We Should Have Colonized Afghanistan (1 Viewer)

[rockaction]

We should have seized political power, eliminated the Taliban and our sworn enemies, controlled all the area's resources, and colonized Afghanistan. That is the conclusion I have drawn from today's news. That is what a superpower in the world does throughout history. If anything, our reluctance to express our might and put it into tangible form has cost us twenty years of turmoil, seen us suffer a diplomatic and now strategic defeat at the hands of the Taliban, and has left the populace to the whim of the butcher and pedophile. 

We should have announced our presence with authority, to quote Bull Durham's intemperate Nuke LaLoosh, and we did, but what we should have done was stay there, control the resources, tell the populace they were under our rule, and exercised our power rightfully.

This is what countries that were attacked on their own soil would do with countries whose rule has fallen into the hands of those that would agitate for our demise; and we might have done so but for the howls of the effeminate and emasculated Western European democracies, democracies that haven't seen the funding of their own defense since WWII.

France, Germany, and even Britain should have been told that this was our way. We should not have appeased "human rights" watchers and grifters by promising democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan; instead, we should have pummeled that region and controlled it and its resources.

This was a diplomatic and strategic loss for the U.S. This was a loss for human rights. The laments of the effeminate West about raped women and children in Afghanistan should not have caused us fear, instead it should have emboldened us to impose our rule, our way of life, our recognized rights. The Pushtans should have been executed for raping little boys once liberated. The Taliban should have been wiped from the earth once control was established in the region.

Instead of acting with self-confidence, we did what all failing republics do. We offered olive branches in the face of a destructive way of life, a way of life that triumphed once our way of life was rejected, and we tried half-measures where only the sword and the imposition of rule was appropriate.

When you see the head-to-toe burka in Afghanistan, when you hear the reports of their raped, and their women stoned without trial for something as simple as accusations of infidelity, know that it is our lack of courage that allowed it. All because we do not believe in our way of life anymore.

This is a tragedy that could have been averted.

 

[The Future Champs]

We would have had to round up most of the population and send them to extermination camps.   Many empires have attempted to hold Afghanistan, and the only ones to meet with any success slaughtered civilians indiscriminately.   

China will probably succeed, and harvest their organs for profit while they're at it.

 

[Mister CIA]

Timeless advice

 

[rockaction]

Timeless advice

Yahoo comments: "Proceeds to make the same mistake again. Dies."

 

[rockaction]

We would have had to round up most of the population and send them to extermination camps.   Many empires have attempted to hold Afghanistan, and the only ones to meet with any success slaughtered civilians indiscriminately.   

China will probably succeed, and harvest their organs for profit while they're at it.

History, meet history.

 

[The Z Machine]

Or we could have left 10 years ago... or 15 or not gone at all. 

 

[Godsbrother]

We should have never gone over there.  

 

[rockaction]

The world was watching. Non-response was not an option to a state actor that admittedly housed a man that launched a massive attack on United States soil. Nothing other than complete and utter annihilation of the enemy was satisfactory to those who took careful note, and while complete annihilation was achieved at first, it was not seen through to its conclusion. The world saw our military dismantle the Middle East's strongest military in the Iraqi army in two weeks. The attempt at democracy was the failure in both states, not the military endeavor. Compulsion and the iron fist should have been law in those two new settlements formerly known to the West as Iraq and Afghanistan. 

That is all.

 

[Godsbrother]

The world was watching. Non-response was not an option to a state actor that admittedly housed a man that launched a massive attack on United States soil. Nothing other than complete and utter annihilation of the enemy was satisfactory to those who took careful note, and while complete annihilation was achieved at first, it was not seen through to its conclusion. The world saw our military dismantle the Middle East's strongest military in the Iraqi army in two weeks. The attempt at democracy was the failure in both states, not the military endeavor. Compulsion and the iron fist should have been law in those two new settlements formerly known to the West as Iraq and Afghanistan. 

That is all.

I agree that the failure was not military, the failure was the decision to invade in the first place.    We quickly dismantled the Iraq and Taliban military but we knew going in that it was not possible to maintain a sustainable peace without remaining there.

I don't enjoy seeing the Taliban takeover of the country but the bottom line is was inevitable unless we stayed there forever.  The amount of US blood spilled and money spent was not even close to being worth it.   

I'll say it again:   it was stupid going in and it was even dumber staying there so long.   

