International Interventions and their comparability

Mistakes generally tend to stick out in people's minds more.

Kinda tangential to the subject, but I'm kind of sick of everything that's going wrong in Afghanistan being attributed to "Graveyard of Empires, duh". It's a tired Orientalist meme that pundits use as a crutch to avoid addressing the specific failings of the current intervention at the expense of all the historical nation-sates that managed to keep the country stable for centuries at a time - not to mention the Mohammed Daoud Khan government, which came close to a true democratic reform before the Saur Revolution happened.

The failures stick out like a sour thump against their successes,that's the problem.And even the success stories like Koria had criticism for intervening

There's also all the less interventionist, more outright subversive stuff we get into. Think Haiti, as late as 2004. And sometimes our presence doesn't help anything, like our drone strikes over Yemen just generally making the situation there more miserable for little visible benefit.

Edited by AzurePaladin on Jan 29th 2019 at 5:58:57 AM

I’ve always felt there was a little bit of a racist element to that mythos, as it always seems to come off as “wow look how crazy violent these hill people are” more than anything else.

I mean, flip side of that there are the dozens of highly successful humanitarian campaigns across Africa and the arguable success of air war over Iraq and Syria. People always forget that the US leads the world in humanitarian spending, as well puts the most money towards UN refugee relief programs and the like.

There’s a strong case for interventionism, it just has to be done correctly. It doesn’t help that the left sort of all but poisoned the well on the subject either.

Relief programs aren't what anyone means by Interventionism though.

The Left 'poisoned the well' on the topic because when we mean intervention, we mean dropping bombs or sending troops. You can argue the merits of those, but please don't strawman people against more interventions by claiming they also mean foreign aid.

Edited by AzurePaladin on Jan 29th 2019 at 6:08:02 AM

Yeah, we're discussing here the merits of direct military intervention.

I don't think anyone would complain about relief efforts.

There are a lot of factors that seem to have an impact on the result of an intervention:

Legitimacy: Is the intervention justified by international standards (e.g. has the Security Council approved it). This might not be crucial at first, but a perceived lack of legitimacy will be very damaging to public support during a prolonged engagement. Those interventions who were largely succesful had this legitimacy ((Korea, Kuwait, Kosovo).

Goal: Is it a defensive or agressive intervention. Is the aim to defend a group/nation against an attack, or to force a regime change. It might be a combination of both, but most of the really succesful interventions (Korea, Kuwait, Kosovo) were mostly aimed at defending.

Support of the local population: Again in the interventions that were succesful, there was usually a strong local support for the intervention (though it arguably not much of a factor in Kuwait).

The Enemy: Is the enemy a political entity that can be negotiated with? In short, is there someone with the authority and rationality who can be brought to heel? Again with the succesful interventions, it was usually against an enemy that had the authority to issue a ceasefire and end hostilities. Religious extremists are arguably the worst kind of enemies you can face, because they are the least likely to compromise.

The Ally: Is there an local ally with authority who can support the intervention?

Available ressources: How much are the intervening parties willing to invest and how much patience can they afford? Perhaps an obvious factor, but something every decision-maker should consider, especially after the Libya-disaster.

No doubt there are more, but I think those can be used to predict whether or not an intervention can yield long-term success.

For example, an intervention that has no legal justification, aims to remove a regime and can not count on local allies and a lack of long-term commitment should never be undertaken.

> I don't think anyone would complain about relief efforts.

Aside from particularly stupid people who believe their country shouldn't aid others because they believe their taxes are being wasted on a foreign country they've never heard of and won't see benefits of,selfishness knows no bounds

The two are never truly separate, though. You can't exactly start sending food and medical staff to North Korean villages without going into how that would affect the legitimacy and military posture of the Kim regime, for instance. That's also why cases like Afghanistan get so damn messy - you can try to measure its success in schools built and women in the workforce, but to achieve the preconditions for those metrics you have to hold up security by military action, which itself runs the risk of causing more deaths, displacement and overall destabilisation.

On the current Venezuela crisis, I think that both wings of the US government should shut up for a moment and let people from the country do the talking. When politicians from the world's most powerful country publicly float the idea of invasion or side with the Maduro government however marginally, it risks discrediting the opposition and setting it up to fail.

Hati was bought up as an example of things done wrong so I’m not sure what’s with the idea that the pro-intervention people are the ones bringing aid situations into this.

Keep in mind that more interventions happen then the big ticket ones, there was a U.N. Force in Croatia, the African Union is running a successful (but very long term) intervention and state building project in Somalia.

Shit there’s an argument for Afganistan and Iraq not being interventions, Afganistan wasn’t about stopping an internal crisis, it was about responding to an act of war (which makes it more akin to WW 2 and Germany than say Bosnia) and Iraq was about starting a war for strategic, economic and political reasons (Saddam’s treatment of internal groups wasn’t at its worst and there was no internal rebellion attempt ongoing at the time).

Another thing worth remembering, is that America’s actions do not exist in a vaccuum.

As I said on the US Politics thread, if America embraces noninterventionism and isolationism, it doesn’t mean the rest of the world will. Withdrawal means that other nations with imperialist ambitions, such as Russia, will just take our place.

Edited by megaeliz on Jan 29th 2019 at 6:29:42 AM

Or China,have you seen what they've been doing in Africa?

By Haiti I was referring to the 2004 coup, not the aid the US sent.

