Why the lessons of 9/11 are wasted

@BlueVeins Plenty of lessons to be learned from Afghanistan but in response to 9-11 what should we have done turn the other cheek?

@Strictgram We really should've done our best to negotiate with the Taliban to turn over Bin Laden & his associates to international court. The Taliban did actually offer to extradite Bin Laden, himself, to a third country; that's not enough to serve as justice for Al-Qaeda's crimes, but we could've at least tried to coax the bastards into giving us more before going into a full-scale war.

If that failed, I think it'd have been reasonable to bomb Al-Qaeda warlords, but we shouldn't have stayed for more than a year. At that point, the purpose of attacking Afghanistan is just to get retribution and prove that we're not to be fucked with. Killing Bin Laden was a good thing, but it wasn't worth the costs we spent doing it.

But honestly, doing nothing still would've been better than what we actually did. Even if Al-Qaeda had carried out another 9/11 (which was unlikely due to changes in public attitudes about hijackings as well as changes in domestic policy), we still would've lost fewer lives than we could've saved with the investments I mentioned earlier.

Of course all this is a matter of opinion and debate. What we are saying is that they withdraw from Afghanistan wasa botched disaster which it was. @BlueVeins

@Grvstu The withdrawal from Afghanistan was messy and horrible, but it was always gonna be that way. You can't just prop up a puppet government for 20 years and expect shit to be all sunshine and rainbows when you finally leave. Regardless of how we did it, withdrawing was always gonna cause a crisis of confidence within the Afghan government and a government that no longer believes in its ability to survive is a clusterfuck 100% of the time.

Unfortunately, the idea of getting everyone out all at once -- soldiers, civilians, allies -- just isn't technologically feasible. And failing that, we have to choose which to evacuate first, all of which have their own unique problems. We could've chosen to evacuate our civilians & allies first, but that probably would've caused the Afghan army to collapse with our soldiers still inside. The CIA wrongly predicted that the Afghans could buy us a few months and really, no one predicted that it'd be as few as ten days, so we went with withdrawing troops first.

The same kind of thing happened in Vietnam, by the way. Thousands of Vietnamese civilians were captured by the NVA and brutalized. If we don't want this kinda shit to happen, we oughta stop starting land wars in countries that don't like us.

@Strictgram There was no need to invade Afghanistan and waste 20 years trying to change their form of government. All that needed to happen was to beef up airport security (which did happen), and send in a team of special forces unannounced to capture bin Laden. Instead, we announced a full-on invasion, giving bin Laden ample warning to escape. Bin Laden was eventually killed a decade later in just such a covert operation.

9/11 was a fluke, that happened because of incompetent leadership that ignored clear warnings, and the inability of intelligence agencies to communicate with each other. Both of those have been remedied.

I think it’s very simplistic to call 9/11 a fluke. @LeopoldBloom