 

[Stealthycat]

well I think yeah, when you go to another country with military power, you conquer it and make it yours or you stay out or at the very least destroy the evil you went there to destroy

 

[rockaction]

I'll say it again:   it was stupid going in and it was even dumber staying there so long.   

You can repeat it all you'd like, a response was necessary. A swift, immediate, completely destructive response was in order, and it was had. The world was watching. The state hosted the man whose bombs of jet fusillade wiped out more than three thousand people in a concentrated area of our nation's financial capital. A more complete annihilation was in order, and instead we focused on exporting democracy to lands in which it was despised, foreign. The homemade bombs that blew the backs of the heads off our citizens on our our soil and had them jumping from burning skyscrapers to avoid being burned alive was something that demanded response. It almost demanded a limited nuclear response, in my estimation, and the Middle East is lucky that cooler heads (and I personally know that those who had the President's ear at the time were taking nothing off of the table) prevailed and that a ground war with Iraq was settled upon as enough of a deterrent. Kissinger, Cheney, Pearl, Rumsfeld and other bigwigs signed off of the deal, and it was done. But Afghanistan is lucky it isn't pure glass.

This colonization that I propose would not have been justified in the language of the sub-human. In other words, most colonies in modern times (since the seventeenth century) have been justified on grounds that the people that are under its boot are subhuman savages that need protection from themselves. In this case, I argue that the people all have human agency, and that the abdication of what were heretofore inalienable (that which we cannot give up nor transfer) basic rights to body and soul have been violated by internal actors so anathema to life and liberty that they must, by our own volition, be forced to be free. They do not lose agency, in fact, they acquire a newfound agency of the universal rights of man so long denied them by tribe, family, other human. It is not to dehumanize those that are to now live under the Western yoke (as benevolent a yoke as could be), but rather to respect their humanity that colonies should have been made of Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead we get roving packs of humans destroying other humans for non-compliance to trivial civil laws that intrusively invade basic dignities. These people should be under Western yoke for having housed and exported such men.

 

[Navin Johnson]

No

 

[rockaction]

No

Quelle suprise! And a detailed reason. Why, I should listen to this!

 

[djmich]

You can repeat it all you'd like, a response was necessary. A swift, immediate, completely destructive response was in order, and it was had. The world was watching. The state hosted the man whose bombs of jet fusillade wiped out more than three thousand people in a concentrated area of our nation's financial capital. A more complete annihilation was in order, and instead we focused on exporting democracy to lands in which it was despised, foreign. The homemade bombs that blew the backs of the heads off our citizens on our our soil and had them jumping from burning skyscrapers to avoid being burned alive was something that demanded response. It almost demanded a limited nuclear response, in my estimation, and the Middle East is lucky that cooler heads (and I personally know that those who had the President's ear at the time were taking nothing off of the table) prevailed and that a ground war with Iraq was settled upon as enough of a deterrent. Kissinger, Cheney, Pearl, Rumsfeld and other bigwigs signed off of the deal, and it was done. But Afghanistan is lucky it isn't pure glass.

This colonization that I propose would not have been justified in the language of the sub-human. In other words, most colonies in modern times (since the seventeenth century) have been justified on grounds that the people that are under its boot are subhuman savages that need protection from themselves. In this case, I argue that the people all have human agency, and that the abdication of what were heretofore inalienable (that which we cannot give up nor transfer) basic rights to body and soul have been violated by internal actors so anathema to life and liberty that they must, by our own volition, be forced to be free. They do not lose agency, in fact, they acquire a newfound agency of the universal rights of man so long denied them by tribe, family, other human. It is not to dehumanize those that are to now live under the Western yoke (as benevolent a yoke as could be), but rather to respect their humanity that colonies should have been made of Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead we get roving packs of humans destroying other humans for non-compliance to trivial civil laws that intrusively invade basic dignities. These people should be under Western yoke.

I like how you think, different and challenging assumptions is good.  I'm not sure I agree with you, but understand the logic.

Unfortunately, there is no practical way to colonize a country in the middle east and our half-### attempt (really a much smaller fraction than half-assed) to "provide" something that would enable them to move forward was of course a disaster.

We needed to respond differently, impactful but smaller scale in terms of in-country ownership.  No good answer because Afghanistan would still be a ####-show either way...but better than a ####show that was ruinous to our country too.