Edited by AzurePaladin on Jan 29th 2019 at 6:27:36 AM

Relief efforts move hand in hand with interventionism. Arguably they are a form of interventionism, and it’s worth bringing them up if only to note that the US isn’t purely acting in bad faith in these regions. And I’ll point out that the same criticism of military interventionism (let other countries handle their business) is often applied to aid efforts in the next breath.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 29th 2019 at 3:30:45 AM

@Silas, page 6: I was only offering an example. For comparison purposes, here is a list of current UN peacekeeping operations around the world. In most cases, the purpose of the intervention is to protect a vulnerable population or community (most usually a minority, but not always) from violent assault and oppression from another community. Generally speaking, they do not and are not intended to "solve" the problem by themselves. Peacekeeping operations keep the peace, giving time for diplomatic or other types of interventions to work.

The US, for better or for worse, generally does not see itself that way. The American public wants to refight WWII, and relive the glories of the "Best Generation." This has both good and bad aspects to it. Due to the highly moralistic aspect of American public, we often will tolerate high casualties (this despite popular opinion, even within the US) if the cause is widely seen as a "good" one. Thus, in situations where other nations are hesitant to take risks with their military personnel (ie, invading a distant landlocked country like Afghanistan) the American public will sometimes support such a thing with enthusiasm.

On the other hand, the American public is susceptible to certain types of persuasion tactics, since the decision to support an intervention is based more on emotional impulse than strategic considerations. Thus, they may sometimes support an intervention when the reasons are shallow or even deceptive (ie, Iraq).

Now, in my own humble opinion, I think Afghanistan was a justifiable intervention. Had we not also invaded Iraq at almost the same time, we would have had more than twice the resources and manpower to concentrate on Afghanistan alone, and that might have made a great difference to the outcome. Also, it wasnt a "war". We went in because terrorist groups had started using the territory as a base of operations, including 9/11. We went in and remained in order to deny terrorists the use of a base of operations, a mission that really has no end date on it. If we want to leave, it behooves us to rebuild that country so that rule of law prevails and no future insurgency can gain more than a toehold. On the other hand, I never saw the necessity of leaving. Staying there and providing backup to the Afghan gov't isnt that expensive, and I believe public opinion in Afghan itself supports our staying. So I would be comfortable with an explicit indefinate presence, not unlike our troops in Germany or South Korea. Compared to those places, our operations in Afghan are cheaper and arguably benefit us more directly.

Edited by DeMarquis on Jan 29th 2019 at 6:32:36 AM

Well, I haven't checked in a long time, but I'm assuming they're basically making a sequel to Tibet?

Edited by HailMuffins on Jan 29th 2019 at 8:36:29 AM

Afghanistan and Syria are very justifiable I think.

There’s really no good option in Syria, but staying seems like the least worst, as leaving just leaves it at the mercy of Assad and Russia, which I consider unacceptable.

Edited by megaeliz on Jan 29th 2019 at 6:42:31 AM

> but I'm assuming they're basically making a sequel to Tibet?

Not exactly,but they're very interested in developing Africa

this Forbes article goes into more detail

I'd argue that biggest problem with Afghanistan is the lack of a strong local ally and a cohesive society. The Northern Alliance was good enough at first, but the Taliban insidiously murdered the man who could have acted as the symbol for a new Afghanistan, and no one else was capable for the job. There are some very decent politicians in Afghanistan who want to reform the country, but unfortunately the ones in charge of politics and military are largely corrupt and incompetent. I remember reading articles stating that the training of young Afghan recruits by Western soldiers has produced some fine officers, but they are too far down the chain of command to make a difference. It would take another decade or two for them to reach the necessary ranks, and we do not know if they have the time.

x6 My criticism is less that, though sometimes that can certainly apply in select cases, and more that we tend to end up breaking things when we do show up. Hence my emphasis on soft power and diplomacy to unwind as many crisis as possible.

Seriously, there's a difference in intervening with words and money and intervening with guns and bombs. I'm making that distinction, insisting that I'm not or there can't be seems rather silly.

Edited by AzurePaladin on Jan 29th 2019 at 6:48:40 AM

X6 The Taliban directly provided aid to the people behind 9/11, that’s a pretty solid argument for saying that the Taliban government of Afganistan declared war on the United States.

The big problem with Afganistan is that it needs a lot of state building, but to do state building one needs to first bring about a level of peace, that’s never been managed in Afganistan, in large part I suspect because it’s a sizeable country and thus needs a lot of troops to bring about stability.

That’s before you get into the political mistakes of the Bush post-invasion team, jsut like with Iraq they thought they could throw some democracy at the wall and be out in a year. That’s not how it works, not in Germany, not in Bosnia, not in Japan, not in Kosovo, not anywhere. What Afganistan needed was real oversight on the government that got established, specifically to prevent it becoming another managed semi-democracy full of corruption just like many post-colonial governments, but that didn’t happen.

As long as the Afgan government is so deeply corrupt and unable to provide basic security the Taliban will have a recruiting ground, but we’re stuck, because we’re far enough in that we can’t jsut scrap the Afgan government and put a U.N. oversight group in to remove any corrupt politicians that do get elected.

X4 I’m partial to arming the Kurds to the point where they don’t need Assad’s help and can maybe even move against him if they so chose (or break away if that’s their choice).

Or go full grand bargain and have a serious talk with Putin about partitioning Syria.

Edited by Silasw on Jan 29th 2019 at 11:53:51 AM

Be glad the United States never thought about action against Pakistan due to the fact that he was discovered there in a compound there,under a non Obama Government they could have

No they couldn’t have, Pakistan has nuclear weapons, not even Bush was stupid enough to attack someone with actual WM Ds (insert Saddam joke here).

That’s why it was only Afganistan invaded in the first place, Pakistan on some level would have made a more logical target (what with the Pakistani government being the ones repsonsible for the Taliban in the first place and playing a big role in spreading AQ propaganda).

Edited by Silasw on Jan 29th 2019 at 12:00:21 PM

Wouldn't the use of WM Ds just make every country in the world go medieval on your ass?