Chagos
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2015
- Messages
- 37,034
- Reaction score
- 13,400
- Location
- in expatria
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Private
No, we all (and that "we" is for the benefit of Europeans like me) find ourselves where we are, because we screwed up the strategy of what we were actually aiming for in 2001 already.
Well, better said, we would have screwed that up if we'd had any strategy at all then.
Goals changed to and fro from the outset, the original one of wasting OBL ****ed up by the US via their decision to withdraw crucial troops in order to invest them in the Iraq adventure.
Meanwhile I didn't hear much protest from the US at the time over NATO's interpretation of drawing the rug from Afghan-based terrorism requiring the country to be stabilized by giving it a democratically elected government.
To be fair, I didn't hear much protest from the coalition nations either, when the most prudent means of achieving any such thing was deemed to be throwing suitcases full of dollars at everyone whose help was begged for, from the most criminal war lord (which Ahmad Shah Massoud for instance was to the point of being a war criminal), to the most corrupt bunch of city slickers made rulers that the country had ever seen.
Nor by both the US and the rest of the coalition turning a blind eye to each others' support of this crap fest, all in the hope that things would eventually work out and in that process actually hurrying the country to the status of failed state that we now see.
To finally top it all, the US signing a deal with the very people they'd come to combat, while consulting none of their allies whose lost blood was no less red than theirs.
The whole thing peaking last week in the US declaration that this whole thing was never about nation building (IOW screw you, you stupid coalitionists) but only about pulling the rug from international terrorism.
Not to be unfair, the incompetence of it all runs across all national borders, but at least France and Germany had learned the lesson already, when they told GWB to go shove it with his Iraq fiasco. And other coalition nations are going to be (mildly put) very hesitant in future, the next time the US asks somebody to come along for help.
Even if the betrayal of the Afghan people that we're now all committing makes the betrayal of the US towards its allies pale in comparison.
Alright, we're gonna cool it off in here now. Things are getting heated and contentious, and we're going to stop that going forward. No more personal insults, no more B/F/T, no more asshatery of any sort. We shall address the topic, the topic alone, and nothing but the topic. This thread is on topic lock down from this moment forward. Got it? Y'all better because failure to abide by this warning may result in moderator action and/or thread banning. 
