Afghani War

Biden has announced American troops along with remaining NATO troops will be withdrawing from Afghanistan by 11 September 2021. This is in consultation with all involved NATO nations. Previously, Trump wanted American troops out by the middle of May, but this would not have given time for the NATO troops to complete their withdrawal, as I understand it.

I hope we just don't have to go in again down the road.
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Comments

  • HarryCHHarryCH Shipmate
    I certainly agree with the last statement. I remember that many years ago the conventional wisdom was the U.S. should not be involved in a land war in Asia. Since then we have had Vietnam, the Gulf war, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. (Or have I missed some?)
  • Technically I think you'd struggle to say the first Gulf War was a land war, given it was predominantly fought from the air. Does the idea date from the Korean War or is it from observations of the Nazi invasion of the USSR?
  • stetsonstetson Shipmate
    edited April 14
    HarryCH wrote: »
    I certainly agree with the last statement. I remember that many years ago the conventional wisdom was the U.S. should not be involved in a land war in Asia. Since then we have had Vietnam, the Gulf war, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. (Or have I missed some?)

    I always thought "a land war in Asia" in that admonition meant "somewhere in the vicinity of Vietnam".

    Because if it literally means "the Asian continent", I'm not sure what the connecting factor would be between all those nations. Topographically and culturally, there really is no such thing as "Asia".
  • stetsonstetson Shipmate
    Technically I think you'd struggle to say the first Gulf War was a land war, given it was predominantly fought from the air. Does the idea date from the Korean War or is it from observations of the Nazi invasion of the USSR?

    According to what I've just been reading, it seems like an apocryphal phrase, attributed to various military figures. The same source said it was popularized by The Princess Bride in 1987, but I know I've seen at least one reference to it from the late 60s/early 70s(in National Lampoon, so meant humourously).

    I remember my dad telling me in the early 80s that you should never fight a war in the jungle(by which he meant Vietnam), or against religious people(by which he meant Afghanistan).
  • stetsonstetson Shipmate
    According to wikitionary, the meaning of the phrase is that you will be outmatched by the sheer number of soldiers on the other side. But even that wouldn't really apply to all countries in Asia, or even East Asia.
  • I always got the impression it was an empirical law rather than one with a basis in theory. You look back at Alexander, Napoleon, the British Empire, Hitler and the USSR: they all had trouble trying to wage war in Asia away from the coast.

    If I had to make a connection it would be territory size and overextended supply lines, but even that's not quite right for the Soviets in Afghanistan.
  • stetsonstetson Shipmate
    I always got the impression it was an empirical law rather than one with a basis in theory. You look back at Alexander, Napoleon, the British Empire, Hitler and the USSR: they all had trouble trying to wage war in Asia away from the coast.

    If I had to make a connection it would be territory size and overextended supply lines, but even that's not quite right for the Soviets in Afghanistan.

    Well, Napoleon and Hitler ran into their trouble in the European part of Russia, if we're being technical. Though I suppose western Europeans probably viewed even the Russians west of the Urals as Asiatic mobs.

    As for land size and supply lines, again those things depend on geography, which is far from uniform across Asia.

    I know popular thinking tends to conflate the Korean War and the Vietnam War(yes, I'm looking at you MASH), but as a resident of Korea, I can tell you the climate and topography here is nothing like what I've heard about Vietnam. Just for starters, it snows, and there are no jungles.
  • Martin54Martin54 Shipmate
    edited April 14
    As well as being Russia's Vietnam, Afghanistan is America's. Again. They'll be back. Like Iraq. This was all inevitable when America took Russia's Vietnam role in Afghanistan. America is responsible for its 40 years of increased involvement. So pulling out will roll American security back 20 years. Afghanistan will descend to a caliphate, its natural state. I wonder what would have happened if America had left Europe in '45?
  • TelfordTelford Shipmate
    The USSR failed in Afghanistan in 1980. I reckon that Stalin would have succeeded in 1945 if he had wanted to. He would have been totally ruthless
  • edited April 14
    The end of the USSR was indeed presaged by their disastrous war in Afghanistan. The USA funded Muslim extremists to help, including Osama bin Laden. Reprinted interview with Jimmy Carter's national security advisor Zbignew Brzeznski 1998 (this is reprinted in various places). If you want to read further, searching "Zbignew Brzeznski " and "Osama bin Laden" brings up various bits of info, some quite political, but the fact remains, the creation of the Afghan mess involved many cooks in the kitchen for many decades. We could place the Sept 11 attacks as just another event within the longer history, which does offend some, but it is probably how history will treat it.

