Anand is one of the more remarkable people I¡¯ve met. He was in Philly for a while back in the mid-00s; he¡¯d just gotten back from a trip down to Oaxaca where there was a months-long teacher¡¯s strike turned mass protest movement. A total live wire of a person, completely casual about rushing to where there was an uprising or war, and strangely the best I¡¯ve met at selling socialist newspapers. I remember following his movements through mutual friends during the Arab Spring. He¡¯s done incredible work reporting in Afghanistan, including his book.
posted by graymouser at 6:10 PM on September 19, 2021 [11 favorites]

Ugh.

This is not how you win Hearts & Minds...

An no one responsible for these horrors will ever be held accountable.
posted by Windopaene at 6:31 PM on September 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Dear lord

Why the hell did we do this
posted by SystematicAbuse at 7:37 PM on September 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

Don't worry kids! All this will be forgotten by your children, the way they never taught you how American forces turned the Philippines' Samar island into a "howling wilderness" in 1899, and how the same "casualty-avoidance" policy that powers American drones in Afghanistan also flattened Manila in 1945, killing thousands. They'll just add it to the long list and we'll all move on.
posted by micketymoc at 8:04 PM on September 19, 2021 [20 favorites]

One of the Australian military's founding conflicts was seeing how badly America fucked up Vietnam - the one part of Vietnam that Australia was tasked with holding had good relationships with the Australian troops, because the troops had gone in and been actually helpful. It didn't last, because in the rest of the country American troops were dropping napalm everywhere and turning the rest of the citizenry against the American "help".

unfortunately the Australian military has not learned to avoid conflicts the Americans are in
posted by Merus at 8:23 PM on September 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

Why the hell did we do this

Near as I can tell from the other side of the world it's because there's a Goodies vs Baddies worldview buried deep in the core of the American psyche, along with a subsidiary narrative that America is by definition Good.

Also because the world had the misfortune, in 2001, of having a crew of utterly irredeemable moral vacua in charge of the US, UK and Australian Governments.
posted by flabdablet at 8:38 PM on September 19, 2021 [8 favorites]

Also by Anand Gopal: How the U.S. Created the Afghan War¡ªand Then Lost It
posted by problemspace at 9:06 PM on September 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

It was sad and predictable that the US military's last engagement in Afghanistan was the pointless slaughter of an aid worker and his children, in what appears to have been revenge for a suicide bombing at Kabul's airport. The thing I find astonishing is that they apparently didn't have any local knowledge: they fired a missile at someone they had identified only by his movement pattern, and the fact that he had entered a compound full of kids didn't stop them.

The US has the world's most powerful surveillance and information processing system. They had effectively been ruling Kabul for two decades and they literally had the ability to intercept every electronic message. But their intelligence in this case was no more sophisticated than the sort that might have been used centuries ago. In fact it was probably worse: back then rulers knew that they needed local agents.

I don't know how anyone could imagine that you can govern a region through a policy of targeted assassination, but at the very least you'd expect the people behind it to be meticulous about the sine qua non of such a policy: the ability to identify targets. But no, they never did, they never had, and in my opinion the people responsible at every level were behaving criminally.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:09 PM on September 19, 2021 [27 favorites]

I don't know how anyone could imagine that you can govern a region through a policy of targeted assassination, but at the very least you'd expect the people behind it to be meticulous about the sine qua non of such a policy: the ability to identify targets.

"signature strikes"

The military claimed they had lots of electronic intercepts that pointed to this car being an ISIS bomb, which makes this a so-called signature strike. I'm not sure there's any indication that this strike was taken with any less than the usual amount of diligence- but the usual amount of diligence has killed a lot of civilians.

The Biden administration's plan for America's ongoing presence in Afghanistan is just more of these, indefinitely.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:41 PM on September 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Also, "legal killings reducing a city to ash" is the topic of another of Gopal's stories, America¡¯s War on Syrian Civilians.

There's a corollary to this in nuclear policy: you're not supposed to target civilians anymore, so our strategic missiles are nominally aimed at military targets. For instance, targets dotted around and inside Moscow. We could nuke the planet and the last surviving US general would claim military necessity and proportionality.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:54 PM on September 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

The Biden administration's plan for America's ongoing presence in Afghanistan is just more of these, indefinitely.

That's an odd thing to say. Thanks to the Biden administration, we no longer have an ongoing presence in Afghanistan.

It is true that Biden has reserved the right to engage in long-range strikes at will, which is the standard tough-guy blustering of U.S. presidents going back into the mists of time. But our strikes over the past 20 years, including this last one, were largely driven by the idea that they were supposed to be protecting our troops on the ground. Now we have no more troops there to protect.

