No.
I don't have to read this to know the answer is no.
Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
21–30 of 44 posts
Re: Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
#22Read ghost wars and directorate S. Few simple narratives explain afghanistan. It is a clusterfuck but for reasons that are definitely not at all related to whatsapp. In the simplest expression it has been a proxy war with pakistan or at least pakistans psuedo-separate intelligence services. If you want to talk win and lose, we "lost" afghanistan in february 1989 when the soviets left and we promptly abandoned all the…
From what I gather Pakistan has never been a good ally to the US. Still they receive both military and humanitarian aid to the tune of billions each year.
And they were the ones sheltering Bin Laden and from what I can gather the ISI - Pakistani intelligence is the ones funding Taliban.
It strikes me as very strange that the US hasn't pressured Pakistan more over the years and that it has accepted this behavior all this time.
Re: Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
#23Wonder if this contributed to recent Chinese decision to choke the social networking (misnamed by SV as "tech") sector.
Re: Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
#24Read ghost wars and directorate S. Few simple narratives explain afghanistan. It is a clusterfuck but for reasons that are definitely not at all related to whatsapp. In the simplest expression it has been a proxy war with pakistan or at least pakistans psuedo-separate intelligence services. If you want to talk win and lose, we "lost" afghanistan in february 1989 when the soviets left and we promptly abandoned all the…
From what I gather Pakistan has never been a good ally to the US. Still they receive both military and humanitarian aid to the tune of billions each year. And they were the ones sheltering Bin Laden and from what I can gather the ISI - Pakistani intelligence is the ones funding Taliban. It strikes me as very strange that the US hasn't pressured Pakistan more over the years and that it has accepted this behavior all t…
Pakistan has never been a good ally to anyone but Muslim majority countries and Islamic terrorist groups.
Pakistan is now heavily indebted and dependent on China for economy, military and finance. They will reap what they sow.
In 20 years time, they will be begging the West & Western institutions for assistance & intervention and I hope we can all turn our back on them.
Re: Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
#25> I’m a tech guy, not a military guy. And in terms of the kind of tech I’m into it’s that weird decentralized crypto tech like Bitcoin, not SaaS.
Re: Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
#26I've seen this linked elsewhere. The short answer is: No. America lost Afghanistan because we spent twenty years fighting a proxy war with Pakistan without ever being able to actually talk about it. Just like we can't talk about Ecohealth Alliance making the Damn Virus or the fraudulent studies that they used to ban treating the Damn Virus with HCQ, or Obama sending the OPM Database to China, or Joe Biden being a sen…
It's less so that people are downvoting you because we don't want to talk about these things but rather because you present grandiose claims without presenting any evidence for them.
Re: Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
#27Meh. WhatsApp had been used by anti-Taliban factions before as mentioned by OP, now the other side is also using it. What's newsworthy about this, exactly? They could be using any number of other channels instead, and it wouldn't change much. We "lost" Afghanistan because as it turned out, no one there actually cared in the least about putting up a fight, even after we spent a lot of resources on giving them the mean…
> What's newsworthy about this, exactly?
The article does a good job of explaining exactly that. Sure other means of communication exist, but the fact that they Taliban put together an ad-hoc reporting system in zero time while running it all through American Servers that could be easily shut down but wasn’t points to either extreme incompetence or willful ignorance.
Re: Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
#28No. I don't have to read this to know the answer is no.
If you're not familiar with Betteridge's law of headlines, you may be interested to learn of its existence:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...
Re: Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
#29What aren't any media outlets picking this up?
While the issue is larger than whatsapp, this is an angle that's worth acknowledging and discussing -- An insurgent force used an American tech platform to take over a country, while a former President is banned from that service.
Regardless of what you think of the situation, this definitely falls into the category of "man bites dog".
Re: Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I gather Pakistan has never been a good ally to the US. Still they receive both military and humanitarian aid to the tune of billions each year. And they were the ones sheltering Bin Laden and from what I can gather the ISI - Pakistani intelligence is the ones funding Taliban. It strikes me as very strange that the US hasn't pressured Pakistan more over the years and that it has accepted this behavior all t…
Pakistan has never been a good ally to anyone but Muslim majority countries and Islamic terrorist groups. Pakistan is now heavily indebted and dependent on China for economy, military and finance. They will reap what they sow. In 20 years time, they will be begging the West & Western institutions for assistance & intervention and I hope we can all turn our back on them.
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