The FOBs in Afghanistan felt like America to me. All the best years of my life were spent there. What I came back to was often unrecognizable. This feels a bit personal.
Little anecdote: Bagram is quite large, and sometimes I used to run late at night into the places where nobody goes. Well, 'nobody' is a legend of some old contractors from back before the centralized personnel tracking systems, who had set up a shantytown in the junkyard in between contracts, and eventually just 'went native' and made it their home. I can't be sure, but there seemed to be signs of life in strange places. I would have bought property and settled in myself if I could. There were a lot of men I worked with who had been completely replaced by their families, stopped taking leave, and didn't want to go back, ever. I can relate. My fiancee died during my first tour, and out there I could be fully in love with a ghost; it was like a superpower. I think I needed a few more years of that.
This is fucking tragic. I'm sorry man. It reminded me of growing up in Vegas, finding the lost places in the desert or the deserted places behind the casinos. I get that. And losing the person I loved. And seeing her when I was tripping. I get that too. But doing that in the middle of a fucking foreign war at the end of the earth, and trying to feel normal about it, that's ...that just seems like it would take an inhuman level of self control.
It was sublime. I felt no pain. I ran until she appeared. I ran harder until I felt my soul rise out of my body to be with her, legs still pumping, rocket attack buzzing overhead. Rapture.
This reads like an episode from a Shawshank Redemption TV series.
I can get how a place can become home when you feel like your links to other places fade, but a hint that it might be more healthy to move around is that you you're sticking to the "recognizable." It seems like you would always be living in some place from the past (which is an illusion because it never really was what you believed it was and it was always changing) which you feel nostalgic for. At the same time, you're building a new place at your other home. Once the romance with the first place becomes destroyed, then the back-up comes forward. I would bet the back-up could have an even greater hold over you if it's a highly controlled (slower changing) environment such as a military base or a prison.
Life in the FOBs in Afghanistan was a time capsule of red-blooded ‘Merica, like hanging out between scenes of a 90s action movie. The gym was 24 hours, everybody was huge, and the music was hardcore 80/90s. Sort of like my high school football team. There were guns in every social situation, which was shocking at first until you realized that it meant that this was the first place on earth where you had nothing to fear from strangers. Everybody knew everything about the people around them. If you had something you were insecure about, you’d get tortured about it until you weren’t. I never fit in, but these people were willing to die for me, and I found ways to earn respect. It was basically the neighborhood I grew up in, or maybe a sports team, or maybe a prison. It didn’t really matter. Food was simple, served every 6 hours on a tray line, and you got everything you needed without thinking about it. On the bigger FOBs, the jet engines ran constantly in idle, and the fighter pilots pretty much did WTF they wanted. There were no cell phones nor internet in most places, which was tremendously liberating. I made the most of every moment there. There was always something important to do, and not much in the way. Most of the time I didn’t worry about my job. We worked 12 hour days, 7 days a week, everybody together in one place. You’re never alone on a deliverable; it’s everybody’s responsibility, everybody’s credit, and everybody’s lives on the line.
It felt like focus. I came back to chaos. Jobs where you have no idea what to do or why, but huge pressure to make your boss happy, just some random person that you don’t really know anything about, but they have the power to ruin your career, and you’re all on your own. Shopping. Cooking. Cleaning. Family. Facebook. Cell phones. Internet dating. Interviews. Leases. License. Registration. Insurance. Doctors. Lawyers. Bills. Taxes. Spam. Scams. Outrage politics. These things are not optional. It’s your entire life consumed by other people’s rackets. It all existed before, but every year away, it seems like it’s been put on overdrive when I get back. People have a tendency to infantilize vets by claiming we’re the victims of PTSD or something, but no, seriously, there are some things that really are getting worse in normal American life, and especially politics of the homefront military. Maybe it’s to be expected; a lot of us went forward to get away from that.
The "everything is organised for you and we're all a team" aspect of the military is something that a lot of people say. It seems to work well for them.
But. And I'm not directing this at you, but it jumped out at me ..
> On the bigger FOBs, the jet engines ran constantly in idle
.. using a considerable quantity of fuel, every drop of which had be trucked from Karachi through unfriendly territory. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11463490 Of course it was comfortable, the kind of comfort only the incredible profligacy of the war machine can offer.
Peak troop numbers: ~100k. So at least $400,000 per troop per year.
No wonder it was so great, I'd be disappointed if you didn't enjoy it if it cost that much. It's all the Americans grinding away in the home system that made it possible for you. $120/year/American.
Did anyone ever say "we can't do that, we don't have the budget"?
In particular, the Pakistan routes were not used at all for many months after the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_NATO_attack_in_Pakistan and "by February 2012 85% of coalition fuel supplies were being shipped through the northern routes".
>>It’s your entire life consumed by other people’s rackets
I lived overseas for 10 years and can verify that things got a lot shittier around here while I was gone. And the people as a whole got a lot dumber and more gullible. Cell phones. Social media. The 24/7 gossip news cycle. Your experience of a more meaningful, directly engaged, lower-bullshit life is actually the way things are, or were until recently, in a lot of countries. America's a runaway train.