I was somewhat surprised that the Pentagon actually trotted out a commander to apologize for the strike. That's a change. I'm guessing it was at the instigation of the White House. It seems like this president may have more of a sensitivity to the human costs of war than his last few predecessors.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:20 PM on September 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

The US has the world's most powerful surveillance and information processing system. They had effectively been ruling Kabul for two decades and they literally had the ability to intercept every electronic message. But their intelligence in this case was no more sophisticated than the sort that might have been used centuries ago. In fact it was probably worse: back then rulers knew that they needed local agents.

Americans always love neat technological solutions, and are always averse to messy human ones.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:30 PM on September 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

were leaving behind just satellites, drones, these intelligence networks and the capability of long-range strikes basically we're leaving behind the ghost army.
posted by clavdivs at 10:32 PM on September 19, 2021

I saw this last week somewhere, a horrifying read, I feel for the journalist; this is like war itself for those look deeply and refuse to lookl away

flabdablet I think it's deeper than goodies vs baddies; Pentecostalism/religious right e.g. Hillsong (and many other 'prosperity gospellers') needs schadenfreude to feel complete. Prosperity and godliness conflict with these people (partly as belief is very shallow imo), and what we see is a lashing out in desperation to deny the tension.
posted by unearthed at 11:24 PM on September 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

It seems like this president may have more of a sensitivity to the human costs of war than his last few predecessors.

Talk about damning with faint (and genuinely disgusting) praise. It¡¯s hard to imagine someone saying this about the leader of any other country that had just committed a shocking atrocity like this one. The whole chain of command thinks that a bunch of kids getting blown to pieces is acceptable collateral damage and that¡¯s why it happens.

What explains the fact that the US loves such ¡°neat technological solutions¡± but not the ¡°messy human ones¡±? Is it perhaps that the fact that there is no actual ¡°problem¡± to ¡°solve¡± here except the problem of appropriating endless funds for American arms manufacturers and their shareholders? It¡¯s amazing how much sense can be made of the senseless once you figure out the actual point of it all.
posted by moorooka at 11:54 PM on September 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

Also because the world had the misfortune, in 2001, of having a crew of utterly irredeemable moral vacua

for example:
"In the century just passed, Australians served side by side with Americans in every major military commitment. In peaceful times like our own, the alliance between our two nations has helped spare the world from other wars and dangers. Australia is a strong and peaceful presence in East Asia and the Pacific."

-George Bush. September, 10, 2001.
posted by clavdivs at 12:12 AM on September 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

The just plain surprising part (as distinct from horrifying even worse than I expected part) was that some, maybe a lot of what was driving mujahadeen rage was that the Soviets imposed a literacy program for women.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:07 AM on September 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thoughts on the #Dronestrike in #Kabul that killed an #Afghan family. For background I was the Chief of High Value Targeting on the Joint Staff 2002-03, led UN war crimes investigations in #Afghanistan in 2011, and in 2015 assisted in a study of airstrikes while working for CNA.org
posted by lalochezia at 4:33 AM on September 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

Remember, kids: they hate us for our freedom.
posted by flabdablet at 4:57 AM on September 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

Gopal's article is devastating, and a counter to all the hand-wringing propaganda we're getting about how the US occupation was helping women, so it's such a pity we're not continuing the war forever.

The infuriating thing is how much the foreign policy / defense establishment has captured the media, notably CNN. They embarked on this insanely destructive policy for twenty years, left Afghanistan worse than when they started, and had the gall to excoriate Biden for finally leaving.

Unfortunately this article is now paywalled, but documents how closely that establishment is tied to defense contractors.

And no one looks good here. Bush started the 20-year debacle, but Obama is just as much to blame. Our allies did no better. And as Gopal points out, Soviet interventionism was just as bad as American. Nearly 40 years ago Jonathan Kwitny's Endless Enemies described an Afghanistan where Americans were welcomed by friendly Afghans¡ª because they weren't Soviets. Well, we sure changed that perception.
posted by zompist at 5:02 AM on September 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

Non-paywalled version of the Business Insider article about how the US stays in bad wars.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:33 AM on September 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

To my mind, the interesting question is how the US did so well in the aftermath of WW2. My current theory is that it was generally accepted that WW2 was the result of the punitive policies at the end of WW1, and that this time, reconstruction had to be done right. It was a very unusual incentive which hasn't been in play since.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:36 AM on September 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

Remember, kids: they hate us for our freedom.

