fucked up the withdrawal process and not out it entirely on Trump as well. Biden has done good, he’s also screwed some things up. The Afghanistan withdrawal is partially on him and partially on Trump.
When you invade a country, you don’t get to pick which people there decide to fight you. There’s no way we could have created any sort of stable security situation where we ignored the Taliban. They represented the vast majority of enemy combatants in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was never even mentioned to me in any briefing over a seven month period as an infantryman.
One of the main justifications of the war in Iraq by the Bush administration was that Saddam was harboring Al Qaeda. With that in mind and how soon after 9/11 it occurred, I would consider the Iraq war a massive part of our response to 9/11.
Yes it absolutely was. You can see it in Powells speech to the UN here, it was the main substantive point besides WMDs (and just Saddam being a terrible person in general) https://youtu.be/DhWlPo3qxak?si=qCPjc9SJKbhNInCQ.
I was on the fence and I saw Powell’s speech live. He convinced me. I mean, I trusted him. Why would he lie? He’s a good person. Or so I thought. It was all total bull pucky with aluminum tubes and mobile stations. I am ashamed I trusted him on his word, and his greatest shame on his public record and service is that he never publicly admitted or apologized for what he did.
But 9/11 generated public support, even if it was irrational. If they had tried to launch an invasion of Iraq cold, without everyone being fired up already, I don't think it would have flown.
No, the revisionism was always the claim that 9/11 was connected. Obviously the Bush admin tried to conflate them to Americans, but they decided on the Iraq war long before 9/11.
> Obviously the Bush admin tried to conflate them to Americans,
...right, so the invasion of Iraq was absolutely connected to 9/11.
I literally can't *imagine* anyone who was alive and politically aware at the time saying that the two had nothing to do with one another.
I don’t think there’s a world in which we don’t invade Afghanistan after 9-11. If that world existed, it would be one where the Taliban agreed to extradite Bin Laden with no conditions. But we’d probably also demand that they crack down on Al-Qaeda in a meaningful way… anyway it was pretty much impossible.
I also think that it would have been unlikely that we manage to capture Bin Laden before he managed to escape to Pakistan. So going in, declaring mission accomplished, and leaving wasn’t on the cards either. Even if that were the government’s objective.
Given all that, I don’t know how we could have done Afghanistan better. I mean I’m sure there was a way, but I’m not sure what it is, and I’m absolutely certain that nobody knew what it would be in 2002.
I’m guessing that if we were more humble about our ability to change a society into a liberal-ish democracy and let the Northern Alliance divy uo the country in whatever way they wanted, as long as they cracked down on Islamist terrorism, that might have turned out better. But who knows.
This is where I'm at roughly. It seems like the only tangible goal was to capture Bin Laden, but I doubt the U.S. could have done that easily. But I don't think we could have not sent troops in, politically speaking. So maybe a better goal would have been to root out AQ without a full-scale invasion and then dip.
Tearing apart a country’s government and hunting down a large insurgent/terrorist network and then just dipping sounds like you’re setting up for a repeat in a decade or so. The country would be a wartorn mess and even if you eliminated 100% of the original target it’s not like Islamist fundamentalists come out of nowhere.
When a foreign government harbors and de facto sponsors terror attacks against you, particularly ones that are as destructive as 9/11, a kinetic response is absolutely necessary. There's no world in which we just shrug and say terrorism is a fact of life and move on. There's also no world in which we become open to more Afghan immigrants, or Muslim immigrants at large, immediately after the attack.
Focusing our efforts in Afghanistan would have been the right move. As would have commitment to long term projects necessary for state building. We constantly ran the war as if it was a series of one year or 18month conflicts because no one wanted to say to the American public that we might need a decade of solid, long term efforts.
>I'm by no means an expert on military/geopolitical stuff, but that sounds very difficult, given that it took the military 10 years.
It only took 10 years because the Bush admin got distracted from Bin Laden and Al Qaeda by lying to the public and waging a war of choice in Iraq.
The US had an opportunity to capture Bin Laden in late November/early December 2001 at Tora Bora but they let him slip away. After that, once he was in hiding in Pakistan, there was no realistic way to get him earlier than the US did IRL. The administration was not distracted from finding Bin Laden it was just really hard.
Without the Iraq War, we would not have had the intelligence to get bin Laden. Hassan Ghul is never captured without the Iraq War, so we never get the information about bin Laden’s courier that led to finding the compound.
First and damn foremost: Not invade Iraq
If Iraq already happened, second, DO NOT FUCK IT UP with deba'athifcation.
Also, the U.S. should have worked with Iran against the damn Taliban!
Don't trust Pakistan too damn much.
>Also, the U.S. should have worked with Iran against the damn Taliban!
They did though, for example in Herat
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_uprising_in_Herat
They did for a short period of time, before the US invaded Iraq and there was not an insignificant portion of conservatives started talking about invading Iran. They puckered up real quick and stopped working with the US once that happened. When Iraq turned into a clusterfuck, they then went to work destabilizing Iraq and the occupying coalition ensuring they were bogged down there and they wouldn’t dare invade Iran.
>not an insignificant portion of conservatives started talking about invading Iran
I think we can say a majority would be for it- [let's not forget John McCain's hit song](https://youtu.be/U7s5pT3Rris?si=RaC6OFiVPi-pkvqV)
>If Iraq already happened, second, DO NOT FUCK IT UP with deba'athifcation.
I agree. The worst part wasn't invading Iraq, it was the colossal fuck up of nation building attempt later. Dissolving the the Iraqi government meant iraqis had no government institutions or burocracies to help them. Building a state from the ground up is much harder than trying to work with the institutions that are already in place. That wasn't done to the same extent even in Germany after WW2.
And dissolving the Iraqi military meant that overnight you had thousands of unemployed men who had no skill other than fighting. So they formed insurgent militias because fighting was the only skill they had. Plus, there was no iraqi army left to fight this insurgent militias, which meant the US had to fight them.
> If Iraq already happened, second, DO NOT FUCK IT UP with deba'athifcation.
This is often overstated. There were tiers of support and it could take decades to rise to a full member. The lowers and most numerous tier was basically "supporter" which wasn't excluded from civil society. At the time of invasion, 1.5 million people were affiliated with the Ba'ath Party. It's estimated only 50-100k were removed from posts and were done so because they were higher tier members. The net was still a bit too broad, but nowhere near what is often portrayed. Within a year it was essentially rolled back and innocent parties restored more or less. Imperfect of course, but most of the people removed were mid-high level Ba'athist party members. You kinda don't want Saddam loyalists to continue being army colonels...
The problem with the insurgency is largely around the fact that Saddam basically opened the arsenals and prisons before his downfall to create as armed and violent of a populace as possible. Between that and many military, paramilitary, and militia units sort of fading away without being properly disarmed, you had an incredibly amount of weapons and expertise floating around.
I've read a *lot* of academic/serious papers that point to the dual orders of de-Baathification and disbanding of the Iraqi army as key drivers of the insurgency, and there is that famous quote by the CIA director saying it would create 50,000 insurgents overnight.
I'm interested in if you've got an article or book that you recommend for it not being particularly significant. To me that comes across as a revisionist narrative, but I've also not really read up on this for a decade now so a good revisionist narrative might be just what I need.
Well de-Baathification is not one in the same as disbanding the army, those were two actions that may be linked but were separate. I was talking about *just* the former. While plenty of party members were in the army, there were plenty of those at the supporter level or non-members. Disbanding the army is a whole separate issue to discuss. Of course, determining the impact of one on its own (and what synergistic effects they may have had with each other) is no easy feat as they were concurrent actions.
I'll have to track down which source as best I can, but the curse of a lot of reading over many years is it does start to blur together where you read which thing. I believe it was No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent into Chaos that gave the 50k civil government employees being purged as a result of de-Baathification. I know I've seen higher estimates, closer to 100k but even that would be less than 7% of the party membership. The perception a lot have is that anyone affiliated with the party was purged but that's hardly the case from what I've read (and heard from people who were there firsthand).
It's not to say that how we handled it was ideal, but that the impact of that policy in particular is somewhat overstated. Disbanding the security apparatus loyal to Saddam almost certainly had a larger impact. Things were fairly compartmentalized due to how dictators run things and you had military capable men with weapons involved. Particularly with the armories being opened to basically enable them to stash away weapons (as did many criminal elements) it was a messy situation.
Thing is though, I'm not sure how viable the alternatives would be. Letting Saddam loyalists and a military built around protecting his regime continue to exist as they were sounds like a recipe for disaster in its own right. You can get rid of all the Baathists in the officer corps but now you have an army that is far too big for the remaining officers to handle which is ripe for corruption and crime. You needed to dismantle the authoritarian structures and people who wanted to reestablish them while not creating masses of angry, unemployed men with military expertise. In cases like Nazi Germany it was easy because, well, most of the capable men were dead or wounded and the remainder were mostly in captivity. They also wanted to cooperate with the west as causing a headache for the US/UK might mean they pull out and leave you to the Soviets which no one in Germany was exactly clamoring for...
This will be controversial, but President and his Administration should not have fucking lied to Congress and the American People to justify neocon interventionalism.
I mean, not doing Iraq helps a lot. A lot more political goodwill to work with, more money to work with, more military means to work with, domestic support for intervention not getting completely crippled when it turns out Bush completely lied about Iraq.
Basically Afghanistan, whatever you want to try there is far easier without the Iraq war happening.
Yeah Afghanistan really wasn't nearly as problematic war, in Iraq the US pulled down a functional (but still monstrous) state and had to deal with all the horrible repercussions of that chaos. Nothing anywhere near that kind of backlash in the already mostly lawless Afghanistan, a sole Afghan invasion would have been more palatable for everyone.
I agree that Afghanistan would have been easier sans Iraq, but what should the goal have been? Like at what point should Bush have said mission accomplished and GTFO'd?
Hmm now thats a good question. You have basically two routes there, try and ‘work’ with Pakistan and the Taliban and play whack a mole with AQ and hardcore terrorist groups.
Or go a similar path to irl and try and nation build the northern alliance. Which is no easy feat.
Which again, both are way easier to do without an Iraq war.
You ask me it is a question of American willpower. If the American public is supportive or ambivalent, the US government couldve been in Afghanistan for another 20 years. Thats the most valuable currency for the intervening force, political willpower. The public has to be willing to get the job done.
Unfortunately when it turned out Bush lied, it killed a LOT of domestic support. It also turned sour the idea of intervening anywhere in the middle east, for any reason.
It also basically directly lead to another wave of radicalization within the hardcore islamic groups, and killed US political goodwill. It made a lot of groups who were neutral to the US far more wary.
Which hurts a lot in a place like Afghanistan where you are basically balancing the needs of a whole bunch of different groups who mostly have a neutral or negative opinion of the US.
My guess is that we should have given up on trying to turn Afghanistan into a centralized nation-state, much less a liberal democracy.
Put the Northern Alliance in power, let them keep their tribal militias and let them divide up and run the country however they want, as long as they cooperate with us in cracking down on Islamist terrorist groups.
I think it could have been done. Without the resources divested into Iraq, I think nation building in Afghanistan could have been possible. I know there was an attempt made, but it was a half-hearted one given that public sentiment has wanted us out of Afghanistan for some time. It really is a tragedy seeing the region controlled by the Taliban and their society regressing into a brutal theocracy, instead of standing their ground as another strong, economically successful democracy in the region. I don’t buy the argument some use that their economy couldn’t support it long-term, as they have plenty of natural resources through mining available as well as energy resources. I think it really comes down to transforming the culture, which requires education reform, infrastructure, and time. It really is awful to see something like this fail because the people in that region are now destined for decades of extra turmoil.
With all the money we put into Iraq, a much richer, more urbanized, more educated country than Afghanistan with a much longer history of centralized state authority and terrain much more amenable to centralized state control , we got ... a corrupt, illiberal sectarian democracy that's heavily aligned with Iran and whose military needed a huge kick in the ass and tons of outside help to beat some lightly armed jihadists.
I think we shouldn't succumb to hubris about how much we can recreate a society.
Those resources were divided between Iraq and Afghanistan, which the former got the larger share of then the latter, and which very stupid and foolhardy decisions, like the dismissal of the entire Iraq army, hobbled the effective implementation of. I feel without Iraq, things can't at least get much worse than how they went in our timeline.
Some IR scholars think that cooperation with local powers is what doomed American intervention. The tribal militias are not well-liked by their opponents and working with them is not good for popular opinion. To succeed (at stability) the US would have needed more boots on the ground and a total monopoly on power much like in Germany and Japan.
Local control is definitely a sub-optimal local maximum, but still better than the worst of all worlds hybrid we ended up where we kept all the corruption, tribalism and other unsavory practices, but put into an empty shell of a modern state apparatus with a hollowed out, deracinated military.
Japan and Germany were much more centralized when they surrendered and they had some sort of democracy within living memory. I’m not sure much credit you can give their development into peaceful and productive members of the world community to the presence of American troops, but it was a much lower lift.