Well... the bureaucratic hassles, taxes, car payments, etc. exist everywhere I've been, since I haven't lived in a sealed work/life environment like you did. I don't think I could personally handle that kind of discipline or regimentation. But I've noticed a pattern in the places where I've found the most happiness. A few things:
(1) People value going out and having conversations over other forms of entertainment like games, television, social media, etc. Discussions in these conditions tend to be more honest and more nuanced. Wit is admired. I believe America has a pattern of politely lying and then back-stabbing, rather than openly disagreeing - and the UK does even more so - and this enters a vicious cycle on social media that doesn't exist when everyone's around a table.
(2) Tradition is valued over technology. This means more care and quality goes into the real world around you - everything from food preparation to the craftsmanship of an ordinary chair can be treated as a work of art and brings aesthetic beauty and pleasure. Pre-prepared things and plastic crap tend to be shunned. Old things are revered, reused and restored. Wealth is therefore not so much the accumulation of things as it is of the stories that go with them. This creates more depth and gives the world a human scale. America is pretty much the opposite; it worships the new, the fast, the convenient, the disposable, the gigantic. Everywhere looks the same because getting from A to B efficiently on the interstate has hollowed out a local or regional sense of place.
(3) Individuality is set within a larger social fabric. It's unacceptable to be alone on a holiday - even if you want to be. Someone will always come find you and bring you into the fold. Family and friends are sacrosanct - nothing you want to do personally comes before them. This can be heavy sometimes, and hard for an American. But if you let yourself be pulled into it, you get a sense of community that doesn't exist in the US. Maybe it used to exist in small-town America, but small-town America is also extremely conservative, judgmental, religious, and whacked out on opioids and meth.
So, the places I've lived that best met my qualifications were: Rural France, where you can rent a village house for €500 a month, if you can work remotely, chop your own wood in the winter, get your food from the butcher and baker, and spend every evening with stonemasons and hunters at the village pub, or walk country roads for a few miles to the next village; Buenos Aires, where all of life is a series of coffee dates and dinners with new and old friends that stretch late into the night; and mid-sized towns in Spain, similarly (away from the tourist coasts). I'd also say Prague - outside of the city center; and Vietnam (Saigon). The last one is tricky because of the language and the fact that their government doesn't really want you there, but the people are incredibly open, sincere and welcoming. My ex and I hit the road when we were 24, with a couple remote jobs lined up, and lived well for 10 years, mostly on under $2k/mo, by finding out of the way places. Paid no federal income tax because we stayed out. Saved enough to buy a house in the States, and now I'm sitting on my porch going - what am I doing here worrying about maintenance and bills, hardly seeing friends who are all too busy with kids and work? I should be back out there. Anyway, that's my story.
also - been thinking about this. The shit you said about this country was so incisive. I would really be happy to hook you up with some good places to go. And people who would have your back there.
For better or worse, your first paragraph is never what America was. The second is closer. The privilege of purpose, handed down from on high and wrapped in an American flag, is the socialism-flavored tradeoff for all the horrible things servicemen have to contend with.
I do think it's dangerous to romanticize what the military does for soldiers without recognizing what it does to our enemies and the innocents caught in the crossfire; especially when we, as a country, cannot fathom "service" (and all the things that flow from that structure, which we can agree can be edifying for one's soul) being anything but that which involves airstrikes and ammunition. As for how to cure the nation of its woes, I feel that a huge part of it is competition run amok. Things are difficult because it's an advantageous condition for those who are able to navigate the rough waters when their neighbors can't.
Perhaps we go the two-birds-one-stone route. I hear that there are some bridges and buildings and roads that may need repair.
I have similar opinions on these topics as many that were out there, which is to say, not at all what others may assume or want us to think, nor what may be in our best interest to share.
That may be for the best; I assume they are controversial. If they are rational, that controversy would frustrate; if they're unfounded, their exposure to credible pushback would perhaps leave you with an identity crisis. That said, keeping them bottled up may be similarly undesirable; when driven by principles not subject to community scrutiny, an individual is likelier to act in socially (even morally) unacceptable ways, perhaps in a moment of opportunity or crisis.
Bagram valley especially, is shockingly beautiful when it snows in the Hindu Kush. In the early spring, you get sunshine and lush greens against snowy peaks. In the south, the mud flooding is so strong in the winter, you can ride it like an amusement park, and it all turns into this deep silt moon dust in the summer. Khandahar had a septic pit that the base ended up expanding all around, and there’s a very slight drift in one direction that goes down one road. In August, you can smell it a little bit everywhere, but if you turn a corner onto that road, it will immediately knock you back. Sorry; unrelated, but funny.
After having traveled to the Middle East and Pakistan, I’d consider living in some of those places. I haven’t made it to Afghanistan yet. The people are super friendly. Pakistan’s hospitality culture is an order of magnitude more than anything I’ve experienced in the USA. I would probably want an air conditioner though!
