‘A Total F*cking Disaster’: Inside Seth Moulton’s Secret Trip to Kabul

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It was always going to be a disaster the second we invaded, 20 years ago. The only time to avoid it was 2001. In the last 20 years, we've been killing thousands of innocent civilians every year. Dude just went to jail for leaking the data showing over 90% of drone strikes were innocent civilians. Continuing the war there doesn't make Afghans as a whole safer or better off, it makes a small % of Afghans (interpreters, guides) richer and safer.

We should all be sad we let Bush/Cheney lie us into the war, but should not for a moment think there's anything we can do to solve that enormous error now.

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

We had no choice but to go into Afghanistan in 2001. We should have never left, this should have been treated like a Korea situation with benefits. And if we DID leave, it should have been done much better than Biden did. The Biden Administration's incompetence is an international disgrace.

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u/catdaddy230 19d ago edited 19d ago

While I agree that in the days following 9/11, there was no way we weren't going to Afghanistan, I can't agree that the only answer is to stay forever. As soon as bin laden was killed we should have started a couple of year process to get all the way out instead of changing the mission.

The United States is almost unbeatable when it comes to attaining military goals; our failures come from state building. We can't change hearts and minds before the enemy state has been defeated and should stop trying. Yes Germany and Japan but those were nation states that had been defeated and the rest of the world was helping. Vietnam was a colonial war, we had no business there. Afghanistan is not a nation state; its a piece of land filled with tribes who have been fighting for literally thousands of years and the only thing they like fighting more than each other is any invader stupid enough to show up. I feel bad for the civilians and I think we should help them as much as possible but there is no excuse to stay there. Let China and Russia police them for awhile

Edit: typos

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

We're still in Korea, Germany, and Japan. The failures started when the American left started actively undermining our war efforts in the 1960s. Vietnam was a just war, we were slowing down and trying to stop the spread of Communism! The rest of the civilized world helped us in Afghanistan!

Just keep Bagram and support the local government in exchange for access to some of the natural resources. There's trillions of dollars worth of rare earths and lithium that China's now got a great chance of getting to, plus other natural resources. Fmr. Pres. Trump talked to Breitbart news recently and he echoed what I've been saying for the past two weeks. If you're going to get out, get the civilians out first, then do something about all military hardware that's in place, and then get your troops out. And he says he would've kept Bagram. This isn't that hard to figure out. The problem is the current President is a very stupid person.

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u/superskier18 19d ago

Korea, Germany, and Japan were all conventional wars and we didn't occupy them for 20 years. We have troops in there now not because we were once at war but because they are allies. We have bases and troops everywhere. Germany and Japan weren't fighting in a gurella war after the conquests either. Afghanistan and Vietnam were fought in entirety different ways then WW2. That's why we struggled.

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u/catdaddy230 19d ago

I'm sorry to reply separately but I just processed that you are worrying Trump on lbreitbart as saying he meant to undermine his own peace resolution and maintain an indefinite military presence in an attempt to extract wealth. We don't need to get further into the empire business. Yesterday was the first day in awhile Americans have been killed in Afghanistan. Are you ready for deaths everyday for forever so a private company makes immeasurable wealth off the back of slave labor who will have every reason to find a way to kill as many soldiers as possible. I don't see the bonus for myself or most Americans really even though the military contractors, weapons manufacturers, and mine owners would probably love it

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

There was no peace resolution. The Taliban, predictably, violated their end of the deal.

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u/catdaddy230 19d ago edited 19d ago

How? We were supposed to be gone in May. We asked for more time they said yes and then we changed it again. Now I'm supposed to act surprised and angry that they didn't abide by the deal we were no longer abiding by? And who do we blame? They aren't all taliban but they're in change right now. Honestly this would be rather funny if it weren't for the civilians in hand way. The taliban expected the afghan government and by extension the United States to maintain the actual governance of the country (paying bills, doing paperwork, paying bills, allocating money to build infrastructure things to have them promptly destroyed by dueling insurgencies, and of course paying the bills) while the taliban got to subjugate, extort, and punish the rest of the country. We cover the overhead, individuals get rich and the taliban claim ownership of the country with all the requisite forced marriage, stonings, and immolation. An idea you seem to be totally fine with for some reason.

I find it preferable that the taliban now have to figure out how to govern and police borders for more than personal gain and how they will temper their incel zealots, their vision of a perfect sharia state, and the difficulty of running a country with no infrastructure, little education, and an active distrust of any non religious thinking that doesn't pertain to weaponry. The taliban wants to be taken seriously this time. They know they need external moneyto get anything done. How will they balance it?

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

Alright, I'm done with this. The Biden apologists just aren't around in the real world right now. I have better things to do than to repeatedly explain these things to the extreme minority who thinks Biden isn't some major idiot for what he did in Afghanistan.

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u/catdaddy230 19d ago

Vietnam wasn't a just war. The French tried to hold on to their empire to extract more wealth and the communists were pushing them out with the express approval of their fellow Vietnamese. The US just couldn't stand the thought of losing another country to communism. While we were ignoring thousands of years of history between Vietnam and China and hundreds of years of history with France, we were only focused on a couple of decades of soviet power and our myopia damaged us as a country.