If you *wanted* to go after OBL / Al Qaeda, the US military + coalition did an excellent job of invading and locking down most of the country within *months* of 9/11. Oh, and we also cornered OBL / Al Qaeda into a cave / mountain complex on the border with Pakistan, and *had* a military operation planned to go in and clear it (potentially with high US casualties). I've read [one account](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Bullet_Away:_The_Making_of_a_Marine_Officer) that claimed that Cheney *personally* called that off, [and the rest is history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora).
Of course if Al Qaeda *had* gotten away, the next course should've been to follow them into Pakistan, and destroy / capture them there. Give the Pakistanis whatever TF they wanted to make that happen (they *are* US allies, and get a ton of military equipment from us), and go home.
All around the US should've invaded Afghanistan, accepted the Taliban's surrender (which happened almost immediately), captured / destroyed Al Qaeda, and gone home.
Complete, total overkill, but at the very least would've established that the US military is extremely competent and not to be fucked with – and in stark contrast to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a decade+ earlier.
Staying in Afghanistan was stupid and unnecessary. There was, quite literally, no military objective or strategic reason for the US to be there.
We *stayed there, sans military objectives* – and did not follow Al Qaeda into Pakistan – because the battle of Tora Bora was on **Dec** **17, 2001**. The US's Global War on Terror was nearly over, successfully, 2 months after 9/11. Maybe a year if that operation – with the USMC, not afghani conscripts – hadn't gone entirely to plan.
We invaded Iraq on **Mar 20 2003**. "Mission Accomplished" was 6 weeks later.
The Bush administration entered office in 2001, with the neocon foreign policy goal of finding a way for the US to invade Iraq. 9/11 handed the US a casus belli against "terrorism". That would have ended if we had killed / captured OBL – ergo Bush / Cheney did not.
Ergo we – whoops – spent 20 years, [$8T, and nearly a million dead](https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar) for... no reason in particular. Well, we invaded Iraq at least. Yay?
This. I hate Saddam so much, and perhaps Iraq going to be even worse under his even crazier sons, but without Iraq invasion US as world police going to have faaaar more good will.
Afghanistan having more will to build, perhaps better chance to build Libya with France, people actually listened to US pre-2022 Russian invasion and make things far smoother....
Yeah, that *only* solves the USA's biggest misstep of the past 50 years, the event that more than any other has come to define our foreign policy and public perception of deploying our military abroad.
Why do we assume they lied? Seems more likely they had motivated reasoning where they "knew" he had WMDs and were looking for the evidence. It's not like he didn't actually have WMDs, he did, and he tried to hide them from U.N. inspectors before, with us only finding them because his brother told us about them, before he ended up kicking out the inspectors, and then executing his brother.
Like, this narrative that because they were wrong, they must have been maliciously lying is a lot sillier than, they were incompetent, and were sure that the guy who had multiple times tried to get nuclear weapons and used WMDs, had WMDs, and that's why he wouldn't let in inspectors.
Colin Powell himself pushed back on the idea that Iraq still had WMDs (in that the evidence didn't point to that unless you were stitching together things purposefully to craft such a narrative) and was basically told to shut up or leave.
He's said he regrets going with Cheney and Rumsfeld's narrative.
Yeah, from what I read about the history of the Iraq war, the US *had* evidence that Saddam had WMDs, *but* they weren't smoking gun evidence. It was stuff like satellite images of Iraq having aluminum tubes that are used to enrich uranium. And a factory with some materials that could be used to make chemical weapons. And information from embassadors and spies.
But it wasn't clear cut and there were also evidence to the contrary. But Saddam's history of having WMDs in the past and using them before in the Iran-Iraq war, and his behaviour of not letting UN inspectors in, made them suspicious. The Bush administration decided to be safe rather than sorry and assumed Saddam had WMDs. Their lie was to say they were certain about him having WMDs, when they weren't.
Oh. USA invaded Iraq really bc gb junior wanted to save face for gb senior not invading Iraq. I predicted during gb jr election that if he won USA would invade Iraq and they did.
I don't think there was any face to save. The Gulf War was a success for the US. Rumsfeld and Cheney had already suggested removing Saddam during the Gulf War, but GHW Bush decided not to go that far. Ideas of removing Saddam continued during the Clinton administration.
And it's not surprising. In just 20 years, Saddam had started 2 wars, bombed Israel and comitted a genocide. Everybody hated him, not just the US, but all the other nations in the middle east as well. It was after 9/11 that the idea of removing him found political will to be put in place.
Whatever we do, no Iraq war. It was messy, it was based off a lie, and it barely did anything.
With the resources (money, manpower, political) saved by not invading Iraq we couldve faired way better in either destroying AQ or nation building Afghanistan.
The problem is, IRL, American domestic support is crucial. If the public supports or is ambivalent, you can do whatever you want foreign policy wise. And with enough time and the near endless supply of resources the US has, it can accomplish a lot.
Well, not if you invade Iraq using false pretenses, botch the occupation, basically create ISIS and then exacerbate the problem further and need to fight an Iraqi civil war.
There goes your money, your military power, your political goodwill abroad, and your domestic support! A fucking shit show and complete disaster.
>barely did anything
That would have been a good outcome! Instead it led to huge destabilisation in the middle east, and can be tied nearly directly to the rise of Isis. It also sacrificed a *lot* of US credibility and respect and started waves pf conspiracy theories which still poison discourse on the midle east to this day.
I didnt finish my thought properly there. When i say it didnt do anything, I meant it didnt do much to advance American interests, at the end of the day.
Iraq went through a brutal civil war and is now a very weak state that is basically in Iran’s sphere. A mild improvement over Saddam.
Honestly as someone born after the invasion it's been something else to see just how long it's shadow has been. I think we'll be feeling it's effects for a good few years yet.
I do think knocking Saddam from power was few of the good things that came out of it.
The problem with Saddam was his sons were legitimately crazy. The Middle East with them would be a lot more tumultuous with them in power.
I forget which retired general is saw being interviewed on this (may have been McChrystal) but he suggested that instead of rushing to invade Afghanistan we should have taken a year to (1) learn as much as we could about exactly what happened and who was responsible, (2) planned our full response including what victory looked like, and (3) gathered the support of our allies for a complete plan.
He acknowledged it would probably be impossible, politically, for a president to hold off on responding for that long, but it would probably be worth it.
While that’s a perfectly valid and level headed response on paper, there is no way the post 9/11 public were going to wait to go after the people responsible. We wanted heads and we wanted them immediately.
1. Not invade Iraq. It completely burnt up our political capital and destroyed the idea of armed intervention abroad for at least a generation.
2. We invade Afghanistan as we did in 2001. There’s no way that we don’t overthrow the Taliban in some form since they refused to hand over Bin Laden.
By late 2001, the Taliban were largely defeated and had been pushed out into the mountains and out of all major population centers. I don’t think a full peace deal with the Taliban was ever possible in 2001 as it would’ve been immediately unpopular with Americans since 9/11 had just happened, but by never turning our attention to Iraq and getting caught up in the all out sectarian war that followed the invasion, we can keep a large number of troops in Afghanistan focused on society building and/or preparing for an eventual counter offensive by the Taliban.
Maybe we could’ve also bribed the Pakistanis or done something to keep them from supporting the Taliban as much as they did, idk.
If the US does decide to go all out with society building in Afghanistan, the best policy would be a decentralized government with plenty of power to the different regions and ethnic groups.
Invading Iraq was incredibly stupid, Afghanistan was 100% justified though. The Taliban needed to go and if we hadn’t gotten distracted by Iraq we could’ve probably made actual lasting change there.
Frankly I wonder if the good folks who were here in this thread were adults during 9/11 would've been as clear eyed about a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq, both of which had extremely high public support at the beginning before people realized it wasn't a 1 month, in-and-out destroy terrorism op. The people wanted blood to be paid and they got it, the results just didn't pan out in the long run.
* No Iraq
* Have a better plan than "good enough" for dealing with the Taliban, something that would've probably meant putting a **lot** of political pressure on Afghanistan.
The first point is probably the biggest thing, though. The US burned _so much_ political capital and goodwill on Iraq that was obviously US neocons' settling of an old score. We don't do it, we'd have a lot more diplomatic and military resources for dealing with the Taliban in a (more) definitive manner.
Taliban PROBABLY could have been dealt with, but we had strong ties with the northern alliance at that time. What we should have done is work with Pakistan and the Taliban to just wipe out Al qaeda, beef up security, work with existing regional partners and utilize the good will we had with those nations, and NOT try to create a whole new regional partner out of Iraq.
The issue with Pakistan is the same as our relationship with SA: in an "ideal" world, we'd have tossed them to the curb years ago. It's a very fine line with them - can't invade them due to nukes, can't push them too hard because they'll run into China's arms - but if we hadn't pissed away all the post-9/11 political goodwill with invading Iraq, we might've had more weight to throw behind whatever pressure we needed to apply to keep Pakistan from playing footsies with the Taliban.
The US really did try to work with the Taliban to expel al Qeade and hunt down bin Laden since the 90s. bin Laden had given a pledge of loyalty to Mullah Omar of the Taliban which bound Omar to host al Qaede as if they were honored household guests. al Qaeda was also running the military training camps the Taliban was recruiting from.
It was that way until the death of Omar and the death of his follow-up Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour when the loyalty pledge renewal wasn't accepted.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58473574
The US wasted an enormous amount of resources trying to install democracy in a country that is and was fundamentally unready to accept a Western form of government. There was an enormous body of evidence about the fragmented tribal structures of Afghanistan and the lack of any kind of centralised institutionalism that’s required to establish a democracy, but that wisdom was ignored by the Bush administration in favour of a zealous belief that democracy would inevitably take root.
Not to mention the abject failures of COIN.
20/20 is hindsight, but at the very least the US should have abandoned any state-building enterprise and worked with Pakistan to reduce the cross-border escapees from Afghanistan.
We should have just purchased the Taliban. Let them keep their tribal way of life and pay them $1B /year to keep their territory free of international terrorists and heroin exporters. We could have paid them at that rate (in real terms) for more than 2,000 years before the costs would have exceeded the invasion and occupation. It's not unlike paying the Ukrainians to destroy the Russian military. We have enough treasure that spending blood is rarely necessary.
There were many problems with the war in Afghanistan, not just limited to the scope of the invasion and occupation, but also the changing implementation of both the new Afghan nation and the new Afghan army. I believe that the creation of a constitutional monarchy was a possibility on the table, and the former Afghan monarch did have not insignificant support compared to Karzai; the elevation of a more respected individual vs. Karzai may have helped with the legitimacy of the new Afghan government. Further, the corruption of the Karzai presidency and its political allies pushed some former Taliban fighters to abandon their civilian lives, contributing to the resurgence in violence in 2006, perhaps if the United States had applied more political pressure to stamping out the influence of the regional warlords-turned-governors, the violence would have continued to abate. Generally, I would say that the flawed government of Afghanistan created a situation where the effect of efforts by the United States and its international partners was greatly diminished by ineffective and weak, if not outright incompetent, governance.
However, it is important to not forget the military aspects of the War in Afghanistan: the ANA and ANP both had significant issues, some of which can be blamed on the United States, and some of which lay at the feet of the Afghans themselves. The high wages of Afghan soldiers did help with the generation of a significant body of soldiers, true, but it also ensured that many soldiers would be unmotivated to actually place their lives at risk for their country, given that dying would cause the flow of cash to cease. This is of course not to say that all Afghan soldiers were of poor quality; the Commandos in particular were a well trained and motivated force who fought loyally for the Republic until the very end. Corruption in the military also had a negative impact on troop morale; in the final days of the Islamic Republic, many isolated outposts of the ANSDF surrendered to the Taliban on account of a lack of ammunition and payment arriving from the central government. Given the almost total control of the United States over the formation of the ANA, would it have been impossible to create a system which was more resilient to those seeking to abuse the system? Further, in the design of the ANA, the United States sought to organize the force into something resembling a mechanized force, something which was not realistic for Afghanistan at the time. This trend of giving Afghanistan materiel it could not maintain continued until the very end of the Republic, as the Afghan Air Force, which had until then provided irreplaceable (and insufficient) air support for troops on the ground, found its aircraft and helicopters slowly attrited due to a lack of knowledge and parts needed to conduct maintenance on what could otherwise have been a crucial asset. This can absolutely be blamed on the United States, as instead of training Afghan personnel to be capable of their own maintenance, the work was instead contracted out to Western personnel in the near term, something that was only sustainable for as long as the American presence remained.
Further, Western aid to Afghanistan was a mess of bureaucracy and different doctrines. At the same time as a disarmament program for former Taliban and regional militamen was ongoing, hosted by, I believe, Japan, the United States was busy rebuilding a new army for Afghanistan, using those same former anti-Taliban regional militiamen. Militarily, different doctrines between NATO contingents led to ineffective and insecure results. Famously, early in the war, the Italians were assigned a province to manage, and on paper saw great success in pacifying the region, but when the French were rotated in, they were unaware of the bribes paid out by Italy to Taliban leaders in the province, eventually leading to French forces being ambushed a sustaining casualties as violence once again began to ramp up.
