So, /k/ - with 16 years of hindsight, how would you rate the

Can I grade it on a percentile?

>>33054453
Yes.

>>33054377
not nuking it was a mistake

Beats Soviet performance, but there were some screwups.

The major one would be not figuring out a way to get Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban.

After that, losing focus during the Surge and concentrating on Iraq, which allowed the Taliban to come back.

I frequently wonder what would have happened if an occupation government was installed and the Americans just directly ran the country instead of a bunch of shitty warlords.

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>>33054474
Okay.

59-70%. That seems like a wide margin, but let me explain:

Firstly, no force has ever been 100%. In recent memory the closest you can realistically find is GW1, where a huge orgasm of cold war tension was released upon a tiny unassuming shithole-it was like getting a whore after a month of blue balls. That even still manages a 90-94%.

The US and allies involvement in Afghanistan has been a debatable success. Much of Afghanistan is secured and reletivly stable, it's transitioning to a somewhat stable state, and it's a fair sight better than it was in 1999. However, outcome is not all that this grade is based on.

Lessions of history have taught us no nation is too big to loose, and Afghanistan often proves to be the stone on which the backs are broken. Difficult terrain, hellish landscapes, underdeveloped infastructue, complicated sects of feudalistic like tribes and warlords, and dozens of other factors have broken the backs of armies ranging from Genghis Khan to Great Brittian, to the Soviet Union and the United States. NATO it seems did not take these lessions of history seriously-and there's one they should have taken especially seriously.

>>33054377
Just like with Iraq, the initial stages of buttfucking were off the charts successful. Within 2 months the US ousted the Taliban and had them fleeing into Pakistan. It's the post-invasion stages that fucked everything up, with Afghanistan it was the protection that Pakistan gave the Taliban, without it they surely would have been decimated in those early stages with SAD and JSOC units being able to keep after them instead of being road blocked by a border.

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>>33054502
Up until 2009, China had big plans to invest in Afghanistan, and to integrate it into its "new silk road" plans.

But their engineers and workers kept getting kidnapped or murdered, and they finally decided that NATO had failed, and that Afghanistan would not be stable in the foreseeable future.

That's a big part of the reason they shifted so much attention over to Pakistan. Pakistan has militants and has attacks, but it's a lot more stable and functional than Afghanistan. Chinese truckers can actually use Paki highways without getting constantly shot.

China is also bypassing Afghanistan in its land trade routes with Iran. It is going through the ex-Soviet republics, even though the route is longer.

Chinese investment was supposed to help "stabilize" Afghanistan, but the country never became stable enough for that investment to take off in the first place.

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>>33054597

When the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan, it was, arguably, the world's most powerful land force. A fully mechanized, modern, and well equipped Army with a carde of Generals who had spent their whole lives preparing for the glorious struggle against capitalism in the German and Polish fields. A massive conventional army with integrated tanks, feild artillery, engineering troops, MPs, anti tank troops, rocket artillery, aviation of both the rotor and fixed wing variation, and more. Yet the failed. They failed against a nation whos population was less than that of a twentieth of their rivals, who's GDP and industry was pathetic, and who's most significant contribution to society was a kind of blanket.

The Soviets failings in Afghanistan are the subjects of dozens of books, and I draw my opinion from these.

Firstly, the USSR had a notion of how to conduct a counter insurgency effort and how not to. An initial issue they faced was that Generals were rooted in Marxist-Lenninst thinking: there existed concepts of war for socialist uprising against capitalists, state wars against capitalists, how to crush uprisings of Capitalism, and more "Us vs them" mentality, but there did not exist a mentality of a communist vs communist state or insurrection. There was no play book to fight yourself, as it were.

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>>33054782
The US and much of NATO found itself in a similar predicament. While it had an idea on how to and how to not fight a counter insurgency effort, it's generals were rooted heavily in this idea of "the big one". The long peace had made them believe that they were due for an enomous state versus state, alliance versus alliance war of mobility, where aircraft would sprite once and never return, where Regiments would be reduced to less than half strength in hours, and where mass casualties could only be prevented by waging an overwhelming war of superior firepower, and the consequences of not successfully doing so was to be to witness your army atrophy as you entered a permanent stalemate with the enemy until you or they launched a nuke and became the catalyst by which the world was blown back to the stone age.

Most of NATOs highest commanders, much like the Soviets of 1979-1984 (the first segment of the S-A War, as defined by the Soviet general staffs report on the war), had no concept in their mind on how to plan out this invasion. For Iraq it was more easy: It was 1991 all over again. For Afghanistan, though? They were about to enter a struggle with a cause, an ideal, a belief. They hardly had a flag-how can you fight an idea?

That idea was not terrorism. That idea was not "death to America". That idea was Islam. That idea was and is Jihad.