Flab, the last time I said that here I was yelled at by someone. Granted I was saying it a lot back then. Haha
posted by drstrangelove at 6:49 AM on September 20, 2021

To my mind, the interesting question is how the US did so well in the aftermath of WW2.

Only well by comparison, eg in Greece
posted by BungaDunga at 8:11 AM on September 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

Anand is one of the more remarkable people I¡¯ve met.

There is surprisingly little recent content on youtube with him. After reading this I went looking for fresh interviews with him, and there is just not that much there when you sort by recent. What is there is pretty interesting though, a live wire indeed.
posted by pol at 8:58 AM on September 20, 2021

I'd leave Japan to people who know it better, but the occupation and reconstruction of West Germany went well for a few reasons -

Most importantly, a bigger bad. The Allies were all that protected West Germans from the Soviets. BIG incentive to play nice. This factor is hardly Germany-specific. The U.S. got a lot more popular when ISIS was a threat to conquer all of Iraq and Syria, and that popularity has receded with the threat of ISIS.

Secondly, a ready establishment in reserve/exile. There was an entire left-to-right political establishment the Nazis shoved aside a dozen years earlier that the Allies could simply restore. Very few of the civil service, business and technical elite were Nazis by conviction, and were able to be retained in place - albeit with a lot of looking the other way about what they'd done in the war years. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan had anything that looked like that.

Third, the ideological clarity of total defeat. Every West German, even those who had been convinced Nazis, recognized Nazism and its twisted implementation of traditional Prussian militarism had been a disaster in every regard for Germany. There was no Nazi or even more heritage militarism resistance/restoration and no temptation for it.
posted by MattD at 9:08 AM on September 20, 2021 [6 favorites]

problemspace, I'm making my way through that article that you linked, and it really is incredible.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:18 AM on September 20, 2021

In the aftermath of WW2, in many places (not Greece) there was a plausible government with wide legitimacy that could be re-installed. Even where this was questionable on a national level, there were local government layers that remained intact.

Obviously that required leaving in place (in theory temporarily but in practice permanently) collaborators and Nazis in many countries but there was a system that could have the head excised and replaced with an allied occupation authority.

I disagree with MattD on Iraq (but not Afghanistan). Most Iraqi army officers, civil servants, police, at the senior levels were required ex officio to be party members. Removing them and dissolving the army were extremely stupid mistakes. It is perfectly possible to believe that there never would have been any kind of insurgency as we think of it in Iraq had those things not been done.
posted by atrazine at 10:06 AM on September 20, 2021 [7 favorites]

It seems like this president may have more of a sensitivity to the human costs of war than his last few predecessors.

IMO Biden's decision to withdrawal from Afghanistan is one of the best things this country has ever done, the best thing Biden has ever done, and instantly makes Biden the best president of my lifetime. But come the fuck on---go read what Biden was saying at the onset of this war and the war in Iraq. He was all for it. And his whole career has been fairly hawkish.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:16 AM on September 20, 2021 [6 favorites]

The TL;DR for why America's occupation of Japan was successful is pretty simple:

Japan surrendered and stopped trying to fight.


Here's the slightly longer version:

There wasn't a Japanese insurgency. There wasn't a Japanese guerrilla campaign against the occupying Americans.

Japan had a functional government that was near enough to unanimously agreed to be legitimate by the Japanese people. So when it said surrender, they did.

In Afghanistan the US denied there was even a government to negotiate with, invaded out of nothing but a sheer rage fueled temper tantrum and for no purpose but to hurt more or less random people [1]. There was no plan beyond hurting Afghans and destroying the Taliban then a new democratic government would magically appear and we'd be thanked by grateful Afghans.

The Taliban was a successful guerrilla movement. They drove the USSR out of Afghanistan by waging guerrilla war, in large part trained by by America to do it! So that they then waged successful guerrilla war on America is not really surprising.

No one said to surrender, they didn't. They fought.

A guerrilla movement can't actually defeat an occupying army in the military sense. But it can make an occupation so grinding, so long, so expensive, that the occupiers give up and leave. And that's what the Taliban did.

The occupation of Japan was more or less a formalism, not a futile effort to defeat a guerrilla movement that had popular support.

Which brings us back to the TL;DR: America's occupation of Japan was easy because Japan surrendered and stopped fighting.

[1] As Thomas Friedman honestly and infamously said to tell Muslims worldwide to "Suck. On. This."
posted by sotonohito at 10:40 AM on September 20, 2021 [6 favorites]

the pointless slaughter of an aid worker and his children, in what appears to have been revenge for a suicide bombing at Kabul's airport. The thing I find astonishing is that they apparently didn't have any local knowledge: they fired a missile at someone they had identified only by his movement pattern, and the fact that he had entered a compound full of kids didn't stop them.

