Submission Statement
Between 2001 and 2021, under four U.S. presidents, the United States spent approximately $2.3 trillion, with 2,459 American military fatalities and up to 360,000 estimated Afghan civilian deaths.
After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, approximately $7.12 billion worth of military equipment was left behind, according to a 2022 Department of Defense report. This equipment, transferred to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) from 2005 to 2021, included:
Weapons: Over 300,000 of 427,300 weapons, including rifles like M4s and M16s.
Vehicles: More than 40,000 of 96,000 military vehicles, including 12,000 Humvees and 1,000 armored vehicles.
Aircraft: 78 aircraft, valued at $923.3 million, left at Hamid Karzai International Airport, all demilitarized and rendered inoperable.
Munitions: 9,524 air-to-ground munitions worth $6.54 million, mostly non-precision.
Communications and Specialized Equipment: Nearly all communications gear (e.g., radios, encryption devices) and 42,000 pieces of night vision, surveillance, biometric, and positioning equipment.
The total equipment provided to the ANDSF was valued at $18.6 billion, with the $7.12 billion figure representing what remained after the withdrawal. Much of this equipment is now under Taliban control, though its operational capability is limited due to the need for specialized maintenance and technical expertise.
The United States has provided at least $93.41 billion in total aid to Afghanistan since 2001. This includes:
Military Aid (2001–2020): Approximately $72.7 billion (in current dollars), primarily through the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund ($71.7 billion) and other programs like International Military Education and Training, Foreign Military Financing, and Peacekeeping Operations ($1 billion combined).
Humanitarian and Reconstruction Aid (2001–2025): Around $20.71 billion, including $3 billion in humanitarian and development aid post-2021 and $3.5 billion in frozen Afghan assets transferred to the Afghan Fund in 2022. Pre-2021 reconstruction and humanitarian aid (e.g., $174 million in 2001 and $300 million pledged in 2002) adds to this, though exact figures for the full period are less clear.
I mean yeah, all that, but did you even stop to consider how absolutely insanely wealthy we made like 7 people!?
God you people are so selfish with your wah wah thousands upon thousands have died! Think of the rich people for once!
:P
deleted by creator
Yes but actually no. Mujahideen (did I spell that correctly?) were CIA funded as they opposed the Russian invasion.
A lot of former Mujahideen fighters did end up in both Taliban and Al-Quebec (autocorrect tells me that’s the right spelling) after the soviet-Afghan war, including Osama himself. While allied, they are separate entities.
They are allies and with common roots, but saying Taliban was trained by CIA is an oversimplification. Some of its members were, yes, but that was long before Taliban was a thing.
Also, the paragon of Aged Like Milk:
Hahahahahahahhqhahaa!!! Al-Quebec!
The French Canadian province would like a word
So it wasn’t these guys that ended up in Afghanistan somehow?
Ehh, we’re here to bring you to Allah ya hosers.
Sorry, eh.
No. The Taliban only got started after the Soviets left. But the US funded and trained the Mujahedeen which later created Al-Quaeda.
Removed by mod
No, US funded what became Al-Qaeda, but the word Mohajed is usually used for a certain mix of Marxist and Islamist which is not common in our world anymore. The, eh, Islamic Republic of Iran in its ideology bears a significant trace of that though.
Removed by mod
I’ve literally told you where to look for an example. You are wrong. That this syncretism seems impossible to you means nothing.
In the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan local leftist-Islamist groups (with just a few al-Qaeda like ones) were against the USSR, while the secular-leftist government remnants were its ally (after they created the whole situation by assassinating the friendly dictator, it’s complex).
Mojahed has, yes, a rather wide meaning, but politically it’s associated with left-Islamist groups.
Shia fundamentalism is pretty socialist. Actually Islamic (including right and Sunni) fundamentalism in general has a lot about support nets, helping poor and such. They also have their own “not dirty” financial organization methods, like “Islamic banking”.
What had to be done to make political Islam the jihadi-Christian\Yazidi-beheading-ISIS-like-Caliphate-willing movement again, since the Ottoman empire, was a lot of work by western nations and a few small Arab monarchies. In Soviet times it was basically the western MO, to support-create-guide right-wing and fundamentalist organizations as opposed to the kind of movements USSR’s appearances attracted.
Of course, now they are trying to wash their hands.
“That’s why the Taliban is so deadly and effective — hapkido training. Where’d they learn that? From Steven Seagal’s fat ass. Why do you think Kelly Lebrock left him? 'Cause he’s Taliban.”