ITT: OP samefags his own boring thread

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>>33054843
Jihad is not an idea as old as you might think. It hardly predates the printing press, and certainly in Islamic society the idea did not become common until later. It replaced ideas of other Islamic thinkers for holy wars, but none the less it remains a powerful force today.

Jihad promises eternal happiness and bliss, and 5,040 virgins to the man who martyrs himself for the Jihad. Called by clerics of Islam, a jihad provides a steady stream of fighters willing to fight and die against aggressors.

The Americans knew this first had. They used that very same jihad against the Soviet Union for a decade, financing a war against the Soviets to bleed the superpower dry and keep some 130,000 troops tied up in a strategically useless area. NATO assumed, perhaps arrogantly, that they would be welcomed by the people of Iraq and Afghanistan as liberators.

What they found instead was a not insignificant sect of the population living under a system they had accidentally helped to create, who were willing to fight them back so they didn't make things worse.

>>33054866
Shut up, I am enjoying this.

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>>33054950

The US knew well the war in Afghanistan, because it had already helped to fight it.

NATO by and large succeeded in its mission. Afghanistan is more stable now than it was before it's invasion. The majority of fighters be been killed, captured, driven from Afghan lands, or disenfranchised. Afghanistans infastructue is better now than it has been at any time in history. The ANA is a standing military force with an actual command structure and something at least resembling a real force of troops-their ability may be poor, but backed up alongside coalition forces they might do well yet.

The warfighting went well.

The Taliban were mostly destroyed, and unable to continue to assert their power. It was a huge favor to Iran since they hated the Taliban, so if we leave, and the Taliban come back, Iran will curbstomp them. As a supranational ideology, thy couldn't be defeated in any traditional manner since they could always sneak into Pakistan to regroup, and an invasion of Pakistan in unfeasible.

In terms of nation building, a lot of money and work was wasted on unnecessary projects. To get Afghani's closer to the modern era, we could have built them more roads, rail, and radio networks, like how Stalin did after taking control of the USSR. We didn't and missed a huge opportunity. We tried to teach their young girls, which alienated our allies. Just tons of mistakes, and missed chances.

>>33055041

However, issues NATO has made in its dealings of course take away from score.

ISIS is by and large a result of the continued actions of Western states against near and middle-east Arab or Islamic nations. ISIS was forged in NATO detention facilities under the watchful eyes of NATO, supplied and funded by NATO , all in an effort to prevent more forces from entering the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and destabilize the nation. Now NATO forces fight ISIS from the air over Syria and Iraq, and engage in small arms exchange with ISIS cells in the Khorasan region.

But in the more macro sense, NATO has entered an unpopular war. The war was more popular when it started: 9/11 made not just a nation but the whole of an entire civilization thirst for blood in a way that no one ever really had before. Thinking irrationally, NATO entered a war, and that war ended up costing trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives and a counterculture that forever tarnished the reputation of the alliance.

NATO not only succeeded in creating dissent at home, but abroad as well. Bombs and artillery kill indiscriminately, and convincing a 16 year old boy his brothers and mother's death was an accident when all you've heard from the local NATO rep is that their bombs are so accurate they can be fired through a chimney like some explosive Santa is really hard. That kid might feel obliged to go out, join his local fidāʼīyīn, and crank out some shots at a passing humvee. And it didn't end just with him. Villages could change allegiance very quickly-not for money, but for fear or anger.

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>>33055143

And that goes back to the concept of Jihad. The holy war is not just a state of action, but a state of being. Jihad is a war economy, wartime mobilization, wartime suspension of civil rights, and society at war-but for the soul. Jihad applies to everything for the jihadist. The sanctity of Islam may be violated for the Jihad, and the Jihadist has an exponential effect on those he comes into contact with, if sufficiently radicalized. And it became, as the war dragged on, increasingly easy to radicalize.

NATO should have spent more time reaching out to the communities and offering more to them than stability and safety. Sometimes all these people needed was a hot meal and a reminder of Islam's peaceful tenants. NATO had no easy way to avoid this, however. This was set in stone the second Gothic serpent kicked off. NATO was never going to win the war of ideology here, because the war was won over 800 years prior.

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>>33055212

Their failing was one I am not sure really could have been prevented. NATO could have never won an idealogical war against an authoritarian religion that has held the region since the time of Hernán Cortés, and it not trying would have made things only worse. Could NATO have done more? Yes. Would it have helped much? Probably, bit it would have never won without an infinite amount of money or a nuclear weapon.

NATO basically always won it's engagements. When Mujahideen or Taliban engaged NATO forces, they very rarely were effective. Delaying actions and harassment attacks are the hallmark of an insurgency, and these rarely resulted in the deaths of destruction of significant NATO assets. The most dangerous weapon of the Mujahideen was a Nokia 3310 and a Soviet TM-82 mine or OF-430 shell, and a shovel. IEDs introduced the world to body armor, MRAPs, V-Hulls and motorized vs Mechanized infantry.