They don't want us there. They don't like us! A perhaps-surprising number of the people we were training as police turned around and killed their US trainers! A small government's worth of bribery targets yeeted as soon as they saw our tail lights. Of course we're going to get bad intelligence. We probably only ever got bad intelligence.
posted by rhizome at 12:41 PM on September 20, 2021

I have a good friend who is Afghani. She's been in Australia about 18 months.

When Kabul fell, I did not see her for a few days, and when I did she was always on the phone, talking animatedly in Persian to relatives and friends. She had me round to tea eventually (and I tell you, when an Afghani woman invites you to tea, wear loose pants) and the subject came up, largely at the behest of her 14 year old daughter, who has no idea how lucky she is to be in Australia.

Her entire position was that maybe, maybe there might be some kind of peace now. It was really confronting, because in those few days there was this wail of HOLY FUCK WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE WOMEN AND GIRLS OF AFGHANISTAN and it turns out yes, actually, she had been. She'd been thinking of the lives like Shakira's, the relentless fighting and how maybe a peace under the Taliban would be better than war under everyone else.

"But the poor will always suffer," she said. "It doesn't matter under who."
posted by Jilder at 7:02 PM on September 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

There was an entire left-to-right political establishment the Nazis shoved aside a dozen years earlier that the Allies could simply restore.

Actually they pretty much just kept the Nazis
posted by moorooka at 8:01 PM on September 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

Most importantly, a bigger bad. The Allies were all that protected West Germans from the Soviets. BIG incentive to play nice. This factor is hardly Germany-specific. The U.S. got a lot more popular when ISIS was a threat to conquer all of Iraq and Syria, and that popularity has receded with the threat of ISIS.

Mind you it is important to keep in mind that this dynamic used to also affect the American leadership psyche and not just the psyche of the reconstructed nation. The existence of the bigger bad also motivated America's leaders to try and do better than the Soviets. That motivation for America to be a better nation than any ideological opponent is now completely absent.

There was no plan beyond hurting Afghans and destroying the Taliban then a new democratic government would magically appear and we'd be thanked by grateful Afghans.

This failure is largely because the early show was run by Republicans. To stand up a government during an occupation would have required them to admit large parts of Democratic Party ideology were correct to implement and fund a functioning government. Instead they went with the Republican platform drown-it-in-a-bathtub and rampant cronyism and corruption. Afghanistan and Iraq were in effect Republican "free-market" Galt's Gulch zones and the great men well they were spectacularly ignorant dumbass shitheads.
posted by srboisvert at 5:17 AM on September 21, 2021 [5 favorites]

The existence of the bigger bad also motivated America's leaders to try and do better than the Soviets. That motivation for America to be a better nation than any ideological opponent is now completely absent.

I don't miss the expectation of certain nuclear annihilation, but I sure do miss at least giving lip service to the idea that better things are possible.
posted by whuppy at 6:47 AM on September 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

This article by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos seems very good and to the point:
Paying the price for Obama¡¯s drone war

The attack on the M¨¦decins Sans Fronti¨¨res hospital was covered here previously.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:42 PM on September 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

A perhaps-surprising number of the people we were training as police turned around and killed their US trainers! A small government's worth of bribery targets yeeted as soon as they saw our tail lights.

I think the correct point of comparison isn't Japan and Germany but the British Raj, in India, which did in fact transform a subcontinent of disparate and feudal states into a modern nation and ruled it for nearly eighty years. The fact that such a huge and disparate entity subsequently fractured into only two (or three) major parts is remarkable, considering its highly divided nature until then.

I think the most significant distinction is that Britain intended to possess India outright, and proceeded on that basis. Their tactics weren't less brutal than the Americans', but their colonial servants weren't being constantly reminded that the occupation had a use-by date. Britain deployed vast numbers of its own people to India with the clear intent that they would become established there, and at least paid lip service to the idea that, by becoming part of the British Empire, India was now part of a global entity in which ambitious Indians could find opportunities on an equal footing. Indians were British subjects and could travel on British Indian Passports throughout the Empire and much of the rest of the world.

The structure of government in the Raj evolved as the colonial project became more established. Initially, particularly in more rural areas, British rule was via existing power structures. It couldn't have been any other way: India was huge and the supply of British officers was limited. But the number of locally trained personnel increased and Britain was eventually able to govern largely via indigenous officers who had common backgrounds, loyalties, and aspirations. That was the turning point which made India a potentially independent entity, and although independence was IMO inevitable, I believe a more generous and respectful attitude could have led to British decolonisation earlier and on better terms.

