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The food is shit and the waiting about is long and unpredictable.

You get a renewal discount if you broke at least 3 ceasefires in the last year.

No there's a massive difference. Accusing someone of failing to recognise the consequences of their preferred policy choices, or deliberately pretending that the link between those policy choices and certain outcomes don't exist, is not the same as accusing them of wanting those outcomes or supporting those who want those outcomes. It is accusing them of cognitive dissonance. And cowardice not to front up to that being what logically follows from their stance. In other words: being a mealy mouthed coward. Service in uniform doesn't exempt you from the charge of being a coward if you're happy in your words and policy preferences to leave women and girls to the whims of theocratic regimes on the basis that "well them forins don't share our values".

No one here has suggested that anyone else on here supports the Taliban. Learn to read.

Says someone who advocates a policy that is going to lead to the widespread forced marriage, rape and murder of Muslim women and girls in a country that until days ago had women in its political cabinet and presiding over court cases.

Motion to include Greenock in the surge target list?

Whereas you're just a smarmy p***k chipping in about "colonialism" from thousands of miles away sneering at the personal testimonies of those who actually know what they're talking about.

Donald Rumsfeld is dead mate.

"But Bloody Sunday"

I do not deny for a second that there are examples, plenty even, of NATO troops committing unconscionable crimes, including those against civilians, which have gone unpunished. Nor even do I deny that there are systemic problems that need addressed to eradicate such behaviour. But it is not even remotely comparable to the Taliban, which proactively encourages war crimes against girls by dint of their theocratic diktats. It takes an extraordinary amount of bad faith on your part to give the two something even vaguely resembling equivalence.

Notice that those soldiers face a court martial. When the Taliban do it, they get given a thirteen year old trophy bride.

Insisting that the Afghan state doesn't sanction the forced marriage, rape, stoning and beheading of women and girls (and others) isn't "imposing Western values" and it's incredibly fucking racist for you to imply that the values of people not from the West are somehow innately presdisposed to that. You are in effect pretending that there are no Muslim majority countries or nations where these things are wrong and condemned. The values of the Taliban are out of step not just with substantial parts of the Western world, but also most of the societies elsewhere on the planet in the second half of the 20th, let alone in the 21st, century. No of course not. The way the Taliban treats LGBT people, for example, is every bit as despicable as the way it treats women. Thank you for helping to identify yet another group that has benefited tremendously from not being governed (in Kabul and other provincial capitals) by the Taliban for 20 years. The NATO nations have overwhelmingly spent more money and shed more of their own soldiers' blood fighting and supporting the Afghan army than they could ever hope to have made in energy contracts and reconstruction. I agree with you that NATO for the most part was unsuccessful in helping those outside Kabul and a handful of other provincial capitals. But for years they also haven't been in those parts of Afghanistan. So they're not really "withdrawing" from there are they? Good thing no one is suggesting this then, is it? Except of course most of those refugees are seeking refuge... because we withdrew. And many of those deaths were at the hands of the Taliban or were themselves civilian supporters of the Taliban who oppressed women and girls. It is not racist to call the Taliban theocratic savages. They are. They forcibly marry, rape, stone and behead women and girls, deny them the vote, deny them positions of political power, force them to wear certain clothes and more. All in the name of a barbaric legal system founded upon a religious code conceived a millennium or so ago. It would be like us imposing the letter of Leviticus. This is just a completely empty assertion, lacking in any factual underpinning. But let's assume you're right, and the financial gains of the occupation outweigh the astronomical military and aid cost that has gone into it in the past 20 years. Why on earth would they pull out of Afghanistan just when those sources of revenue were starting to bear fruit? That makes absolutely no strategic sense, even selfishly. The more plausible explanation is that the operation does not have at its heart a profit motive. The American constitution literally provides for the separation of Church and state. Both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson treat women appallingly. That is not in dispute. By any reasonable standards, we in this country should (and I do) condemn their track records, judged against any standards. But neither of them have, as far as I can tell, used a religious justification for forcing girls to get married when they've barely hit puberty. Neither of them has advocated or used state power to stone or behead anyone. Neither of them has tried to tell women that they cannot show their nose and mouth in public (in Boris' case, slightly disgustingly, he has done the opposite by comparing burqas to letterboxes). Their appalling records on women's and LGBT rights are not even remotely comparable to those who throw gay people off towerblocks tied to chairs. And you know that just as well as I do. Except I didn't say "and live in a country that won't fight back". I explained very clearly that no military intervention in Saudi Arabia or China would have any reasonable prospect of success, even in pockets of populations (as in Kabul). You don't do things that would be demonstrably futile and counter-productive to your objectives and values. Staying in Afghanistan would be better for millions of women and girls in Kabul and other provincial capitals. There are precisely zero military intervention strategies that would improve the lives of a single person in Saudi Arabia or China. That is not to endorse the West's accommodation of and cooperation with Saudi Arabia. Quite the opposite. It is simply a recognition that if your priorities and values are the upholding of human rights, some military interventions advance them whereas others actively hinder them.

