[AKN #55] Ok fine, I will talk about Afghanistan
also jobs we were bad at and a 30 second optical illusion
Sup homies?
Crazy thing happened.
Three different people THIS WEEKEND reached out thanking me for my advice on writing a wedding toast!
It is clear that people found that article VERY helpful.
So before I get started with this edition, I would like to resurface that article for anyone who is giving a toast soon.
If you are giving a wedding toast soon, feel free to reach out.
I enjoy helping people get ready for these toasts and I am using the learnings from others to make future wedding toast advice stronger.
I might even offer this type of thing as a service in the future!
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Ok fine, I will talk about Afghanistan
On September 11, 2001, I was 11 years old and living in New York.
I remember sitting in my band class when we heard the news.
“A plane hit the Twin Towers.”
My 11 year old naïveté showed through: “I didn’t think they flew planes that low!”
We were told to sit there in silence with the lights off.
I believe the lights were off because it was a hot day and it was silent because the adults had enough situational awareness to realize today might not be the best day for a 6th grade band to badly play 1812 overture.
Soon the second plane hit.
Again my innocence bled through: “what are the odds!”
At 11, I lived a sheltered existence.
I was accustomed to the fake cartoon “villains” which thwarted my best intentions by deploying banana peels on the ground.
I did not know real world evil even existed. But I was introduced to it that day.
Visually, it is cemented in my brain from the dark clouds forming to the West over New York City.
Emotionally, it is cemented in my brain as one-by-one the kids with family who worked in World Trade Center were called to the principal’s office.
This event wholly colors my opinion when I hear someone say “Afghanistan.”
However, I don’t really “know” much about Afghanistan.
Sure, I feel like I know. I mean, 9/11 was my “coming online” moment in terms of paying attention to politics.
Surely if I paid attention to something for 20 years, I would know SOMETHING about it, right?
But in actuality, I knew nothing about the country as an 11 year old and I have not made much progress in furthering that understanding in the last 20 years.
Ask me what I thought about US involvement in Afghanistan four months ago, I would have said something like “we invaded because of 9/11 and we have been 6 months away from withdrawing troops for the last 15 years.”
It is squarely outside of my circle of competence.
But of course, when big events happen, we feel compelled to comment on them regardless of our expertise.
But Bo Burnham makes a very compelling point on this matter:
He is right.
I am going to lead by example.
So rather than give you my half-baked, non-nuanced, potentially biased opinion, I am going to choose to shut the fuck up and stay in the fact finding stage.
Instead, I will highlight sources of information which have helped me better understand this conflict.
Disclaimer: I do not agree with everything said in every thread/article. I just think they are interesting data points which highlight different ways of thinking about the problem.
How did this happen so quickly?
Key quotes that stuck with me:
the decision to invade Iraq shortly after invading Afghanistan drew away vital resources (attention, military resources, and aid) during the critical early years of the occupation.
Essentially, any chance at creating a stable country not controlled by the Taliban was lost (let's say squandered) in the first few years following the invasion. This report even refers to a "Golden Hour" for nation building success.
Why did the army fall so quickly, I thought they had 300,000 troops?
Glenn Greenwald’s article below covers how a lot of this “surprise” comes from the propaganda we were being fed about how well it was going in Afghanistan.
Ends up, it was never going that well at all.
And of course, sometimes there are really simple explanations for things too.
Thoughts from someone who toured Afghanistan:
In light of the idea that we were never being told the full story of how things were going in the country, I found it useful to hear from someone who did a couple tours in Afghanistan.
Quotes that stuck with me:
Heads I win, Tails you lose
I remember how every year the US would have to decide how to deal with the opium fields
You could let them alone, and then the Taliban would shake the farmers down and use the money to buy weapons
Or you could carpet bomb the fields and then the farmers would join the Taliban
There are only two teams
It's Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever, there is no third team
Opinion that appears to most align with where my head is at
Quotes that stuck with me:
Could they have better used those few months? Maybe. But the problem runs deep, it's the US system, which has screwed this up forever, not with the Biden Administration. The Afghan papers cover the Bush and Obama years, read them and say they would've done better
It's also important to realize how complaining about conditions for withdrawal is a way for the pro-war crowd to stay forever.
We cannot do anything well in Afghanistan. Obama surged, violence got worse. Trump increased the bombing campaign and casualties, the Taliban kept gaining. But then instead of massive incompetence being a reason to leave, it's an excuse to stay. "Give us a few months."
Conclusion
This subject doesn’t squarely fit into our demand for simplistic narratives.
We want this is a good decision and that is a bad decision.
Instead we get a series of tradeoffs that lead to suboptimal decisions in every direction.
Overall, I recommend reading more about it and at the end, you don’t even need to let people know what you think.
Normalize keeping your opinions to yourself…says the guy with the eponymous newsletter where he talks about literally every major event.
LAUGH: Jobs I tried that didn’t work out
I laughed out loud at the following series of photos.
But I thought twice about posting it right after the section on Afghanistan.
I thought “maybe you should have more tact in this situation?”
But then I thought about it again and I considered how humor’s force for good is in its ability to help people rise above the gravity of situations.
Or to quote Viktor Frankl from Man’s Search for Meaning:
It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
So I choose to respect and honor this man’s ability to rise above his situation.
LOVE: Optical Illusion Trick
Sort of a heavy edition this week, huh!
Well. Here is a fun one to end on.
It is a super trippy optical illusion that is a good use of 30 seconds of your time.
Closing time
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?