Quote:
Originally Posted by jwb
Dunno about the president but from what i heard, which admittedly isn't much cause i don't have that much free time to research this ****, is that the intelligence projections expected the conflict to drag on a couple months at least. Every source I've seen has remarked on how quickly everything fell compared to what they were anticipating. Maybe the president was wise enough to foresee how botched this whole thing would be. Either way you can't tell me it's impossible to pull out from a country without doing it all at once so the whole place goes to **** in a matter of weeks. I can't see how you could think that level of chaos is not something we would want to mitigate.
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Alright, the generals in Afghanistan? Pre-existing warlords we gave uniforms and cash. Then they inflated their recruit numbers to get more cash out of cause we pay their troops for them. Then they took the money we'd give them for their actual soldiers and send it to Dubai. Then their soldiers who never gor paid would sell whatever they had (guns, ammo, fuel, shoes) to the Taliban so they could eat. Then they'd probably desert, the warlords would recruit more "soldiers", rinse repeat gor 20 years.
The Afghan army mostly existed on paper.
As far as I know the officials were just whatever tribal leaders we thought would be the best colonial figureheads and their power never went much further than the buildings housing their offices since they didn't actually have any functional control over the warlords. Mostly they just used their positions to do much the same as the warlords, grifting money and sending it to Dubai.
The Afghan government also mostly existed on paper.
This happened differently than in Iraq because despite everything that happened between the two Gulf Wars and the sanctions in the 90s it was still some semblance of a functional country, whereas Afghanistan has been one big crater since the 70s.