People rarely like or dislike a place for its nature, buildings, food, etc. That's all BS we tell ourselves. People connect with people. I can see how a military base is conducive to forming the kinds of personal bonds that are so rare in today's developed nations.
There was an instagram post I saw (one of the boys sent it to me, I'm not a social media guy) that showed the Taliban walking through our old FOB in Afghanistan. What was odd to me about seeing that is I really had no emotional response to it. I thought I would, but I just ... didn't care anymore. Over the last few weeks I've also been sent article after article about the withdrawal from other friends (not veterans) who are deep in policy circles, about how this or that thing will mean this or that thing for Afghanistan. Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts? Apparently these people in DC think they do.
My brother today asked me if I had an opinion on the withdrawal from Afghanistan when we did our weekly gaming session (tonight was Hearts Of Iron), and I told him "no, why would I? The war was over years before I even got there".
> Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts?
I don’t think too many people care out of compassion for individual Afghans, but the original reason we “liberated“ them was because the Taliban was providing a safe haven for Al Qaeda to train and launch terrorist attacks. The USA created a democratic government in the hopes that the troops could be withdrawn and the local Afghan government would maintain its own affairs and keep terrorists from operating in its country. There are many Americans that care that after 20 years the Taliban will take over again shortly after the troops are gone. Nothing changed, the next OBL could be operating out of Afghanistan and Americans got nothing for their 20 years of wasted tax money except thousands of casualties and a lot of broken families.
So I don’t know if too many Americans care exactly which government Afghanistan adopts, but I’m pretty sure anyone paying attention is disappointed that they didn’t get literally anything different.
Edit: to be clear, this wasn't me critiquing the plan, saying whether it would or wouldn't work. This was me responding to GP's prompt about whether America cared about what style of government Afghanistan adopted. Yes America cares, not so much about the style of government but about the outcome. They were told that Afghanistan was going to get a new government that wouldn't allow terrorists free reign to operate as they please; as a result America and the world would be safer. They didn't get that. Yes there are other places that terrorists could operate from, but removing Afghanistan from the list would have been nice. Yes, democracy would be nice, but America would have accepted if Afghanistan had adopted a limited monarchy ran by a Grand Poobah. What we're about to end up with is the Taliban running the government again and probably handing a few of the recently vacated facilities to terrorists as new training camps.
> The USA created a democratic government in the hopes that the troops could be withdrawn and the local Afghan government would maintain its own affairs
Democracy in the USA is based upon directly elected local government and a local property tax on landowners. We never tried to establish anything resembling american style democracy in Afghanistan.
Imagine if after each contentious national election the President appointed all of the state governors, all the county and city executives were also appointed by the governors or the President, that there was no direct property tax on corporate and individual land owners, and that the national government levied an internal sales tax.
The USA wouldn't survive more than a few years under Afghanistan style democracy.
>The USA created a democratic government in the hopes that the troops could be withdrawn and the local Afghan government would maintain its own affairs and keep terrorists from operating in its country
Lemme stop you right there. Even the idea of "voting" was foreign to them. You have to understand, we can provide security, but if they think democracy is stupid what do we do? Tell them democracy isn't stupid?
>There are many Americans that care that after 20 years the Taliban will take over again shortly after the troops are gone.
Yeah, No. I mean, psychologically it's weird to see the place we were at for 11 months get overrun by Islamists but at some point we've just realized that Afghanistan is their country. If they want to run it that way, with an Islamist political party running the entire government then that's their right. The US should stay out of it.
OBL was, in the end, operating out of Pakistan, a "democratic" "US ally".
It was impossible to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan because they could retreat to, operate from, and occasionally bomb US fuel supplies in, Pakistan.
The quest for revenge after 9/11 just gave the US two more Vietnams.
True but at least the US doesn't have the draft anymore so American society doesn't care much and life goes on unchanged.
When I read about an aircraft carrier being diverted to cover the withdrawal I couldn't help mutter "Saigon".
> The USA created a democratic government in the hopes...
Saying this is kinda insulting to actually democratic countries. Why would exactly the country with the most broken democracy feel to spread that? Did they ask for that? Did other countries ask the US to break Afghanistan the way they did?
I live far from both, and I do not really care. But bringing democracy simply sounds like a empty blanket statement that from a democratic perspective doesn't make much sense.
Afghanistan borders to many Regional-Super-Power-spheres to be ever left alone. Its between India/Pakistan, Russia/US and Belt & RoadStates/ Traditional Western Cooperate Colonies.
Bin Laden was in Pakistan. The 9/11 attacks were carried out by Saudis, partially trained in the US.
The blatantly false narrative about Al Qaeda should have died years ago.
The US has invaded Iraq and Afghanistan because this was in the interests of Israel (to control the countries bordering Iran), and US foreign affairs are largely influenced, if not straight up controlled, by israelis and/or jews (to the point that US soldiers in Iraq were simply called "the jews" by the population, according to Thomas Friedman).
The idea that Afghanistan was going to adopt democracy and western liberalism is so absurd on its face that I won't even discuss it.