The war forced NATO to upgrade, update or straight on invent new gear, new tools and new devices to engage the enemy and keep the soldiers alive. The first modern mass media war, OIF and OEF had profound impacts on Soviet and culture, and to keep the public outcry from bloodshed, NATO began overburdening their troops with armor and weapons, putting them in vehicles that were more dangerous to their crew while in a turn than any roadside bomb was, and created ROEs that killed more civilians than militants.

>>33055367

*Society and Culture.

NATO is a dominantly western organization. It falls victim of politics. Politicians do not understand war, and many of the strategic and tactical errors of the post-opening stages can be traced back to them. Because low intensity conflicts are usually more politically intense than militarily, the west was at a disadvantage here as well, since there were no politics to be plaid by the militia. They had no Senate oversight committee, no joint committee on armed services, no House judiciary court. They had the cell number for a 36 kilo 152mm high explosive shell from a 2S1 and a magazine of 7.62x39mm M43 loaded into a Chinese type 56.

NATO benefited from the conflict tactically and military. A whole new cards of experienced NCOs and junior officers entered the ranks of the US, France and UK. New armor systems, survivability packages and new tactics were developed to keep troops.alive. Battlefeild medicine tool a gigantic leap forward. Small arms technology even advanced a little bit, no small feat since it had been stuck right where it was at since 1968. The WORLD learned much on how to fight a counter insurgency, lessions soon applied when France entered Mali and showcases it's level of skill earned from its troops battles in the middle East.

>>33055464

So, all and all, NATO did well on the military and objective front, but could have done better and was crippled under politics and cold war theory.

The good:
-Military success
-High proportion of inflicted casualties to casualties taken
-Objectives completed mostly
-Massive experience gained for all major participating members
-Gain of new and hardened troops into reserves and into the knowledge base
-Nation improved by and large
-Enemy rendered mostly ineffective

The bad:
-Failed to learn from history
-Crushing bureaucratic reforms and legislation hampered effectiveness
-Poor execution or mantinance of managing cultural phenomenon and societal outreach
-Poor early stage planning
-No exit strategy

The ugly:
-Created a worse enemy to face
-Military-Industrial complex expanded
-Allowed progressive/Regressive politics to take hold in the west
-Political correctness allowed to sell a narrative of peace
-Cost

Overall, you can not fault NATO for the war, because it was won, but you can fault them for how they won it, and how they failed to foresee it's evolution.

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>>33055568
How was the war "won" when the Taliban still controls large chunks of Afghan territory?

It wasn't as fun.

Coverage of Desert Storm was a hell of a lot more fun. I remember staying up late at night watching CNN night vision footage of Iraq getting BTFO.

>>33055605

Well, "won" being a term I attempted to avoid the whole time and slipped at the end: something I should have put in quotes at the least since I agree, it was not won. I meant to say "most objectives completed".

The goal now is, since the Taliban resides mostly within pockets, to allow the ANA to fight them and bleed them dry. If that will ever come I don't know, it's not my place to say.

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>>33055568
Holy fuck that was a good way to sum up the middle East.

>>33055568
Holy fuck that was a good way to sum up the middle East. 10/10 wouldn't plot to invade the Middle East

>>33055568
Thanks m8

Early 2000s website design was so much better than the resource hog eyecancer animated shit of today, I wish people would go back to utility focuses layouts and just present information.

>>33055568
Nice sum up, would read again. Only that if I was you I would really abstain myself from using the therm "won". The Russians "won" the First Chechen War in the first 110 days of the war in the same manner. History teaches us that you can't really win against mujahideen until you eradicate them all and cut their flow from other countries, namely Middle-Eastern oil states.

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>>33057357

>>33054659
>early stage was successful

The whole idea was to capture bin laden. Which did not happen successfully until years later

Regime change in Afghanistan was just a consolation prize when he escaped

>>33054377
We didn't learn from 200 years of history, where afghanistan proved unconquerable by Russia & Britain even though they both tried multiple times.

As soon as we leave whatever puppet government we leave behind is going to come crashing down. Afghans are a hospitable people but they're also deeply xenophobic and ignorant. They're like the muslim world's equivalent of the deep south.

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>>33054782
Jesus Christ, people still think that Soviets were there to conquer Afghanistan and add it as another republic. And that it was full scale conventional invasion. Go read god damn book.

>>33055568
The biggest fuckup was disbanding the army and secret services, so these soldiers needed other places to use thier knowledge

>>33054666
china trading with iran isn't good for America so why should we care?

how is that a black mark against nato? lol