Well it's sold as "help", but "intervention" is just intervention. It may be experienced as a good, bad or mixed thing by the occupied country, and of course differently by different groups.
There are many motives for intervention, ranging from pursuing the strategic interests of the US (or of the UK / Russia / China / other occupying power) to being a populist move intended for consumption by the domestic electorate – as pastiched in Wag the Dog.
That's all trite to say, but still true. We should never be fobbed off with the word "help" without looking under the covers.
And I completely agree, Across: troops need an achievable exit date/criterion. Otherwise, what's it for.
It's been a horribly frustrating experience over the last two decades seeing the rhetoric used about Afghanistan and Iraq. When people are feeling hurt after a terrorist attack in the West, they've blithely come out with comments like "Bomb them back to the Stone Age" and in so many words, "I don't care if that country was nothing to do with it, or if it kills civilians or makes conflict worse: it will make me feel better."
I really have seen people come out with shit like that – although they don't usually join up the clauses. High explosive as therapy for their bad feelz. I just... have no words.
And all the time you know that a time like this withdrawal from Afghanistan is coming. It's been in the post since the troops went in.
And the people shouting about how awful it now is ('cos it is awful), and labelling as a Bad Guy the person left holding the parcel when the music stopped, are often the very same people who were shouting for the troops to go in the first place.
In the UK, I remember very well seeing in people's windows posters printed by some of the newspapers (the Sun? The Daily Mail?) saying "I Support Our Boys" – meaning support sending them into harm's way in Iraq to start a conflict that anyone with an ounce of sense could see would (and did) cause mass deaths and regional instability and trigger terrorism in the UK.
Then the same papers get a second bite at the cherry being outraged about the consequences. Dubya who instigated the Second Gulf War as well as the invasion of Afghanistan, got rewarded with a second term in office – and skipped off into the sunset before the other shoe dropped.
I don't know. I'm feeling very despondent today.
I get that people have great passion to "help" when they see an obvious wrong. But it all gets so much more complicated from there. And there's no lack of people with very different agendas queuing up to channel even the most well-meant passion into something useful for themselves.