Afghanistan probably had a better shot at a flawed democracy than Iraq. The country is decentralized by the very nature of the geographical obstacles it sports, and the Pashtun culture has a concept of collective decision making. Look up "Jirga", it isn't that different from other ancient decision bodies that predated democracy in European cultures [0]
On the other hand, Iraq has a long tradition of absolute rule by ruthless powerful figures, going well back to antiquity. It is much easier to concentrate resources and build a standing military to steamroll your opponents in a flat agricultural country.
If this was any other place on the internet, I probably wouldn't bother because it's usually useless (but this is hackernews, so ill try)
Jews don't in fact control the united states of america or a subset of it's government.
Jews don't control the world either.
They have various views on issues, politics, and culture. They're found in places all around the world, and like any other group you'll find good and bad. To say they control the U.S.'s foreign policy seems ignorant to me and based on an anti-semetic trope.
> The idea that Afghanistan was going to adopt democracy and western liberalism is so absurd on its face that I won't even discuss it.
Some people are just delusional thinking implementing a broken half baked American forced democracy would simply replace thausands of years of history that lead the the current country.
Love this. And it's how I feel about most things which aren't directly relevant to the items on my todo list in a given day. I care if my house was flooding, I care about tickets being posted to some queue that I'm being paid to watch and I care about anything which is generally conspiring to get me to make a reaction or even just move a finger to show I'm still alive. Outside of these things, my life is about keeping the list of things I care about as small as possible. Nothing about politics makes that list.
For the past 20 years we have been focused on what it costs us to remain. Leaving has shown the cost to others for us to go. No matter what you think we should do, that cost is a bitter pill to swallow.
Don't get me wrong, it's sad, but the USA is not what it used to be, and we need to target our borrowed money resources.
(I have no idea as to the real reason we stayed so long there. I'm beginning to think it was military practice. I wouldn't be suprised if some defense guy said, we have to build up our the iron in our military in order to keep our lead on China's expanding fleet of war machines. (I used "iron" because I'm lazy, and figured it was ok because of what Xi just said.)
> Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts?
As just an ordinary American citizen, I think that question is nearly 20 years too late (or 32 if we consider Charlie Wilson’s War). And that particular question is downstream of other more important questions.
My primary calculation is: what is the likelihood that a central Afghan government could actually influence the governing of regions far from the major cities, what is the likelihood that American soldiers could support the central government in establishing order/governance there, how much progress have we made in 20 years, how much longer would it take to make such a project self-sustaining without further US support, would the central government be considered authentic by those whom it governs or just a Vichy, and how do American citizens know the progress we are making is real or just optimistic spin by professional generals whose reputation is tied to this engagement.
Honestly I’ve been pretty pessimistic about Afghanistan since Bush 2 took his eye off the ball in 2003 and moved his efforts to Iraq, which was at least a stable governing organization (although I freely admit I would never want to live there). We elected Obama and Trump since, both of whom tried to pull the US out of these Middle East wars and mostly did (until things changed).
If America had any real chance to help Afghanistan, it was in 1989 right after the Soviets left and we left the weak remaining government to deal with the well trained mujaheddin with no significant American support.
I apologize if this comes off as blunt, but there is overwhelming evidence that the purpose of US intervention in the middle east is almost purely for reasons of power and resources, and this has been obvious to scholars and even casual laymen observers for nearly half a century. Human rights and self defense have very little to do with it, and to believe so is to fall to propaganda.
">the purpose of US intervention in the middle east is almost purely for reasons of power and resources"
"if this were the case, then the USA would have actually benefited from these wars."
I don't see where that conclusions comes from unless you fall for the same mistake you mention - adress too much competence. Also the US ruling class can loose a gamble.
I don't think you can correctly conceptualize the US presence in Afghanistan as a gamble for resources that was lost. It's been 20 years. If there was ever a gamble, it was a while ago
It was likely less about resources and more strategic influence. "Owning" Afghanistan would give America the ability to project power in a critically important region surrounded by American rivals where it lacked a military presence.
It boxes Iran in, it taps on China's exposed western shoulder and borders the stans that buffer Russia's soft underbelly and it's close enough to other established air bases that can provide logistical support.
Better yet, if you do manage to capture it, it's has some of the most favorable geography for repelling invasions of any country. If America was fully established there, getting it out would be pretty much impossible.
It's not a huge shocker it was seen as a prize worthy of an expensive gamble at a time when America felt it was at the peak of its power. Anyone remember fukuyama's "the end of history"? America had a pretty severe case of hubris in the 90s/early 00s.
The war was lost a while ago, of course. It's really hard to admit defeat however, and there's always a tinge of hope it might be turned around, a disbelief that the American military could suffer defeat, so, of course it dragged on.
Anybody who has worked on a huge, vastly expensive high profile project knows that inertia can drag it on for years after it's clear to everyone that it's dead in the water.
There’s a whole lot of (literally) nothing between Afghanistan and anything worth bombing in Russia or China, and the US has military presence much, much closer to the important parts of those countries.
