Hacker Cinema
This Is What Winning Looks Like
2013 · Film · documentary · 89 min
Directed by Ben Anderson
Ben Anderson looks at the in-country experiences of the International Security Assistance Force after the American invasion of Afghanistan, especially in Helmand Province.
6 positive3 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
Vice used to provide something that other publishers didn't: It put correspondents out in the field, and showed you things that other outlets ignored. "Old Vice", everybody calls it.
It wasn't perfect. Sometimes the kids were clueless. And they had some bad habits, like making the reporters curse gratuitously just to look "authentic". Which then made you wonder how much else was fake, reality-tv stuff. What was happening outside the frame, or when the camera was off? Is this just "news porno"?
(Actually, some of that may have been "New Vice" trying to mimic "Old Vice", around the takeover, "hello fellow kids" style.)
But sometimes, you got a masterpiece from an experienced reporter, like This is What Winning Looks Like. Or you got a kid who was earnestly trying to be a good reporter, and you found yourself rooting for him. Plus, he was bound to find something in his journeys. In fact, he often did.
What was important about it was that it interacted with the world. People went out and recorded things.
Then at some point it changed. No longer did hipster acolytes of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson take cameras abroad. Instead, English majors wrote essays on the Approved Themes from the safety of their offices. Then it became pointless.
I understand that the founder flirted with various kinds of politics, including some on the Right. Now, if Vice were to devolve into Murdochian hysterics, then it would be terrible and worthless. But I do think that that political curiosity made it more interesting. I remember they embedded with the Oath Keepers in a somewhat skeptical but largely sympathetic piece, years before that same group got mixed up in Trumpist/Jan-6 shit. It was a perspective that would have been impossible to get from any other outlet.
Buzzfeed, on the other hand, was always gossipy crap.
Nowadays, you can get a tamer version of some of this from European outlets like DW, or occasionally from Al Jazeera, and somewhat from various semi-anonymous European documentary-makers on YouTube (who occasionally devolve to the worst impulses of a previous generation's National Geographic). But I feel more could easily fit in this niche.
There was no right way. Anyone who thinks a different outcome was possible should watch the Vice documentary “This is What Winning Looks Like”. The Taliban was going to take over no matter what we did. If we couldn’t create a stable government in 20 years and hundreds of billions of dollars then it simply wasn’t possible. It was probably never possible. The only alternative was to do what Obama and Trump did which is to kick the can further down the road at the cost of more American lives and dollars. The Biden admin absolutely did the right thing and the best that can be done now is to accept refugees.
For a fascinating insight into the disaster that was supposed to be the training of and transition to local security forces, I highly recommend the 2013 documentary "This Is What Winning Looks Like":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI
The VICE documentary This Is What Winning Looks like [0] was very illuminating for me, the situation there is a total clusterfuck and waste of resources.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI
> No, no, no. The Taliban were broadly distributed throughout Southern Afghanistan, and they had a cross border sanctuary in Pakistan.
I guess it depends on your definition of "remove". I don't doubt that a Taliban government could be very quickly overthrown by the US military. Probably within weeks. Now, the Taliban as an irregular militia is a completely different manner.
I remember watching a Vice documentary on Afghanistan called "This is what winning looks like". The line that struck me was a US Marine saying something like "the average Taliban fighter fights within 15 yards of their home". If that's anything close to true, no wonder the Taliban have been so hard to defeat.
The VICE documentary This Is What Winning Looks Like exposes some of the same struggles with Afghanistan.
It's a very sobering and disturbing report, available on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI
"The documentary follows U.S. Marines as they train Afghan security forces, showing their ineptitude, drug abuse, sexual misconduct, and corruption as well as the reduced role of US Marines due to the troop withdrawal."
A reddit discussion on looking at the documentary critically.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/25vm20/this_is_what_winning_looks_like_2013_the/chlc80w
The Vice documentary 'This Is What Winning Looks Like' has some great reporting on Afghanistan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI
I would not just say Western society. The VICE documentary "This is What Winning Looks Like"* seems to show CSA has a tradition in Afghanistan.
* http://www.vice.com/vice-news/this-is-what-winning-looks-like-full-length