We did.
There’s a whole joke about it in The Boys when the Soldier Boy character is revived.
Adds another ~4 billion to the equation.
Removed by mod
and the USA claims healcare for its citizens is unaffordable
We’re also cutting Veteran benefits, which has been a recurring thing.
deleted by creator
“Invade Afghanistan, you will regret it,” is one of history’s NCDish lessons. Like:
- Don’t invade Russia in winter.
- Don’t let Germany get too economically depressed.
- Don’t let the Chinese people get too unhappy with their govt.
Iran feels geographically close enough to inherit the curse for sure.
Iran has been invaded quite a few times with rather satisfying results for those doing the invasions.
And most important:
I don’t think that’s what they’re after. It’s oil and money somehow at the root, it always is.
Because america is special?
Is this text AI generated? The civilian death toll in the “submission statement” is about 6x higher than accepted numbers and about 100K higher than all total deaths in the entire conflict.
IMO (AI or not) slop like this just “floods the zone with shit” while doing noting to help the progressive cause.
This is in the first paragraph of what you linked:
The Cost of War project estimated in 2015 that the number who have died through indirect causes related to the war may be as high as 360,000 additional people based on a ratio of indirect to direct deaths in contemporary conflicts.
I shouldn’t need to tell you that that is a completely different statistic. You don’t need to muddy the waters of truth to make the point.
TBF, withdrawing was a Trump era decision that Joe Biden simply didn’t stop. Trump also released 5,000+ Taliban Fighters just before. I feel like if we didn’t elect people like Donald fucking Trump then the outcome might have been different, it really seems like he was intentionally causing these problems.
I remember Bush had withdrawal plan he started putting in action, then Obama had one, then Trump had one, then Biden had one
At every stage, the US lost more and more territory. By Biden, they’d been hedged into Kabul like the US was backed into Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
The idea that we could have just camped out and refused to leave was politically impractical and logistically incredibly difficult. And why would we have been there, except to periodically fling bombs into neighboring territory?
We’d lost the war a decade earlier and simply refused to admit it. By Biden, it was a farce. We didn’t control the country in any meaningful way.
Removed by mod
Trump absolutely didn’t have a plan unless the plan was to fuck everything up.
Their plan was to reduce us casualties to generate an illusion that the us was winning the war. So they cut a deal with the Taliban: the us would no longer support Afgani government soldiers with air support and in exchange the taliban would not attack us bases. This led to Afghanistan government soldiers quitting and the government collapsing.
Removed by mod
As long as it took. They had a democracy, they had international trade, they had human rights. You can’t put a pricetag on that. The USA was protecting something worth protecting for a change.
They had a democracy, they had international trade, they had human rights. You can’t put a pricetag on that.
Around $2.3 trillion.
Removed by mod
I’m sorry that you’re on the faction opposing women in education, driving, or any form of authority. I’m sorry that you prefer an actual theocratic dictatorship. I’m at a loss that you didn’t notice the immediate tariffs, sanctions, and funds being frozen when they took over.
Removed by mod
It became their business many times over the decades starting when it became a strategic territory in the proxy wars between the west and the east. Surrendering to authoritarianism might seem like a cool idea until you’ve given up everything and allowed everyone to suffer. Some fights are unavoidable.
How other people govern themselves is everyone’s business. This isnt a difference of opinion it is brutal totalitarianism. People are killed and you hide behind it being a difference of culture. It isnt acceptable. That said the US are shitbags.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Lmao, that money never belonged to the theocracy.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Thousands of lives
Ya kinda are forgetting the lives lost on the Afghani side there buddy
Removed by mod
I learned 2 important lesson from this.
-
You can’t bomb people into liking you.
-
Most people don’t give a shit about number 1.
Edit: AutoIncorrect got me.
deleted by creator
Yes, but sometimes my phone thinks it I went to write different words.
No, I hear you! Just checking…
Yeah. I might be a jackass, but not a cycle path.
Yeah but autocorrect disagreed.
-
You actually think they were there to stop the Taliban?
Absolutely. The plan was to do in Afghanistan what we’d done in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Argentina and the Philippines.
We wanted a local aristocracy beholden to the US business interests with a police force willing to brutalize dissidents. Taliban wasn’t that thing, so they needed to be supplanted.
Problem was, the Afghan aristocracy that the US aligned with were more vile than the Taliban and rejected by the public at large. So the US spent 23 years killing everyone who refused to submit to them.