Afghanistan would be good to have in a war with Iran, but I honestly think that the opportunity for that is gone. AFAIK Iraq has gone from being a US client state to nominally independent, and Russia’s plan to prop up the Assad regime worked out very well for them.
The "geopolitics" is just marketing. The point is to spend money that will disappear unaccountably into the Pentagon. Thousands of rich people get even richer. None of them care who is more secure or who dies, here or abroad. All of the fables that USA (war) news media excretes are for the purpose of making those rich people even richer.
>but there is overwhelming evidence that the purpose of US intervention in the middle east is almost purely for reasons of power and resource
Sure, I'll collect my check at the pump, I guess.
>and this has been obvious to scholars and even casual laymen observers for nearly half a century
I think you're missing the meaning of my original post, which was a comment about people who experienced war in Afghanistan feel about it. You're welcome to contort that into whatever point about human rights, "America is bad", whatever point you feel like. Like I said originally. I don't care.
No. Buy you seem to think your policy buddies care about finding the right government structure. If they are true establishment and not just cogs they don't care about anything other than game theory and maximum extraction of value.
Ah yes, the power and resources that flow from the rich nation of Afghanistan.
I had dinner with the ambassador to the Taliban once at Yale, back in 2000. He said they banned TVs because there wasn't any Pashtun programming, so they were effectively just banning porn. He was accompanied by this very nice lady, Lailia Helms, who was the granddaughter of the former king of Afghanistan and married to the son of the former CIA director, Richard Helms. Weird.
Outside of the excessive dev costs, and high price tags of these things, ongoing, year after year, institutional knowledge of "how to construct weaponry", and "how to test / build" the same is absolutely vital.
You absolutely cannot be in a position where no company and employees exist, which knows these things.
The cannot be overstated. Imagine a war breaks out, and now you try to build ... missiles. You have no tooling, no factory, no employees which have ever done so, and no supply chains either. Nor even engineered, first step designs!
Now, I agree things are not perfect, but something must be in place. Something ongoing.
This same logic holds with the military too. You want to lose a war? Have a no standing military, or one which is never deployed.
You need trained, experienced troops, which will train other troops if a massive war breaks out and your numbers swell. You need experienced persons to lead, which have not been trained in isolation.
Canada tries to solve this, as much as possible by peacekeeping. It's not perfect though, blue hats don't often engage in large scale actions.
Point in all this is, trying to pick just, humanitarian causes for troop deployment, and weaponry usage in the field, and to keep supply chains alive, is difficult, yet is literally essential if you want to have a real defense potential.
Or should the US, the West, just degrade their military, and hope for the best?
(Canada was in Afghanistan for more than a decade.)
It really sounds like you've managed to reason into "we have a military, so it's best to use it for its own sake." If so, that's pretty frightening logic, particularly for anyone in the rest of the world.
All the fluff aside you just said that the US (or any other country for that matter) needs to mess with other countries in order to keep their military in proper shape. Sure it does make sense from that standpoint. Or maybe not and conducting military exercise is more than enough given your already very advanced state.
The receiving end however might hold a different point of view.
"Standing army" used to be an epithet, a sign that a society had lost its way. The best military we've ever had was the one we built from scratch for WWII. They curbstomped two actual "evil empires". Everything we've had since has been a pale imitation, not fit to wear the same uniform. That's because in WWII we were trying to win, and ever since then we've been trying to spend money.
If we demobilized, we'd probably never really need to remobilize. (What, are the Nazis going to rise again?) But if we did, we could.
> If we demobilized, we'd probably never really need to remobilize
This is a very 1990s/2000s point of view. We have a real global competitor now. China's military spending is rising faster than their fast-rising GDP. Some recent war games exercises suggest that the US could already be in losing position in a conventional war with China [1].
Not even our generals are stupid enough to get in a war with China. (Our politicians probably are, but they're not in charge.) They'd probably take all of our Pacific Islands, and they would definitely sink all our carriers. It will take a few years for the Pentagon to forget the asskickings we've received recently. They're searching for nations smaller and weaker than Syria; China is off the list completely. Even though we spend far more on the military than they do.
However, we don't have to get in a war with China. We owe them trillions of dollars. We're probably not going to start out by straight-up defaulting, but there are all sorts of things we could fiddle with to put the hurt on them. What are they going to do in response? Stop exporting us lots of crap? That would be good for American workers. Maybe they'll hack American firms' insecure shit more? Ditto.
We would live happier, healthier, and more prosperous lives if we stopped viewing every challenge through a military lens. Especially since our military is incompetent to achieve any goal through military action.
How does maintaining military readiness and being at war in Afghanistan relate? Isn't it reducing our military readiness and preparatory investment? Couldn't we have bought hundreds of aircraft carriers for the cost?
Correct, the common person in the US suffers immensely due to the resources being poured into the military, leading to wealth, health care, and education outcomes far below many other countries with smaller GDP per Capita.
You’ll have to define power and resources. I mean, Afghanistan offers very little of either and any control you want to exert comes at a high cost and fades pretty quickly.
