Ahahahaha, ah.
ohai gais im 14 and i wnt to sound intelegent!!!1111 how abut i maek a peost in teh masdurbatin hall abut agfvanistant and aks why were derr and diss rebuplicons??? o my paernts will b so pruod 
Its a country, but not a state. A country is just a land mass with defined borders; to become a state it needs to have sovereignty over that territory. Or, at least, that’s the way I’ve been taught to distinguish between the two.
I.E. Scotland is a country.
But It’s not.
Without the Karzai government, there would be Taliban government. I’ve read they already have “shadow” governments set up in 75% of the country.
To me it means a conflict instigated within a country’s boundaries by local actors. The Afghan conflict was not instigated by local actors, therefore it isn’t a civil war. By your definition when the Iraqi Army created by the USA fights insurgents, it’s a civil war - I disagree.
Except it’s part of England.
Scotland is not a real country, they’re all englishmen with dresses
You would wear a dress if you were always wasted, too.
I’d wear a kilt.
Ironically of course.
Even the brown people in America hate brown people.
Its always fun to lace lithium with other drugs.
besides all the shit they say about oil and what not, the idea of taking it?
Too fucking right.
I think its a little shortsighted to treat the Afghan conflict as a homogenous conflict. It changed a lot:
Pre-USSR Invasion - Isolated pockets of resistance spring up in resistance to the Socialist government. Jihad is declared. No direct involvement from external actors (though the Socialists have heavy ties to the USSR with the non-aggression pact, etc.).
USSR Invasion - Following the increase in threat from the mujahideen groups (partly as a result of US funding), the USSR invades to support the socialist government. Leader of the government is executed by invading forces. Full proxy-war initiated.
Carter’s Response - Carter continues to fund and arm the mujahideen under the principle of “plausible deniability”; in other words, he gives them weapons that are found in Egypt and other ME states so that if they were found, the US couldn’t be blamed.
Reagan’s Response - Following the election of Reagan, he amps up support for the mujahideen, announcing formally what they’re doing and sending huge amounts of weapons, including shoulder-mounted Stinger missiles, to them through the Pakistani ISI. No safeguards are used to monitor their distribution, and the CIA warns Reagan that this will have disastrous long-term consequences; Reagan is unphased.
USSR Withdrawal - After a huge war of attrition with the mujahideen, and the internal collapse of the USSR, the foreign forces withdraw, giving the local groups a huge boost both psychologically and authoritatively.
Aftermath - Both the USSR and the USA quickly lose interest in Afghanistan, leaving it alone. The local mujahideen begin fighting against each other, resulting in huge loss of life and destruction of infrastructure. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia begin actively funding the Taliban, whereas Iran (and a few others) start funding the Northern Alliance to oppose them. Government overthrown in 1993, Taliban assert authority over ~90% of the country in 1995.
The point of that rather long history exercise was to point out that the war changed a number of times. It started as an almost cut-and-dry civil conflict before turning into a full-blown proxy war with a huge number of states involved. I guess you’re right that there is always involvement from other states, but there is never a civil war that occurs in a bubble. Whether you look at the Russian civil war back in 1918, or the Angolan Civil War that ended in 2002, its rare to find any civil conflict that doesn’t involve interaction from countries outside that conflict.
To me, the conflict with the USSR wasn’t a civil war because there was the direct involvement of another state. In every other stage of the conflict, however, there was only indirect involvement, and that makes the war primarily civil. You make a good point that that word is overly simplified and ignores the real causes behind the conflict, but in reality, it was a war fought amongst native groups within a country, and that makes it a civil war.
OP does realise we were there before the Lithium was found, and that Japan has first dibs on it regardless?
I haven’t researched this at all, but I’d guess you omitted the pre-pre-USSR Invasion phase, which was more than likely a Kremlin-backed coup over the indigenous Afghan government, installing a “Socialist” client state. Faced with the democratic overthrow of their puppet government the USSR had no choice but to invade in order to prop up their preferred government. Am I in the ballpark?
the U.S is so fucked up anymore, we have shitty politics, corrupted leaders, and we are in a war that take up about 662 billion dollars a year. On top of all of that, everyones losing there jobs and/or houses, and on top of all of that we still have to deal with Sarah Palin!!!
nice speculation, but you’re still thinking in Western-hemisphere terms
One of these days Swampfox is going to make a thread with a title as shitty as this one, and inside it will say nothing other than “Intentional Logical Fallacies”.
Either he is a completely mentally subnormal 12 year old or he is a master troll.