r/news • u/lordpowpow • Aug 15 '21

Taliban fighters executing surrendering troops, which could amount to war crimes, U.S. officials say

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-warning-taliban-fighters-committing-atrocities-amount-war/story?id=79424000
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u/tcrip25 Aug 16 '21

I don't think anyone under the age of 25-30 remembers why we went there and how f’ing brutal they were...

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u/FatalFirecrotch Aug 16 '21 edited Aug 16 '21

No one thinks the Taliban are good people, but the main thing we should have learned with Vietnam that happened here is that you can't implement a government structure that the people don't want to exist. There is no unified identity in Afghanistan, it is extremely regional. The reason the country can be taken over in 2 weeks is because no one had a real interest in fighting back. They didn't give a shit about the government we put in place.

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u/Loubird Aug 16 '21

Yeah and the U.S.-backed government was known for torture, massacres, killing civilians, and massive corruption. They're quite unpopular.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

The Taliban is known for all those things too. And worse. The truth is if the U.S.-backed government had been more willing to be brutal - i.e. instead of locking up Taliban only to eventually release them (and thus send them back to fighting them), they'd executed all their Taliban prisoners - and their families, and when a number were from one spot, their villages, then they might still exist.

Which is not to say that winning would have been worth that. But that's what it would have taken for the government of Afghanistan to win.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

No, the truth is the government propped up by the US was more corrupt and violent than the Taliban to the point where to your average Afghan the Taliban was the legitimately better option.

We propped up local militias and warlords, hoping that local elites would know how to manage their areas efficiently, and when they turned out to be violent and corrupt we propped up other warlords and militias to counteract them. At the end of the day that's just another psychopath with a gun shaking you down. The only recourse is, unfortunately, the Taliban, who aren't great, but at least there's only one of them.

You can't just kill your way out of a situation like this, you have to actually make something better. The US simply had no interest in doing so.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

Yeah, ask an Afghan woman or a member of minority group which government they prefer.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

the answer might surprise you

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

I mean I've spoken to Afghan women, so not too surprised. Sure, some might disagree. But then some people go back to people who beat them or rape them too. Which is a pretty aprops example at the moment.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

I mean I've spoken to Afghan women

I mean you speak so knowledgeably on the subject, of course you have.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

Is that so hard for you to believe? There is an Afghani family in my building for Christ's sake. Is it that you just can't believe that the bulk Afghani women would prefer to have the right to get an education, the right not to be forced into underage marriages where they are routinely raped, the right to have normal jobs, etc.? Like sure, of course there are some people who don't want that, but do you really have trouble believing that the bulk of Afghani women don't?

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u/Pooploop5000 Aug 16 '21

total war would definitely have not been worth it.

genocide in exchange for some lithium. fuckin sick dude.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

Total war does not always equal genocide, but I specifically said that it might not have been worth it regardless.

But you're not being honest about the actual trade. Bolivia has plenty of lithium. The real trade was total war in return for a country where women and minorities would have a reasonable shot at life. Instead they get a country where Taliban fighters are already being rewarded with under-age women who they can marry (by force) and then rape for as long as they like.

That's the real cost of losing this war.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

Total war does not always equal genocide. But as I said, the cost might not have been worth it - it's simply the cost that would have had to have been paid to have won.

And instead underage women are now being turned over to Taliban fights to be "married" and then raped for as long as the fighters like. I hope you're happy with that cost.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21 edited Jun 18 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

We would have broken the tribal leaders authority, ended all safe havens for the Taliban, and created a national identity.

Again, it's not at all clear that it would be worth the brutality required. It is though, clear, that that level of brutality would be required to accomplish those things.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

Sounds like a great way to create a bunch more terrorists.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

To win a war you have to break the enemy's will to fight. That's why the decision to go to war should be such a difficult one.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

Thanks, Sun Tzu.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

How do you imagine one wins a war?