    Unrelated but parallel: the subsequent close ties of the Bush II gov't with Saddam Hussein (Iraq). Dick Cheney is a bad man on that. Halliburton, the oil contracting company Cheney is attached to did equally well before and after the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses and lies.

    I think the "land war in Asia" thing has it's best reference in the movie "The Princess Bride". Except, apparently if there's oil it's thought of as a good idea.
  • Gramps49Gramps49 Shipmate
    In truth, Afghanistan has been a quagmire for any outside force even before Alexander the Great. Persians tried to conquer it, Muslims did introduce their faith to the region, but by and large, it has been like quicksand to any outside power. How many Brits first invaded Afghanistan in 1838? How many British troops finally retreated from Afghanistan in 1919?
  • HarryCHHarryCH Shipmate
    As I understand it, the first part of the Gulf war was indeed mostly aerial, but the tail end of it was classic tank warfare (and messy).

    As for the phrase itself: (from stackexchange.com,)
    <quote>
    "Never fight a land war in Asia" is one of those weird aphorisms that is widely known, but on which nobody agrees who originally said it. It has variously been attributed to Bernard Montgomery (British General), Dwight Eisenhower (American General and later President), and Douglas MacArthur (American General).
    ...
    Getting involved in a land war in Asia is a classic blunder in the real world. Examples from before The Princess Bride include:

    The Korean War
    The Vietnam War
    The Russian War in Afghanistan

    All three were land wars in Asia that have been seen as mistakes. Grave mistakes. Epic blunders. Arguably the most famous classic blunders.
    </quote>
  • stetsonstetson Shipmate
    edited April 15
    From stackexchange:
    Getting involved in a land war in Asia is a classic blunder in the real world. Examples from before The Princess Bride include:

    The Korean War
    The Vietnam War
    The Russian War in Afghanistan

    But it's not clear what, if any, specifically "Asian" factors caused those wars to be epic blunders.

    All the list really shows is three wars that happened in Asia, which one side lost. Well, in almost any war you can name, there's usually one side that loses. And Asia is a huge land mass, so odds are, some of those wars are gonna happen there.

    The French lost Canada to the British in 1759. Then, Britain lost America to the colonists in the 1770s(we'll call 1812 a draw). Then, the CSA lost to the Union in 1865.

    So...don't get involved in a land war in North America?

  • Simon ToadSimon Toad Shipmate
    Bloody hell. That got sidetracked.

    The traditional intelligence community response to a withdrawal from Afghanistan is that it will mean the Taliban will establish control of the country as a base for terrorist groups. Here is a NYT article discussing the withdrawal. The relevant point is:
    A new intelligence report released Tuesday offered a grim assessment of Afghanistan and the prospects for peace. American intelligence agencies assessed that a peace deal was unlikely in the next year, and that the Taliban would make battlefield gains.

    “The Afghan government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support,” the report said.

    Military and other officials who favored troops remaining in the country longer had used a similar classified intelligence assessment to argue for a slower drawdown, worried that an exit of American troops could trigger a wider civil war and an eventual return of terrorist groups.

    The report released Tuesday did not contain an assessment of the likelihood of a return of Al Qaeda to Afghanistan, and some senior officials remain skeptical the Taliban would allow it. The report did say that Afghan government forces continued to hold major cities. But they have been “tied down in defensive missions and have struggled to hold recaptured territory.”

