The passage above seems quite obviously true, indeed pretty much common sense.
Yet you don’t offer any direct evidence. Moreover, the style of your comment is precisely the reason why political debates aren’t encouraged on LW. The problems are:
offering only one possible explanation of a selected historical event, ignoring other possible explanations and several important concerns (e.g. you have tacitly assumed that it was feasible to impose any government in Afghanistan without regard to the opinion of the Pashtuns—a dubious assumption in the least)
rhetorical questions instead of well formulated arguments (“you may think this account [...] is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that …”)
implicitly suggesting that the opponent may be biased against new ideas (“or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other”)
conspirationist-style vocabulary (“conventional wisdom ”, “comprehensively contradicts official history”) and unnecessary use of political labels (“leftward direction”); this seems to imply that there is some leftist conspiracy to cover the important facts
The points 3 and 4 are mainly a matter of style, but 1 and 2 are more important. Inference (X is odd, therefore Y must be true), where X and Y are neither exhaustive nor enough precisely specified, is a fairly typical ingredient of nowhere-leading frustrating debates. This is what we try to avoid here.
offering only one possible explanation of a selected historical event, ignoring other possible explanations and several important concerns (e.g. you have tacitly assumed that it was feasible to impose any government in Afghanistan without regard to the opinion of the Pashtuns—a dubious assumption in the least)
In any one particular case one can rationalize all sorts of excellent reasons why the US wanted to preserve the left enemy while utterly destroying the right enemy. But the point is not to argue particular cases, but that in almost every case the US sought to utterly destroy the right enemy, while preserving the left enemy.
And when the US did seek to destroy the left enemy, the State Department resisted that policy the whole way kicking and screaming.
In any one particular case one can rationalize all sorts of excellent reasons...
It was you who started arguing about one particular case. Therefore my reaction logically addressed that case.
More generally, if you offer a particular event (siege of Kabul) as evidence for a general hypothesis (the US State Department always tries to utterly destroy the right enemies and never the left enemies), you have to show that the particular example really supports the general hypothesis (here you had to show that the reason of the SD’s opposition is best explained by sympathies to Taliban). But at this moment you can’t use the general hypothesis to show that it is indeed the best explanation; that would be circular.
Yet you don’t offer any direct evidence. Moreover, the style of your comment is precisely the reason why political debates aren’t encouraged on LW. The problems are:
offering only one possible explanation of a selected historical event, ignoring other possible explanations and several important concerns (e.g. you have tacitly assumed that it was feasible to impose any government in Afghanistan without regard to the opinion of the Pashtuns—a dubious assumption in the least)
rhetorical questions instead of well formulated arguments (“you may think this account [...] is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that …”)
implicitly suggesting that the opponent may be biased against new ideas (“or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other”)
conspirationist-style vocabulary (“conventional wisdom ”, “comprehensively contradicts official history”) and unnecessary use of political labels (“leftward direction”); this seems to imply that there is some leftist conspiracy to cover the important facts
The points 3 and 4 are mainly a matter of style, but 1 and 2 are more important. Inference (X is odd, therefore Y must be true), where X and Y are neither exhaustive nor enough precisely specified, is a fairly typical ingredient of nowhere-leading frustrating debates. This is what we try to avoid here.
In any one particular case one can rationalize all sorts of excellent reasons why the US wanted to preserve the left enemy while utterly destroying the right enemy. But the point is not to argue particular cases, but that in almost every case the US sought to utterly destroy the right enemy, while preserving the left enemy.
And when the US did seek to destroy the left enemy, the State Department resisted that policy the whole way kicking and screaming.
It was you who started arguing about one particular case. Therefore my reaction logically addressed that case.
More generally, if you offer a particular event (siege of Kabul) as evidence for a general hypothesis (the US State Department always tries to utterly destroy the right enemies and never the left enemies), you have to show that the particular example really supports the general hypothesis (here you had to show that the reason of the SD’s opposition is best explained by sympathies to Taliban). But at this moment you can’t use the general hypothesis to show that it is indeed the best explanation; that would be circular.