 

[Godsbrother]

The response was inappropriate and the cost way too great but we're never going to agree so I'll just leave it at that.

 

[rockaction]

As I sat with the man from CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) at a bar called Politiki in D.C., and he traced the development of nuclear weapons and the future development of them on September 14, 2001, I knew the world was forever changed. As he wept at the bar for his friends in the Towers and asked me "what do you think deaf ##### is like?" (the girls of Gallaudet were there that night), I knew we were really at war with China. He showed me his card, introduced himself. I had been talking and he had taken a shine to me because of where I worked and what I said.

"Look at a map," he told me.

"It all goes from China, to Mongolia, to North Korea, and on the other side to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, to Iran."

"That's where the nuclear secrets are going and coming from. China."

He cried more. "We've been warning about Al-Qaeda for ten years now. I've gotten in front of Congress and told all those ####ers. They didn't listen."

Gekko is not wrong in these here boards. Most men in the know will privately admit we're really in a diplomatic war with China.

We're losing.

You don't have to want war. All one powerful side has to do is decide that they are at war and you have a war.

 

[rockaction]

I like how you think, different and challenging assumptions is good.  I'm not sure I agree with you, but understand the logic.

No good answer because Afghanistan would still be a ####-show either way...but better than a ####show that was ruinous to our country too.

Thanks.

I don't think there is a good answer, either. Nobody wants a colony unless they are there to abuse its resources and view the populace as subhuman. Our colony would have been for our own foreign policy self-interest, so that a hateful state can no longer export that hate in the form of large bombs that hit cities. Our solution was democracy for the undemocratic. Those who know and knew better would argue, as I do, for presence and accountability by the populace. The Pushtans stop raping little boys every time the Taliban comes around. Our soldiers were unprepared for what that sort of "democracy" (and it was rule by the eligible elder folk) would look like. We were caught off-guard. Not so if we set up a satellite state.

I agree it would have to be limited in scope and area. We could not go out in the surrounding mountains and converted all the tribes, worried about all of them. But we could have taken a confederation of lifeblood cities. That would have sufficed, I think.

 

[2Squirrels1Nut]

We should have built a bunch of bars, restaurants, casinos and a Duff Gardens or two. 

 

[djmich]

We should have built a bunch of bars, restaurants, casinos and a Duff Gardens or two. 

7-11's

 

[rockaction]

We should have built a bunch of bars, restaurants, casinos and a Duff Gardens or two. 

Dave and Buster's before they hit the 'rupt. (Like you didn't see that coming.)

Remember the "democracy, whiskey, sexy" guy? How he became an international phenomenon during the heady days of the liberation of Iraq? How people hoped for that to be the case? That the Iraqi populace saw our diversionary culture and might embrace it. That Dr. Frank, young adult author and leader of the punk band the Mr. T Experience even wrote a song about it, in hopes? That Andrew Sullivan blogged it? That Instapundit was behind it?

It was an international news sensation.

That lasted a week.

 

[rockaction]

well I think yeah, when you go to another country with military power, you conquer it and make it yours or you stay out or at the very least destroy the evil you went there to destroy

I would have them forcibly vaccinated.

 

[tonydead]

Yes

 

[squistion]

Waiting with bated breath for Rock's next thread:

We Should Have Colonized Vietnam. 

 

[djmich]

Waiting with bated breath for Rock's next thread:

We Should Have Colonized Vietnam. 

North Korea probably a better example.

 

[rockaction]

.

 

[Phil Elliott]

Russia gave up after 10 years. 

 

[Sand]

Turn it into The Glass Sea.  

(That's about as realistic as the OP).

 

[Redwes25]

No we shouldn’t have. What we should done is never gone into Iraq and focused on Afghanistan. We had a chance in the beginning but let it fester as an open wound for to long as we focused on a truly pointless was in Iraq. 
 

 

[Godsbrother]

No we shouldn’t have. What we should done is never gone into Iraq and focused on Afghanistan. We had a chance in the beginning but let it fester as an open wound for to long as we focused on a truly pointless was in Iraq. 
 