    The NYT reports the fears of the current Afghan Govt later in the article:
    Afghan officials are afraid that Mr. Biden’s decision to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond the May 1 deadline, as outlined in last year’s peace deal, would pressure Kabul’s government to release the roughly 7,000 Taliban prisoners the insurgent group has long asked to be freed.

    Right now, those prisoners and the lifting of United Nations sanctions were some of the last leverage the United States had over the Taliban. The Afghan government has been staunchly opposed to any further prisoner release.

    After 5,000 Taliban prisoners were released last fall to start negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban, government officials say many of them returned to the battlefield.

    Withdrawing by Sept. 11 “essentially means that the Biden administration policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ to pressure Afghan parties to reach a political settlement is not working,” said Tamim Asey, a former Afghan deputy defense minister under President Ashraf Ghani.

    It seems to me that these are the core issues in terms of strategy. In terms of politics, withdrawing from Afghanistan is a no-brainer. Not only is it extremely popular across the political spectrum, but surely it will ease America's debt burden, allowing funds to be re-directed to other much-needed areas. That debt stuff is speculative on my part.

    I have heard some commentary to the effect that in the face of the GOP's extremism, the Biden Administration is prioritising initiatives that have widespread public support: rolling out the Covid vaccine while not being heavy-handed on masks and lockdowns (the wrong settings, but what can they do?); big spending on infrastructure, and using the reconciliation process to include much needed Aged Care and School funding; sort of acting a bit on gun control; and now withdrawing from Afghanistan. The theory fits, ISTM.
  • mousethiefmousethief Shipmate
    The Graveyard of Empires, I've heard it called. The sooner we can get out, the better.
  • TelfordTelford Shipmate
    HarryCH wrote: »
    As I understand it, the first part of the Gulf war was indeed mostly aerial, but the tail end of it was classic tank warfare (and messy).

    As for the phrase itself: (from stackexchange.com,)
    <quote>
    "Never fight a land war in Asia" is one of those weird aphorisms that is widely known, but on which nobody agrees who originally said it. It has variously been attributed to Bernard Montgomery (British General), Dwight Eisenhower (American General and later President), and Douglas MacArthur (American General).
    ...
    Getting involved in a land war in Asia is a classic blunder in the real world. Examples from before The Princess Bride include:

    The Korean War
    The Vietnam War
    The Russian War in Afghanistan

    All three were land wars in Asia that have been seen as mistakes. Grave mistakes. Epic blunders. Arguably the most famous classic blunders.
    </quote>

    The West did not start the Korean war, North Korea did. Should North Korea have just been able to take over South Korea ?
  • Simon ToadSimon Toad Shipmate
    I don't think the Korean War was a blunder. Was it seen as a blunder at the time? I wonder to what extent MASH had an influence on how the Korean War was perceived, a show that more reflected attitudes to Vietnam.
  • @stetson There are meaningful commonalities in the three Asian wars cited, though each has its individual profile as well. The Korean War was separate from the other two in that both Koreas were proxies and the imperial powers (US/UN vs China) were active on the ground, whereas in the other two the opposing imperial power (USSR in Vietnam, US in Afghanistan) operated almost entirely by proxies or clients. In terms of prestige (and let's not unduly minimise the importance of prestige and of perception of power in the exertion of broader influence, not just with the contended theatre), one imperial power had less at risk, less 'skin in the game' than did the power visibly on the ground. On paper, in all three, the imperial power faced a hostile local population, but held an overwhelming technical advantage, and "should have won." In all three the imperial power was in some degree the victim of its own orientalism, holding the local population in disregard while also allowing itself to get spooked by the cultural and geographic 'otherness'. The density of the jungle, or the blankness of plains and mountains, were potent psychological factors which could be 'weaponised' against the invader. In all three wars, the inability to differentiate civilian from combatant was a problem, more psychologically than in the actual butcher's bill.

    Speaking of the psychological effect on the invading force, remember the verse from Kipling:

    When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains
    And the women come out to cut up what remains,
    Jest roll up your rifle and blow out your brains
    And go to your gawd like a soldier.

    In all three wars the invader seriously underestimated local commitment to defence and the lengths that they were willing to go in that cause.