The only reason to stay in Afghanistan, if we're being real, is to plunder rare earth minerals. No country stays indefinitely out of the goodness of their hearts. There is always a financial incentive. The only way it would make sense is to invest more billions to build the infrastructure necessary to extract, process, and export those minerals while also fighting off multiple insurgencies of which the taliban is only one. We would have to brutalize the population as an occupying force for the occupation to make financial sense and they would hate us anyway.

Sometimes there is no winning, sometimes you can just try to shield yourself from the splatter of shit when it hits the fan.

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

Bagram is close enough to China and Russia. Keeping it helps the civilian Afghan government and checks against the Chinese and Russians. It makes more sense to stay in Afghanistan than it does to stay in Japan.

Of course we should have made a deal for the rare earth and lithium mines.

Vietnam was a free country until the Communists took it.

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u/catdaddy230 19d ago

Why not let all those Muslim zealots have an easier time to unleash their frustrations against the Chinese and Russian governments? We've been the main thing stopping them. Let China and Russia pay for their own security

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u/redrumWinsNational 19d ago

"Vietnam was a just war" WoW time to stop reading

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u/idontcare345 19d ago

We should have never left,

An overwhelming majority of americans feel the opposite

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

That just means that an overwhelming majority of Americans are wrong. And, again, if we do leave it must be done right and not how Biden did it.

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u/admoo 19d ago

We should have never left?? We should have never been there to begin with. What a joke.

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

So just let them destroy the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon? They had a 4th plane that was believed to be headed towards the Capitol. Just leave these people alone?

We're still in Korea, Germany, and Japan. We never left those places, either. Bagram is a great strategic location. It's in just the right spot to provide support to the freely elected Afghan government while making China, Russia, and Iran feel a little more uncomfortable. Biden just handed our biggest enemies a tremendous gift by leaving Afghanistan the way that he did.

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u/bourbondown 19d ago

Them? Do you mean our best pals Saudi Arabia?

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

You think we should have attacked Saudi Arabia for something that people who were kicked out of Saudi Arabia organized/planned from Afghanistan?

Remember it was Joe Biden who undermined the domestic oil industry and cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have secured more oil from Canada, and who has since asked OPEC to produce more oil. He also helped the Russians with their pipeline to Germany.

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u/bourbondown 19d ago

No we should have found out which Saudi royal family members funded the 17 Saudi nationals to move to America and learn how to fly planes and dealt with them. Along with targeted strikes on al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Attempting to establish a democracy in a tribal desert to the tune of 2 trillion dollars into the pockets of haliburton et al did nothing to avenge 911. Especially given how the corrupt government collapsed in a matter of days.

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

Maybe we should have kept Bagram AFB so we could maintain a limited support role and let the country be a vassal state, giving us access to the resources?

If the Saudi Royal Family funded 9/11 then screwing domestic and Canadian oil suppliers and then asking OPEC, which Saudi Arabia is the most prominent member of, to produce more oil isn't the right path is it?

What's going on right now is pretty major. Are we ceding hegemony to neofascist China? I think we may be.

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u/admoo 19d ago

Who is “them”. A terrorist group is not a country. We went in for false premise. Only in reality it was about oil and reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan and then subsequently Iraq. How old are you? This is common knowledge man. Look up Halliburton.. Dick Cheney ran it.

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

LOL. Iraq was a mistake but it, too, was a just war. I'm old enough to remember it all. The "war for oil" is a baseless conspiracy theory.

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u/80_firebird 19d ago

So just let them destroy the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon? They had a 4th plane that was believed to be headed towards the Capitol. Just leave these people alone?

And that was Afghanistan, was it?

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

Yep! Everyone except for those who went to the School of Michael Moore knows that is the country that harbored bin Laden.

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u/80_firebird 19d ago

And Bin Laden has been dead how long now? What country was he in?

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

The powers that be won't invade a nuclear power, which is something that the Obama/Biden foreign policy disasters makes there likely to be more of. You can't trust us, and we're dangerous. Rather than end up like Iraq, Libya, the Ukraine, or Afghanistan it is best to be like Iran or North Korea. Nuke up. I sincerely hope Taiwan nukes up soon, but some countries that shouldn't be nuking up will certainly try as well. This is a disaster.

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u/80_firebird 19d ago

But we went into Pakistan and got Bin Laden.

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u/BudrickBundy 19d ago

I take it you weren't a Boy Scout. One thing you learn in the scouts is you try to leave a place better than you found it. Once you invade a country, you basically own the consequences of what happens under your watch. Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal was a disgrace and it is going to lead to more nuclear proliferation, among other things.

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u/k2on0s 17d ago

Lol, sure pal.

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u/PennJerseyDevil 19d ago

There is no go answer for the West on this topic… it is Chinas turn now… let’s watch?

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u/boytjie 19d ago

Reaping the whirlwind springs to mind. The US has pissed-off many countries.

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u/Friydis 19d ago

China: "America is indeed done, and not just in Afghanistan "