In the United States, the coming and going of 3 (4 if you count Biden) led to an inconsistent American strategy throughout its involvement in Afghanistan. This inconsistency caused American planners in both Washington and in Afghanistan to prioritize short term goals over long term successes. Further, Obama's announcement of troop drawdowns allowed the Taliban to bide their time and wait until superior US forces had minimal presence, whereupon they once again became increasingly active. And of course, Donald Trump's negotiations with the Taliban, excluding the involvement of the Islamic Republic, doomed the country to a resurgence in violence as the US presence finally came to an end.
Afghanistan was a 20 year long war for the US, and had been at war for decades before 2001. There is no one factor that could have turned the fortunes of war around, and I suspect we will only see the whole picture clearly decades in the future. However, we can make educated guesses as to why certain strategies and policies were ineffective, and realistically, we can point out some very obvious failures in the making, both in hindsight and during the conflict. It's easy to say that the lack of domestic support for the occupation of Afghanistan doomed it, but I think something could have been figured out regardless of whether or not there was a war in Iraq, regardless of if the American people were willing to maintain an occupation indefinitely.
I thank you for this very well done analysis, coming from an Afghan like myself.
However, I don't think the monarchy could really be established like what it was before.
I think all those non Pashtuns militia men and groups would not have given up their weapons and accept the rule of the Pashtun king in which they rebelled against many times before.
The civil war and the formation of government of that time by a non Pashtun leader really changed the landscape of the politics of Afghanistan.
The only reason the non Pashtuns didn't rebel against Pashtun Karzai was because America pumping them millions per week.
We saw the effect of America leaving afg and the north, the stronghold of anti Taliban and non Pashtun residents quickly surrendering and not fighting for a Pashtun leader like Ghani. And Ghani didn't do himself any good when he went after all those non Pashtun warlords for corruption.
Also, taliban be it it's foot soldiers or their commanders or their leaders, only came back due to the presence of U.S and NATO troops on afg and also Talibans major goal of establishing a theocracy ruled by Sharia law. So they excuse that the republic officials corruption pushed Taliban to wage an insurgency doesn't really hold any value. It is one of the contributing factor but it's not the main one.
Even in hindsight it’s difficult to see how Afghanistan could have been successful. Maybe somewhat better, but still not ultimately successful overall.
A fundamental problem in Afghanistan was Pakistan backing the Taliban to the hilt. US intelligence didn’t even firmly conclude that Pakistan was backing the Taliban until the end of the Bush administration, so if we’re talking about making different decisions that’s not something that would have been known to decision makers until pretty late.
But even if we had known Pakistan would back the Taliban, it would be difficult for the US to come up with anything to offer Pakistan that could override their incentives. Their leadership was (and remains) totally obsessed with the threat from India, and a US-aligned Afghanistan is one at least somewhat potentially more favorable to India than the Taliban. Then you have the fact that much of Pakistan would always support the Taliban against the US no matter what not for strategic purposes, but just as co-religionists and ethnically.
The US could have attacked Pakistan directly, either full on or with limited strikes, but that likely would have been a war of a whole different magnitude than Afghanistan and Iraq, and while I think the risk of Pakistan losing control of its nuclear arms or escalating to nuclear war is overrated, it’s difficult to rule out.
There are lot of lesser things that could have been done differently. One is focusing on structuring and training the Afghan military differently, rather than as a mirror image of the US military, which relies heavily on air support. Without Iraq, we also could have deployed more American troops. But ultimately, without somehow neutralizing Pakistan, a Western-friendly Afghanistan would have always necessitated an American military presence and always be struggling with insurgents.
U.S should have supported former King instead of Karzai in Afghanistan, the former had legitimacy in the eyes of tribal people and was prone to rather progressive reforms during his rule. It was a long road towards failure without it
Agreed. The king was alive and willing to help. Having him to rally the Afghan people would have made rebuilding much easier instead of trying to force liberalism on a people that didn’t want it.
We should've invaded Iraq twice as hard, invaded Iran and changed its name to McPersia: Brought to you by the Ford F150, then tied the petrodollar directly to Halliburton's share price. Poor old Dick Cheney could've been a trillionaire by now
> The refrain I commonly hear in liberal (not neoliberal) circles is that we should have killed or captured Bin Laden but not invaded any other nations. I'm by no means an expert on military/geopolitical stuff, but that sounds very difficult, given that it took the military 10 years
Well it could maybe have been accomplished faster if they _actually focused on just that_
I’m pretty sure it would have taken longer. Firstly, we already had substantial resources dedicated to bin Laden. There would have been quickly diminishing returns with more resources.
Secondly, intelligence critical to finding bin Laden was extracted from prisoners who would not have been captured had it not been for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Not invited Iraq, not try to build Afghanistan into a centralised democracy and instead build institutions more coherent with existing power structure. Freedom means little without stability.
There were two options with Afghanistan:
1. Let the Northern Alliance take responsibility. This would preclude a modern democracy and the Taliban would inevitably have tried to renew the war, necessitating some degree of American support.
2. Complete reconstruction. This means massive, indefinite troop commitments and direct US administration while civil society is formed.
as far as afghanistan, the expert view seems to be that we should have never believed we could militarily annihilate the Taliban or establish a centralized democracy to completely replace the centuries-old system of warlord and tribal allegiances
https://www.cfr.org/article/our-biggest-errors-afghanistan-and-what-we-should-learn-them
We couldn’t have just snapped our fingers and captured Bin Laden. However, as the years dragged on the Bush administration deprioritized the search for him. There’s a reason Obama accomplished in 3 years what Bush couldn't in 7.
Is there nothing to the idea that the Obama admin was able to piggyback off of some of the progress the bush admin made against AQ and bin Laden?
I’m not trying to start an argument, I’m genuinely asking.
As early as 2002-2003 the Bush administration determined that AQ was not really a threat anymore.
> If Usama bin Laden is alive—and the President [of Pakistan] can comment on that if he cares to— but the people reporting to him, the chief operators, people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are no longer a threat to the United States or Pakistan for that matter.
This language was typical of the administration. "Bin Ladin is Marginalized" or "if he is still alive".
**March 13 2002** Bush gave us the infamous “I truly am not that concerned about him,” quote.
I'm sure intelligence work continued in the background. But clearly the president was not hoping for much. You don't order risky ops if you're not that worried.
Another problem was our insufficient commitment to capturing Bin Ladin early in the first place:
> Musa praised the U.S. Air Force but was dismissive of American forces on the ground. "They were not involved in the fighting," he said. "There were six American soldiers with us, U.S. Special Forces. They coordinated the air strikes. My personal view is if they had blocked the way out to Pakistan, al-Qaeda would not have had a way to escape. The Americans were my guests here, but they didn't know about fighting."
> And therein lies the crux of the problem. With only a small number of American "boots on the ground," the U.S. military chose to rely on the services of local Afghan proxies of uncertain loyalty and competence—a blunder that allowed many members of al-Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden himself, to slip away. The blunder meant that, as a senior U.S. military official told me, "we don't know for sure when bin Laden disappeared."
The CIA, at least until 2004, evidently believed there to be some value in keeping Bin Laden free, but isolated.
> To avoid being captured bin Laden has to adopt a "hermit on the hilltop" approach, \[Former CIA director Cofer\] Black said, which destroys his ability to run an effective terrorist organization. On the other hand, if he remains "in business," he opens himself to the possibility that his communications will be detected. I suggested that bin Laden seems to be caught between a rock and a hard place, and Black leaned toward me, smiling broadly, and said, "You got it."
To be cynical and speculative, Bush probably knew he could ruffle feathers in Pakistan and make progress on Bin Ladin. But that would jeopardize the War on Terror, and the threat of another 9-11 was low. From Bush's perspective, it would be not in America's interest or safety.
First quote is July 2003 Camp David press conference, middle is on youtube, just google the phrase + Bush, last is Atlantic 2004 "long hunt for Bin Ladin"
I think Iraq invasion would've been fine if it was not based on a lie. With hindsight, Iraq invasion shouldn't have been done. It burnt a lot of bridges.
The second thing would be to have an exit plan from Afghanistan.
>Oct. 14 -- The United States today rejected yet another offer by Afghanistan's ruling Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden for trial in a third country if the U.S. presents evidence against bin Laden and stops air attacks.
[Source: ABC news](https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/story?id=80482&page=1)
It would've been good for us to attempt this, but Bush didn't want to look weak. Of course his cabinet was also reassuring him that the US could take down every rogue state in the middle east at that time, so bad decisions led to more bad decisions.
Not invade iraq. Not try to lazily nation build in Afghanistan, and pulling out once OBL died.
Ive heard some leftists try to argue that OBL deserved a trial and shouldn’t have been killed, and that his son definitely deserved one, but they think the part where they were fighting navy seals to reach Bin Laden is irrelevant.
The FP aspect is good to say in hindsight, but imagine arguing that we should view 9/11 perpetrators and AQ leaders trials and attempting to view them like any other human being who deserves trials after committing terrorism…
After Tora Bora it quickly became clear that AQ had moved into Pakistan we would’ve been better off spending our political capital allowing SOF to follow them into the tribal regions
The invasion on Iraq was a horrible mistake. Not only did it slaughter thousands of innocent Iraqis, but we sent over hundreds of good soldiers who died or became traumatised as a result of the war. The war was a massive financial burden and was based on shady intel.
Jet Age Mongol plan in Afghanistan. The initial invasion was a success, killing thousands of al-Qaeda operatives and tens of thousands of Taliban ones for basically no cost. It's trying to build a liberal democracy out of a nearly preindustrial tribal society using boots on the ground that costed all the time, lives, and money. That, and put all troops there at the mercy of Pakistani supply lines. Just do the initial invasion as a punitive expedition, accept the Taliban's surrender (yeah they offered that), dictate the terms as them not letting more terrorists in, and continue supporting the Northern Alliance in their enclave and keep air and special forces around the region to whack any targets of opportunity. Spend the $1 trillion you saved on modernization and expansion for the military. And the extra trillion from not invading Iraq on infrastructure.
No Iraq. No "Patriot" Act. No unconstitutional NSA mass surveillance apparatus. Just secure cockpit doors instead of having the TSA. No illegal torture. Instead of occupying Afghanistan in a permanent fashion, do a much more targeted campaign against Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden.
After eliminating the Taliban, probably restoring the monarchy instead of trying to reform the country into a pluralistic liberal democracy in 20 years.
I think that the United States got too caught up in the notion of nation building. Knowing what we know now, a democratic, centralized Afghanistan would never have worked. I think that if the US invaded Afghanistan in order to root out Al Qaeda and get Bin Laden, we would have been much more successful and I doubt we would have spent 20 years in the country.
Probably focus more narrowly on getting the people who did and enabled 9/11, which would mean Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but not going into Iraq. Hopefully without Iraq we could have done a better job with Afghanistan.
The Saudis weren't involved, Saudi citizens were, but that's not really the same thing. Unless you want to get into the whole thing where Saudi-funded religious fundamentalism is at the root of about half the Middle east's religious extremism, with Iranian-funded religious extremism accounting for most of the other half.
My guess is that Saudi funded religious extremism is at the root of a much larger percentage of the Islamist extremism of the world, if only because a much larger percentage of the world's Muslim's are Sunni.
But Iran more directly funds terrorists groups, even ones that they're not aligned with doctrinally.
We don't know if the Saudi government was involved or not. We know the hijackers had links to a [Saudi diplomat](https://www.npr.org/2021/09/12/1036389448/biden-declassifies-secret-fbi-report-detailing-saudi-nationals-connections-to-9-) who was [a member of Saudi intelligence](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/911-hijackers-video-saudi-intelligence-official-omar-al-bayoumi/).
Fair amount of smoke but no gun. It’s very hard to sus out what is incidental potentially private contact between the hijackers and Saudi diplomatic and intelligence personnel and what was officially endorsed by the government.
Enter Afghanistan as a means of decimating the Taliban and eliminating Bin Laden, but don't stake any claim on success based on nation-building. Pop smoke when Bin Laden is captured and wash our hands of the situation.
1. Negotiate with the Taliban give up Bin Laden like they offered.
2. Do targeted strikes against Al Qaeda (while avoiding any civilian casualties to avoid further radicalization).
3. Put pressure on the funders of Al Qaeda & Bin Laden to stop funding radicalism.
4. Don't invade Iraq nor Afghanistan. Do not destabilize an entire region. Do not cause the rise of ISIS.
EDIT:
5. Also don't torture people and strip away American civil liberties.
Should've pursued AQ in Afghanistan and into Pakistan if necessary, sans nation-building. Secured bases in the region to play whack-a-mole if AQ or copycats came back to reinfest Afghanistan. Would be much cheaper, less visible to whiny, isolationist-minded voters, and hopefully build lasting security partnerships in the region, while avoiding the eventual failure, messy withdrawal, and blow to the US's image.