    Of your three North American examples, I think that the American Civil War can safely be ignored as a counter example, because by definition a civil war is fought on home territory. With the Pakistani civil war that birthed Bangladesh, there was no choice but to fight it somewhere in Asia, probably in Pakistan; the American Civil War had to be fought in North America. Of the other two wars you cite, neither was an invasion of North America, as France and the UK were already established (as were Russia, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark) in North America, and while there were First Nations allied with both the French and the British, the First Nations were not the specific target of the European powers in those wars, and to a considerable degree were pursuing their own interests within the context of a European-led world war.

  • TelfordTelford Shipmate
    In all three wars the invader seriously underestimated local commitment to defence and the lengths that they were willing to go in that cause.
    North Korea was easily beaten and it was only the Chinese that allowed it to survive and make a ceasefire.

  • SojournerSojourner Shipmate
    North Korea was hardly beaten easily; the conflict dragged on for 3 years and there were many lives lost

  • edited April 15
    So it's full circle then for Afghanistan? Fund the Muslim extremists to take on your cold war rivals, they take over the country, they believe that they, not you, defeated the USSR, and they then target you. So you go to war against friends. You declare victory and go home. I guess they'll believe defeated you also?

    Re Vietnam. The agreement to hand the country back to the French in 1945 and ignore the country's desire to be independent looks key in that fiasco. Terrible series of bad blunders.

    Strategies where a country allies itself with another for selfish monetary or political reasons seems pretty evil when their gov'ts are terrible. It didn't go well in Iran/shah and one wonders about Saudi Arabia.
  • Simon ToadSimon Toad Shipmate
    @Pangolin Guerre wrote:
    On paper, in all three, the imperial power faced a hostile local population, but held an overwhelming technical advantage, and "should have won." In all three the imperial power was in some degree the victim of its own orientalism, holding the local population in disregard while also allowing itself to get spooked by the cultural and geographic 'otherness'. The density of the jungle, or the blankness of plains and mountains, were potent psychological factors which could be 'weaponised' against the invader. In all three wars, the inability to differentiate civilian from combatant was a problem, more psychologically than in the actual butcher's bill.

    I think you are impermissibly lumping three very different conficts together, but I have real difficulty with treating the Korean war as the same as the other two. I think I see the Korean war through the prism of MASH, and that founds my gut rejection of the idea of a hostile Korean population. I'm open, as always, to being wrong.
  • stetsonstetson Shipmate
    @Pangolin Guerre

    I agree there are commonalities between all three of the Asian wars. I'm just not convinced that it's their "Asianness" that gives them those commonalities.

    I suppose it might be the case that Asia was the place where these sorts of wars were likely to be fought in the first place, possibly due it being the scene of substantial decolonisation post-WW2 and/or nations bordering on larger nations regarded by the west as Cold War rivals.
  • Martin54Martin54 Shipmate
    Telford wrote: »
    HarryCH wrote: »
    As I understand it, the first part of the Gulf war was indeed mostly aerial, but the tail end of it was classic tank warfare (and messy).

    As for the phrase itself: (from stackexchange.com,)
    <quote>
    "Never fight a land war in Asia" is one of those weird aphorisms that is widely known, but on which nobody agrees who originally said it. It has variously been attributed to Bernard Montgomery (British General), Dwight Eisenhower (American General and later President), and Douglas MacArthur (American General).
    ...
    Getting involved in a land war in Asia is a classic blunder in the real world. Examples from before The Princess Bride include:

    The Korean War
    The Vietnam War
    The Russian War in Afghanistan

    All three were land wars in Asia that have been seen as mistakes. Grave mistakes. Epic blunders. Arguably the most famous classic blunders.
    </quote>

    The West did not start the Korean war, North Korea did. Should North Korea have just been able to take over South Korea ?

