Afghanistan withdrawal bad or good?

[noname223]

I think many Americans are tired of war. Spending so much money in other coutries while having no proper health care and bad infrastructure. I can understand that.

I think first many Americans liked the idea of a withdrawal. But the media reported in a very one-sided way about it. In the media of my country i Had the feeling 95% of reportings framed it is as a horrible decision.
I had the feeling they might be kind of biased because they did not differentiate.

My opinion is the war was lost a long time ago. There were so many strategical mistakes and Afghanistan is a lost case. Too much corruption and builing new democracies is extremely difficult. The politicians were kind of naive to think one could change country in a such a deep-rooted way. The thought yeah we did that with Germany and Japan lets do it with the rest of the world. Kind of short-sighted.

The media barely talked about that aspect. They acted like if we just spent some decades more Afghanistan could have become a flourishing democracy which is a lie. The media portrayed themselve as morally superior and pointed to the evil politicians: I thinik since then the ratings for Biden were plummeting.

But on the other hand I think they were right with one thing. The way we left the country was embarrassing. We betrayed many of our loyal allies and many have to pay for that (with their own lives) . What is the lesson for people in the developing world? Don't trust the Western countries you cannot count on them. I think we should have evacuated more people.

The videos of people trying to chain themselves to planes and then died were heartbreaking.
On the other hand the media barely reported that our allied Afghan policemen that had children as sexslaves. I think in my country noone talked about this issue.
I read the intelligence services might lied to Biden to make him look bad. And the media listened to all their talking points without any hesitation. But these are only rumors.

 

[DarkRange55]

There's rare earth minerals there that down the road some country is gonna go in there, probably China and harvest. But China plays the long game so they're not necessarily in need of getting in the trucks and going to Afghanistan immediately. There's really no energy there, it's not really an energy related issue. I think a lot of people are hugely disappointed with the way the US conducted this and the idea of getting out of Afghanistan is an A+, the execution was an F. And I think it really just hurt the stature of how foreigners looked at America and the American leadership. I think there's a big void of quality in American leadership right now.

The reality is that the Middle East is an area of enormous strategic importance and the US has loads of reasons to assert its control there. Oil is one reason obviously, but geography as well: It's close to the Indian subcontinent, it borders Russia at the Caucuses, the trade routes of the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal...

While it is not technically part of the middle east (debatable between central and southern Asia) - Just like Vietnam, the war is essentially one of attrition. The US Army can hold ever major city it wants, but for every cave in the Afghan mountains it clears out there's ten more. As long as the country is poor and communities isolated from each other, the government will be unable to control the entire country and the Taliban will hold sway over many places and recruit. Afghanistan has been at war nonstop for 40 years. The last time Afghanistan was stable was under their last king, Zahir Shah. Since then, it's been coups, countercoups, Soviet invasions, civil war, American invasion, then high-level insurgency. There's no end in sight.

Don't forget the porous border with Pakistan that enables more militants to move resources without detection.

A Colonel gave three main reasons why America continued to have an interest in Afghanistan (has nothing to do with fighting terrorism).

1) Securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

2) Disrupting China's OBOR through support for Muslim terrorists.

3) Afghanistan provides a base from which America could possibly launch military action against China

Biden said it's expensive, it's $150-300 million per day and I'm not sure if he's extrapolating the earlier costs of the war, where the war was a lot more expensive. But it's worth noting that we haven't lost a service member in Afghanistan in over 18 months and obviously a big honor to all the service men and woman in our country. But this is something where we look and we go wait a minute I mean yeah we had 2,500 troops there folks weren't actively dying in Afghanistan anymore, we had some relative stability and we didn't have an entire government take all of our weapons and essentially run away and hand them to an enemy of ours. This is important because we look at that maintenance level and would it have been worth leaving maintenance level of troops kind of like a maintenance pill as an analogy, if you had asthma if you had a maintenance pill and you keep stability. At least you're not in the hospital. I mean its obviously too late to go back and change anything but right now with whats happening its kind of like we're in the hospital. I also think we've got a massive failure of leadership in Afghanistan, I believe one of the reasons why they fell. The leadership collapsed, the leadership fled so of course everybody else fled. It's very, very devastating whats happening there, obviously my heart goes out to everybody in the region affected by this.
I am concerned about that conclusion, I actually kind of think Russia and China are glad that we're gone because it gives them an opportunity to help fill that power vacuum in the region.

What we've done is open this geopolitical Pandora's box. And I'm far from an expert on geopolitical stuff. But I look at this as an outside observer and I think we are perceived to be weak or ineffective ok Afghanistan which opens the door to Russia and China act more aggressively and those events whether its Russia and Ukraine or China and Taiwan, those are the types of events that are really black swan events that could happen at some point in the future so the probability of something like that happening has gone up just a tiny amount. So it makes me slightly less bullish.

Afghanistan has this massive, massive trade deficit it's like 40% or something. Immediately I was like thats Lebanon, thats gonna be hyper inflation. Bu I was listening to a podcast where they interviewed the for former central bank governor he relieved that they have no money printer in Afghanistan. Because what they did was imported new notes of Afghan currency and thanks to sanctions that the country they imported it from is no longer allowed to export it to. Even though I don't think money printing is the source of most hyperinflation episodes, it often is a part of it since a government has to at some point start printing more because it can't pay its bills.