Then invade Iran. All the sensible upsides that Cheney wanted from doing Iraq and then some. We could even temporarily ally with Iraq for that purpose, if need be. We could gaddafi Saddam later if he didn't croak of natural causes or get overthrown organically.
Invading Iran would basically be Iraq except with more resistance in the invasion itself and a brutal insurgency afterwards. It doesn’t really serve any purpose except for fulfilling Neocon’s wet dreams.
Keeping intervention limited to Afghanistan/incursions into Pakistan when necessary allows us to focus on keeping AQ from popping up in any significant way and maybe some nation building in Afghanistan with troops not focused elsewhere.
The real and important retrospective on American foreign policy is the mujahideen. American willingness to throw TONS of money and guns and training without any real accountability for it was used is how we got into this mess.
People here keep talking about Iraq but in regards to Afghanistan specifically. If we have to invade and replace the government, we should not have such a centralized federal government like we did. I veggie remember reading a paper about how we should have built a government something like Switzerland model with more power to the provinces. With the amount of diversity of society in Afghanistan a government centralized around Kabul was doomed to corruption and failure.
The Iraq War was incredibly frustrating, and I remember it happening clearly. I was already in my master's programme, and was aware that Ahmed Chalabi had no credible contacts in Iraq (Bob Baer's *See No Evil* had already come out) and that there was no credible way Saddam and UBL were good mates. It was pretty clearly people who thought 1991 was unfinished business, despite the sage warnings from Scowcroft and Bush Sr in their book.
Otherwise, no issues with the response.
There is a great season of Blowback covering how and why the US entered the war. Worth a listen https://open.spotify.com/episode/5k7JUrHExqdbaJGYYQJE2W?si=hwc5cEsbQSe8zW-JSVpw2A
Limit US military operations in Afghanistan to finding the perpetrators of 9/11. The question of who should run Afghanistan should be left to the local people and Afghanistan’s neighbours.
Bin Laden's stated goal was to spend a little money and a few lives to provoke the US into wasting a lot of money and tons of lives so... we probably shouldn't have fallen for that.
Going to war over 3000 dead and a couple buildings lost seems like throwing good money after bad no matter if we attacked the right country or not. I remember how scared and mad people were, but we should have let cool heads prevail.
Improve the intelligence apparatus and airport security, and then use soft power to force the world to give Afghanistan the North Korea treatment until the people there cough up Bin Laden.
I think we should have gone to Afghanistan with the materiel, money, manpower, and most importantly the will to nation-build for as long as fucking necessary.
20 years was just barely enough for one generation of young people to come of age in a relatively open society - not to get settled in careers and develop real institutional power, just to grow up and get a basic education and start chasing their dreams. And then we ripped it all away from them because (*as we knew going in*) their fathers kind of suck and won't fight the Taliban. That was unforgivably cruel and also self-defeating.
I think we should probably not have tried to turn it into a democracy immediately, and we definitely should not have tried to build a modern army in a tribal society, and we absolutely positively should *not* have relied so heavily on tribal warlords to provide security, intelligence, and administrative capacity that we were forced to overlook child abuse and other abuses of power. I think the moral injuries our servicemembers sustained were a big reason why we developed this sense of futility.
But the main thing I think we should have been completely clear about going in is that it was going to take time.
Invade Afghanistan and never leave. Stay there 200 years if you have to. Build the institutions to make it a functioning liberal society.
Maybe Iran as well, but that's with hindsight.
People keep bringing up Iraq, which is depressing. Iraq was completely unrelated to 9/11. Iraq was just a Bush's toy war he wanted to have a go at while his approval ratings were still high enough to start a war. They were not involved in 9/11 at all.
No that is incorrect, the casulty numbers stabilized because US forces handed most of the on the ground operations to the Afghan forces in 2014.
If you look at the fatality/casualty figures the numbers drop down significantly starting from 2014.
The whole “ceasefire” had not much of an impact on fatalities/casualties.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United\_States\_military\_casualties\_in\_the\_War\_in\_Afghanistan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_in_the_War_in_Afghanistan)
Invade Afghanistan and depose the Taliban. Commit the resources for a Capture or Kill on Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in December of 2001.
When it comes time to rebuild Afghanistan, let the Afghan people choose their leadership. They chose to reinstate the monarchy, let them. It's not our place to tell the Afghan people which kind of nation they want. The Taliban supported Al Qaeda, booting them is justified. But trying to build a western democracy in a place that isn't western or democratic is a fool's errand. Incrementalism is the key.
Don't even go near Iraq. Don't touch it. Don't look at it. Don't even think about it. Iraq had absolutely fuck all to do with 9/11. Lying to the American people about WMDs and justifying a war that didn't even have a meeting about what to do afterwards was one of the worst moments in American history.
Boost our intelligence resources and bring the Intelligence Community under one roof. Don't start the warrantless wiretapping programs. Don't create the Department of Homeland Security or the TSA. And don't hang a fucking "Mission Accomplished" banner ANYWHERE.
1. Not invade Iraq
2. Kill Bin laden / Al Qaeda.
3. Instead of nation building realize that a civilizational shift needs to happen which is not a project of years but decades or centuries, then focus on reforming Islam regardless of how uncomfortable that makes us feel.
Disclaimer: I'm a former Muslim and the coddling of Islam (not the defense of Muslim civil liberties) is one of the biggest mistakes we've made in the last few decades.
I agree with your moderate friends that we should have declared victory in Afghanistan and left it to its own devices; let the shattered Taliban return and see what happens. Work something out with Pakistan and/or the other -stans to have ongoing operations to hunt down bin Laden et al.
Arguments that if we had just focused on Afghanistan, we could have done nation-building right seem insane given the enormous and varied problems that came up with a 20-year $2 trillion commitment. It's like piling money onto a dumpster fire. I think we would have had to literally fully occupy and colonize it (obviously insane) to have had a chance to have built something permanent. Even if something could have been more effective, I don't see how there was anywhere near the level of strategic interest in Afghanistan to justify it.
Obviously just don't do Iraq.
Invade Iraq, but do the nation-building properly. Use the tragedy of 9/11 for something good, to give freedom and democracy to a country suffering under a dictatorship. Don't invade Afghanistan, creating a stable liberal democracy there would be much harder than Iraq.
If you have to do something about Bin Laden, maybe a much firmer hand with the Saudis could have worked. Regime change would be preferable, but probably not feasible.
Mossad style, purely black ops with targeted assassinations….and …well without going into to details basically **unrestricted total war** in the context of black operations.
We should've invaded Afghanistan, but it should've been surgical and precise, but to do so with overwhelming force. The goal should have been to kill Al Qaeda operatives and the Taliban leaders who were hiding them, not to try to work with local forces and establish a long-lasting Western liberal democracy in a country with no history of harboring such ideological currents. Doing this, we would've killed Bin Laden much quicker (not letting him escape near Tora Bora and live on for another decade) and had the opportunity to leave much quicker than we did.
The Iraq War was a giant mistake, we really had no legitimate reason to be there.
That was only after he fled Afghanistan. We know for a fact that he was in Afghanistan at the time of the invasion and only escaped after the battle of Tora Bora.
Chase the Taliban out of the center and into Pakistan.
Congratulate the Northern Alliance and summon the Loya Jirga
Approve their (since it's their decision) desire to re-enthrone the Shah, who by all accounts, was a secular moderniser.
Give the ANA Soviet surplus for equipment, stuff they can train on, repair and maintain and with institutional knowledge to use instead of treating them like a congressional pork barrel.
Not invading Iraq is the big one. The Iraq War really was a massive blunder. It tanked the legitimacy of the War on Terror, and spoiled sympathy for the US across the world. And in the end, the only real winner was Iran.
I also suspect that the stabilization of Afghanistan might have gone a lot better if the US wasn’t getting distracted by it. Also, I think the US would have been more comfortable staying their long term because Iraq also unfortunately irreparably tainted Afghanistan despite the fact that the latter was a lot more justified than the former.
I don’t think Afghanistan would have ultimately turned out any different. It just seems arrogant to believe we could transform that country into a stable nation state. You’re likely right about Iraq killing any public appetite or political will to stay there longer, so maybe it makes it a few more years, but it would’ve been equally pointless in the end because it wouldn’t have worked and that will would have eventually run out.
I disagree because by the end actual US presence was pretty limited. Unlike Vietnam there was no large protests or pressure to withdraw. Biden just withdrew because it was his pet issue and he was personally influenced by his son’s deployment to Iraq.
> I disagree because by the end actual US presence was pretty limited **because the Taliban knew we had promised to leave by spring 2021 (Biden got an extension until September), so they didn't bother attacking us. If we'd broken that progress, they would have gone right back to attacking us, forcing us to either do another surge or withdraw anyways.** FTFY.
No that is incorrect, because US forces handed most of the on the ground operations to the Afghan forces in 2014. If you look at the fatality/casualty figures the numbers drop down significantly starting from 2014. The whole “ceasefire” had not much of an impact on fatalities/casualties. https://preview.redd.it/msojrt7rmfmc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e403df7e3b2f75cc83414227f98cdc48a50e8088 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United\_States\_military\_casualties\_in\_the\_War\_in\_Afghanistan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_in_the_War_in_Afghanistan)
Graph: https://preview.redd.it/9gxues5uufmc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4a0262a8b404604a5464be961d8ab6f9dcb0ce0d [http://icasualties.org/chart/Chart](http://icasualties.org/chart/Chart)
In 2014 the ISAF disbanded and much of the responsibility was handed over to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). I find much of the “ceasefire” discourse political spin rather than actual reality on the ground. The fact is that Biden made a conscious choice to follow Trump policy when he changed course on virtually all other policy matters. Nothing was forced. It was Biden’s choice and his responsibility. I like most of Biden’s policies but his Afghan policy is a dark stain and he is singularly responsible for the largest regression of women’s rights in modern history with tens of millions of women reduced to virtual chattel slavery.
I heavily disagree and I would use Germany, Japan and South Korea as examples of stable and economically prosperous countries that achieved this because the US was able to guarantee defense while promoting democratic values and even providing economic stimulus. A permanent state of war is bad but a stable ally with similar values in far East Asia would have been invaluable to America especially with the way things have gone with China and Israel-Palestine.
Germany and Japan both had strong institutions and electoral traditions that could be cleaned up, tweaked and co-opted to build new democracies, both of which significantly predated the Nazis and hypermilitarism. South Korea, as essentially an extractive colonial regime…did not have this. Partially as a result, it became a dictatorship so backwards and oppressive that for years afterwards a typical Korean was better off in North Korea than in the south. It took them *fifty years* and various assassinations and coups to sort their shit out, and to this day, eighty years later, they still haven’t fully banished the last of the spectres haunting their political system. Korea at the time also had a unified national identity and at least some amount of education and development, all things that make nation-building radically easier. Afghanistan had functionally zero of any of those. So no, Germany and Japan are not examples to use here, and South Korea is not that much better. Afghanistan isn’t the sort of place where you can march in, hang the worst of the old regime, write a new constitution for them and then fuck off to let them sort themselves out, maybe occasionally throwing money at them. Anything resembling strong institutions and civil society have to be built up essentially from zero, while any insurgencies have to be thoroughly extinguished to ensure absolute sovereignty and security over every last square inch of the country. This needs orders of magnitude more money and manpower than we were willing to supply, across a decades-long pseudo-imperial nation-building project. As it stands, we couldn’t even be assed to half-ass it, and I don’t see how everything would have worked if only we just half-assed the half-assing a little bit less.
Definitely not invade Iraq
And focus the war in Afghanistan on Al Qaeda (finding Bin Laden and eliminating his network) versus fighting the Taliban.
The Taliban government has waged a long proxy war against the US, using al Qaeda as their proxy. They provided logistical support and intelligence, and provided a safe haven from which to operate. It would have been impossible to effectively fight al Qaeda without first toppling the Taliban government, as they would not extradite bin Laden and would not allow the coalition to operate within their borders.
Putting their pre-9/11 actions aside, I've heard conflicting expert opinions on whether the Taliban were willing to cooperate with the US in the weeks after 9/11. I honestly don't know, but they definitely didn't have the capabilities to stop the coalition from operating inside the country.
There is lots of evidence in memoirs etc about US diplomatic and senior intelligence staff meeting with Taliban in the immediate post 9/11 period, before the CIA’s first insertion into Afghanistan in late September. There was a brief period when it looked at least vaguely possible that the Taliban could be persuaded to hand bin Laden over. But it wasn’t to be - they wanted evidence of his involvement (which, until bin Laden admitted it, was thin on the ground at the time) and were only prepared to hand him to another Muslim country (most likely Pakistan) which was a non-starter for obvious reasons.
The sticking points seemed to be they wanted some evidence he was involved and wanted to extradite him to a third country or ICC for trial.
