-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Washington Post - The Afghanistan Papers: Documents Reveal U.S. Officials Misled Public
- Thread starter Titanpaul
- Start date
- Status
I'm reading through this and... no shit? Who was still under the impression that Afghanistan was a worthwhile war effort after 17+ years of throwing people into a meat grinder?
If you can't explain why you're there and what your win condition is then it's time to get out. It's project management 101 except failure costs lives and unimaginable amounts of money.
Also the entire thing cost $1 trillion dollars for nothing but human suffering so anyone complaining about how we could possibly pay for health care or school should be shown the door.
Also the entire thing cost $1 trillion dollars for nothing but human suffering so anyone complaining about how we could possibly pay for health care or school should be shown the door.
You'd think everyone would be in agreement on this but then you look at George W Bush's recent favorability ratings and get depressed.
This. We've just this year been dealing with people who should otherwise know better working hard to whitewash Bush and in turn the entire administration despite the overwhelming evidence:
Fucking propoganda war, built on lies. On top of that, Afghanistan has never been successfully invaded or held afaik. So many Afghan people dead, and for what?
Last edited:
The war was clearly mismanaged but I don't understand people who think we should have never been there. Like did people just forget 9-11 and that Afghanistan was their base of operations?
It wasn't worth fucking our economy over,
exacerbating pre-existing wealth gaps, and wasting Obama's first term. War is fucking dumb. You hit the people that got you and bounce, period if anything.
It was a doomed war from the jump. There was no opposing army, just centuries of ideology and decades of propaganda that we helped reinforce by simply being there.
Great article. Anyone saying "duh, we knew that" is missing the point. Two adminstrations basically lied to us and themselves about the reality of the situation, costing tons of money and lives. What a fucking disaster.
Iraq was the one we lied to get in to. I don't get the posts suggesting this one was bullshit, too. Is there really that much confusion about this? 18 years, thousands of lives, and a trillion dollars is bullshit, obviously, but there was a "reason" in 2001.
Ehh people can be in agreement that Iraq/Afghanistan was a failure and still be coming around on Bush. They are not intrinsically linked.
You're right, they shouldn't have bothered reporting on these documents.
But that was always a flimsy reason to invade and start a war with an entire country. And it was known around the time that Saudi Arabia was likely more responsible for the 9/11 attack and we haven't done anything to them. Bin Laden having any responsibility for the attack was convenient for the US as it gave them an easy target to seem like they were giving an appropriate response to 9/11.
"This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while." GWB on the eve of the war in Iraq.
There was no reason whatsoever to invade an entire country.
Afghani is a slur and I'm sure even US soldiers don't know that and keep repeating it and wonder why people hate them. It's either Afghan or Afghanistani.
Im only referring to American citizens, who don't care as much about foreign policy nearly as much as domestic issues. If he could be forgiven for the recession and Katrina, he was definitely going to be forgiven for the Middle East. Also those wars spanned Obama's admin as well.
You we should have gone and then been out of there within a month. Wipe out the Taliban and bounce. We fucked up by staying around and playing nation-builder.
I don't know about Oil (which Afghanistan is not known for) but the article certainly points out it was a boon for the opium industry
Guys, how would we pay for Medicare for all!?
Guys, how do we pay for free college!?
People need to shut up about how will we pay for X when we can dump 1 trillion into a pointless war.
Guys, how do we pay for free college!?
People need to shut up about how will we pay for X when we can dump 1 trillion into a pointless war.
But the point is to sell weapons and bullets. Its really that simple. When you look at it this way, this was amazingly successful for the arms industry. It was not for nothing. It was for profit and destabilizing a region for further profit/easier access down the line. How many times can we see the same exact pattern and not notice it?
1 trillion would help americans more so than blowing up the middle east.. thats a fact at this point.
1 trillion doesn't WIN ALL WARS, or A war either, yet, its still being spent.
Obviously it's a waste of money.
The point is that cutting it wouldn't fund MFA. If we completely dismantled the entire DoD that wouldn't cover MFA. It's not a simple as "just cut military spending!" like many seem to think.
You need oil for all those tanks,trucks and planes, they just pay American oil companies with tax money for it.
Who said it would fund MFA in its entirety? --- Like, 100%.
The pushback for anything actually useful to americans quality of life is "how are we gunna pay for it?!" Or, "But this wont fund its entirety!" to be honest. Stepping a foot in the right direction would be 1 trillion towards programs to get the ball rolling for MFA. It is beyond ridiculous to argue from the point of "but it wont fund it totally" government doesn't even work like that, they fund things for decades and use different sources of allocataed money.. For example, cutting the budget + taxing the wealthy + having gigantic corporations actually pay taxes in America would all contribute.
Military spending is bloated, and we aren't getting any return.
Is it a problem for you that the government can just waste trillions of your money on shit, whats the plan? Eh, who knows just get the billions. But for something actually useful, it needs to be vetted beyond the realistic scope of how government actually functions? For health care...
everyones realistic plans have ways of funding, cutting the military budget would in fact, aid in those goals. Dems are just as war hungry as republicans, and that will never happen. But the point remains that its true.
This is like fucking Vietnam all over again.
The whole this is just a massive mother fucking cluster fuck.
The whole this is just a massive mother fucking cluster fuck.
Yea it would get the ball rolling. Maybe 2-3% of the way there over the same period of time, according to most estimates.
I was just replying to someone who implied that the cost of the war in Afghanistan and the cost of MFA are even comparable. They're in different galaxies. It's beyond ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
Note: I strongly support MFA and couldn't possibly support the war in Afghanistan any less, having directly suffered physically and mentally because of it.
Part of the american playbook is blowing places up so they can pay themselves to fix it. This has been the move since the end of the cold war.
That's still a "duh, we knew that." Every, single nation building war we've had ended this way. It never works, Syria could be handled better but it also would not have worked. People lie to themselves and others because people are dying, don't you want to save them? Money is fake anyway right? I don't think anyone has an good answer other than you should never get into such situations in the first place.
- Status