Without the Iraq invasion we would never have been able to enjoy this guy

 

[Joe Schmo]

You can repeat it all you'd like, a response was necessary. A swift, immediate, completely destructive response was in order, and it was had. The world was watching. The state hosted the man whose bombs of jet fusillade wiped out more than three thousand people in a concentrated area of our nation's financial capital. A more complete annihilation was in order, and instead we focused on exporting democracy to lands in which it was despised, foreign. The homemade bombs that blew the backs of the heads off our citizens on our our soil and had them jumping from burning skyscrapers to avoid being burned alive was something that demanded response. It almost demanded a limited nuclear response, in my estimation, and the Middle East is lucky that cooler heads (and I personally know that those who had the President's ear at the time were taking nothing off of the table) prevailed and that a ground war with Iraq was settled upon as enough of a deterrent. Kissinger, Cheney, Pearl, Rumsfeld and other bigwigs signed off of the deal, and it was done. But Afghanistan is lucky it isn't pure glass.

This colonization that I propose would not have been justified in the language of the sub-human. In other words, most colonies in modern times (since the seventeenth century) have been justified on grounds that the people that are under its boot are subhuman savages that need protection from themselves. In this case, I argue that the people all have human agency, and that the abdication of what were heretofore inalienable (that which we cannot give up nor transfer) basic rights to body and soul have been violated by internal actors so anathema to life and liberty that they must, by our own volition, be forced to be free. They do not lose agency, in fact, they acquire a newfound agency of the universal rights of man so long denied them by tribe, family, other human. It is not to dehumanize those that are to now live under the Western yoke (as benevolent a yoke as could be), but rather to respect their humanity that colonies should have been made of Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead we get roving packs of humans destroying other humans for non-compliance to trivial civil laws that intrusively invade basic dignities. These people should be under Western yoke for having housed and exported such men.

It's hard to argue we value humanity after we vaporize a whole swath of people checkered with the ignorant innocent that we bequeath human agency with basic dignities which we redeem by repealing their right to life itself. And to those left wandering after the destruction of home and society we offer compelled deference at the foot of our boot. That way certainly allows us the moral high ground over the encroaching Red Horde. 

Don't see anyway that wouldn't work out in our favor.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

We should have seized political power, eliminated the Taliban and our sworn enemies, controlled all the area's resources, and colonized Afghanistan. That is the conclusion I have drawn from today's news.

I had the same thought. But it seems like the execution would have been difficult and may have also ended in disaster.

At the time, treating them like 1946 Japan (after reducing them to 1945 Japan) might have made more sense than treating them like the 1898 Philippines -- or maybe vice versa, it's hard to say.

Neither strategy was going to work out great, I suspect. But maybe no worse than the strategy we actually pursued...

 

[fatguyinalittlecoat]

So, normally countries colonize other countries to exploit their labor and natural resources.  But you’ve suggested you don’t want to do that (neither would I).  But if you don’t do that, wouldn’t this be an extraordinarily expensive undertaking for the U.S. without much benefit?  Seems like there are a lot better uses for our money than trying something like this.

 

[rockaction]

It's hard to argue we value humanity after we vaporize a whole swath of people checkered with the ignorant innocent that we bequeath human agency with basic dignities which we redeem by repealing their right to life itself. And to those left wandering after the destruction of home and society we offer compelled deference at the foot of our boot. That way certainly allows us the moral high ground over the encroaching Red Horde. 

Don't see anyway that wouldn't work out in our favor.

This is the ideology I spoke of in the OP that prevented Afghanistan from moving from the Dark Ages to a viable, modern state. You are one of the ones that would have doubted the mission, doubted the show of righteous force after being attacked by those very people on our own soil. The populace was complicit in that attack, and we have always held the populace accountable up until the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is fine, and probably a step forward in the fight for the human rights of all.

But keep in mind that your ideology is why we didn't do exactly what I said and why Afghanistan falls into disrepair, its women raped, its children killed, its populace subject to the Islamist whim, a whim whose barbarism predates a half millenium of its own enlightenment. Your doubt in our world mission permeates everything and is why republics wind up unsure of themselves, in gradual and inevitable decline, unable to defend the goals of its existence -- human rights under its auspices.

 

[Manster]

well I think yeah, when you go to another country with military power, you conquer it and make it yours or you stay out or at the very least destroy the evil you went there to destroy

The problem is there are other bad people waiting to swoop in.

 

[rockaction]

I had the same thought. But it seems like the execution would have been difficult and may have also ended in disaster.