    US anti-communism was the main driver. Three million people died for democracy of one flavour or another.
  • TelfordTelford Shipmate
    Sojourner wrote: »
    North Korea was hardly beaten easily; the conflict dragged on for 3 years and there were many lives lost
    MacArthur had chased them all the way to the Chinese border and then the Chinese intervened to save them.
  • SojournerSojourner Shipmate
    That is hardly being “easily beaten”...
  • @Telford - your comment suggests that you do not have a lot of experience or understanding of the Korean War. Those I have known who were involved have been extremely reluctant to relive those experiences in any way, shape or form and were far from dismissive, as you have just been.
  • TelfordTelford Shipmate
    @Telford - your comment suggests that you do not have a lot of experience or understanding of the Korean War. Those I have known who were involved have been extremely reluctant to relive those experiences in any way, shape or form and were far from dismissive, as you have just been.

    You are deliberately confusing the bad experiences of individuals with the over all picture and please don't pretend that I have been dismissive
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    Someone actually mentioned the Afghani women, albeit in a rather nasty context. At least half of the population are terrified of what is going to happen to them when the Taliban rake over.
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/14/afghan-women-fear-the-return-of-the-taliban
  • Penny S wrote: »
    Someone actually mentioned the Afghani women, albeit in a rather nasty context. At least half of the population are terrified of what is going to happen to them when the Taliban rake over.
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/14/afghan-women-fear-the-return-of-the-taliban

    So it seems to me that this is the sort of issue that you either solve 'properly' (whatever that means in terms of resources and so on) or leave well alone to start with. At present there are a few garrisoned cities and then the majority of country being subject to the odd patrol and constant threat of Predator strikes.

    This has led to a constantly terrorized rural population, a tit for tat war of local chiefs informing on their rivals and the ISI threatening Pakistani tribesmen with drone attacks if they don't go over the border and fight the Americans.
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    OK, let's leave well alone as it has been for practically the whole of human existence. Let's allow men (not all men, of course) to keep half of humanity imprisoned and unable to be the full image of God they were created to be because it isn't our business.
  • Penny S wrote: »
    OK, let's leave well alone as it has been for practically the whole of human existence. Let's allow men (not all men, of course) to keep half of humanity imprisoned and unable to be the full image of God they were created to be because it isn't our business.

    I'm curious what you think currently happens to the women outside the very few areas in the country that the Americans permanently garrison? Or over the border in the tribal areas of Pakistan 'our ally' ?
  • Penny S wrote: »
    OK, let's leave well alone as it has been for practically the whole of human existence. Let's allow men (not all men, of course) to keep half of humanity imprisoned and unable to be the full image of God they were created to be because it isn't our business.

    The question is how do you fix it? How many of those men do you have to kill before the rest start behaving better?
  • RicardusRicardus Shipmate
    Besides which I'm not sure that protecting Afghan women was ever the purpose of the NATO mission. A happy bonus, perhaps.
  • Simon Toad wrote: »
    @Pangolin Guerre wrote:
    On paper, in all three, the imperial power faced a hostile local population, but held an overwhelming technical advantage, and "should have won." In all three the imperial power was in some degree the victim of its own orientalism, holding the local population in disregard while also allowing itself to get spooked by the cultural and geographic 'otherness'. The density of the jungle, or the blankness of plains and mountains, were potent psychological factors which could be 'weaponised' against the invader. In all three wars, the inability to differentiate civilian from combatant was a problem, more psychologically than in the actual butcher's bill.

    I think you are impermissibly lumping three very different conficts together, but I have real difficulty with treating the Korean war as the same as the other two. I think I see the Korean war through the prism of MASH, and that founds my gut rejection of the idea of a hostile Korean population. I'm open, as always, to being wrong.

    I'd suggest a different historical prism from something filmed in the Californian countryside by CBS, which demonstrates that history doesn't repeat, neither does it rhyme, it's just a series baggy pants bad puns. Much as I admire some of Alan Alda'a work, he's not a historian. MASH was more about American sensibilities during the Vietnam War than it was about anything else. I don't think that I'm the one doing something historiographically 'impermissible' here.

    It was @stetson who selected the example Asian wars, not I (supra). I was merely replying to him.

