Reddit reviews No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes (American Empire Project)

We need to leave Afghanistan. It’s called the graveyard of empires for a reason. The soviets had over 100,000 troops in the country and they couldn’t hold it. What makes us think we can hold it with 7,500. The taliban has been making progress year after year, they have roughly 50% of the country in their grip. This is just like Vietnam where Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon are all recorded saying it’s a stupid war that we will never win. I bet those same words have been said by Obama and Trump about Afghanistan yet we’re still there. We will never remake this country in our image it’s a lost cause. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1250069262/ref=tmm_fbs_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr= this is a book about the war in Afghanistan. This is one of my all time favorite books. I was legit unable to put it down. It follows a member of the taliban, a US backed warlord and a woman caught in the middle. It shows you how we won and then lost this war.

More absurd than this?

> DID YOU KNOW that shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban tried to surrender? For centuries in Afghanistan, when a rival force had come to power, the defeated one would put down their weapons and be integrated into the new power structure — obviously with much less power, or none at all. That’s how you do with neighbors you have to continue to live with.

> So when the Taliban came to surrender, the U.S. turned them down repeatedly, in a series of arrogant blunders spelled out in Anand Gopal’s investigative treatment of the Afghanistan war, “No Good Men Among the Living.” Only full annihilation was enough for the Bush administration. They wanted more terrorists in body bags. The problem was that the Taliban had stopped fighting, having either fled to Pakistan or melted back into civilian life. Al Qaeda, for its part, was down to a handful of members.

> So how do you kill terrorists if there aren’t any? Simple: Afghans that the U.S. worked with understood the predicament their military sponsors were in, so they fabricated bad guys. Demand has a way of creating supply, and the U.S. was paying for information that led to the death or capture of Taliban fighters. Suddenly there were Taliban everywhere. Score-settling ran amok; all you had to do to get your neighbor killed or sent to Guantánamo was tell the U.S. they were members of the Taliban.

I hadn't read this -- The Taliban Tried to Surrender and the U.S. Rebuffed Them. Now Here We Are. -- when I made the top post, it makes for pretty depressing reading.

Otherwise I agree with you, but note that any "clear cut victory" would have involved killing tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent farmers and villagers, can the word carry meaning if that is the case?

> The Americans are there for the same reason currently. ISIS formed when they tried to leave and a power vacuum developed.

Eh, not the NPR link backs that up.

> That link has no sources for its claims except for a link to book which is a personal narrative. Could you link something else?

It sources to a book by Anand Gopal... ? If you want I have the book and can try to give the exact quote.

https://www.amazon.com/No-Good-Men-Among-Living/dp/1250069262

> The network existed, Taliban literally captured Kabul before the war.

The Taliban had very little to do with Al-Qaeda.

> Which one?

I guess American Exceptionalism.

> Overall, I was just trying to show why the Americans have been there for so long. It isn't about capability as it is more about the logistics and politics of the region.

I mean literally the capability of an army is how good it is at achieving its strategic goals no ? Which the Americans seem to fail at.

I actually recommend you read No Good Men Among the Living. It will cure you of your false assumptions that the US military is good at running anything.