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/who-responsible-taliban
maybe there is more to it…
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
I might take this with a large grain of salt. My man is a neocon’s neocon.
If you dig into Afghanistan’s history, particularly with regard to the Soviet Union, there were a lot of parallels between the quasi-socialism of the Soviet occupation and the quasi-liberalism of the American occupation.
In both cases, the occupying army tried to subvert self-determination of the Afghan people. Trying to claim The Taliban as a product of US policy against the Communists or a product of Islamist policy against the Christian Nationalists really misses this as an ongoing effort by Afghanis to secure their own brand of domestic nationalism.
Get down to “Who is responsible?” Rubin doggedly insists that (a) US support for the Taliban in the '70s was worth the price, entirely to keep Communism out of Pakistan. And (b) we are the victims of imperfect policy rather than our own hubris.
Both beliefs are ultimately misguided, even if his history is a fun read.
It’s strange how Rubin glosses over the CIA’s training and arming of the very extremist groups which conducted 911. I don’t see how anyone can try to argue that arming and training such groups was worth it.
Simple. 3000 dead Americans was a small price to pay to bring down the Evil Empire of the USSR and liberate billions of people from Communism.
These people argue that all sacrifices are worth the goal of spreading global freedom even when they turn democracies into dictatorships. These people can never admit they were wrong about anything. Even now when the communist nations are beginning to overtake the west, these fools argue that China is a capitalist nation. They live in a fantasy world.
China is a capitalist nation
Capitalism is when people get rich, and the richer you are, the more capitalist you have become.
But also, Communism is when everyone hates their government. This proves that Americans are the Communists and China are the Capitalists.
but can we agree OPs title is useless? the reminder does neither help nor explain anything. no one won anything. there is no likeable party.
before that it was the mujahadeen trained by SEALs/special operations, turned taliban.
Man, am I glad that never backfired.
Still, we got Charlie Wilson’s War out of it.
Never get involved in someone else’s civil war.
Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to.
What about starting them? Is that allowed?
No, only coups and revolutions
Booooo
-the world seeing the Spanish Republic bombed to dust by Nazis and Italian Fascists in 1936-1939
trillions of dollar
That’s a lot of dollar.
Like in the first episode of Beverley Hillbillies: “They offered me 125 dollars for the bog. But I don’t know what kind of dollars. I know gold dollars and silver dollars, and even those newfangled paper dollars. But what is a million dollar?”
2.3 trillion went missing in the 00s and no one ever found it. Maybe that’s money being used to achieve what’s happening now in USA… Maybe it was stolen and used to help overthrow USA with criminals… Maybe American strings are being pulled by organized crime intertwined with politicians and businesses that are too naive to believe that could happen them in their country or are extorted and pressured to follow along. And when some senator is murdered that’s just the strong arm of the boss manipulating some victim to kill showing what can happen if you don’t go along with their idealistic games.
What’s happening in America now isn’t new. It’s a long game. Careers are chosen for its completion. Corrupting the system that’s used as our foundation.
Legal modern Mafia.
The money isnt “missing”. It was spent somewhere somehow by DHS/Pentagon. They are just so bad at basic math they don’t know what exactly it was spent on. But if we keep giving them more money I’m sure they’ll get better at…eventually.
Removed by mod
I forget, which movie was this from?
Removed by mod
I think the text is doctored, in the OG film it’s not so explicit. Feel free to correct me though, I’m working off “I heard it somewhere”.
The movie is Rambo 3 and you are correct. The real dedication is to the “Gallant people of Afghanistan”.
Removed by mod
Throw another 20 years at it
Hell, throw another 100 years at it, it wouldn’t make a difference
Doesn’t even matter which country invades, it won’t hold it for long.
Even Alexander the Great only briefly held it for 25 years after defeating Darius III
The people didn’t want us there and we weren’t interested in forcing ourselves on them like some kind of brutal Soviet satellite state
The rampant unchecked corruption was way worse than we thought and it was a major consideration for pulling out
Can’t help people who are unwilling to help themselves
Just wait.
In a few years we’re going to find out similar corruption occurred in Ukraine.
Not likely
How so?
It happened with every other war in recent years, and you’ll recall that Hamid Karzai got the Zelensky treatment, even making speeches in Congress, before it was found out he was personally benefitting from war funds.
One major reason is that even before the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine has been hot on the goal of trying to join the European Union which has strict metrics against corruption which Ukraine has been striving to eliminate with EU watchdogs constantly visiting Ukraine to independently assess their effort.
By the end of which Ukraine will likely have far less corruption than the US