    The Koreans are a proud people subjected to the tender mercies of Japanese colonialism (slaughter of demonstrators, slavery - both labour and sexual, de-korification, forced resettlement), super power partition, followed by a proxy war. I imagine that I'd be pretty hostile to anyone I didn't recognise from my village. If that doesn't jibe with a Hollywood 'understanding' of history, I'm quite comfortable with that.
  • Penny S wrote: »
    Someone actually mentioned the Afghani women, albeit in a rather nasty context. At least half of the population are terrified of what is going to happen to them when the Taliban rake over.
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/14/afghan-women-fear-the-return-of-the-taliban

    Point of clarification: My quotation from Kipling was not a comment on Afghan culture or Afghan women, but on the colonialist/orientalist perception of the Asian other. But yes, it is a nasty context.
  • stetsonstetson Shipmate
    edited April 15
    @Pangolin Guerre

    It was @stetson who selected the example Asian wars, not I (supra). I was merely replying to him.

    For the record, I was replying to HarryCH's mention of the phrase about land wars in Asia.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    Telford wrote: »
    The USSR failed in Afghanistan in 1980. I reckon that Stalin would have succeeded in 1945 if he had wanted to.

    The problem here is that "success" in the Afghanistan War is very tricky to define. Does it mean rooting out al Qæda from the country? If so, then mission accomplished! (For real this time.) Does it mean America's preferred government stays in power in Afghanistan in perpetuity? If so, that would seem to require perpetual military occupation, which leads to the question of whether this is a worthy enough goal to keep doing it forever.
    Telford wrote: »
    He would have been totally ruthless

    I've long thought that this kind of thinking leads to two very distinct fallacies. The first is that in order to "succeed" (however defined) one has to be ruthless. The other is that if someone is being ruthless then they're sure to "succeed".
  • stetson wrote: »
    @Pangolin Guerre

    I agree there are commonalities between all three of the Asian wars. I'm just not convinced that it's their "Asianness" that gives them those commonalities.

    I suppose it might be the case that Asia was the place where these sorts of wars were likely to be fought in the first place, possibly due it being the scene of substantial decolonisation post-WW2 and/or nations bordering on larger nations regarded by the west as Cold War rivals.

    I'm not certain that we have go looking for an "Asianness", or where we'd go looking for it. As I argued above, the "Asianness" seems to have resided as much in the mind of the westerner perceiving Asia as it did anywhere. The genius Vizzini seems to have been thinking along the lines of Alexander or Xenophon as much as Korea or Vietnam. Kipling certainly had Alexander in mind (The Man Who Would Be King). I suppose that to a degree Germania or Scythia held a similar exoticism for the Romans, the Finnish interior for the mediaeval Swedes, Abyssinia and Prester John for scholastic culture; "Asianness" being a subspecies of a cultural otherness of the imagination (albeit a sometimes heavily armed imagination inflicting serious real world casualties).
  • stetsonstetson Shipmate
    @Pangolin Guerre

    I think we're in agreement. There is no "Asianness" that is a relevant factor in determining whether or not a particular war is a good idea. But the phrase "Never have a land war in Asia" presumes that there is such a quality, and that it can be examined for predictive purposes.

    If I say "Never pet a dog that's foaming at the mouth", I would also be able to tell you what exactly it is about a dog foaming at the mouth that makes it dangerous: it's a symptom of rabies.

    But the land-war-in-Asia thing is like saying "Never pet a dog with brown fur", because you can remember three times that you got bitten by a dog with brown fur. But that's a coincidence, not a pattern.
  • Simon ToadSimon Toad Shipmate
    Simon Toad wrote: »
    @Pangolin Guerre wrote:
    On paper, in all three, the imperial power faced a hostile local population, but held an overwhelming technical advantage, and "should have won." In all three the imperial power was in some degree the victim of its own orientalism, holding the local population in disregard while also allowing itself to get spooked by the cultural and geographic 'otherness'. The density of the jungle, or the blankness of plains and mountains, were potent psychological factors which could be 'weaponised' against the invader. In all three wars, the inability to differentiate civilian from combatant was a problem, more psychologically than in the actual butcher's bill.