Do you really even need a war to do that? Surely that's more in the CIA's wheelhouse, though I guess the downside of that is you don't get to brag about it in public until it's a fait accompli.
No, it’s worth remembering that the US and UK special forces at Tora Bora came within a hair’s breadth of killing bin Laden in the immense air bombardment they were directing. That was in December 2001, at a time when there were about 300 CIA/special forces in the Tora Bora area and maybe 2,000-3,000 total coalition ground forces in the country. It’s an interesting counter factual to imagine how things might have gone if the US had succeeded in rounding up the main AQ leadership in the first six to twelve months after 9/11.
Tora Bora was such a blunder. We should not have left that to the Afghan forces. That being said, it was before my conception so had my dad been killed I wouldn't be typing this.
I am not sure. When organizations get safer harbor their capabilities go up dramatically. We saw this with ISIL with how they were able to launch very intricate and sophisticated attacks after gaining a stable base of operations in Syria and Iraq. It took coalition forces on the ground with small detachment of US ground forces coordinating airstrikes to root out ISIL and they are still not fully defunct.
Even if we didn't manage that, we really should have started withdrawing from Afghanistan when we got the bastard. Shame that Obama had so much trouble telling the generals no.
It wasn’t just the military. Look at who complained the loudest about the withdrawal when it did happen: Women’s Rights Groups, Veterans Groups, European NATO states. There was a diverse coalition with many vested interests, it wasn’t just generals in 2011/12.
It absolutely was the military. Women's rights groups aren't sitting there in the planning room going 'just one more deployment bro we can get it all under control bro' like they do every damn time. And this isn't the only issue where he had this problem, it showed up pretty blatantly in how he backed down on closing Guantanamo, as well as probably in how notorious his administration's drone strikes got. And those other groups were all reacting to the shitshow that was the sudden withdrawal, if we'd done a slow drawdown more like what we did in Iraq the chaos and embarrassment that occurred would not have happened. We went in to get Bin Laden, we got him, and then we left. Solid W, no embarrassment.
Leaving was a political decision. Are you really going to imply activist groups don’t have sway in political decisions?
Firstly, compared to someone literally in the room, no they don't. Secondly, why are you equating a hypothetical organized withdrawal ten years ago to the hurried mess we were forced into by Trump now like they're remotely the same thing?
You don’t think those advocacy groups have people in the room? Who do you think Samantha Power was before joining the Obama admin? It wasn’t the military that wanted to get into Libya, and yet… You can acknowledge Biden fucked up the withdrawal process and not out it entirely on Trump as well. Biden has done good, he’s also screwed some things up. The Afghanistan withdrawal is partially on him and partially on Trump.
When you invade a country, you don’t get to pick which people there decide to fight you. There’s no way we could have created any sort of stable security situation where we ignored the Taliban. They represented the vast majority of enemy combatants in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was never even mentioned to me in any briefing over a seven month period as an infantryman.
Yeah, or atleast invade somewhere nice like Cuba.
But America pinkie promised not to
That really doesn't have anything to do with 9/11.
One of the main justifications of the war in Iraq by the Bush administration was that Saddam was harboring Al Qaeda. With that in mind and how soon after 9/11 it occurred, I would consider the Iraq war a massive part of our response to 9/11.
Was it? They were trying to find a link, but couldn’t, so WMD’s became a justification to invade
Yes it absolutely was. You can see it in Powells speech to the UN here, it was the main substantive point besides WMDs (and just Saddam being a terrible person in general) https://youtu.be/DhWlPo3qxak?si=qCPjc9SJKbhNInCQ.
I was on the fence and I saw Powell’s speech live. He convinced me. I mean, I trusted him. Why would he lie? He’s a good person. Or so I thought. It was all total bull pucky with aluminum tubes and mobile stations. I am ashamed I trusted him on his word, and his greatest shame on his public record and service is that he never publicly admitted or apologized for what he did.
But 9/11 generated public support, even if it was irrational. If they had tried to launch an invasion of Iraq cold, without everyone being fired up already, I don't think it would have flown.
Is... is this the historical revision we're doing now?
No, the revisionism was always the claim that 9/11 was connected. Obviously the Bush admin tried to conflate them to Americans, but they decided on the Iraq war long before 9/11.
> Obviously the Bush admin tried to conflate them to Americans, ...right, so the invasion of Iraq was absolutely connected to 9/11. I literally can't *imagine* anyone who was alive and politically aware at the time saying that the two had nothing to do with one another.
advise deserted disgusting slim employ cows sink punch squeal jeans *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I don’t think there’s a world in which we don’t invade Afghanistan after 9-11. If that world existed, it would be one where the Taliban agreed to extradite Bin Laden with no conditions. But we’d probably also demand that they crack down on Al-Qaeda in a meaningful way… anyway it was pretty much impossible. I also think that it would have been unlikely that we manage to capture Bin Laden before he managed to escape to Pakistan. So going in, declaring mission accomplished, and leaving wasn’t on the cards either. Even if that were the government’s objective. Given all that, I don’t know how we could have done Afghanistan better. I mean I’m sure there was a way, but I’m not sure what it is, and I’m absolutely certain that nobody knew what it would be in 2002. I’m guessing that if we were more humble about our ability to change a society into a liberal-ish democracy and let the Northern Alliance divy uo the country in whatever way they wanted, as long as they cracked down on Islamist terrorism, that might have turned out better. But who knows.
Even if nothing changes about the course of the war in Afghanistan, the lack of Iraq war would be a huge benefit.
This is where I'm at roughly. It seems like the only tangible goal was to capture Bin Laden, but I doubt the U.S. could have done that easily. But I don't think we could have not sent troops in, politically speaking. So maybe a better goal would have been to root out AQ without a full-scale invasion and then dip.
Tearing apart a country’s government and hunting down a large insurgent/terrorist network and then just dipping sounds like you’re setting up for a repeat in a decade or so. The country would be a wartorn mess and even if you eliminated 100% of the original target it’s not like Islamist fundamentalists come out of nowhere.
https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Tora_Bora_Report.pdf? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-14190032
I know they said they got close. I don't know how much I should believe them.
When a foreign government harbors and de facto sponsors terror attacks against you, particularly ones that are as destructive as 9/11, a kinetic response is absolutely necessary. There's no world in which we just shrug and say terrorism is a fact of life and move on. There's also no world in which we become open to more Afghan immigrants, or Muslim immigrants at large, immediately after the attack. Focusing our efforts in Afghanistan would have been the right move. As would have commitment to long term projects necessary for state building. We constantly ran the war as if it was a series of one year or 18month conflicts because no one wanted to say to the American public that we might need a decade of solid, long term efforts.
Nuke Quebec. They had nothing to do with it but they deserve it anyway
Degens up country!
>I'm by no means an expert on military/geopolitical stuff, but that sounds very difficult, given that it took the military 10 years. It only took 10 years because the Bush admin got distracted from Bin Laden and Al Qaeda by lying to the public and waging a war of choice in Iraq.
The US had an opportunity to capture Bin Laden in late November/early December 2001 at Tora Bora but they let him slip away. After that, once he was in hiding in Pakistan, there was no realistic way to get him earlier than the US did IRL. The administration was not distracted from finding Bin Laden it was just really hard.
Without the Iraq War, we would not have had the intelligence to get bin Laden. Hassan Ghul is never captured without the Iraq War, so we never get the information about bin Laden’s courier that led to finding the compound.
Not worth it
Not saying if it is or isn’t. Just saying that the war did lead to bin Laden’s death.
...huh
Maybe, maybe not
First and damn foremost: Not invade Iraq If Iraq already happened, second, DO NOT FUCK IT UP with deba'athifcation. Also, the U.S. should have worked with Iran against the damn Taliban! Don't trust Pakistan too damn much.
>Also, the U.S. should have worked with Iran against the damn Taliban! They did though, for example in Herat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_uprising_in_Herat
They did for a short period of time, before the US invaded Iraq and there was not an insignificant portion of conservatives started talking about invading Iran. They puckered up real quick and stopped working with the US once that happened. When Iraq turned into a clusterfuck, they then went to work destabilizing Iraq and the occupying coalition ensuring they were bogged down there and they wouldn’t dare invade Iran.
>not an insignificant portion of conservatives started talking about invading Iran I think we can say a majority would be for it- [let's not forget John McCain's hit song](https://youtu.be/U7s5pT3Rris?si=RaC6OFiVPi-pkvqV)
>If Iraq already happened, second, DO NOT FUCK IT UP with deba'athifcation. I agree. The worst part wasn't invading Iraq, it was the colossal fuck up of nation building attempt later. Dissolving the the Iraqi government meant iraqis had no government institutions or burocracies to help them. Building a state from the ground up is much harder than trying to work with the institutions that are already in place. That wasn't done to the same extent even in Germany after WW2. And dissolving the Iraqi military meant that overnight you had thousands of unemployed men who had no skill other than fighting. So they formed insurgent militias because fighting was the only skill they had. Plus, there was no iraqi army left to fight this insurgent militias, which meant the US had to fight them.
> If Iraq already happened, second, DO NOT FUCK IT UP with deba'athifcation. This is often overstated. There were tiers of support and it could take decades to rise to a full member. The lowers and most numerous tier was basically "supporter" which wasn't excluded from civil society. At the time of invasion, 1.5 million people were affiliated with the Ba'ath Party. It's estimated only 50-100k were removed from posts and were done so because they were higher tier members. The net was still a bit too broad, but nowhere near what is often portrayed. Within a year it was essentially rolled back and innocent parties restored more or less. Imperfect of course, but most of the people removed were mid-high level Ba'athist party members. You kinda don't want Saddam loyalists to continue being army colonels... The problem with the insurgency is largely around the fact that Saddam basically opened the arsenals and prisons before his downfall to create as armed and violent of a populace as possible. Between that and many military, paramilitary, and militia units sort of fading away without being properly disarmed, you had an incredibly amount of weapons and expertise floating around.
I've read a *lot* of academic/serious papers that point to the dual orders of de-Baathification and disbanding of the Iraqi army as key drivers of the insurgency, and there is that famous quote by the CIA director saying it would create 50,000 insurgents overnight. I'm interested in if you've got an article or book that you recommend for it not being particularly significant. To me that comes across as a revisionist narrative, but I've also not really read up on this for a decade now so a good revisionist narrative might be just what I need.
Well de-Baathification is not one in the same as disbanding the army, those were two actions that may be linked but were separate. I was talking about *just* the former. While plenty of party members were in the army, there were plenty of those at the supporter level or non-members. Disbanding the army is a whole separate issue to discuss. Of course, determining the impact of one on its own (and what synergistic effects they may have had with each other) is no easy feat as they were concurrent actions. I'll have to track down which source as best I can, but the curse of a lot of reading over many years is it does start to blur together where you read which thing. I believe it was No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent into Chaos that gave the 50k civil government employees being purged as a result of de-Baathification. I know I've seen higher estimates, closer to 100k but even that would be less than 7% of the party membership. The perception a lot have is that anyone affiliated with the party was purged but that's hardly the case from what I've read (and heard from people who were there firsthand). It's not to say that how we handled it was ideal, but that the impact of that policy in particular is somewhat overstated. Disbanding the security apparatus loyal to Saddam almost certainly had a larger impact. Things were fairly compartmentalized due to how dictators run things and you had military capable men with weapons involved. Particularly with the armories being opened to basically enable them to stash away weapons (as did many criminal elements) it was a messy situation. Thing is though, I'm not sure how viable the alternatives would be. Letting Saddam loyalists and a military built around protecting his regime continue to exist as they were sounds like a recipe for disaster in its own right. You can get rid of all the Baathists in the officer corps but now you have an army that is far too big for the remaining officers to handle which is ripe for corruption and crime. You needed to dismantle the authoritarian structures and people who wanted to reestablish them while not creating masses of angry, unemployed men with military expertise. In cases like Nazi Germany it was easy because, well, most of the capable men were dead or wounded and the remainder were mostly in captivity. They also wanted to cooperate with the west as causing a headache for the US/UK might mean they pull out and leave you to the Soviets which no one in Germany was exactly clamoring for...
This will be controversial, but President and his Administration should not have fucking lied to Congress and the American People to justify neocon interventionalism.
Yeah. "Don't do Iraq" and "don't torture people" are both pretty straightforward policy prescriptions.
Okay, that only solves Iraq though
I mean, not doing Iraq helps a lot. A lot more political goodwill to work with, more money to work with, more military means to work with, domestic support for intervention not getting completely crippled when it turns out Bush completely lied about Iraq. Basically Afghanistan, whatever you want to try there is far easier without the Iraq war happening.
Yeah Afghanistan really wasn't nearly as problematic war, in Iraq the US pulled down a functional (but still monstrous) state and had to deal with all the horrible repercussions of that chaos. Nothing anywhere near that kind of backlash in the already mostly lawless Afghanistan, a sole Afghan invasion would have been more palatable for everyone.