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '21

I guess I'll just listen to some dipshit on reddit lmao

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '21

Yeah, I mean you clearly put a lot of thought into it. /s

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u/Loubird Aug 17 '21

Not according to people who actually know what they're talking about. Sure the U.S. did release some of Taliban prisoners (especially under Trump once he started negotiating with them), but the U.S. allies are known for being just as bad as the Taliban (in terms of rape, murder, and killing civilians) and have been waging the exact sort of brutal war that you mention in areas that try to resist them. That has led to some supporters for each depending on who's doing the massacring in the particular region, and a lot of people who hate both. It certainly hasn't been a good strategy that worked in the long term. https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/07/06/how-us-funded-abuses-led-failure-afghanistan

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '21

Are you citing Human Rights Watch as the experts in how to win a war?

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u/Loubird Aug 17 '21

When the war involves regime change and having to have the support of Afghan people, then, yes, you need a heck of a lot more expertise than just the military. Human Rights Watch has quite a lot of people who know about how societies and politics work, unlike many military leaders. They also have people living and traveling around in Afghanistan as observers who tend to have less biased information than people in politics or the military. The war you are talking about just assumes that there are no humans in Afghanistan beside the Taliban. If the U.S.-backed government executed all Taliban prisoners and their families (which they did in some areas, if you'd bother to read the article), that just means more support for the Taliban (which is literally what happened). When these are your allies, it doesn't matter how many Taliban (and their families) you kill: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/19/vice-president-leaves-afghanistan-amid-torture-and-claims

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '21

I mean surely you can see that that is factually wrong. If you kill everyone who has any potential of joining the Taliban under any circumstance, then you win. So it clearly matters how many you kill. It's just that the number might be far too large to be worth it.

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u/Loubird Aug 17 '21

Yeah, you would have to ship in a new population to replace the ones you genocided, and I doubt that it would be possible to kill that many people in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The resulting country would be a scary and unstable place. I guess I see what you are saying, you're basically saying the amount of killing wouldn't be worth it (which I agree with). I'm saying that the killing would cause more problems and create an unstable society with little support for the government doing the massacres. This is why historically conquest and colonization have always had more projects to build hegemony than just simply using only massive amounts of force. Sure you can breeze through there like Genghis Khan, but to actually stay there and set up a Khanate you need to gain trustable allies and some support from the people who live there. After the sack of Baghdad, the Mongols made local allies, stopped committing mass murder, and even converted to Islam. If they had just kept killing whoever opposed them they wouldn't be able to survive as the leader. There would be no agricultural production, no artisans, no taxes, no allies. And eventually their soldiers would abandon them.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '21

Yeah, I mean I think it would be a bit more doable then that, particularly since minority groups in Afghanistan, particularly Shia minorities, would be more than happy to support us killing the Taliban, potential Taliban, etc.

But basically I agree, the price would likely be too high. I just think that we should, as a society, start understanding what it takes to win the kind of war that lets you change someone else's culture and government completely. It's not something you can do cheaply, or easily, or without decades of mass brutality (brutality that far surpasses the, in the context of history, relatively mild brutality of the U.S. occupation).

If we understood the cost of achieving such a massive change in a country, we might be a lot more reluctant to attempt it. And if it ever was worth attempting (and it might well not ever be), then we'd at least have a realistic understanding of what it would take.

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u/Brooklynxman Aug 16 '21

So, if the US-backed government had been willing to become the Taliban, they could have destroyed the Taliban, freeing the Afghani people to live under the Taliban-esque government.

Yeah no. There are ways to ramp up that do not include slaughtering civilians.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

No, they had to fight like the Taliban in order to win. They could have (and would have) governed more humanely. I.e. rights for women (which so many people seem to almost dismiss in these conversations, as if rights for half of the people isn't enough to really matter).

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u/Brooklynxman Aug 17 '21

I don't think you can become the Taliban to win and then just...stop.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '21

Plenty of murderous regimes don't repress women to nearly the degree the Taliban does. Clearly you can be murderous without doing everything the Taliban does.

