20+ years, billions of dollars, and years of the West bitching about the US swinging it’s dick around.
5 years later: Help us Afghanistan is a shit hole and Europe probably couldn’t defend itself against Russia much less China.
Russia failed to defeat Ukraine after 2 years of fighting and you think they would be able to amount to anything against the whole of Europe? Lol.
At some point, the people of Afghanistan should be able to take control of their own country. How can a vast majority of the people sit there and let a tiny percentage dictate the lives and rules for everyone? Kick the Taliban out of your country.
The problem is that “the people of Afghanistan” don’t see themselves as a united people. Regional and tribal ties are far, far stronger in the region than any true sense of national identity outside of “let’s cooperate just long enough to kick these fucking foreigners out”. Immediately after that’s accomplished, the region regresses into very old-school power politics and warlord fiefdoms. This has happened twice now in the space of 50 years. The truly galling point, though, is that US leaders and officials should have known this… but there were effectively zero coherent plans to handle that aspect of the occupation.
How can a vast majority of the people sit there and let a tiny percentage dictate the lives and rules for everyone?
As an American looking at American policy right now…that’s ironic.
Quickly forget? Didn’t US spend like 20 years there?
Yeah, but we aren’t reporting at the level we used to.
But to be fair, we still ignored Afghanistan a lot during the occupation.
If all you use are facts, the soundbites aren’t as good.