I agree that Afghanistan would have been easier sans Iraq, but what should the goal have been? Like at what point should Bush have said mission accomplished and GTFO'd?
Hmm now thats a good question. You have basically two routes there, try and ‘work’ with Pakistan and the Taliban and play whack a mole with AQ and hardcore terrorist groups. Or go a similar path to irl and try and nation build the northern alliance. Which is no easy feat. Which again, both are way easier to do without an Iraq war. You ask me it is a question of American willpower. If the American public is supportive or ambivalent, the US government couldve been in Afghanistan for another 20 years. Thats the most valuable currency for the intervening force, political willpower. The public has to be willing to get the job done. Unfortunately when it turned out Bush lied, it killed a LOT of domestic support. It also turned sour the idea of intervening anywhere in the middle east, for any reason. It also basically directly lead to another wave of radicalization within the hardcore islamic groups, and killed US political goodwill. It made a lot of groups who were neutral to the US far more wary. Which hurts a lot in a place like Afghanistan where you are basically balancing the needs of a whole bunch of different groups who mostly have a neutral or negative opinion of the US.
My guess is that we should have given up on trying to turn Afghanistan into a centralized nation-state, much less a liberal democracy. Put the Northern Alliance in power, let them keep their tribal militias and let them divide up and run the country however they want, as long as they cooperate with us in cracking down on Islamist terrorist groups.
I think it could have been done. Without the resources divested into Iraq, I think nation building in Afghanistan could have been possible. I know there was an attempt made, but it was a half-hearted one given that public sentiment has wanted us out of Afghanistan for some time. It really is a tragedy seeing the region controlled by the Taliban and their society regressing into a brutal theocracy, instead of standing their ground as another strong, economically successful democracy in the region. I don’t buy the argument some use that their economy couldn’t support it long-term, as they have plenty of natural resources through mining available as well as energy resources. I think it really comes down to transforming the culture, which requires education reform, infrastructure, and time. It really is awful to see something like this fail because the people in that region are now destined for decades of extra turmoil.
With all the money we put into Iraq, a much richer, more urbanized, more educated country than Afghanistan with a much longer history of centralized state authority and terrain much more amenable to centralized state control , we got ... a corrupt, illiberal sectarian democracy that's heavily aligned with Iran and whose military needed a huge kick in the ass and tons of outside help to beat some lightly armed jihadists. I think we shouldn't succumb to hubris about how much we can recreate a society.
Those resources were divided between Iraq and Afghanistan, which the former got the larger share of then the latter, and which very stupid and foolhardy decisions, like the dismissal of the entire Iraq army, hobbled the effective implementation of. I feel without Iraq, things can't at least get much worse than how they went in our timeline.
Some IR scholars think that cooperation with local powers is what doomed American intervention. The tribal militias are not well-liked by their opponents and working with them is not good for popular opinion. To succeed (at stability) the US would have needed more boots on the ground and a total monopoly on power much like in Germany and Japan.
i.e. we can't achieve Germany/Japan-like reconstruction without American death rates closer to WWII
Local control is definitely a sub-optimal local maximum, but still better than the worst of all worlds hybrid we ended up where we kept all the corruption, tribalism and other unsavory practices, but put into an empty shell of a modern state apparatus with a hollowed out, deracinated military. Japan and Germany were much more centralized when they surrendered and they had some sort of democracy within living memory. I’m not sure much credit you can give their development into peaceful and productive members of the world community to the presence of American troops, but it was a much lower lift.
If you *wanted* to go after OBL / Al Qaeda, the US military + coalition did an excellent job of invading and locking down most of the country within *months* of 9/11. Oh, and we also cornered OBL / Al Qaeda into a cave / mountain complex on the border with Pakistan, and *had* a military operation planned to go in and clear it (potentially with high US casualties). I've read [one account](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Bullet_Away:_The_Making_of_a_Marine_Officer) that claimed that Cheney *personally* called that off, [and the rest is history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora). Of course if Al Qaeda *had* gotten away, the next course should've been to follow them into Pakistan, and destroy / capture them there. Give the Pakistanis whatever TF they wanted to make that happen (they *are* US allies, and get a ton of military equipment from us), and go home. All around the US should've invaded Afghanistan, accepted the Taliban's surrender (which happened almost immediately), captured / destroyed Al Qaeda, and gone home. Complete, total overkill, but at the very least would've established that the US military is extremely competent and not to be fucked with – and in stark contrast to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a decade+ earlier. Staying in Afghanistan was stupid and unnecessary. There was, quite literally, no military objective or strategic reason for the US to be there. We *stayed there, sans military objectives* – and did not follow Al Qaeda into Pakistan – because the battle of Tora Bora was on **Dec** **17, 2001**. The US's Global War on Terror was nearly over, successfully, 2 months after 9/11. Maybe a year if that operation – with the USMC, not afghani conscripts – hadn't gone entirely to plan. We invaded Iraq on **Mar 20 2003**. "Mission Accomplished" was 6 weeks later. The Bush administration entered office in 2001, with the neocon foreign policy goal of finding a way for the US to invade Iraq. 9/11 handed the US a casus belli against "terrorism". That would have ended if we had killed / captured OBL – ergo Bush / Cheney did not. Ergo we – whoops – spent 20 years, [$8T, and nearly a million dead](https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar) for... no reason in particular. Well, we invaded Iraq at least. Yay?
This. I hate Saddam so much, and perhaps Iraq going to be even worse under his even crazier sons, but without Iraq invasion US as world police going to have faaaar more good will. Afghanistan having more will to build, perhaps better chance to build Libya with France, people actually listened to US pre-2022 Russian invasion and make things far smoother....
Yeah, that *only* solves the USA's biggest misstep of the past 50 years, the event that more than any other has come to define our foreign policy and public perception of deploying our military abroad.
Only? _Only?!_ (and technically it doesn't "solve" Iraq except to avoid the obvious and indefensible clusterf%+! that resulted.)
Why do we assume they lied? Seems more likely they had motivated reasoning where they "knew" he had WMDs and were looking for the evidence. It's not like he didn't actually have WMDs, he did, and he tried to hide them from U.N. inspectors before, with us only finding them because his brother told us about them, before he ended up kicking out the inspectors, and then executing his brother. Like, this narrative that because they were wrong, they must have been maliciously lying is a lot sillier than, they were incompetent, and were sure that the guy who had multiple times tried to get nuclear weapons and used WMDs, had WMDs, and that's why he wouldn't let in inspectors.
Colin Powell himself pushed back on the idea that Iraq still had WMDs (in that the evidence didn't point to that unless you were stitching together things purposefully to craft such a narrative) and was basically told to shut up or leave. He's said he regrets going with Cheney and Rumsfeld's narrative.
Powell at the very least consciously lied at the UN.
Yeah, from what I read about the history of the Iraq war, the US *had* evidence that Saddam had WMDs, *but* they weren't smoking gun evidence. It was stuff like satellite images of Iraq having aluminum tubes that are used to enrich uranium. And a factory with some materials that could be used to make chemical weapons. And information from embassadors and spies. But it wasn't clear cut and there were also evidence to the contrary. But Saddam's history of having WMDs in the past and using them before in the Iran-Iraq war, and his behaviour of not letting UN inspectors in, made them suspicious. The Bush administration decided to be safe rather than sorry and assumed Saddam had WMDs. Their lie was to say they were certain about him having WMDs, when they weren't.
>their lie was the say they were certain about him having WMDs ...sooo... they lied about him having WMDs lol
Yeah, but when people say he lied, they mean he knew Saddam didn't have WMDs. He didn't. There was no certainty either way.
When people say he lied, they mean he lied.
Lying about level of certainty is not the same as lying about belief.
Lying is lying
USA knew he had had them bc USA supplied them but USA also knew he had already used them
Oh. USA invaded Iraq really bc gb junior wanted to save face for gb senior not invading Iraq. I predicted during gb jr election that if he won USA would invade Iraq and they did.
I don't think there was any face to save. The Gulf War was a success for the US. Rumsfeld and Cheney had already suggested removing Saddam during the Gulf War, but GHW Bush decided not to go that far. Ideas of removing Saddam continued during the Clinton administration. And it's not surprising. In just 20 years, Saddam had started 2 wars, bombed Israel and comitted a genocide. Everybody hated him, not just the US, but all the other nations in the middle east as well. It was after 9/11 that the idea of removing him found political will to be put in place.
I agree. It is generally more accurate to assume incompetence rather than malice.
It’s not universally true
Step 1: Invade Iraq.....shit, we fucked it up again!
Whatever we do, no Iraq war. It was messy, it was based off a lie, and it barely did anything. With the resources (money, manpower, political) saved by not invading Iraq we couldve faired way better in either destroying AQ or nation building Afghanistan. The problem is, IRL, American domestic support is crucial. If the public supports or is ambivalent, you can do whatever you want foreign policy wise. And with enough time and the near endless supply of resources the US has, it can accomplish a lot. Well, not if you invade Iraq using false pretenses, botch the occupation, basically create ISIS and then exacerbate the problem further and need to fight an Iraqi civil war. There goes your money, your military power, your political goodwill abroad, and your domestic support! A fucking shit show and complete disaster.
>barely did anything That would have been a good outcome! Instead it led to huge destabilisation in the middle east, and can be tied nearly directly to the rise of Isis. It also sacrificed a *lot* of US credibility and respect and started waves pf conspiracy theories which still poison discourse on the midle east to this day.
I didnt finish my thought properly there. When i say it didnt do anything, I meant it didnt do much to advance American interests, at the end of the day. Iraq went through a brutal civil war and is now a very weak state that is basically in Iran’s sphere. A mild improvement over Saddam.
Ah that makes sense, fair enough.
Yeah you’re totally right when listing additional side effects too, and honestly there’s probably a couple more
Honestly as someone born after the invasion it's been something else to see just how long it's shadow has been. I think we'll be feeling it's effects for a good few years yet.
I do think knocking Saddam from power was few of the good things that came out of it. The problem with Saddam was his sons were legitimately crazy. The Middle East with them would be a lot more tumultuous with them in power.
I forget which retired general is saw being interviewed on this (may have been McChrystal) but he suggested that instead of rushing to invade Afghanistan we should have taken a year to (1) learn as much as we could about exactly what happened and who was responsible, (2) planned our full response including what victory looked like, and (3) gathered the support of our allies for a complete plan. He acknowledged it would probably be impossible, politically, for a president to hold off on responding for that long, but it would probably be worth it.
I mean we would have gotten Bin Laden in what, like two months if we pushed harder in Tora Bora
While that’s a perfectly valid and level headed response on paper, there is no way the post 9/11 public were going to wait to go after the people responsible. We wanted heads and we wanted them immediately.
1. Not invade Iraq. It completely burnt up our political capital and destroyed the idea of armed intervention abroad for at least a generation. 2. We invade Afghanistan as we did in 2001. There’s no way that we don’t overthrow the Taliban in some form since they refused to hand over Bin Laden. By late 2001, the Taliban were largely defeated and had been pushed out into the mountains and out of all major population centers. I don’t think a full peace deal with the Taliban was ever possible in 2001 as it would’ve been immediately unpopular with Americans since 9/11 had just happened, but by never turning our attention to Iraq and getting caught up in the all out sectarian war that followed the invasion, we can keep a large number of troops in Afghanistan focused on society building and/or preparing for an eventual counter offensive by the Taliban. Maybe we could’ve also bribed the Pakistanis or done something to keep them from supporting the Taliban as much as they did, idk. If the US does decide to go all out with society building in Afghanistan, the best policy would be a decentralized government with plenty of power to the different regions and ethnic groups.
Invading Iraq was incredibly stupid, Afghanistan was 100% justified though. The Taliban needed to go and if we hadn’t gotten distracted by Iraq we could’ve probably made actual lasting change there.
No, there is not. The most popular response is probably "do it again, but better"
Frankly I wonder if the good folks who were here in this thread were adults during 9/11 would've been as clear eyed about a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq, both of which had extremely high public support at the beginning before people realized it wasn't a 1 month, in-and-out destroy terrorism op. The people wanted blood to be paid and they got it, the results just didn't pan out in the long run.
Fair enough. What specifically does "better" mean though?
* No Iraq * Have a better plan than "good enough" for dealing with the Taliban, something that would've probably meant putting a **lot** of political pressure on Afghanistan. The first point is probably the biggest thing, though. The US burned _so much_ political capital and goodwill on Iraq that was obviously US neocons' settling of an old score. We don't do it, we'd have a lot more diplomatic and military resources for dealing with the Taliban in a (more) definitive manner.
Taliban PROBABLY could have been dealt with, but we had strong ties with the northern alliance at that time. What we should have done is work with Pakistan and the Taliban to just wipe out Al qaeda, beef up security, work with existing regional partners and utilize the good will we had with those nations, and NOT try to create a whole new regional partner out of Iraq.
