Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads

theintercept.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–58 of 58 posts

Re: The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads

#51

Post by 082349872349872 »

kstenerud wrote: post #8
082349872349872 wrote: post #2

The death squad sort of thing is part of why I believe Smith is an unreliable narrator in 1984. Real regimes don't mildly torture problematic people and then keep them around at length, as if they were boys[1] enforcing a boarding school hierarchy, instead they get rid of them shortly and cheaply, for instance by one-way helicopter rides. [1] although the very puerile "it's no fun ruling unless the ruled know you're…

> Real regimes don't mildly torture problematic people and then keep them around at length, as if they were boys[1] enforcing a boarding school hierarchy That's precisely how it's done in China and North Korea, as well as many other places, and almost every terror regime in history. It's also used in America whenever prosecutors / prison operators want to "send a message." There's great value in keeping a population…

Regimes that execute at all, judicially or extrajudicially, are outside the pale from where I sit.

Re: The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads

#52

Post by 082349872349872 »

bostonsre wrote: post #36
spamizbad wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US brought the practice of Bacha bazi[1] back into the mainstream with the tasset approval of the US military (basically US service members aren't permitted to interfere or discourage it). It was banned and severely punished under the Taliban. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi

Again, not saying both sides are without fault, but everyone seems to ignore the fact that the taliban do horrible shit too. What do the taliban do to girls that go to school? The war is not black and white; good versus evil. Almost nothing in the world is that simple and straightforward. Do you honestly think it would become a great place to live if the US just withdrew? This is not a competition to count up who did…

Maybe one easy right morally correct answer would have been to have not given manpads to the Taliban in the 80's?

Re: The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads

#53

Post by bostonsre »

082349872349872 wrote: post #52
bostonsre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, not saying both sides are without fault, but everyone seems to ignore the fact that the taliban do horrible shit too. What do the taliban do to girls that go to school? The war is not black and white; good versus evil. Almost nothing in the world is that simple and straightforward. Do you honestly think it would become a great place to live if the US just withdrew? This is not a competition to count up who did…

Maybe one easy right morally correct answer would have been to have not given manpads to the Taliban in the 80's?

Maybe, but I think its debatable and not exactly black and white. We were terrified of communism and communist countries haven't exactly turned out to be a bastion of humanity. Again, I think it was a shit situation with shit choices. They were our allies. Russia was invading and slaughtering them. Would the "right" thing to do really be to let it continue and not help them?

Re: The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads

#54

Post by aebtebeten »

bostonsre wrote: post #53
082349872349872 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe one easy right morally correct answer would have been to have not given manpads to the Taliban in the 80's?

Maybe, but I think its debatable and not exactly black and white. We were terrified of communism and communist countries haven't exactly turned out to be a bastion of humanity. Again, I think it was a shit situation with shit choices. They were our allies. Russia was invading and slaughtering them. Would the "right" thing to do really be to let it continue and not help them?

Certainly debatable, by all means. As to a bastion of humanity, I see that the people of the Warsaw Pact countries managed, once they decided their System wasn't doing what they'd been brought up to believe it should, to change it with very little violence.

In a better world, the soviets would have done all the hard work to introduce minor things like school for girls[1] to afghanistan in the early eighties, and then it would have gone capitalist along with the rest of the ex-soviet -stans, nearly bloodlessly, in the early nineties.

Help afghanis, yes. Help the taliban? That was a poor, even a foreseeably poor, decision.

[1] for an idea of the variation in that part of asia, compare music videos from tajikistan and from iran, for example...

Re: The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads

#55

Post by bostonsre »

aebtebeten wrote: post #54
bostonsre wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but I think its debatable and not exactly black and white. We were terrified of communism and communist countries haven't exactly turned out to be a bastion of humanity. Again, I think it was a shit situation with shit choices. They were our allies. Russia was invading and slaughtering them. Would the "right" thing to do really be to let it continue and not help them?