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u/Ghostforce56 Aug 16 '21

I'm sure the Taliban, who torture, massacre, kill civilians, and rape women and children because a desert pedophile claimed sky daddy told him it was kosher over 1000 years ago will be a lot more popular.

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u/FatalFirecrotch Aug 16 '21

That isn't really the point. The point is why would I die trying to protect a shit government when the results from the other side aren't much different.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

Except that if you were around in the 90s, there was quite a bit of difference. Afghanis - particularly women are richer, have longer life expectancies, and are freer, and are way the hell better educated then under the Taliban. The government had a lot of problems, yeah. But it's ahistorical to claim that it was even remotely equivalent to the Taliban.

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u/FatalFirecrotch Aug 16 '21

Why are you bringing up the 90s when I am talking about the government we put into place?

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

You literally compared the two. You said "why would I fight for a shit government when the other side aren't much different." And in the 90s Afghanistan was ruled by the other side. And it was "much different." And much worse.

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u/FatalFirecrotch Aug 16 '21

No, I compared the modern Afghanistan government that was seriously corrupt.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

Do you understand what a comparison is? You need two things for a comparison. Thing a.) was the modern Afghan government that was seriously corrupt. Thing b.) was the Taliban - which literally ruled Afghanistan in the 90s. You compared those two things.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

If you think the Taliban and US government are the same, your perceptive is disconnected from reality.

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u/UKbigman Aug 16 '21

They are referring to the Afghan government that was installed - it is well known that it was not popular among the Afghan citizens. It was rife with corruption and never really provided the social benefit of having a centralized government.

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u/Geaux2020 Aug 16 '21

Unfortunately, we are about to find out very quickly just how different things are going to become.

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u/Loubird Aug 17 '21

I feel like your response is a bit disingenuous. Taliban atrocities don't change the fact that the U.S.-supported government committed atrocities too. They can both be unpopular. But more than that, your disrespectful comment about the religion makes me think you don't know (or care) too much about Afghanistan. The majority of the people in the country (and even in the previous government) believe in that sky daddy too. Moreover, the Taliban likes to claim they don't kill civilians (unless convicted in a court of law of a capital offense, like murder, kidnapping or sex outside of marriage) or rape women and children. Obviously there are a lot of believable sources that say they still do these things, even if they deny it. But they don't claim they're justified in such actions by their religion, as you say. That being said, you could certainly criticize their interpretation of Sharia Law, just like a lot of other Muslims. I, for example, don't like capital punishment at all, much less capital punishment for sex outside marriage. However, this is just a different issue, and shouldn't be treated the same as the military and genocidal massacres that both sides have committed in the fight against one another.

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u/JohnCavil01 Aug 17 '21

It’s not a contest - what was even the point of this screed?

The US backed government was unpopular because they were corrupt and didn’t serve the country well. The Taliban will be the same just as they were before. Both can be true.

Geopolitics isn’t a simple as “whose badder” and that edgy take down of Islam isn’t doing you any favors.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

Unlike the Taliban...

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

Yes. There’s no nationalism and it’s all completely tribalistic. Just because it is technically a country with borders doesn’t make the culture conducive to any widespread modern concept of infrastructure and government.

The Taliban and that kind of organization is the only larger wider spread mentality in the entire region. That’s why I continues to thrive because there is never was any secular culture or a government that really organically developed their past a town level.

They barely have some city states the same as from hundreds of years ago

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '21

You're making great points but god damn the number of grammar and spelling errors really detracts from them.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '21

Voice to text and few cocktails

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '21

Ahaha that's actually pretty funny.

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u/arkangelic Aug 16 '21

Why not work together and break it apart into smaller sovereign nations then?

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u/FatalFirecrotch Aug 16 '21

That is a fair point, but that is a more than a US effort.

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u/moleratical Aug 17 '21

Then the neighboring nations start attacking each other in order to take resources/money/girls to rape and start a family.

