I just don't get it. If last year (or the year before) the Iranian government, say, had decided to take out the Taliban and replace it with a less... extreme... government, everyone (or almost everyone) including me would have cheered, just as we cheered when the North Vietnamese took out Pol Pot and the rest of the Khmer Rouge. There would have been the danger of a wider war between Pakistan and Iran, yes. There would have been Hobbes's point that even a bad government is better than no government and that anarchy with roving gangs of thugs is worst of all, and so there would have been danger from that direction as well.
But the Taliban rank *way* down there on the scale of human political regimes, and the overwhelming balance of probabilities would have been that taking them out--if it could be done quickly and without huge amounts of bloodshed--would have made the world a better place.
So what has changed? Why does the fact that it is the U.S. that is doing it rather than Iran lead to different conclusions?
Brad DeLong
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CB: It is not so much that the Taliban being out is bad, as the U.S. has a bad record in terms of who it puts in or supports in. If they were only going to kick the Taliban out that would be one thing. But they are going to put somebody else in. That's not promising. The Taliban got in in the first place as the ultimate result of the U.S. involvement before, wherein the U.S. gave crucial help in annihilating the progressive forces in Afghanistan. The question is why would you trust the U.S. to do the right thing this time ?
More importantly, in terms of the world as a whole, the U.S. and its military attacks are doing more harm than the Taliban. Any exercise of U.S. militarism is another act by the leading outlaw nation in the world today.
U.S. out of everywhere !