The exit plan should have been “we don’t exit until we can say with Well founded confidence that the Taliban will not displace the Government”. We weren’t trying to impose “Western democracy”. We were imposing “actually have elections” and “stop theocratically state sanctioning the raping, flogging and stoning to death/beheading of women and girls”. Thats several orders of magnitude short of Western democracy and is the absolute bare minimum necessary to drag a society out of the dark ages. It can, and for twenty years did, impose a clear societal expectation in Kabul and other provincial capitals that women are human beings. Something the Taliban do not do. Horseshit. There are plenty of Muslim majority countries and peoples that manage to afford women basic human rights. The Taliban do not speak for the Muslim world and it’s frankly disgusting that you are willing to equivocate in this way and basically engage in a racism of low expectations. You are in effect suggesting that Muslims by dint of their religion and political history are in some fundamental sense more predisposed towards barbarity towards women. It is when they beat, rape, forcibly marry and stone women, you mealy mouthed coward. You’re an excuse.

Lord c**t of Shitebaggery, in the county of Cockwombleshire, actually.

He calls himself Lord Miles. He isn’t a Lord. He went on the internet and pretended to buy land.

I mean fair, I was being hyperbolic. But these aren’t resources that we have in any meaningful sense sought to exploit in over 20 years. If there was a strategic resource interest in control of Afganistan and NATO really is as callously self interested as several people on this thread claims it is, then we wouldn’t be looking at a US withdrawal at all, would we?

If you honestly think that NATO forces have tortured more people than the Taliban in Afghanistan or that they’ve killed even close to as many civilians on the basis that “it’s classified” you are beyond help. Nonsense. They are incapable because the Taliban has too much military and civic influence on their society and the Taliban are theocratic savages. The presence of NATO forces is not in itself “colonial brutality”. It is, on the contrary, the only guarantee they have against brutal theocratic oppression. This is not like India or Egypt. We aren’t in Afghanistan to plunder its non-existent natural resources. We aren’t there to exploit cheap Labour to prop up an empire. Our presence there comes at great but justifiable cost to our own Exchequer. And our presence, on the whole, was a guarantor not of some great woke third wave feminist utopia, but of really fucking basic expectations about how women, on the whole, should be treated in the bits of their society not controlled by the Taliban. That you would give precedence to the wishes of godbothering patriarchs who treat women as chattels is very revealing and suggests people probably shouldn’t listen to you on questions of morality in this country either.

Clearly it is not acceptable for Afghan civilians and prisoners of war to be brutally mistreated by anyone. Since absolutely no one on this thread has even remotely suggested that is an acceptable state of affairs, I'm not sure what you think you're proving. What we do know is that the Taliban brutally mistreats civilians and prisoners of war in orders of magnitude higher numbers and in even more brutal ways, and routinely, than the NATO forces that have at various points been stationed in Afghanistan.

Plenty of people do. But of course the critical difference is we didn't go into Riyadh, occupy, and create the conditions in which millions of Saudi women were able to live a fundamentally different life than the oppressive one they had been living under, and would be forced to live under in the event of a decades-premature withdrawal of international forces. It's just as well no one is saying they were "benign" or "not deliberate" then, isn't it. I've not seen straw men this blatant since xbl was a poster on this site. None of this was "essential to the occupation". You're talking utter shite. In those circumstances yes, I would have given it serious consideration. I briefly considered joining the armed forces while at University. Edit to add: indeed a good friend of mine is an army officer only a couple of months back after a six month or so stint out in Afghanistan. The idea that centre-left middle class types don't step up to the plate if required is for the birds. I'm afraid that "unwritten pact" just doesn't exist. The armed forces are a tool of the state, to be deployed however the state wants to deploy them, subject only to there being proper due process and prosecution for war crimes. That is what you sign up for, not some misty-eyed PROTECT THE QUEEN. Like I said before, whatever the soldiers' own reasons are for enlisting, absolutely none of them under the age of 48 (i.e. almost all of those who are still in combat roles) can have done so under anything other than the understanding that some of their operations would be non-defensive and would involve, where necessary, prolonged periods of occupation in inhospitable environments with protection of certain civilian groups being part of their strategic objectives. Of course not. Are you mad?

Not by raping and killing civilians as spoils of war they don't. The violence and extremism doesn't go away just because we do. Now look who's being rose-tinted and idealistic. The Taliban are dictatorial theocrats who effectively treat women and children as chattels. That's not a "functioning state" worth having and it's certainly not one that those women have any effective choice about whether they want it.

This is fair. I'm not asking you to trust my judgement.

I'm sure the working class people of Berlin and Seoul share your contempt for foreign military personnel stationed in their countries.

But my answer is that if it was demanded of me I would do it. Is that non-evasive enough for you? The very nature of signing up to the armed forces is that you do what you're told unless it's a war crime. It's not a pay-as-you go vocation.

I don't vote for the Liberal Democrats you absolute divvy. Never voted for Jo Swinson. If a permanent military presence from a foreign power was necessary to stop the British equivalent of the Taliban from taking over the country I would welcome it with open arms.

We don't have conscription. That's the beginning and end of the discussion. Any soldier signing up for the US or UK military in the last three decades cannot have done so ignorant of the possibility, nay, likelihood, that they would be asked to serve in combat zones otherwise than for purely defensive purposes. If conscripted I would of course join one of the Armed Forces, but I doubt they'd want me. I am an obese 5ft 7 man in my 30s with poor eyesight and impaired hearing, and I shit myself when a car unexpectedly backfires. Judging by the one and only time I went paintballing, or any of the times I've played Halo, it would be in their strategic interest to keep me as far away from combat as possible.