Certainly debatable, by all means. As to a bastion of humanity, I see that the people of the Warsaw Pact countries managed, once they decided their System wasn't doing what they'd been brought up to believe it should, to change it with very little violence. In a better world, the soviets would have done all the hard work to introduce minor things like school for girls[1] to afghanistan in the early eighties, and then…

Yes, those countries absolutely turned out well, but at the time it wasn't clear that communism was going to fall and that the outcome for any of those countries could be positive at all. The counter point to the countries that exited communism well are the autocratic countries like Russia, Belarus and China. Also, at the time, I can understand the extreme fear of communism that the leaders in America had at the time. It was the cold war, we know of nothing similar to the persistent existential threat of armageddon that people on both sides of the conflict experienced every day. People were scared, it seems rational that both sides pushed hard to prevail and they each tried to pick the least shitty option out of a set of shitty options.

Also, what other options did we have to help afghanis at the time? There were definitely numerous cons to supporting the taliban, but weren't they the most capable organization at waging war in the area at the time? I guess we could have tried to find more moderate opposition to the Russians but that would have come at the cost of having less capable opposition to the Russians.

I'm sure that some of our leaders, members of the CIA, and soldiers may have been corrupt and self serving in their decisions but I would argue that a majority of them were rational and honorable individuals who were doing their best to uphold the oaths they made to protect America. They were figuratively and some times literally giving their lives to something they truly believed in. It doesn't seem right to cast them all under the bus and say they were corrupt evil individuals without exercising empathy and contemplating what they knew at the time and the choices that were laid out in front of them.

Re: The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads

#56

Post by aebtebeten »

bostonsre wrote: post #55
aebtebeten wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly debatable, by all means. As to a bastion of humanity, I see that the people of the Warsaw Pact countries managed, once they decided their System wasn't doing what they'd been brought up to believe it should, to change it with very little violence. In a better world, the soviets would have done all the hard work to introduce minor things like school for girls[1] to afghanistan in the early eighties, and then…

Yes, those countries absolutely turned out well, but at the time it wasn't clear that communism was going to fall and that the outcome for any of those countries could be positive at all. The counter point to the countries that exited communism well are the autocratic countries like Russia, Belarus and China. Also, at the time, I can understand the extreme fear of communism that the leaders in America had at the time…

Yeah, I tend to forget that anti-communism was so strong and so reflexive a tenet of US foreign policy that they were willing to support the Khmer Rouge on that basis.

(I'm not attempting to say that people were making corrupt decisions, I'm sure they were trying to do their best. What I'm attempting to say is that "providing advanced technology to people whose values are entirely contrary to yours" is not only in retrospect stupid, but should have been notably stupid at the time as well.)

Re: The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads

#57

Post by disown »

082349872349872 wrote: post #48
enriquto wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it is absurd to say that 1984 uses an unreliable narrator (and any other Orwell writings for that matter, it's just not his style).

It's not absurd because in 1984, Goldstein's writing shows evidence of thinking like Orwell (based on Orwell's other writing) and evidence of rational thought processes, while Smith is an extremely dislikable protagonist, a wannabe acid-throwing murderer[1], which makes me think he's cardboard, suitable for the "fast-forward". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737728 [1] part II chap 8. By comparison with 1984,…

> the FBI ... but in real life

You really are failing to understand the criticism. You can't claim a narrator is unreliable because the fiction doesn't align with reality. That's not how that works.

You do realize that 1984 was written in the 1940s predicting describing a fictional world nearly 50 years in the future?

It's a simple concept you are intentionally ignoring. If you want to claim "unreliable narrator", you need to show that within the fictional world. You can claim it because the fictional world doesn't match the real world. Because using that absurd logic, everything is unreliable.

Re: The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads

#58

Post by 082349872349872 »

disown wrote: post #57
082349872349872 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not absurd because in 1984, Goldstein's writing shows evidence of thinking like Orwell (based on Orwell's other writing) and evidence of rational thought processes, while Smith is an extremely dislikable protagonist, a wannabe acid-throwing murderer[1], which makes me think he's cardboard, suitable for the "fast-forward". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737728 [1] part II chap 8. By comparison with 1984,…

> the FBI ... but in real life You really are failing to understand the criticism. You can't claim a narrator is unreliable because the fiction doesn't align with reality. That's not how that works. You do realize that 1984 was written in the 1940s predicting describing a fictional world nearly 50 years in the future? It's a simple concept you are intentionally ignoring. If you want to claim "unreliable narrator", yo…

Except Goldstein, another character in the same work, does align with reality...
Post reply on HN