    I think you are impermissibly lumping three very different conficts together, but I have real difficulty with treating the Korean war as the same as the other two. I think I see the Korean war through the prism of MASH, and that founds my gut rejection of the idea of a hostile Korean population. I'm open, as always, to being wrong.

    I'd suggest a different historical prism from something filmed in the Californian countryside by CBS, which demonstrates that history doesn't repeat, neither does it rhyme, it's just a series baggy pants bad puns. Much as I admire some of Alan Alda'a work, he's not a historian. MASH was more about American sensibilities during the Vietnam War than it was about anything else. I don't think that I'm the one doing something historiographically 'impermissible' here.

    It was @stetson who selected the example Asian wars, not I (supra). I was merely replying to him.

    The Koreans are a proud people subjected to the tender mercies of Japanese colonialism (slaughter of demonstrators, slavery - both labour and sexual, de-korification, forced resettlement), super power partition, followed by a proxy war. I imagine that I'd be pretty hostile to anyone I didn't recognise from my village. If that doesn't jibe with a Hollywood 'understanding' of history, I'm quite comfortable with that.

    I was conceding that my view might be distorted because of MASH, not using it to dispute your assertion. I was looking for more detail about the attitude of Koreans to the war. I thought it might be a complex issue.
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    PG, I realised that your comment from Kipling wasn't about Afghan women.
    But I remembered how the improvement of the position of Afghan women was mentioned as a benefit at the beginning of the venture into Afghanistan, and had read the article about the way the women were now feeling, and felt that this had been utterly forgotten.
    Your post was the only one which even approached half the population, and this gave me a way in.
  • EnochEnoch Shipmate
    If there is any obvious lesson to be learnt from history, it's don't go to war in Afghanistan because whoever you are, the one constant is that the Afghans always win.

    British India, three times, the Russians, the present grinding and inconclusively unsuccessful conflict. I rest my case.

  • EirenistEirenist Shipmate
    Inquestion whether the Third Afghan war was a defeat for the British.
  • Dave WDave W Shipmate
    In question whether the situation in Afghanistan any time in the last 40 years (at least) could be considered “victory” for the Afghans. I hope I never experience such a triumph.
  • Martin54Martin54 Shipmate
    Telford wrote: »
    Sojourner wrote: »
    North Korea was hardly beaten easily; the conflict dragged on for 3 years and there were many lives lost
    MacArthur had chased them all the way to the Chinese border and then the Chinese intervened to save them.

    The Chinese intervened to save themselves from the Americans on their border.
  • EnochEnoch Shipmate
    Dave W wrote: »
    In question whether the situation in Afghanistan any time in the last 40 years (at least) could be considered “victory” for the Afghans. I hope I never experience such a triumph.
    A very fair comment @Dave W but by the simple test test 'did they manage to repel the invaders', yes, they did though at a price nobody should be expected to have to pay.

  • TelfordTelford Shipmate
    Martin54 wrote: »
    Telford wrote: »
    Sojourner wrote: »
    North Korea was hardly beaten easily; the conflict dragged on for 3 years and there were many lives lost
    MacArthur had chased them all the way to the Chinese border and then the Chinese intervened to save them.

    The Chinese intervened to save themselves from the Americans on their border.

    The Americans had no plans to go into China
  • Telford wrote: »
    Martin54 wrote: »
    Telford wrote: »
    Sojourner wrote: »
    North Korea was hardly beaten easily; the conflict dragged on for 3 years and there were many lives lost
    MacArthur had chased them all the way to the Chinese border and then the Chinese intervened to save them.

    The Chinese intervened to save themselves from the Americans on their border.

    The Americans had no plans to go into China
    The Chinese were certainly worried about America being on their border. With USA agreement to support the French retaking Vietnam instead of supporting its independence. Fear of colonialism.
  • Martin54Martin54 Shipmate
    Also North Korea under the Soviets supported Chinese communists during the civil war, that ideological bond has not been broken.
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