Re:College-educated workers are taking over the American fac...
by blaser-waffle on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @12:17PM
(#21754436)
> Problem with Afghanistan/Iraq is that the US lost the knowledge on how to conduct a war since WW2.
Did Vietnam and Korea not happen? Plenty of nation building going on there. Vietnam failed because peacekeeping isn't the same as peacemaking. The Nazi fought to the last man (or close to it) and were beaten down completely; the Japanese were nuked into submission. Both of those are not or were not options in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where there was/is still strong opposition backed by foreign powers.
> There was no plan on how to fix/rebuild the country after the threat (Taliban/Saddam)
Afghanistan wasn't intended to be a long term fix, just chase out the Taliban, kill Osama, and let the Northern Alliance take over. That didn't work out so well. Nation building is also a lot easier when the nations were already global empires; Afghanistan is still having a hard time catching up to the 20th century.
Iraq was a deliberate failure in this regard, and troop numbers were kept deliberately low to more easily sell the operation to the public.
Did Vietnam and Korea not happen? Plenty of nation building going on there. Vietnam failed because peacekeeping isn't the same as peacemaking. The Nazi fought to the last man (or close to it) and were beaten down completely; the Japanese were nuked into submission. Both of those are not or were not options in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where there was/is still strong opposition backed by foreign powers.
> There was no plan on how to fix/rebuild the country after the threat (Taliban/Saddam)
Afghanistan wasn't intended to be a long term fix, just chase out the Taliban, kill Osama, and let the Northern Alliance take over. That didn't work out so well. Nation building is also a lot easier when the nations were already global empires; Afghanistan is still having a hard time catching up to the 20th century.
Iraq was a deliberate failure in this regard, and troop numbers were kept deliberately low to more easily sell the operation to the public.