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Target880 t1_j60nw9r wrote

Reply to comment by Lithuim in ELI5: How is donating equipment to participate in war, not considered going to war? by lloyd705

>The Taliban did the same to Al Quaeda and the US definitely did consider material support an act of war, and retaliated in kind.

That is not exactly what happened. The US demanded that the Taliban movement would extradite Osama bin Laden and other suspected terrorists. They also demanded that Al Quaeda bases and training camps should be shut down. That did not happen and the result was the invasion.

If they would have done that I doubt there would have been in invasion

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AmisThysia t1_j63cnck wrote

That is also not exactly what happened, though, is it? It's not known if Bin Laden and Al Qaeda leaders were even in Afghanistan at the time; many of them very quickly fled to Pakistan, for example. Even if they were in Afghanistan, the tribal areas where they would be hiding are a bit of a political and cultural quagmire in themselves. And Pakistan is, after all, where Bin Laden was eventually found.

While it is extremely likely some members of the Taliban regularly did withhold information, acting as if extradition was this simple little thing that simply "did not happen" is... misleading and jingoistic, at the very least.

The invasion and subsequent lengthy occupation was (and still is, by consequences) an extremely complex geopolitical event with an abundance of nuance, and the vast majority of the pertinent information is likely never going to be publicly known.

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[deleted] t1_j62rc4f wrote

[removed]

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ShootingPains t1_j62rs6e wrote

Plus it’s pretty clear that the Afghan Government didn’t have the military capacity to do what the US wanted. After all, it took the combined might of the west ten years to ferret out Osama.

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monkChuck105 t1_j632jkp wrote

The Taliban demanded proof that bin Laden did 9/11. The Taliban had no quarrel with the US prior to the invasion, even if they had close ties to Al Qaeda which wanted the US out of the mid east entirely.

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