Afghanistan is extremely rich in mineral resources. The fact that we failed to secure them isn’t really proof of anything. We have a long history of trying to install foreign leaders who are friendly to US business interests with mixed results.
The most interesting part is that this game has not been flagged by the USA as an issue of foreign intelligence. I thought the placement of staff and personnel was supposed to be a much guarded secret.
> this game has not been flagged by the USA as an issue of foreign intelligence
It may be backwards. Niantic - the developer of the game, was founded by a guy who worked in "foreign affairs" for the US Govt [1]. One of his early companies was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital branch [0].
Why put boots on the ground to get street level imagery, when you can just have kids all over the world do it for you?
It may not be your intention, but both this and the parent comment really misplace the blame.
The "fitness tracking app Starva" did not reveal the secret army base, soldiers inappropriately using their phones and broadcasting their routines by using a civilian application designed to share their location revealed the secret army base.
I know it sounds pedantic, but I think we should be very careful about verbiage when it comes to who is to blame here: it's not the apps. This kind of thing gets exacerbated hugely by media headlines too - always putting the app front-and-center and downplaying the policy/training/OpSec failures. This leads to erroneous and scary conclusions like "apps should be flagged for national security" like the GP mentioned - but the actual takeaway should be that we need to train the dang soldiers operational security.
News are terrible at that kind of writing. For instance with traffic incidents, it's always "a person getting hit by a car", not "a driver ramming their car into a person". So they write it like as if the driver had no agency, and the incident was completely non-avoidable and no one should stop to think about why it happened or how it can be prevented in the future. For good measurement they also use the word "accident" a lot.
Point was to show the two extremes, with news articles mostly using the passive one (which you call neutral but is far from neutral). So in practice never assigning blame to the driver no matter what, or even vaguely assigning the blame to the victim.
I don't think it's pedantic at all. I think we misplace the importance of how we communicate with each other and how we use our already limited languages (I mean, it's hard enough to communicate an idea in its purest form despite being articulate, the internet makes it harder, and not being concious about what you're saying just adds to the problems in the world imo)
Imagine if these companies did their best to hide the existence of secret military bases. They would need the location of secret military bases otherwise they cannot censor their public maps. The secret nature of the bases makes them impossible to not reveal.
Why not? The despite most most depictions, the Taliban (and insurgents in general) are capable of impressive feats of engineering and electronic hacking. Seems like this would be pretty basic.
If you could IED a Pokemon Go site or base location and hurt or kill personnel, every soldier in the region would be told about it and it would affect their daily lives if they played the game. It would work.
If you could create something to drawn them in, it would work better, but I'm not sure how the game works. Like attacking certain locations in Go to make them 'hard' to draw solders to an 'easy' IED'ed location.
The Taliban are just us, they like creativity, they'd think hacking Western Pokemon Go would be cool, it would help them recruit.
But, the logistics of getting for instance a McDonalds on a base also has risk. It's all risk management.
The article mentions using a hacked client to spoof your GPS location. You just need a computer that can run multiple android emulators.
You could probably just make raw API calls. I'm pretty sure that's how all those pokemon-mapping websites worked for the first several months of the game's release before they removed those features from the game.
No, they currently don't, but this is a convenient boogieman to trot out whenever you need to drum up patriotism, or to accuse your political opponents of a lack of patriotism, or demand a higher defense budget or a justification for another extension of the forever-war in the Middle East.
This isn't the Soviet-Afghan war, where the US was happily and openly supporting the same mujahedeen that eventually became the Taliban. Russia and China both have significant 'problematic' Muslim minorities, and have little taste for seriously sponsoring Islamic extremism.
(The US and Saudi Wahhabism, on the other hand, continue to be odd bedfellows, because, you know, we still can't get over Iran.)
Not the Taliban, but ISIS was very quick in adopting Google Earth/Google Maps early in their war in Syria, you could see some map screens in the videos where they used to prepare a targeted suicide bombing and such (not sure if those videos are on YT or Twitter anymore).
I don’t want to be too dismissive of your claims, because the sentiment is well placed- lots of apps present security concerns. But the location of every FOB and COP is/was well known to the locals. Hopefully Pokémon Go isn’t revealing the locations of more sensitive locations, but the people running clandestine operations aren’t letting E-3’s play games on a cell phone next to them. There may be other vulnerabilities but Pokemon Go isn’t too big of a problem since it only reveals where people have been congregating for a while. So it’s different than a terrorist revealing their camp’s location because Twitter geotagged a post.
Several bases I went to in the continental US had all the gyms/pokestops disabled after the game came out. I wonder if that was intentionally not done at Bagram for morale reasons?
So could an interpreter. Also, Afghanistan has mountains and binoculars, neither of which requires guessing Air Force usernames on Strava or whatever. Not that you don't do anything you can that works in asymmetrical warfare or whatever the inside-the-beltway crowd prefers to call it these days, but it's hardly as if there's much in the way of a unique threat model here.
