31–40 of 63 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fighting being the relevant word. If they hadn’t been armed and trained, the fight would have been over before it began.
It's hilarious how you can simultaneously make 10 years of Afghan and Soviet fighting a secondary act in this supposedly American performance. Just proves my point.
Fascinating though this is, the negative long term impact of these guys tends to be much greater than their positive short-term impact. You go in, you train a bunch of locals as guerrillas, you achieve the objective, and then you get out, leaving the local guerrillas behind. These guys now have the knowledge, experience and organisation to make the place ungovernable. At least some of them will proceed to do so; eith…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hilarious how you can simultaneously make 10 years of Afghan and Soviet fighting a secondary act in this supposedly American performance. Just proves my point.
>It's hilarious how you can simultaneously make 10 years of Afghan and Soviet fighting a secondary act in this supposedly American performance. Just proves my point. You're making his by ignoring the fact that the Afghans were trained and armed by US to fight the Soviets. That training remains, just who they're fighting has changed.
Also, becoming a half competent combatant is not like getting a PhD, more a function of you surviving your first few encounters.
The world does not revolve around America, people were able to fight and kill each other well before the CIA was formed.
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Huh? This is about military training, equipment, and logistics, not religion.
These things sound like catalysts, but not as the fundamental reasons things were happening. Just look at history to see that violence was there before training, equipment and logistics were available.
Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible.
Fascinating though this is, the negative long term impact of these guys tends to be much greater than their positive short-term impact. You go in, you train a bunch of locals as guerrillas, you achieve the objective, and then you get out, leaving the local guerrillas behind. These guys now have the knowledge, experience and organisation to make the place ungovernable. At least some of them will proceed to do so; eith…
> Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event. This is just plain false. A nice book that I can recommend on the actual history of it is Ghost Wars by Steve Coll.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's hilarious how you can simultaneously make 10 years of Afghan and Soviet fighting a secondary act in this supposedly American performance. Just proves my point. You're making his by ignoring the fact that the Afghans were trained and armed by US to fight the Soviets. That training remains, just who they're fighting has changed.
The vast majority of Mujahedeen never underwent US training. Most of their small arms (those that didn't originally float in the always militant tribes) were provided by Pakistan and China. Also, becoming a half competent combatant is not like getting a PhD, more a function of you surviving your first few encounters. The world does not revolve around America, people were able to fight and kill each other well before…
Didn’t these mujahadeen stick around to train the next generation of soldiers? Aren’t there consistent conflict in the Middle East to harden that kind of training (eg Chechnya)? Aren’t there mercenary opportunities to deploy and evolve that training?
Whether they would have developed it on their own is unclear but the US didn’t develop that knowledge on their own either, instead synthesizing it from experience of Allies during WWII and likely observing other insurgencies and criminal enterprises they helped back.
To me the playbook is the same “drug” but way more potent and mass produced and perhaps the first to market in this distributable form.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event. This is just plain false. A nice book that I can recommend on the actual history of it is Ghost Wars by Steve Coll.
Assume that most of us haven't read that book, or even if we have that we don't recall it perfectly. What specific information in it would lead us to agree with the blanket statement "this is just plain false"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement
So to say that "most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event" (the US training the Mujahideen) ignores many significant events over the past hundred years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_conflicts_in_th...
At best, it's an overly broad claim.
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This does happen but is not necessary. Cases in point: Norway, France, Eastern Europe, Germany after WW2. The crucial difference seems to be that the winner must immediately invest in nation building or the defeated must be crushed.
Yea, firing the Iraqi Army after the 03 invasion was a small whoopsie.
Even supporters of Bush's Folly have to admit Rumsfield and crew biffed the execution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assume that most of us haven't read that book, or even if we have that we don't recall it perfectly. What specific information in it would lead us to agree with the blanket statement "this is just plain false"?
You can start with the US and Britain intervening in Iran in the the late 1940s to protect oil interests and work your way forward from there. You could arguably go back to post-WWI with Britain, France and Russia arguing over the remains of the Ottoman empire (Sykes–Picot Agreement). The last century has been one interference after the next by Western powers and Russia in the Middle East: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
The last two centuries, the interference was so common in the 19th century it inspired the name "The Great Game."
Fascinating though this is, the negative long term impact of these guys tends to be much greater than their positive short-term impact. You go in, you train a bunch of locals as guerrillas, you achieve the objective, and then you get out, leaving the local guerrillas behind. These guys now have the knowledge, experience and organisation to make the place ungovernable. At least some of them will proceed to do so; eith…
You are far too kind to the US military. Afghanistan was too tough a nut for the British long before the Americans showed up. Pastoralist herders with a country that’s mostly mountain is practically perfect for making ungovernable people. See the Caucasus, Balkans and upland Indochina for further examples. All the more so when they were swimming with guns already.
Ditto Switzerland?
IIRC, Hitler didn't invade for similar reasons. A well armed citizenry. (And a convenient fence for all the spoils of war.)
Historically, was Switzerland it's own thing? Did Napoleon, the Hapsburgs, misc Papacies, Franks and Normans, etc, march around those mountains?