Contrast this to the American strategy in Afghanistan: American personnel were explicitly there on short assignments and never meant to establish themselves. In fact, US rhetoric about training locals to take over could only ever have been meant to assure locals that they could not rely on American support indefinitely. If locals had been incorporated into the American governance they might have had some hope that the structure would survive a US pullout: as it was, they could see that they were just local employees, and had not become part of an indigenous power structure.

The world has moved on from 19th-century colonialism and I don't expect that the US could have imposed its rule the way Britain did in India. However, even though British rule was brutal and exploitative, there was at least some degree of generosity in that Indians could see their interests tied up with Britain's. There was nothing of the sort under American occupation: can you imagine Afghans having the right to travel to the USA, let alone receiving any class of US citizenship?

If you have read this far, please accept that I have no intention of defending the Raj. Successful imperial projects do not magically become moral ones. My point is rather that the US was engaged in a colonial, or at least an imperial, project in Afghanistan, and that it was doomed to failure because the US was both less committed and less generous than Britain in the Raj.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:57 PM on September 22, 2021

Joe, I don't quite agree with you there although you make some very good points.

First, it's pretty relevant to note that the British did indeed try to replicate the methods they evolved in India in Afghanistan and found that they did not work. Any subject monarch who accepted even theoretical British suzerainty was considered tainted and rejected by (at least and not exclusively) the Pashtun extended royal families / leadership class). The Moghul political entities that they displaced in many parts of India were not exactly foreign (and there are some very dangerous and unpleasant people in India who will insist that they were) but they did descend from outsiders with different religious and cultural traditions which they maintained and that means that there was an element of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". Again, Afghanistan is different. I don't want to simplify this into Pashtun vs everyone else because Afghanistan was and is much more complicated than that but they in particular have no recent experience of being dominated by "foreigners".

Second, the areas where the British started their control were already well organised centralised states where suborning the local prince meant taking control of a substantial government.

Third, in areas where territorial control was weaker, the British were content to exercise very little influence for quite some time, many decades into the empire.

Fourth, it is tempting to think that because Afghanistan is so poor that rural Afghanistan is "in the stone/bronze/whatever age" and that therefore stuff that worked two hundred years ago would still be relevant. The reality is that no human alive today lives in anything other than the 21st century. The Taliban are a modern movement (ISIS was a highly globalised movement, even more so than the Taliban). We live in a world where modern communications technology shapes peoples views on things like national identity in a way that didn't exist in the 18th century.
posted by atrazine at 5:24 AM on September 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

It seems that the British teaching about the Raj ("we were developing them!") is taught in Australia too. Just a few of many possible counterpoints:

* Indian unity developed despite rather than because of the British. The use of Punjabi troops to put down the Indian Revolt is one example. The Indian Army in WW2 was 40% Muslim, surely a factor in today's anti-Muslim sentiment.
* British border-making was egregious and causes troubles to this day¡ª not least in Afghanistan, where the Durand Line divides the Pashtun. For Pakistan this has been both a huge headache and an opportunity for meddling.
* British institutions were designed to exclude Indians. E.g. you could enter the Civil Service only if you were educated in England and enrolled before the age of 19.
* Britain generally allowed its white colonists to rule themselves, and granted near-independence to Canada in 1867. It held its first elections in India in 1920, more than 150 years after it had conquered Bengal.
* The British squelched economic development not only in India but in Ireland. It famously built railroads, but did not allow Indians to manufacture steel until 1899.
* We just don't know what would have happened in a divided but uncolonized India. I'd note that local rulers like Haider Ali in Mysuru created efficient governments and set up trading companies and gunpowder factories in the 1700s¡ª well before such things were developed in China and Japan.

I'd also note that the British practice of co-opting local leaders was practiced by the Americans in Afghanistan¡ª and that that's part of the problem; they were notoriously brutal and corrupt.

The one thing I'd grant you is that the British did see themselves as governing India. They were terrible governors and ignored most of what a modern government should do, but that was the goal at least. The US paid lip service to "nation-building" in Afghanistan but mostly wanted to blow up bad guys. And anyone who happened to be standing next to them.
posted by zompist at 4:32 PM on September 24, 2021

It seems that the British teaching about the Raj ("we were developing them!") is taught in Australia too.

No, I come by my misconceptions honestly. You could put the amount of Asian / Eastern history I got on a postage stamp and still have room for South America.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:46 PM on September 25, 2021