In any case, Pokemon Go's been out since, what, 2016? No one on any side has taken the American war in Afghanistan seriously since well before then. When you're just waiting around for Americans to acknowledge the inevitable and leave, there's not all that much point in finding clever ways to blow up Americans - all that's liable to do is make Americans maybe decide to stick around longer. That doesn't necessarily make Americans playing Pokemon Go in Bagram a good idea, but it also doesn't make it a bad one, and I can think of a lot worse.
This page is not working well. As I'm trying to read the bottom of the article, it keeps jumping to the page top.
As for the content, it doesn't seem newsworthy to me. PokeGo players know that your Pokemon will stay in a gym for a long time (indefinitely) if there's no rival team to knock it out.
Source? There is no 48 hour limit. Did you read the article? It's about US troop pokemon staying in gyms long after the personnel have left.
Googling gave me this answer for how they stay in gyms:
"Forever. Someone has to defeat it in battle to knock its motivation down to 0. Otherwise, it will never hit 0 through normal decay."
I guess they call it "motivation decay". It's a mechanic where you have to feed your pokemon food to keep it motivated. You can feed it remotely, though. They can be fed up to 10 times with normal food, or an unlimited number of times with golden raspberries.
EDIT: I was wrong about getting kicked when the boss came. So if you kept feeding your pokemon, you could keep it there indefinitely. My bad.
As a person who plays daily, my understanding is you don't have to feed it any berries (and it will stay there indefinitely until a rival team member knocks your pokemon out by battling).
This was not true when I played the game at least. I know people who have placed Pokemon in remote gyms and had them stay up for almost a whole year before being taken.
Reminds me of Apocalypse Now where colonel Kurtz explains the US will lose because in their minds they aren't fighting a war in Vietnam they're still in America.
I realize nobody actually watches that movie anymore but I have and everything still fits.
I was too young to see the original release in a movie theater and was all the more exited to catch up on this when the Final Cut was released. Truly a remarkable and timeless piece of cinema. The 4K Dolby Atmos/Vision version is also highly recommendable if you've never seen this gem.
America’s policy in Afghanistan is absolutely horrifying. Invading them, then occupying and setting up a government, then abandoning it is a foolish waste of trillions of dollars. It is incredibly inhumane to all of the Afghanis who supported us and to all of the regular citizenry there. Remember all of those schools for girls and things like that? Those poor girls are now in for a short and tortured life. America should have done what Rome did and annexed Afghanistan and set it up as another state in our union. A permanent commitment would have paid off in the long run, but now we just have created a failed state that will fall into civil war.
I haven't played the game in years but the more obvious affect would be in ingress as fields come down as captured assets decay or are taken over. Ingress fields can be transcontinental.
>> "Bagram once had a thriving Pokemon Go community of troops, contractors and civilians who played the game while exercising and after work."
This is why i dont like Stars and Stripes. Little disingenuous comments like this show thier priorities. Does anyone actually believe that soldiers didnt play during work? And, for a soldier, exercising is work. We know that a bunch of young men away from home with cellphones will play mobile games. We dont need to be told that they are all boys scouts who would never do so during office hours.
Im more woried about the security implications. A camera app that involves soldiers wandering around a base chasing gps-tagged sprites is ripe for intelligence gathering. How secure was pokemon go at this time?
Stars and Stripes isn't technically published by the Department of Defense, but it's as close as you can get while maintaining a veneer of editorial independence. I don't think this variety of satire is in their repertoire.
> Like other veterans, he said he is pessimistic about the future of Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. But he hopes the situation improves one day, to the point he can once again play Pokemon Go there.
As the US withdraws it’s troops after an incredible amount of time, the next few months will likely see many such stories about “life in Afghanistan” and what is being left behind.
"a hacked version of the game in which the user changed the game’s GPS coordinates to Bagram."
What? they need a different version of the game to do this? On Android anyone can can set their gps location to whatever they want. I do this to test stuff all the time.
I completely disagree with the decision to abandon the project in Afghanistan. We could have used a few decades to truly cement democracy and values that the US stands for.
Leaving now is an incredible waste and lack of leadership.
Maybe it's trying to make a horrible shitty situation a little less bad.
There was zero right answer in this war. We don't have some corrupt cabal of leaders in our government and military. I can't recall a single American that didn't want to go into there after 911. Our soldiers have been stuck there putting their lives on the line to keep the house of cards from falling down. This power vacuum will disappear with another incredibly violent war after we leave. There will be zero way for the current government to maintain control. I don't see how it could possibly avoid becoming an isis like state that will lash out with more terrorism and I'm afraid this won't be the last time American boots will be in country.
> We don't have some corrupt cabal of leaders in our government and military
You have patriots, who are far more dangerous because they believe they're doing the right thing. And a certain amount of cabal willing to lie about how much of a threat Iraq was.
For the Iraq war. The Afghanistan war had very little resistance as things like the Congressional approval happened on September 14th giving the military a blank check to "capture the criminals."