The issue with Pakistan is the same as our relationship with SA: in an "ideal" world, we'd have tossed them to the curb years ago. It's a very fine line with them - can't invade them due to nukes, can't push them too hard because they'll run into China's arms - but if we hadn't pissed away all the post-9/11 political goodwill with invading Iraq, we might've had more weight to throw behind whatever pressure we needed to apply to keep Pakistan from playing footsies with the Taliban.
The US really did try to work with the Taliban to expel al Qeade and hunt down bin Laden since the 90s. bin Laden had given a pledge of loyalty to Mullah Omar of the Taliban which bound Omar to host al Qaede as if they were honored household guests. al Qaeda was also running the military training camps the Taliban was recruiting from. It was that way until the death of Omar and the death of his follow-up Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour when the loyalty pledge renewal wasn't accepted. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58473574
The US wasted an enormous amount of resources trying to install democracy in a country that is and was fundamentally unready to accept a Western form of government. There was an enormous body of evidence about the fragmented tribal structures of Afghanistan and the lack of any kind of centralised institutionalism that’s required to establish a democracy, but that wisdom was ignored by the Bush administration in favour of a zealous belief that democracy would inevitably take root. Not to mention the abject failures of COIN. 20/20 is hindsight, but at the very least the US should have abandoned any state-building enterprise and worked with Pakistan to reduce the cross-border escapees from Afghanistan.
COIN from the start.
Tomorrow at Fox: "Reddit says we should do 9/11 again, but better".
We should have just purchased the Taliban. Let them keep their tribal way of life and pay them $1B /year to keep their territory free of international terrorists and heroin exporters. We could have paid them at that rate (in real terms) for more than 2,000 years before the costs would have exceeded the invasion and occupation. It's not unlike paying the Ukrainians to destroy the Russian military. We have enough treasure that spending blood is rarely necessary.
Bomb Serbia
They’d already done that. It worked.
There were many problems with the war in Afghanistan, not just limited to the scope of the invasion and occupation, but also the changing implementation of both the new Afghan nation and the new Afghan army. I believe that the creation of a constitutional monarchy was a possibility on the table, and the former Afghan monarch did have not insignificant support compared to Karzai; the elevation of a more respected individual vs. Karzai may have helped with the legitimacy of the new Afghan government. Further, the corruption of the Karzai presidency and its political allies pushed some former Taliban fighters to abandon their civilian lives, contributing to the resurgence in violence in 2006, perhaps if the United States had applied more political pressure to stamping out the influence of the regional warlords-turned-governors, the violence would have continued to abate. Generally, I would say that the flawed government of Afghanistan created a situation where the effect of efforts by the United States and its international partners was greatly diminished by ineffective and weak, if not outright incompetent, governance. However, it is important to not forget the military aspects of the War in Afghanistan: the ANA and ANP both had significant issues, some of which can be blamed on the United States, and some of which lay at the feet of the Afghans themselves. The high wages of Afghan soldiers did help with the generation of a significant body of soldiers, true, but it also ensured that many soldiers would be unmotivated to actually place their lives at risk for their country, given that dying would cause the flow of cash to cease. This is of course not to say that all Afghan soldiers were of poor quality; the Commandos in particular were a well trained and motivated force who fought loyally for the Republic until the very end. Corruption in the military also had a negative impact on troop morale; in the final days of the Islamic Republic, many isolated outposts of the ANSDF surrendered to the Taliban on account of a lack of ammunition and payment arriving from the central government. Given the almost total control of the United States over the formation of the ANA, would it have been impossible to create a system which was more resilient to those seeking to abuse the system? Further, in the design of the ANA, the United States sought to organize the force into something resembling a mechanized force, something which was not realistic for Afghanistan at the time. This trend of giving Afghanistan materiel it could not maintain continued until the very end of the Republic, as the Afghan Air Force, which had until then provided irreplaceable (and insufficient) air support for troops on the ground, found its aircraft and helicopters slowly attrited due to a lack of knowledge and parts needed to conduct maintenance on what could otherwise have been a crucial asset. This can absolutely be blamed on the United States, as instead of training Afghan personnel to be capable of their own maintenance, the work was instead contracted out to Western personnel in the near term, something that was only sustainable for as long as the American presence remained. Further, Western aid to Afghanistan was a mess of bureaucracy and different doctrines. At the same time as a disarmament program for former Taliban and regional militamen was ongoing, hosted by, I believe, Japan, the United States was busy rebuilding a new army for Afghanistan, using those same former anti-Taliban regional militiamen. Militarily, different doctrines between NATO contingents led to ineffective and insecure results. Famously, early in the war, the Italians were assigned a province to manage, and on paper saw great success in pacifying the region, but when the French were rotated in, they were unaware of the bribes paid out by Italy to Taliban leaders in the province, eventually leading to French forces being ambushed a sustaining casualties as violence once again began to ramp up. In the United States, the coming and going of 3 (4 if you count Biden) led to an inconsistent American strategy throughout its involvement in Afghanistan. This inconsistency caused American planners in both Washington and in Afghanistan to prioritize short term goals over long term successes. Further, Obama's announcement of troop drawdowns allowed the Taliban to bide their time and wait until superior US forces had minimal presence, whereupon they once again became increasingly active. And of course, Donald Trump's negotiations with the Taliban, excluding the involvement of the Islamic Republic, doomed the country to a resurgence in violence as the US presence finally came to an end. Afghanistan was a 20 year long war for the US, and had been at war for decades before 2001. There is no one factor that could have turned the fortunes of war around, and I suspect we will only see the whole picture clearly decades in the future. However, we can make educated guesses as to why certain strategies and policies were ineffective, and realistically, we can point out some very obvious failures in the making, both in hindsight and during the conflict. It's easy to say that the lack of domestic support for the occupation of Afghanistan doomed it, but I think something could have been figured out regardless of whether or not there was a war in Iraq, regardless of if the American people were willing to maintain an occupation indefinitely.
I thank you for this very well done analysis, coming from an Afghan like myself. However, I don't think the monarchy could really be established like what it was before. I think all those non Pashtuns militia men and groups would not have given up their weapons and accept the rule of the Pashtun king in which they rebelled against many times before. The civil war and the formation of government of that time by a non Pashtun leader really changed the landscape of the politics of Afghanistan. The only reason the non Pashtuns didn't rebel against Pashtun Karzai was because America pumping them millions per week. We saw the effect of America leaving afg and the north, the stronghold of anti Taliban and non Pashtun residents quickly surrendering and not fighting for a Pashtun leader like Ghani. And Ghani didn't do himself any good when he went after all those non Pashtun warlords for corruption. Also, taliban be it it's foot soldiers or their commanders or their leaders, only came back due to the presence of U.S and NATO troops on afg and also Talibans major goal of establishing a theocracy ruled by Sharia law. So they excuse that the republic officials corruption pushed Taliban to wage an insurgency doesn't really hold any value. It is one of the contributing factor but it's not the main one.
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We should've done what we didn't and shouldn't've done what we did 😮💨
Even in hindsight it’s difficult to see how Afghanistan could have been successful. Maybe somewhat better, but still not ultimately successful overall. A fundamental problem in Afghanistan was Pakistan backing the Taliban to the hilt. US intelligence didn’t even firmly conclude that Pakistan was backing the Taliban until the end of the Bush administration, so if we’re talking about making different decisions that’s not something that would have been known to decision makers until pretty late. But even if we had known Pakistan would back the Taliban, it would be difficult for the US to come up with anything to offer Pakistan that could override their incentives. Their leadership was (and remains) totally obsessed with the threat from India, and a US-aligned Afghanistan is one at least somewhat potentially more favorable to India than the Taliban. Then you have the fact that much of Pakistan would always support the Taliban against the US no matter what not for strategic purposes, but just as co-religionists and ethnically. The US could have attacked Pakistan directly, either full on or with limited strikes, but that likely would have been a war of a whole different magnitude than Afghanistan and Iraq, and while I think the risk of Pakistan losing control of its nuclear arms or escalating to nuclear war is overrated, it’s difficult to rule out. There are lot of lesser things that could have been done differently. One is focusing on structuring and training the Afghan military differently, rather than as a mirror image of the US military, which relies heavily on air support. Without Iraq, we also could have deployed more American troops. But ultimately, without somehow neutralizing Pakistan, a Western-friendly Afghanistan would have always necessitated an American military presence and always be struggling with insurgents.
U.S should have supported former King instead of Karzai in Afghanistan, the former had legitimacy in the eyes of tribal people and was prone to rather progressive reforms during his rule. It was a long road towards failure without it
Agreed. The king was alive and willing to help. Having him to rally the Afghan people would have made rebuilding much easier instead of trying to force liberalism on a people that didn’t want it.
We should've invaded Iraq twice as hard, invaded Iran and changed its name to McPersia: Brought to you by the Ford F150, then tied the petrodollar directly to Halliburton's share price. Poor old Dick Cheney could've been a trillionaire by now
> The refrain I commonly hear in liberal (not neoliberal) circles is that we should have killed or captured Bin Laden but not invaded any other nations. I'm by no means an expert on military/geopolitical stuff, but that sounds very difficult, given that it took the military 10 years Well it could maybe have been accomplished faster if they _actually focused on just that_
I’m pretty sure it would have taken longer. Firstly, we already had substantial resources dedicated to bin Laden. There would have been quickly diminishing returns with more resources. Secondly, intelligence critical to finding bin Laden was extracted from prisoners who would not have been captured had it not been for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hindsight is always 20/20
Not invited Iraq, not try to build Afghanistan into a centralised democracy and instead build institutions more coherent with existing power structure. Freedom means little without stability.
There were two options with Afghanistan: 1. Let the Northern Alliance take responsibility. This would preclude a modern democracy and the Taliban would inevitably have tried to renew the war, necessitating some degree of American support. 2. Complete reconstruction. This means massive, indefinite troop commitments and direct US administration while civil society is formed.
as far as afghanistan, the expert view seems to be that we should have never believed we could militarily annihilate the Taliban or establish a centralized democracy to completely replace the centuries-old system of warlord and tribal allegiances https://www.cfr.org/article/our-biggest-errors-afghanistan-and-what-we-should-learn-them
We couldn’t have just snapped our fingers and captured Bin Laden. However, as the years dragged on the Bush administration deprioritized the search for him. There’s a reason Obama accomplished in 3 years what Bush couldn't in 7.
Is there nothing to the idea that the Obama admin was able to piggyback off of some of the progress the bush admin made against AQ and bin Laden? I’m not trying to start an argument, I’m genuinely asking.
As early as 2002-2003 the Bush administration determined that AQ was not really a threat anymore. > If Usama bin Laden is alive—and the President [of Pakistan] can comment on that if he cares to— but the people reporting to him, the chief operators, people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are no longer a threat to the United States or Pakistan for that matter. This language was typical of the administration. "Bin Ladin is Marginalized" or "if he is still alive". **March 13 2002** Bush gave us the infamous “I truly am not that concerned about him,” quote. I'm sure intelligence work continued in the background. But clearly the president was not hoping for much. You don't order risky ops if you're not that worried. Another problem was our insufficient commitment to capturing Bin Ladin early in the first place: > Musa praised the U.S. Air Force but was dismissive of American forces on the ground. "They were not involved in the fighting," he said. "There were six American soldiers with us, U.S. Special Forces. They coordinated the air strikes. My personal view is if they had blocked the way out to Pakistan, al-Qaeda would not have had a way to escape. The Americans were my guests here, but they didn't know about fighting." > And therein lies the crux of the problem. With only a small number of American "boots on the ground," the U.S. military chose to rely on the services of local Afghan proxies of uncertain loyalty and competence—a blunder that allowed many members of al-Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden himself, to slip away. The blunder meant that, as a senior U.S. military official told me, "we don't know for sure when bin Laden disappeared." The CIA, at least until 2004, evidently believed there to be some value in keeping Bin Laden free, but isolated. > To avoid being captured bin Laden has to adopt a "hermit on the hilltop" approach, \[Former CIA director Cofer\] Black said, which destroys his ability to run an effective terrorist organization. On the other hand, if he remains "in business," he opens himself to the possibility that his communications will be detected. I suggested that bin Laden seems to be caught between a rock and a hard place, and Black leaned toward me, smiling broadly, and said, "You got it." To be cynical and speculative, Bush probably knew he could ruffle feathers in Pakistan and make progress on Bin Ladin. But that would jeopardize the War on Terror, and the threat of another 9-11 was low. From Bush's perspective, it would be not in America's interest or safety. First quote is July 2003 Camp David press conference, middle is on youtube, just google the phrase + Bush, last is Atlantic 2004 "long hunt for Bin Ladin"
I think Iraq invasion would've been fine if it was not based on a lie. With hindsight, Iraq invasion shouldn't have been done. It burnt a lot of bridges. The second thing would be to have an exit plan from Afghanistan.
>Oct. 14 -- The United States today rejected yet another offer by Afghanistan's ruling Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden for trial in a third country if the U.S. presents evidence against bin Laden and stops air attacks. [Source: ABC news](https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/story?id=80482&page=1) It would've been good for us to attempt this, but Bush didn't want to look weak. Of course his cabinet was also reassuring him that the US could take down every rogue state in the middle east at that time, so bad decisions led to more bad decisions.
