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Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?

101 点作者 freddier将近 4 年前

20 条评论

hamburgerwah将近 4 年前
Read ghost wars and directorate S. Few simple narratives explain afghanistan. It is a clusterfuck but for reasons that are definitely not at all related to whatsapp. In the simplest expression it has been a proxy war with pakistan or at least pakistans psuedo-separate intelligence services.<p>If you want to talk win and lose, we &quot;lost&quot; afghanistan in february 1989 when the soviets left and we promptly abandoned all the afghanis that helped us to assist in driving them out.
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tharne将近 4 年前
What aren&#x27;t any media outlets picking this up?<p>While the issue is larger than whatsapp, this is an angle that&#x27;s worth acknowledging and discussing -- An insurgent force used an American tech platform to take over a country, while a former President is banned from that service.<p>Regardless of what you think of the situation, this definitely falls into the category of &quot;man bites dog&quot;.
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skarz将近 4 年前
This is one guy who says he is a tech expert taking wildly incorrect guesses as to why the Taliban succeeded. It&#x27;s basically a long HN comment.
kennethh将近 4 年前
This article about the fall of Saigon is interesting, lots of pictures of people evacuation.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;pictures&#x2F;fall-of-saigon-vietnam-anniversary&#x2F;13&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;pictures&#x2F;fall-of-saigon-vietnam-anni...</a><p>Almost same situation, trying to &quot;save&quot; people who do not want to be &quot;saved&quot;
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diragon将近 4 年前
Was Afghanistan America&#x27;s during these 20 years?<p>American taxpayers must be thrilled about this little trip.
vanusa将近 4 年前
Interesting story, but the short answer is no, the U.S. did not &quot;lose&quot; Afghanistan because of an app.<p>It lost because it (by that I mean the U.S. public) never believed in the mission there (which never had much of a strategic rationale in the first place). And because the Taliban, despite enormous setbacks, never lost faith in theirs.<p>Yes the narrative is &quot;complex&quot; and there&#x27;s also Pakistan, etc. But in a nutshell, that&#x27;s what it boils down to.
anm89将近 4 年前
No.<p>I don&#x27;t have to read this to know the answer is no.
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webreac将近 4 年前
After having raised hopes of democracy in part of the Afghan population, the United States opens the door to the Taliban. Even the &quot;democrats&quot; will hate the US. This disaster is not a surprise: it was announced. I don&#x27;t have the solution, but what Afghanistan is going through saddens me.
dependsontheq将近 4 年前
There are enough other networks and apps they could use. It’s just a modern communication channel. The surrender of complete provinces has nothing to do with WhatsApp or Twitter but is a cultural practice in the 40 years Afghan war.
amriksohata将近 4 年前
No, because they are backed by Pakistan playing double game
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reilly3000将近 4 年前
For me it’s hard to pin this on Facebook. E2E encryption should mean the provider has no idea about its content, only metadata. The author is right to blame US intel, as it clearly either legitimately had no idea what was about to happen or set Biden up tor embarrassment.<p>However regressive the Taliban turns out to govern, they did everyone right by making this happen peacefully. I just worry all of that about all that Afghan Military equipment and training that they now possess. Is there a dead-man switch on the gear? With that kind of firepower I worry they would feel more empowered to behave in an extreme manner towards their people, knowing an outside or inside force dare not stand against them.
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jl2718将近 4 年前
This is exactly what they did the first time around, but with a little more tech.
miguelmurca将近 4 年前
&gt; I’m a tech guy, not a military guy. And in terms of the kind of tech I’m into it’s that weird decentralized crypto tech like Bitcoin, not SaaS.
silexia将近 4 年前
Wow this article was super insightful into how the Taliban accomplished taking Afghanistan.
rini17将近 4 年前
Wonder if this contributed to recent Chinese decision to choke the social networking (misnamed by SV as &quot;tech&quot;) sector.
throwaway468845将近 4 年前
&#x27;disruption&#x27;.
aaron695将近 4 年前
It&#x27;s a good article.<p>I liked this interview where the commentator (Peter Bergen) talks about the symbolism of the USA pulling out. It didn&#x27;t matter if they were doing nothing, just being there was enough even with limited troops <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edition.cnn.com&#x2F;videos&#x2F;tv&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;14&#x2F;was-it-a-mistake-for-u-s-to-leave-afghanistan.cnn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edition.cnn.com&#x2F;videos&#x2F;tv&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;14&#x2F;was-it-a-mistak...</a><p>Which this article plays too. The US left and the default became the Taliban, like a run on the bank.<p>The Taliban needed a free flowing network to get the run going, WhatsApp might have been it.<p>It&#x27;s certainly an intelligence failure if WhatsApp wasn&#x27;t considered in depth.
cheaprentalyeti将近 4 年前
I&#x27;ve seen this linked elsewhere. The short answer is: No. America lost Afghanistan because we spent twenty years fighting a proxy war with Pakistan without ever being able to actually talk about it. Just like we can&#x27;t talk about Ecohealth Alliance making the Damn Virus or the fraudulent studies that they used to ban treating the Damn Virus with HCQ, or Obama sending the OPM Database to China, or Joe Biden being a senile puppet.<p>It&#x27;s rather like how 1940 Russia couldn&#x27;t talk about how Stalin spent the previous ten years purging the Soviet Army on German Intelligence&#x27;s orders.<p>It&#x27;ll all be disturbingly meta and recursively when this comment is voted down so y&#x27;all won&#x27;t have to see all the things y&#x27;all won&#x27;t talk about being talked about.
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pjc50将近 4 年前
The parallel with Jan 6 is instructive; memetic insurgency, but this time successful. As is the Taliban being far better at state-building than the highly corrupt puppet state, whose leaders packed as much cash as possible into their SUVs and fled for Uzbekistan.<p>Should these people have been banned from Twitter and Whatsapp? Well, did they break any rules of the service or are we back to having the CIA hand them a list of enemies?<p>Moreover, did anyone even care enough?
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zozbot234将近 4 年前
Meh. WhatsApp had been used by anti-Taliban factions before as mentioned by OP, now the other side is also using it. What&#x27;s newsworthy about this, exactly? They could be using any number of other channels instead, and it wouldn&#x27;t change much. We &quot;lost&quot; Afghanistan because as it turned out, no one there actually cared in the least about putting up a fight, even after we spent a lot of resources on giving them the means of doing so. Just let them reap what they have sowed.
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