Asymmetric warfare is only going to get easier for the underdog with the advent of cheap drones.
What failed was remaking Afghanistan into a modern democracy. Money and patience ran out.
But militarily, it was a total victory.
But I'm the end, who had to flee and who is in power in Afghanistan since then?
No one fled.
What did the US get?
https://www.usip.org/publications/2022/11/afghanistan-was-lo...
It improved the quality of life and security for the people their immeasurably positively. If the withdrawal had not happened, and better leadership was displayed, the would have been completely wiped out.
What they were trying to get, was another ally in the region. They could have to, if it weren't for poor leadership.
Those things have not been achieved. If those were the aims, the US lost and the Teliban won.
That's one way to look at it sure. From a purely force against force perspective though, they didn't come anywhere close to losing.
Yes, I agree. The US saw this as a military problem, but that was only part of it. Winning a particular ground battle, capturing a town etc was only part of what was needed.
It might be a military success by some sort of conventional military definition. But it was a complete failure and utter waste by pretty much every other measure.
It takes decades to subjugate the local population by the invading force and some local resistance will remain for a long, long time.
If victory means "we are now bogged down in some decades-long occupation against guerrillas that drains resources and has no meaningful benefit".
This is objectively false. Eventually, occupation became politically hard to motivate for an American public that was tired of war. But to claim the Taliban beat the US military is ridiculous. FWIW I was there.
- Before the war the Taliban controlled Afghanistan. - The US (+ Allies) invaded and conquered the country. - 20 years later the US Military has left the county. - The Taliban now controls the country again. - At no point during that 20 years was the Taliban actually "defeated" like claimed.
Whether you like it or not "Money and patience ran out" = losing the war.
There are many other "lost wars" where they were lost for the same reason. The most obvious one in this context being the Vietnam war.... which is also a popular one for people to argue that the US Military didn't lose either.
Is this not the case?
And furthermore to my original point do you think that the ubiquity of cheap drones on the battlefield in 2025 would make similar attempts to conquer Afghanistan by the US easier or more difficult if the US were to try the same again?
That the subsequent occupation ended with the Talibans return to power has nothing to do with the war itself but has political reasons. In my opinion, the occupation could have ended completely different with a longer commitment. Unfortunately, the Iraq invasion happened and the American population had little long term interest in nation building, two nations at once.
FWIW Iraq and Afghanistan are very different places.
But this has nothing to do with the military campaign itself. When I was there and where I was(2010, northern Afghanistan), it was a fairly peaceful place. Things were progressing in the right direction.
Regarding your second question, I don't think that the Taliban would have great use of drones considering that we could use essentially the same counter measures we used against remotely operated IEDs(jamming).
Ukraine does not have access to the same equipment we did in Afghanistan.
EDIT:
This article pretty much reflects my views on what went wrong. The US government half assed the occupation and withdrew too early.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-runa...
Could you imagine a different set of circumstances where the year is 1950 and Adolf Hitler is still Fuhrer of the Third Reich and someone is arguing that America won WW2?
America lost in Vietnam, they lost in Iraq, and they lost in Afghanistan. The sooner you come to realize this and that your time spent in Afghanistan was a waste the sooner you'll have a more accurate worldview and can make better decisions than to sign up for what was at that point an obviously pointless war.
> I don't think that the Taliban would have great use of drones considering that we could use essentially the same counter measures we used against remotely operated IEDs(jamming).
Doesn't seem to be working out for either side in Ukraine.
I’ve said what I had to say, have a nice day.
This absolutely did happen and their long fought victory has saddled the US with an tremendous monetary debt and social debt in the form of a fractured American society the consequences of which are an increasingly authoritarian America that is brutishly lashing out at their allies in that conflict.
America's loss in that conflict has cost America far more than we can imagine right now and the cost is only increasing by the day.
Yes, it is.
> and there was no surrender.
Yes, Trump’s release of Taliban priosners and subsequent surrender of Afghanistan to them was a surrender.
> The commander in chief made primarily a political decision
Yes, the decision to abandon a war is always a political decision. It is, in fact, the political decision that every act in war is directed at getting the enemy to make.