I was talking about Afghanistan, but it's a similar situation in Iraq. The justification for the Iraq war is bs, but the situation in both countries is similar right now. There are weak governments that were allies that we are hanging out to dry. Our soldiers feel horrible about leaving the people they fought besides to die from the onslaught that is coming. The enemy is battle hardened and without mercy. I feel horrible for all involved but it seems like it will be worse in Afghanistan. I can't imagine being a father to a daughter who wanted a bright future for their child right now. They have at most, one year of schooling left before those schools are snubbed out harshly. Our previous allies that fought along side our soldiers have an even more grim future. There will be a stasi like hunt and subsequent execution of thousands for those that helped us.
What would you do when you fought alongside people that became your brothers? Would you betray them and abandon them to this horrible fate?
It's easy to call them useful idiots sitting thousands of miles away and safe. They are not dumb, they see the reality on the ground that we are not privy to.
At the same time, our soldiers are dieing. It's ugly whatever route we take and I don't know the least horrible decision that should be made.
That's not really true. It was very true about Iraq, but almost nobody (I assume there are a couple quakers out there somewhere) was against the action in Afghanistan.
The Taliban were widely recognized as the absolute worst, and sheltering Bin Laden was just icing on the cake. This was a close to national unity as anything will ever be.
I don't know about America. But back then we had huge demonstrations every weekend in Austria trying to get attention from the US government to rethink their action.
The public, here in central Europe, was and still is mainly against the US invading countries for their own means.
(This is actually part of the reason so many of my generation learned to hate America for their actions in a early age)
Those were very likely for the Iraq war. The Afghanistan war happened too quickly to garner any major opposition, and though there was some opposition I'm not seeing four weeks of huge Austrian demonstrations listed on Wikipedia at least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_war_in_Af...
And I feel like holding massive anti-US protests in the weeks after 9/11 would have been a huge talking point in the last twenty years.
Anti-Iraq was even bigger for sure. And I am not sure they happened directly after 9/11 or only months later. But the sentiment was obvious, many people do still not believe the official narrative and can't excuse starting a war for a wrong narrative. Pretty sure demos startet after the first related WikiLeaks leaks?
On a side note I would be surprised if Wikipedia had a line for a few hundred young lefties demonstrating in a basically forgotten country like austria. When I say huge, I mean relatively, Austria ain't big. But there should be Media and pics somewhere I guess.
>Pretty sure demos startet after the first related WikiLeaks leaks?
That's like a decade after the war started.
Even in the US, by the time of the Iraq War a significant chunk of the population had turned anti-Afghanistan war, but resistance was very limited in the month between September 11th and the start of the war.
Sorry but the OP is right. Everyone in Europe was shocked and very, very angry that the US attacked yet another country that wasn't a threat to it and had nothing to do with 9/11.
Even today, I personally have no idea what the US went to do in Afghanistan. Iraq, at least, had oil. But, Afghanistan? What was the point?
I think you have your history very mixed up. The connection between Afghanistan and 9/11 was very clear to everyone.
(And in case you genuinely don't know: the Taliban were openly harboring Al Qaeda including Bin Laden. The US ordered them to either hand him over or allow the US to pursue him. They refused. So, the US eliminated the Taliban.)
> You must not have been paying attention. There were a hell of a lot of us, and we weren't quiet. Or wrong.
What? How old are you? Where did you live when it happened? What community or group was against striking back after 911? How can you even say you were "right" when the rest of the country didn't agree with you?
> Oh, of course not. We'll have left behind whole shipping containers full of the things.
Do you really think Afghanistan won't be the new isis state? The government is weak and one of the mightiest militaries in the world couldn't help defeat the taliban. The taliban is battle hardened and it seems incredibly doubtful they won't retake the country. If you disagree, please explain how you envision a happy war free Afghanistan that won't
breed enemies of the United States after we leave.
Genuine question: are there any concrete proofs that the intervention reduced terrorism? Not that their absence would prove the opposite of course, but do we have any hard data or something?
That’s complicated. The Taliban were also generally opposed to terrorism, though they define terrorism a bit differently given their extreme social positions. This resulted in a large rift between the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
You could better answer the question yourself with a study of recent history in the region.
Fairly sure the intervention predated an increase in terrorist acts both locally and internationally. Whether those are related or not is hard to show.
It's an ugly complicated mess of a war that will more than likely go on long past our lives. It is highly debatable and probably unknowable if it was the right call in the long run. But I'd have to assume the war kept the terrorists busy at least for a little while. They also more than likely would not have stopped if we made no response.
Little anecdote: Bagram is quite large, and sometimes I used to run late at night into the places where nobody goes. Well, 'nobody' is a legend of some old contractors from back before the centralized personnel tracking systems, who had set up a shantytown in the junkyard in between contracts, and eventually just 'went native' and made it their home. I can't be sure, but there seemed to be signs of life in strange places. I would have bought property and settled in myself if I could. There were a lot of men I worked with who had been completely replaced by their families, stopped taking leave, and didn't want to go back, ever. I can relate. My fiancee died during my first tour, and out there I could be fully in love with a ghost; it was like a superpower. I think I needed a few more years of that.