At the time, treating them like 1946 Japan (after reducing them to 1945 Japan) might have made more sense than treating them like the 1898 Philippines -- or maybe vice versa, it's hard to say.

Neither strategy was going to work out great, I suspect.

So, normally countries colonize other countries to exploit their labor and natural resources.  But you’ve suggested you don’t want to do that (neither would I).  But if you don’t do that, wouldn’t this be an extraordinarily expensive undertaking for the U.S. without much benefit?  Seems like there are a lot better uses for our money than trying something like this.

What I suggest might have been harder than what we did. I fully understand that. But it would have not cost nearly the lives of our own soldiers nor would we have suffered the diplomatic and political defeat that we have just suffered at the hands of the Taliban.

The Middle East, as Bernard Lewis used to note from his position as de facto academic advisor about Islam to the West, does not forget the long view of war. Every failed war is celebrated by them. Our refusal to remove Sadaam after the first Iraq war (How absurd to a Middle East cleric and academic! You needed two times?) was viewed as a failure, as weakness. Our refusal for the longest time to fight a ground war over there and occupy states was viewed as weakness, as the gallant fighters of Islam and Jihad gain footholds over people, over land, expanding across Asia and Africa. Ours is but a fleeting moment in the world, they think. Liberal democracy will undermine itself. Islam will be king. Lewis emphasized that any action undertaken must be taken with sixty to seventy years in sight, recognizing that once involved, the only thing that the radical Islamists and Middle East Ba'athists or fascists respected was total victory.

Today, to them, we have turned tail and fled. Weeks after we leaveAfghanistan, the Taliban resurfaces, looking to overtake the people there. They will succeed. We will have failed, and their history -- the only history important to them -- will declare them winners over the forces of the would-be imperialists. If they look at us as imperialists, we should have made the most of it.

I remember a man on the street, a Moroccan selling pizza, who had the unusual forthrightness to ask me why all the anti-Muslim talk in America. The anti-mosque talk, etc. I responded that I didn't know, really. He asked, "Do you not know that we were the first to recognize your independence? Us Moroccans?" It was a fact I did not know. If a man selling pizza on the street remembers our history so well, what of their academics, their clerics with nothing else to do but remember our intertwined history? Do they not remember and instruct their citizenry?

I say they do. I say we should have given them something to instruct about.

 

[Joe Schmo]

Creating a sea of glass to use as the foundation of our ideal of human rights is beset with cracks from the beginning as it offers the world a glimpse into our true intent, conquest. Covering it in unabashed vengeance against an ununited tribal population encased within a geographic prison shows an immature understanding of history. The farther the reach of empire and the more militarized the control the more unsustainable it becomes and eventually our way dies. Whether a decade or a century we lose. Forcing our way onto a population that is determined to be closed to change only offers us the chance to become an enemy of the globe. China can pick up the allied slack that we leave behind if we embark on your mission.

 

[wikkidpissah]

for all my fears of cost & consequence, it might do the world some good for a major democracy to "take" a country

 

[Navin Johnson]

This is the ideology I spoke of in the OP that prevented Afghanistan from moving from the Dark Ages to a viable, modern state. You are one of the ones that would have doubted the mission, doubted the show of righteous force after being attacked by those very people on our own soil. The populace was complicit in that attack, and we have always held the populace accountable up until the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is fine, and probably a step forward in the fight for the human rights of all.

But keep in mind that your ideology is why we didn't do exactly what I said and why Afghanistan falls into disrepair, its women raped, its children killed, its populace subject to the Islamist whim, a whim whose barbarism predates a half millenium of its own enlightenment. Your doubt in our world mission permeates everything and is why republics wind up unsure of themselves, in gradual and inevitable decline, unable to defend the goals of its existence -- human rights under its auspices.

Holding the populace accountable for the atrocities is the government is cool, unless it's Americans taking casualties, right?

 

[rockaction]

Holding the populace accountable for the atrocities is the government is cool, unless it's Americans taking casualties, right?

I never said we should do that. But we should not have been concerned with state sovereignty. Civilian casualties should not be acceptable. 

 

[IvanKaramazov]

The Taliban is basically a death cult.  They're perfectly happy to melt into the background until we leave, at which they start murdering everybody again.  We were never going to be able to wipe that out just by being more ruthless -- the people who murder little girls for going to school are going to win a "who can be more ruthless" contest.