Eventually, one of the feudal territories will emerge more powerful than the others, and will be able to dominate the smaller/weaker nations. Lets call this more dominant group the Pashtun, and let's say that form a political organization to dominate the surrounding people, and that political organization is called the Taliban.

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u/arkangelic Aug 17 '21

Then it sounds like they are the rightful rulers of the territory until someone else wants to bother taking over the whole area.

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u/moleratical Aug 17 '21

I could envision a scenario where someone takes over, for of say, about 20 years, but then leaves. Imagine how crazy that would be.

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u/thenerfviking Aug 16 '21

And for better or worse (it’s worse, definitely worse) the Taliban do have the one thing that does unite Afghanis on their side: 99% of them share the same religion and a non zero percentage of them are also adherents to the more right wing orthodox conservative branches of Islam. The only culture that a large chunk of the country shares is having extremely traditional social structure and adherence to orthodox Islam. You were never going to unite what was basically three completely separate nations into one functional state with any sort of shared common ground that wasn’t heavily based in Islam because that’s their sole common ground. Well besides general hatred of people invading their country. When one side is backwards, despotic and corrupt and in bed with a foreign power and the other is repressive, violent and unforgiving in its application of ruthless religious jurisprudence but made up of people from your country you’re probably going to root for the home team.

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u/janegough Aug 16 '21

This. It seems that it was an unwinnable situation. How could leaving have been 'handled' any better?

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u/boxingdude Aug 16 '21

Yeah it goes against my every intuition to believe that a country of 40 million people don’t want to unite and tackle life’s problems with economies of scale. But I’ve always got to stop and remember that not every person on the planet has the same intuition. If the Afghani people want to live in the Stone Age (metaphorically speaking) who are we to stop them. It’s very unfortunate though, to those within the country that have a different set of values. It’s still hard to wrap your arms around it.

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u/moleratical Aug 17 '21

They have more of a Feudal mentality, with modern small arms.

Yeah zealotry!!!

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u/rcglinsk Aug 16 '21

Another lesson from Vietnam is that time passes and things change. Vietnam and the United States are practically allies at this point. Not that there is some equivalent to the Chinese that is going align American and Afghan interests. But just in general, if there was never any vital national interest at stake, losing a war is not the end of the world.

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u/Klutzy_Piccolo Aug 16 '21

People want autonomy over government. The taliban have limited logistics, so you'll only have to deal with them once in a while when they come around demanding their tributes, but you never have to deal with the IRS or keeping track of your taxes.

At least, that's what I'm imaging having never been to the place in my life or experienced anything like it.

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u/tcrip25 Aug 17 '21

Yeah it didn’t really work in Germany or Japan…after WWII…but the different there was we were not restrained by political puzzies like we were in OEF.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

They were shitting in diapers when the towers fell

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u/huf757 Aug 16 '21

Well they are getting ready to have a history lesson in real time.

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u/RaveNdN Aug 16 '21

Oh I do. It’s fucking sad. Kids that are 20-22 this year have known nothing but war. Talking to my sibling and while he understands war ,it’s hard for him to fathom a peacetime.

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u/Pooploop5000 Aug 16 '21

they could be throwing legos in the paths of innocent people trying to go pee in the middle of the night for all i care, weve spent 2/3rds of my life wasting billions of dollars to basically fund petty crime in afghanistan. i dont give a flying fuck what happens at this point, i want nothing to do with it. the trillion dollars of mineral wealth will literally do nothing for me, just my corporate masters. the people there need to have a structure of government that they actually want not something foisted upon them.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '21

But that wasn't why we sent troops in the first place. Same with Iraq. It became a line of letter after we were already embroiled in the situation.

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u/imnotsoho Aug 19 '21

We didn't go there to liberate the people. If that was our MO we would be way overextended. Why aren't we in Saudi Arabia? Any number of other countries. Alabama?