Comments by "nexus1g" (@nexus1g) on "2001 Invasion of Afghanistan | Animated History (REMASTER IN DESCRIPTION)" video.

I've seen that same political comic. It was asinine. The lesson people need to learn is that you don't get into a war if you're not prepared to occupy until stable. This has been a problem with US foreign policy since Vietnam. Many good people in South Vietnam died because we got weak-kneed in our support of their existence as independent from communist rule after we got the North to the peace table to agree to partition the nation. We still have bases in Germany and Japan from World War II, but their purposes have changed from policing to a mutually-beneficial arrangement. The same could occur in a place like Afghanistan, but people stupidly think we can create a power vacuum and then just leave in a decade or two without blowback.
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@GMBalHajri1990 "they actually offered to hand over osama but bush refused" No, they agreed to give up Osama to a third-party nation if the US proved he was guilty. Do you honestly believe they would have ever accepted any evidence of proof? You're a fool if you think that.
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@Femlobster They were already bombing. Part of the conditions to turn over Osama to a third party nation were to stop the bombing, in fact. The other requirement is that the US would need to prove Osama was guilty -- and that was the real dubious part.
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@blindsheep6180 So let's look at a likely scenario... The Soviet Union and communists take over Afghanistan. The Soviet Union falls apart in 1991. Civil wars occur. The Taliban, a ethnically-agnostic Islamic nationalist group, takes hold of power, having the greatest numbers. Same outcome, but they don't have any M16's.
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I'm about to blow your mind: The "present" is an illusion that's really what happened very small fractions of a second ago. Since light has a travel time, the only thing you can ever actually know is history.
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People saying they feel old at 20/25. I was that age when it happened and had considered enlisting. That's old.
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@istoppedcaring6209 I'm not sure what you may mean, so I'll refer to the maxim, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." What I would say that means to me is that while the stages and environments change, humans don't change nearly as quick, and as far as humans dealing with those new settings, little changes. I do feel that we are currently in the throws of an dark age of the information age. What was supposed to be a period of enlightenment was undermined by the fact that incorrect and incomplete information is pithier, panders to preconceived notions, and travels exponentially faster than correct information, which is often long-winded, unsatisfying, elicits more questions than answers, and requires change of the people reading it. This has led to more people loading into extremist ideologies and away from centrist views. I think that as far as concern for the longevity of our current institutional systems, this is, in my view, the greatest threat currently.
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@Biden_is_demented It's worth noting that not all Islamic nationals desired to be as outwardly aggressive as Osama bin Laden, which led to the schism which saw the founding of Al-Qaeda as only a subset of the Afghan mujahideen. It's also important to note that no one has an issue with Afghan people. They have an issue with the Taliban aiding and abetting Islamic extremists that had openly attacked non-combatant American citizens. Many brave and galant Afghans fought with our soldiers, as you see in this video.
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@Biden_is_demented Are you arguing just to argue? A non-combatant is someone who is uninvolved in direct conflict. There may be some gray areas when it comes to those who give orders or declare wars, but people working in an office building or in an embassy in a foreign country are very clearly way into the non-combatant side of the spectrum. You also seem to be under the very weird misunderstanding that going to war in Afghanistan meant killing everyone...? That's not how it works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V80JIswG7P4
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@Biden_is_demented That's simply not true. These deaths included things that we can't say wouldn't have happened otherwise. These deaths include not just collateral damage in strikes and the like, but things like malnutrition, lack of access to healthcare, poor sanitation, poverty, US armaments provided through Operation Cyclone during the Afghan-Soviet War to the Taliban... These are things we could not say would not have happened otherwise. And even then, with all of this included, it's 71,000, not hundreds of thousands. The goal is to have minimum civilian casualties. A hallmark of Islamic insurgencies is to keep civilians close as shields. They wouldn't do that if they knew we didn't care. Give me accurate information I'm not already familiar with if you want to give me a pause for reflection -- not a bunch of generalized propagandized garbage.
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@Biden_is_demented You're not thinking critically here. That is 3,550 people dying a year. Just to put that in perspective, there are about 10,000 gun murders in the US a year. And most of those 3,550 didn't die from direct combat action, making it impossible to determine if they wouldn't have died anyway. The 9/11 attack wasn't to cripple military might as part of an invasion the country being invaded started by invading a neighboring country and not stopping when told to. The Persian Gulf War was a clear declaration of war after advising time and again that if the invasion didn't stop, it would lead to their invasion. Instead, 9/11 was the targeting of civilians for the express purpose to undermine democracy -- terrorism. I'd give you that the Pentagon may have been a valid military target, and the WH if the plane made it there. However, the citizens in the planes are still a major issue there. "by your definition" What I said is that those just going to work or just taking a flight were very clearly non-combatants. That's far from a "definition". It's a spectrum, is what I said.
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