There's this weird and frankly dolschtosslegende-ish trend in America post-Vietnam to characterize American victories in war as military and American losses as “political” as if the two were orthogonal categories, but the only military victory is achieving the desired political end, and if you feel like you were “winning militarily” and didn’t do that, then you just didn’t understand the context of the war and your sense of victory was misplaced.
No, it isn't. Wow, that was easy!
> Yes, Trump’s release of Taliban priosners and subsequent surrender of Afghanistan to them was a surrender.
No, it was a retreat. For it to be a surrender, the Taliban would have had to be in a position of power. They were not.
> Yes, the decision to abandon a war is always a political decision.
Except for the times it is solely a military position.
They control the territory. The Taliban is in fact in a position of power. Doubly so now that it forced the US to retreat.
It is a weird definition of "victory", when the end of the war was a hasty and poorly executed retreat.
Only after a voluntary retreat, so that is irrelevant since they didn't have power at the time of the treat, and were not a factor in the decision to retreat.
> It is a weird definition of "victory", when the end of the war was a hasty and poorly executed retreat.
Of course it was a victory. The Taliban were ousted within weeks and then the place was under US control for 20 years. If it wasn't a victory, the last 20 years would have been like the last year instead of what they were like.
A voluntary retreat is not a victory. You are arguing it is, which is extremely odd.
> Of course it was a victory. The Taliban were ousted within weeks and then the place was under US control for 20 years.
If the victory conditions were to be bogged down for 20 years wasting resources in an occupation that netted no benefits, only to have your enemy be back in the following day when you do your voluntary retreat, those are the most retarded victory conditions ever spelled out.
It would be like claiming victory against the Nazis if after some years both the US and USSR left Germany, and in the following day the Nazis were setting up concentration camps again.
If I come in to your country, invade it, and have complete dominion for 20 years, than I've successfully invaded your country. Victoriously.
If I then change my mind and decide to leave, after 20 years of having a provisional government because I got bored, then yeah, my victory still stands, and the rest is details and semantics.
> It would be like claiming victory against the Nazis if after some years both the US and USSR left Germany, and in the following day the Nazis were setting up concentration camps again.
If they had held dominion over the Nazis for the entire time they were there and left voluntarily because they felt all of a sudden it wasn't there fight, it wouldn't be wrong to do so.
It's kind of like a UFC fighter pinning his opponent for 90% of the match and then suddenly forfeiting. I wouldn't call it fleeing or losing.
My point was simply that the US had complete dominion over the area for 20 years and left voluntarily, not due to any pressure from the enemy. If you don't want to call that a victory, fine, whatever, but it doesn't seem like a surrender or loss to me.
Losing money, troops and public support in the field and back at home is a very real definition of losing.
It sure as hell wasn’t winning.
Retreating voluntarily because of nothing to do with their opposition, sure as hell isn't losing.
Instead of going back and forth constantly with this semantic bullshit, can we just agree at the least the US didn't retreat because the taliban forced and pressured them to?
https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/learning-from-failure-...
The question then becomes "A rich man may be able to dodge taxes, but can he dodge drones?"
Technology is a race between offense and defense and right now we're seeing offense leapfrog defense.
The status quo that we've known our whole lives has meant that anyone trying to assassinate a powerful figure will only get one shot at it before they're caught which does not allow them to learn from their mistakes and sends a chilling message to others who would do the same.
With remote controlled or autonomous drones the dynamic changes because people can operate from a distance -- perhaps even in an entirely different country that doesn't extradite. What's the defense against that?
At the end of the day the attacker only has to succeed once whereas the defender has to succeed every single time.
There may come a time where the ultra-wealthy and powerful decide that it isn't viable for them to be out in public due to the security risks so they will retire to a gilded cage -- which is still a cage -- and what's worse it reduces the search space for attackers to find them.
This doesn't even get into the near future advancements in biotechnology that will allow small groups of dedicated people to develop biological weapons that selectively target a wealthy person's family -- how can they defend themselves against that other than going into a fully sealed environment?
At the end of the day it'll end up being easier and better for these people to just make decisions that benefit the world at large instead of decisions that benefit themselves to the detriment of everyone else.
If you piss less people off less people want to kill you and in fact more people will want to defend you.