To be fair, we couldn’t beat a bunch of 7th century goatherders in mountains in Afghanistan, but then, the Russians couldn’t either.
Afghanistan is were empires go to die.
Well, it wasn’t so much a military defeat than a cultural or political one. We didn’t annihilate the Taliban to the last man and they took over as soon as we left. Ordinarily we killed them freely in combat and didn’t very many deaths for years.
We were able to beat a bunch of Afghanis, but we couldn’t get them to cooperate with each other. They were too separated into various, often conflicted tribes, and there were too many warlords committed to running their own little patch. Also political corruption was endemic, and religious traditions were several centuries in the past.
We should have employed my emBASEee strategee. from my home page
I have been advocating for several years a policy I call ‘embaseees’. Embassy + AirBase —> EmBASEeees. We go into a terrorist country, clear out their taliban equivalent, then withdraw to very large Embassies, perhaps 3 of them. Have them big enough to encompass a military airbase where we can use it for decades on end to conduct anti-terrorism operations. As long as the ‘host’ country aint killing Americans then we let them have self-sovereignty. Kind of like how we operated in the Phillipines for decades. We could even have an intermediate zone that we patrol but it would be autonomous. Let them have their taste of freedom. A referendum every 10 years to see how large the boundaries of the intermediate autonomous zone should be.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/4043681/posts
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