It's almost as though the American leadership doesn't really understand Afghanistan.

Of course they do. But is a nice playing ground for the army and the military industrial complex makes good profits. The lifes of milions do not matter for them.

I'm not necessarily doubting this, but I feel like this is always a convenient goto excuse to criticize any terrible, unethical military strategy the US is responsible for. Is there good evidence that certain powerful corporations/people made so much money and have so much power that they could and did successfully pressure politicians for two decades across a bunch of administrations into staying in Afghanistan? Not only successfully pressuring them to start the war but successfully pressuring them to stay there for so long?

(I of course don't at all doubt that the big military contractors have been making a ton of money from the wars, but I'm specifically referring to their corporate influence being the primary/secondary/tertiary/etc. force behind why we were still in Afghanistan after two decades.)

My own uninformed Occam's razor assumption would've been that it's primarily a matter of tangled geopolitics rather than a military-industrial complex scheme from day one to today. That is, that the State Department and top-level strategists and policy advisors are mostly the people to blame.

Maybe it's all of the above or some complex mixture. But what I want to know is the actual individuals responsible, or at least where they're contained. Not just an opaque storm cloud labeled "the military-industrial complex" or "the Deep State". For example, it could potentially be the case that this narrative might actually unintentionally help to shield the people who are truly culpable.

>OMG look at these new conspiracists attacking these well off gentlemen

I'm definitely not at all defending arms dealers and military contractors. I'm no fan of the military-industrial complex, or war, or imperialism, or the US government.

I just want to know - based on evidence - who's directly responsible for us staying in Afghanistan for 23 years. Everyone should want to know this. If the root cause is corrupt politicians and military contractors, that's extremely important information to know. And if it isn't, then the actual root cause is extremely important information to know.

>do you think those actually responsible want their names easily known? The powerful ones? They know their heads would be on the chopping block.

All the more reason to try to figure out who they are, then?

>eff off you monocle wanna-be shithead.

Good argument.

If a Muslim country will invade a Christian country, say Sweden, to improve democracy, what will happen when they will leave?

Like Caliphate of Córdoba?

They have 300,000 troops that are either poorly trained, lead by incompetent officers and/or corrupt to the bone. It is expected to lose badly. This was known, that makes the speech a big lie as many speeches of most leaders of most countries.

And wasn't there recently something shared here, that the afghan air force cannot really fly, because the US cancelled their contracted maintainance service?

Also with the sheer size of the US embassy - it rather looks to me like there never was a sovereign afghan government in the first place, so of course they don't stand a chance on its own. It was all too artificial and US dependent.

Now, who's equipped? History repeats itself...

He was obviously posturing to make the question go away. Everybody knew this would be the outcome, the die was cast.