One of the grimly amusing things I’ve noticed is some of the establishment pundits who didn’t buy fully into the PNAC fantasy instead trying to sell the line that the American presence in Afghanistan was “never about nation-building”. It’s a mire of BS in DC, with the defense contractors laughing all the way to the bank.
Yes, their supposed commitment to democracy didn’t hold up well in practise when they supported scummy politicians like this thief Ashraf Ghani or a jumped-up warlord like this cockroach:
You may well be correct, but it may also be a rough estimate converted with too much precision from another currency, which happens all the time in news articles. Others mention that the source is a Russian news agency, and it just so happens that 12.5 billion Russian rubles – which reads more like a rough estimate – converts to just over 169 million US dollars. I suspect that is why the number seems so specific, and I would also be surprised if the cash he took was all in a single currency (though not surprised if most of it was in USD).
I’m not trying to argue that the Russian source is reputable, just that I don’t think the precision of the number is suspicious in and of itself.
Perhaps for everyday use – but for fleeing the country in a hurry that would be quite a hassle. Even in $100 bills (the largest denomination in general use), $169 million would be several Euro pallets full of blocks of cash, and (maybe more inconveniently), at approximately 10 kilograms per $1 million, would weigh almost 1.7 tons altogether. Moving this would require a fairly sizeable helicopter already, and if the bulk of the money is in smaller bills, things would only get worse. (For example, US banknotes all being the same size and weight, $169 million in $20 bills would be five times as big and heavy, and from a haulage POV would make one think of an articulated lorry, a very large helicopter, or something like a C-130.)
I imagine that with a multi thousand year history of warfare, sudden regime changes and such, people in power do not trust banks. Certainly not their own.
You can read reports from British generals written in the first Afghan War in the 1800’s that could have been written last week aboyt the problems of local warlords and Provincial authorities who have to be bought off but who only stay bought until you leave their tent and local troops who wills witch sides in a heartbeat depending on who looks to be winning or when a chance to further some local tribal squabble presents itself.
Alexander the Great couldn’t beat them. The Soviet Empire couldn’t do it with a lot more ruthless tactics than we’d employ.
If it weren’t for the women and children, I’d say it’s better to just wash our hands and leave.
We simply can no longer be the New Rome and enforce our Pax everywhere.
Sure, but we could’ve done a lot better at trying to support a viable alternative to the Taliban. That might’ve worked.
I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were. . . .
Americans like to think of ourselves as having valiantly tried to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Afghans, so the narrative goes, just weren’t ready for it, or didn’t care enough about democracy to bother defending it. Or we’ll repeat the cliche that Afghans have always rejected foreign intervention; we’re just the latest in a long line.
I was there. Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for.
And what did we stand for? What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules.
I get really bored of the ahistorical view that “those people” are just “inherently warlike”, unlike us “peaceful” white people… like… do people even read history?
And, I’m one of those historians who do not believe that war is the engine of history and that much of human history isn’t just about conflict. The real historical shit are the times when we cooperate and create.
And it also serves to erase how things ended up the way they are. Like people talk about how the Middle East has been in conflict forever, as if the fact that the modern states were all created by colonial powers isn’t really significant. Or how those people aren’t ready for democracy, when the truth is that most of the democracies got sucker-punched by US backed coups.
Exactly! Which is why that’s the preferred narrative… white people brought those poor people “civilization” and those people rejected it! How dare they? How ungrateful can people be, rejecting something brought out of the kindness of our hearts… not for their resources at ALL! /s
Right!
I WILL say that some of the groups who are getting mind-share in places like the mid East is in part because we’ve imposed our systems without asking the people who live there. They see western governance as failed, in part because it DID fail them. So, this is in part about how colonialism fucks stuff up, but it’s also about reactions to actual failures to improve people’s lives.