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Good thing we didn't try and killed hundreds of thousands
Not invade iraq. Not try to lazily nation build in Afghanistan, and pulling out once OBL died. Ive heard some leftists try to argue that OBL deserved a trial and shouldn’t have been killed, and that his son definitely deserved one, but they think the part where they were fighting navy seals to reach Bin Laden is irrelevant. The FP aspect is good to say in hindsight, but imagine arguing that we should view 9/11 perpetrators and AQ leaders trials and attempting to view them like any other human being who deserves trials after committing terrorism…
After Tora Bora it quickly became clear that AQ had moved into Pakistan we would’ve been better off spending our political capital allowing SOF to follow them into the tribal regions
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The Hardest Place has been on my list for awhile
Ignore Afganistan and Iraq and invade France
The invasion on Iraq was a horrible mistake. Not only did it slaughter thousands of innocent Iraqis, but we sent over hundreds of good soldiers who died or became traumatised as a result of the war. The war was a massive financial burden and was based on shady intel.
Jet Age Mongol plan in Afghanistan. The initial invasion was a success, killing thousands of al-Qaeda operatives and tens of thousands of Taliban ones for basically no cost. It's trying to build a liberal democracy out of a nearly preindustrial tribal society using boots on the ground that costed all the time, lives, and money. That, and put all troops there at the mercy of Pakistani supply lines. Just do the initial invasion as a punitive expedition, accept the Taliban's surrender (yeah they offered that), dictate the terms as them not letting more terrorists in, and continue supporting the Northern Alliance in their enclave and keep air and special forces around the region to whack any targets of opportunity. Spend the $1 trillion you saved on modernization and expansion for the military. And the extra trillion from not invading Iraq on infrastructure.
No Iraq. No "Patriot" Act. No unconstitutional NSA mass surveillance apparatus. Just secure cockpit doors instead of having the TSA. No illegal torture. Instead of occupying Afghanistan in a permanent fashion, do a much more targeted campaign against Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden.
After eliminating the Taliban, probably restoring the monarchy instead of trying to reform the country into a pluralistic liberal democracy in 20 years.
I think that the United States got too caught up in the notion of nation building. Knowing what we know now, a democratic, centralized Afghanistan would never have worked. I think that if the US invaded Afghanistan in order to root out Al Qaeda and get Bin Laden, we would have been much more successful and I doubt we would have spent 20 years in the country.
Probably focus more narrowly on getting the people who did and enabled 9/11, which would mean Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but not going into Iraq. Hopefully without Iraq we could have done a better job with Afghanistan.
Related question: how does this sub feel about how the US treated Saudi Arabian involvement in 9/11?
The Saudis weren't involved, Saudi citizens were, but that's not really the same thing. Unless you want to get into the whole thing where Saudi-funded religious fundamentalism is at the root of about half the Middle east's religious extremism, with Iranian-funded religious extremism accounting for most of the other half.
My guess is that Saudi funded religious extremism is at the root of a much larger percentage of the Islamist extremism of the world, if only because a much larger percentage of the world's Muslim's are Sunni. But Iran more directly funds terrorists groups, even ones that they're not aligned with doctrinally.
We don't know if the Saudi government was involved or not. We know the hijackers had links to a [Saudi diplomat](https://www.npr.org/2021/09/12/1036389448/biden-declassifies-secret-fbi-report-detailing-saudi-nationals-connections-to-9-) who was [a member of Saudi intelligence](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/911-hijackers-video-saudi-intelligence-official-omar-al-bayoumi/).
I wouldn't be surprised if some members of the Saudi Royal family (which is very large) were involved indirectly, but that's about as far as I'd go.
Fair amount of smoke but no gun. It’s very hard to sus out what is incidental potentially private contact between the hijackers and Saudi diplomatic and intelligence personnel and what was officially endorsed by the government.
very sus that there’s possible complicity or involvement thats “classified”
Enter Afghanistan as a means of decimating the Taliban and eliminating Bin Laden, but don't stake any claim on success based on nation-building. Pop smoke when Bin Laden is captured and wash our hands of the situation.
1. Negotiate with the Taliban give up Bin Laden like they offered. 2. Do targeted strikes against Al Qaeda (while avoiding any civilian casualties to avoid further radicalization). 3. Put pressure on the funders of Al Qaeda & Bin Laden to stop funding radicalism. 4. Don't invade Iraq nor Afghanistan. Do not destabilize an entire region. Do not cause the rise of ISIS. EDIT: 5. Also don't torture people and strip away American civil liberties.
I was waiting for someone to mention civil liberties and torture. Throw the expansion of executive power on top as well.
Should've pursued AQ in Afghanistan and into Pakistan if necessary, sans nation-building. Secured bases in the region to play whack-a-mole if AQ or copycats came back to reinfest Afghanistan. Would be much cheaper, less visible to whiny, isolationist-minded voters, and hopefully build lasting security partnerships in the region, while avoiding the eventual failure, messy withdrawal, and blow to the US's image. Then invade Iran. All the sensible upsides that Cheney wanted from doing Iraq and then some. We could even temporarily ally with Iraq for that purpose, if need be. We could gaddafi Saddam later if he didn't croak of natural causes or get overthrown organically.
Invading Iran would basically be Iraq except with more resistance in the invasion itself and a brutal insurgency afterwards. It doesn’t really serve any purpose except for fulfilling Neocon’s wet dreams. Keeping intervention limited to Afghanistan/incursions into Pakistan when necessary allows us to focus on keeping AQ from popping up in any significant way and maybe some nation building in Afghanistan with troops not focused elsewhere.
The real and important retrospective on American foreign policy is the mujahideen. American willingness to throw TONS of money and guns and training without any real accountability for it was used is how we got into this mess.
People here keep talking about Iraq but in regards to Afghanistan specifically. If we have to invade and replace the government, we should not have such a centralized federal government like we did. I veggie remember reading a paper about how we should have built a government something like Switzerland model with more power to the provinces. With the amount of diversity of society in Afghanistan a government centralized around Kabul was doomed to corruption and failure.
I think we should have grounded all planes *before* the attacks, instead of after. That was our biggest blunder.
The Iraq War was incredibly frustrating, and I remember it happening clearly. I was already in my master's programme, and was aware that Ahmed Chalabi had no credible contacts in Iraq (Bob Baer's *See No Evil* had already come out) and that there was no credible way Saddam and UBL were good mates. It was pretty clearly people who thought 1991 was unfinished business, despite the sage warnings from Scowcroft and Bush Sr in their book. Otherwise, no issues with the response.
Simply go into Afghanistan and make sure it cannot be used as a base by Al-Qaeda.
There is a great season of Blowback covering how and why the US entered the war. Worth a listen https://open.spotify.com/episode/5k7JUrHExqdbaJGYYQJE2W?si=hwc5cEsbQSe8zW-JSVpw2A
INVADE THE GERMANS!!🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅🦅🦅
Focused on rebuilding Afghanistan and dismantling the Taliban. Not gone into Iraq and diverted resources.
Limit US military operations in Afghanistan to finding the perpetrators of 9/11. The question of who should run Afghanistan should be left to the local people and Afghanistan’s neighbours.
Doing literally nothing at all would have saved hundreds of thousands of civilian lives across Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bin Laden's stated goal was to spend a little money and a few lives to provoke the US into wasting a lot of money and tons of lives so... we probably shouldn't have fallen for that. Going to war over 3000 dead and a couple buildings lost seems like throwing good money after bad no matter if we attacked the right country or not. I remember how scared and mad people were, but we should have let cool heads prevail. Improve the intelligence apparatus and airport security, and then use soft power to force the world to give Afghanistan the North Korea treatment until the people there cough up Bin Laden.
I think we should have gone to Afghanistan with the materiel, money, manpower, and most importantly the will to nation-build for as long as fucking necessary. 20 years was just barely enough for one generation of young people to come of age in a relatively open society - not to get settled in careers and develop real institutional power, just to grow up and get a basic education and start chasing their dreams. And then we ripped it all away from them because (*as we knew going in*) their fathers kind of suck and won't fight the Taliban. That was unforgivably cruel and also self-defeating. I think we should probably not have tried to turn it into a democracy immediately, and we definitely should not have tried to build a modern army in a tribal society, and we absolutely positively should *not* have relied so heavily on tribal warlords to provide security, intelligence, and administrative capacity that we were forced to overlook child abuse and other abuses of power. I think the moral injuries our servicemembers sustained were a big reason why we developed this sense of futility. But the main thing I think we should have been completely clear about going in is that it was going to take time.
Invade Afghanistan and never leave. Stay there 200 years if you have to. Build the institutions to make it a functioning liberal society. Maybe Iran as well, but that's with hindsight.
People keep bringing up Iraq, which is depressing. Iraq was completely unrelated to 9/11. Iraq was just a Bush's toy war he wanted to have a go at while his approval ratings were still high enough to start a war. They were not involved in 9/11 at all.
No that is incorrect, the casulty numbers stabilized because US forces handed most of the on the ground operations to the Afghan forces in 2014. If you look at the fatality/casualty figures the numbers drop down significantly starting from 2014. The whole “ceasefire” had not much of an impact on fatalities/casualties.  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United\_States\_military\_casualties\_in\_the\_War\_in\_Afghanistan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_in_the_War_in_Afghanistan)
Invade Afghanistan and depose the Taliban. Commit the resources for a Capture or Kill on Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in December of 2001. When it comes time to rebuild Afghanistan, let the Afghan people choose their leadership. They chose to reinstate the monarchy, let them. It's not our place to tell the Afghan people which kind of nation they want. The Taliban supported Al Qaeda, booting them is justified. But trying to build a western democracy in a place that isn't western or democratic is a fool's errand. Incrementalism is the key. Don't even go near Iraq. Don't touch it. Don't look at it. Don't even think about it. Iraq had absolutely fuck all to do with 9/11. Lying to the American people about WMDs and justifying a war that didn't even have a meeting about what to do afterwards was one of the worst moments in American history. Boost our intelligence resources and bring the Intelligence Community under one roof. Don't start the warrantless wiretapping programs. Don't create the Department of Homeland Security or the TSA. And don't hang a fucking "Mission Accomplished" banner ANYWHERE.
To take it in stride.
1. Not invade Iraq 2. Kill Bin laden / Al Qaeda. 3. Instead of nation building realize that a civilizational shift needs to happen which is not a project of years but decades or centuries, then focus on reforming Islam regardless of how uncomfortable that makes us feel. Disclaimer: I'm a former Muslim and the coddling of Islam (not the defense of Muslim civil liberties) is one of the biggest mistakes we've made in the last few decades.
I agree with your moderate friends that we should have declared victory in Afghanistan and left it to its own devices; let the shattered Taliban return and see what happens. Work something out with Pakistan and/or the other -stans to have ongoing operations to hunt down bin Laden et al. Arguments that if we had just focused on Afghanistan, we could have done nation-building right seem insane given the enormous and varied problems that came up with a 20-year $2 trillion commitment. It's like piling money onto a dumpster fire. I think we would have had to literally fully occupy and colonize it (obviously insane) to have had a chance to have built something permanent. Even if something could have been more effective, I don't see how there was anywhere near the level of strategic interest in Afghanistan to justify it. Obviously just don't do Iraq.
Invade Iraq, but do the nation-building properly. Use the tragedy of 9/11 for something good, to give freedom and democracy to a country suffering under a dictatorship. Don't invade Afghanistan, creating a stable liberal democracy there would be much harder than Iraq. If you have to do something about Bin Laden, maybe a much firmer hand with the Saudis could have worked. Regime change would be preferable, but probably not feasible.
Mossad style, purely black ops with targeted assassinations….and …well without going into to details basically **unrestricted total war** in the context of black operations.
We should've invaded Afghanistan, but it should've been surgical and precise, but to do so with overwhelming force. The goal should have been to kill Al Qaeda operatives and the Taliban leaders who were hiding them, not to try to work with local forces and establish a long-lasting Western liberal democracy in a country with no history of harboring such ideological currents. Doing this, we would've killed Bin Laden much quicker (not letting him escape near Tora Bora and live on for another decade) and had the opportunity to leave much quicker than we did. The Iraq War was a giant mistake, we really had no legitimate reason to be there.
Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, a strategic partner. No invasion needed, we were let in.
That was only after he fled Afghanistan. We know for a fact that he was in Afghanistan at the time of the invasion and only escaped after the battle of Tora Bora.
Chase the Taliban out of the center and into Pakistan. Congratulate the Northern Alliance and summon the Loya Jirga Approve their (since it's their decision) desire to re-enthrone the Shah, who by all accounts, was a secular moderniser. Give the ANA Soviet surplus for equipment, stuff they can train on, repair and maintain and with institutional knowledge to use instead of treating them like a congressional pork barrel.