A better approach would have been to go in, bomb the hell out of the Taliban and kill enough of them to facilitate going after UBL, and then just leave.  If the Taliban continue to cause problems, we can always do some targeted strikes without trying to prop up an incompetent government.  (Similar to Iraq).  

 

[tri-man 47]

The Taliban is basically a death cult.  They're perfectly happy to melt into the background until we leave, at which they start murdering everybody again.  We were never going to be able to wipe that out just by being more ruthless -- the people who murder little girls for going to school are going to win a "who can be more ruthless" contest.

A better approach would have been to go in, bomb the hell out of the Taliban and kill enough of them to facilitate going after UBL, and then just leave.  If the Taliban continue to cause problems, we can always do some targeted strikes without trying to prop up an incompetent government.  (Similar to Iraq).  

We actually were effective in suppressing the Taliban after 9/11, right?  What's sad to me is that, 20 years later, the country was not able to position itself (economically and militarily) to stand on its own.  This quick collapse is rather shocking to me.   

 

[IvanKaramazov]

We actually were effective in suppressing the Taliban after 9/11, right?  

Yep.  Just like we had no problem displacing the Ba'ath government in Iraq.  The military conflicts themselves were pretty straightforward -- we just overestimate our ability to engage in nation building.  Neither of these countries were like a defeated Germany or defeated Japan.

 

[Shula-holic]

Yep.  Just like we had no problem displacing the Ba'ath government in Iraq.  The military conflicts themselves were pretty straightforward -- we just overestimate our ability to engage in nation building.  Neither of these countries were like a defeated Germany or defeated Japan.

We cannot make the general population live in a society that we deem proper.  It's obvious with the speed of advancement that either the Taliban owns the hearts and minds of the majority of the population, or that the population is indifferent to living under Taliban rule making the Taliban the only motivated force.  We were right to flush out bin Laden, I think our plan there should be critiqued.  But this place was broken before we got there, we had no obligation to stay and never should have.  This end was inevitable 20 years ago, all we are doing is deciding the timing.

 

[tri-man 47]

We cannot make the general population live in a society that we deem proper.  It's obvious with the speed of advancement that either the Taliban owns the hearts and minds of the majority of the population, or that the population is indifferent to living under Taliban rule making the Taliban the only motivated force.  We were right to flush out bin Laden, I think our plan there should be critiqued.  But this place was broken before we got there, we had no obligation to stay and never should have.  This end was inevitable 20 years ago, all we are doing is deciding the timing.

But...then we end up with a vacuum, as in Iraq and Libya.  

 

[Shula-holic]

But...then we end up with a vacuum, as in Iraq and Libya.  

We can't choose leaders for other countries.  Iraq and Libya had leaders, we foolishly created the vacuum.  Sometimes rough neighborhoods are going to be ran by rough customers.  We can't fix it, we can only waste our money and lives.  Keep in mind what Afghanistan was when we got there.  The Taliban had control of a large portion, but warlords held pockets too.  We likely are headed back to those days and us with some kind of tacit alliance with warlords who made up the old Northern Alliance.  That's really what we are left with.

 

[rockaction]

The vacuum and strongmen is exactly what colonization and subjugation avoids. 

 

[Terminalxylem]

So what do we envision for the Afghan colony? Dirt poor, terrible infrastructure and a buncha mountains, with opium as its principal export. Maybe call it Middle East Virginia? Terro(r)lina?

 

[Joe Schmo]

So what do we envision for the Afghan colony? Dirt poor, terrible infrastructure and a buncha mountains, with opium as its principal export. Maybe call it Middle East Virginia? 

We call it what it is...Rock Nation.

 

[parasaurolophus]

So, normally countries colonize other countries to exploit their labor and natural resources.  But you’ve suggested you don’t want to do that (neither would I).  But if you don’t do that, wouldn’t this be an extraordinarily expensive undertaking for the U.S. without much benefit?  Seems like there are a lot better uses for our money than trying something like this.

Do they even have natural resources? 

 

[Ilov80s]

I don't think colonization works because nobody from America wanted to be there. Once the Taliban was defeated, nobody wanted the US military to stay there in the numbers needed to control the country forever. There weren't Americans lining up to move to Afghanistan to live and conduct business there. We wanted revenge but we didn't ever really want to own it. Once we took over, we were immediately trying to figure out how to get out.