- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
The global War on Terror was based on a mistake.
Quintupling down are we? Never change, The Atlantic.
ETA: Not sure if there’s a paywall, so just in case: https://archive.ph/68sf0
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Haven’t we already known this for, you know, 23 years?
People who actually paid attention have known; people who read The Atlantic not so much.
yeah. I even heard the bin laden guy was a saudi /s
I don’t understand how sarcasm applies. Not only was he a Saudi of enormous wealth and close ties to the royal family, he was a CIA asset for years.
6 December 1993: Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace
these taliban guys are going to the top I say. Thanks Bin Laden for being a western ally against those horrible communists.
You know, communism/socialism is a failed model that has never succeeded.
Laissez-faire is the only economic model that has been 100% successful every time. Capitalism is the only way to stop the RED MENACE. /s
Now please lemmy/mbin. Commence your “tankie/russian bot” comments.
If man was meant to fly, it would have been given wings!
Not even the great genius Leonardo da Vinci managed to build a flying machine!
The sarcasm is that anyone who was paying attention knew all this 20 years ago.
Everyone was too busy pushing the war on Iraq and buying American flag stickers for 30 bucks a pop to notice, however.
To be fair afghanistan was where bin laden was holed up.
On May 2,[a] 2011, Osama bin Laden, the founder and first leader of the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda, was shot and killed at his compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad by United States Navy SEALs of SEAL Team Six (also known as DEVGRU).[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Osama_bin_Laden#:~:text=On May 2%2C 2011%2C Osama,(also known as DEVGRU)
Maybe he was in Afghanistan during some of that time period, but he was pretty comfortable in Pakistan.
He was in Afghanistan until the assault to capture him on Tora Bora, when he escaped to <fuck all knows where> because the US was distracted trying to invade Iraq. Because Bush made shit up.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CPRT-111SPRT53709/html/CPRT-111SPRT53709.htm
But the Al Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies, and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan. The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines. Instead, the U.S. command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack bin Laden and on Pakistan’s loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal his escape routes. On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today. The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, the architects of the unconventional Afghan battle plan known as Operation Enduring Freedom. Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency. Reversing the recent American military orthodoxy known as the Powell doctrine, the Afghan model emphasized minimizing the U.S. presence by relying on small, highly mobile teams of special operations troops and CIA paramilitary operatives working with the Afghan opposition. Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, Franks refused to deviate from the plan. There were enough U.S. troops in or near Afghanistan to execute the classic sweep-and-block maneuver required to attack bin Laden and try to prevent his escape. It would have been a dangerous fight across treacherous terrain, and the injection of more U.S. troops and the resulting casualties would have contradicted the risk-averse, ``light footprint’’ model formulated by Rumsfeld and Franks. But commanders on the scene and elsewhere in Afghanistan argued that the risks were worth the reward. After bin Laden’s escape, some military and intelligence analysts and the press criticized the Pentagon’s failure to mount a full-scale attack despite the tough rhetoric by President Bush. Franks, Vice President Dick Cheney and others defended the decision, arguing that the intelligence was inconclusive about the Al Qaeda leader’s location. But the review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants underlying this report removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora. For example, the CIA and Delta Force commanders who spent three weeks at Tora Bora as well as other intelligence and military sources are certain he was there.
Talib government at the time asked US for evidence of Osama involvement, they would consider extradition. They didn’t get any. Thinking about it, neither did we.
Even if the US had 2024 intelligence at the time they would have still went after the rest of al kaida, in particular the rest of the leadership. It is sorta funny because I think they did buy into bin ladens press who ended up being just like trump or others. rich guy not going to be living in a cave and surprise surprise actually lives in luxury while pretending to be this cave dwelling freedom fighter man of the people.
Except he was found in Pakistan, yes?
yes, although even if the US had 2024 intelligence at the time they would have still went after the rest of al kaida, in particular the rest of the leadership. It is sorta funny because I think they did buy into bin ladens press who ended up being just like trump or others. rich guy not going to be living in a cave and surprise surprise actually lives in luxury while pretending to be this cave dwelling freedom fighter man of the people.
If you read the full article, it seems as if the Saudi religious establishment was infiltrated by Egyptian extremists fleeing a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood following the assassination of Sadat. Their ideology meshed with Wahhabism and Bin Laden’s religious vendetta against the United States. The Saudi state apparatus did not have effective oversight over the religious establishment and so this all happened under the House of Saud’s nose. The countries in red are (at the time) places with either US puppet regimes or some form of Arab Revolt descended, nominally secular/socialist regimes. The religious extremists pushing Islamic rule operated in these countries under various militias and terrorist groups, notably Al Qaeda, backed by the newly radicalized Saudi Wahhabi establishment, and of course, Iran.
From that perspective, the US was waging war against militias and terrorist groups with roots and support in Saudi Arabia, but the House of Saud was not considered to be complicit. The article goes on to say…
Astonishingly, the attacks of 9/11 had little effect on the Saudi approach to religious extremism, as diplomats and intelligence officials have attested. What finally changed royal minds was the experience of suffering an attack on Saudi soil. In May 2003, gunmen and suicide bombers struck three residential compounds in Riyadh, killing 39 people. The authorities attributed the attacks to al-Qaeda, and cooperation with the U.S. improved quickly and dramatically.
Interesting stuff, to be sure.
Bin Laden was “from” within the borders of the Saudi Arabian (Sunni) state but he was a Shiite pan-islamist and a lot of Al Quaeda’s support came from Iran, a major enemy of Saudi Arabia.
This is just to say it’s much more complicated than “Saudis did 9/11”, and maps like this grossly oversimplify things when they put Arab peoples into the types of cultural boxes westerners are used to seeing. It doesn’t apply here.
