Fate of Afghanistan, Taliban resurgence

[Easo]

I am not entirely sure why we did not have a thread about this before, especially in the light of current events, but here we go.

During the last six days Taliban have conquered 9 of 34 provincial capitals, including the infamous and important Kunduz, some of which fell in within hours on the same day (as well as holding more than half of all districts in the country + most of the country's border). All of this is, of course, happening after USA and allies made their withdrawals from the country as part of "peace process" to end the 20 year old conflict. Thousands are dead, thousands more will be soon.
Worst outlook already is less than 90 days until Kabul's goverment falls and Talibs again become the rulers of that sad place. Potentially this time there is not gonna be an Northern Alliance refusing to give up.

In short - religious extremist shitstains are potentially going to be in charge of another country soon and will throw it back to medieval ages and customs.

There are some differences this time compared to the previous civil war which ended after invasion caused by events of 9/11. First and foremost - Talibs are doing some attempts at realpolitik, a new one for them, specifically, they actually avoided attacking Western forces as agreed. They also visited Moscow and gave guarantees that they won't leave Afghanistan's borders (there was a funny situation when Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov was accused of meeting a banned terrorist organization... technically true). They agreed to "keep the rights of women" to have West off their backs, etc. China has also been involved as potential third party.
Of course, now they are ignoring all calls to stop their offensive, who would have thought

How did it all come to this? Now that is the biggest question for starting a shitfest, but first - there are no Afghans/the national identity of being Afghani is very low. There are, however, Pushtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara and bunch of others. There are local tribes, where the oldest farts are in charge. They almost all are Muslim, but there are conflicts between different sects because of course there are. Then there is Pakistan, probably the biggest reason why Talibs always could recover... There are also various groups withing Taliban, there is the ISIS (though badly mauled now), etc. etc.
Bunch of places were simply given up without a fight, with tribal leaders making agreements with talibs and/or goverment. Sure, it does avoid civilian losses. It also springstarts new offensives...

Talibs are not some kind of amazing fighting force, they still are mostly the same sand fuckers in sandals with AK's (they never were actually a real regional threat to the Western peace keeping force). Yes, they are dying in droves, there is enough proof of that, though dying seems to happen mostly to USA and what is left of ANA airstrikes. Problem is, that Afghanistan's army is worthless, due to all the tribalism mentioned before. Fanatics have the advantage of absorbing losses better, being more motivated to actually fight.
Special forces, the best trained and motivated units in the Army, are the ones who are sent to plug in the holes ("tactic" used for years now), realistically, they are doing most of the fighting, suffice to say such approach can not last for long. Numerical advantage is simply not used because said numerical advantage just does not fight. I already have bad feeling about something similar to what happened in Iraq back in 2014. All those soldiers who run instead of fighting an inferior outnumbered enemy, then getting their heads cut off en masse after surendering. Now president Ghani is basically trying to raise the local militias and get the influential persons (Dustum...) to bring in their support. If they win - all those people will want power. Round 2....

One of the biggest, if not the biggest mistake done by USA was, imho, the reduction of troop count from the so called surge numbers. Go in and stay in, as long as it is needed, to grow a new generation which is educated and does not really wanna go die in mountains because bearded farts said so.
We can argue a lot about people back at home, or, more precisely, voters back at home, but all that is pointless now. Though Biden's recent words were idiotic.

Personally... I only care about women and girls, who are more than likely to loose everything gained within the last 20 years and will again become the non-existant half of the country + kids living through the war. As I said, all those agreements are waste of paper, there already are reports of Talibs doing talib things. Executions, torture, bans of everything imaginable, the usual. It will only become worse if they win.

Reading Russian news sites was interesting. There was some very obvious glee about USA "failing and running away", BUT at the same time cooler heads noted that this creates more headache for Russia - because only a moron would actually trust Taliban. All those recent military drills together with Russia in the Afghanistan's northern neighbhours are only for this reason plus the likely future problems of exporting extremism and drug trade. And no, Talibs are not really against drug trade...

P.S.
I can already imagine some posters going off about USA being bad imperialist and how West is at fault for all of this. Would be nice if you could think for a moment before posting, though.

[uuuhname]

wow, shocking how people with a history of having to repel foreign invaders rather be left alone than have some invading army sit in their village for..... god knows how long.

like your entire idea of how democracy will "kick in" is a fucking family guy joke.

[D Luniz]

If they arent willing to fight the Taliban, why should we keep fighting them?

We'll worry about coming back if/when they are a threat to us again.

[Themius]

If they arent willing to fight the Taliban, why should we keep fighting them?

We'll worry about coming back if/when they are a threat to us again.

They weren’t a threat to us to begin with.

[Yadryonych]

Maybe after the taliban takeover they would finally have a functional government

- - - Updated - - -

CNN saw a graphic example of how low morale is among some army units on a visit to the city of Ghazni, three hours from Kabul. A group of soldiers who had been under fire from Taliban snipers simply ran from their base, flagged down a passing car and left.

SMFH…

They only joined the military because it was one of very few jobs in the failed state and it was safe while american forces did all the thing. Now when they left the job isn't safe enough so they leave

[alkyd]

They also visited Moscow and gave guarantees that they won't leave Afghanistan's borders (there was a funny situation when Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov was accused of meeting a banned terrorist organization... technically true). They agreed to "keep the rights of women" to have West off their backs, etc. China has also been involved as potential third party.
Of course, now they are ignoring all calls to stop their offensive, who would have thought

If you want to be objective in your post you should also mention this:

President Joe Biden's envoy for Afghanistan will meet with the Taliban's political leadership this week to urge them "to stop their military offensive and to negotiate a political settlement," the State Department announced.

and this:

Psaki says the Taliban "has to make an assessment on what they want their role to be in the international community."

Quite a funny situation as well when US government wants a banned terrorist organization to have a role in the international community.

How did it all come to this? Now that is the biggest question for starting a shitfest, but first - there are no Afghans/the national identity of being Afghani is very low. There are, however, Pushtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara and bunch of others. There are local tribes, where the oldest farts are in charge. They almost all are Muslim, but there are conflicts between different sects because of course there are. Then there is Pakistan, probably the biggest reason why Talibs always could recover... There are also various groups withing Taliban, there is the ISIS (though badly mauled now), etc. etc.
Bunch of places were simply given up without a fight, with tribal leaders making agreements with talibs and/or goverment. Sure, it does avoid civilian losses. It also springstarts new offensives...

This is how it all came to this. Both Soviet Union and USA are at fault. Soviets for invading Afghanistan and the US for funding Taliban to fight back Soviets.

"After the Soviet Union intervened and occupied Afghanistan in 1979, Islamic mujahideen fighters engaged in war with those Soviet forces.

Pakistan's President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq feared that the Soviets were planning to also invade Balochistan, Pakistan, so he sent Akhtar Abdur Rahman to Saudi Arabia to garner support for the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation forces. A while later, the US CIA and Saudi Arabian General Intelligence Directorate (GID) funnelled funding and equipment through the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) to the Afghan mujahideen.

About 90,000 Afghans, including Mohammed Omar, were trained by Pakistan's ISI during the 1980s. British professor Carole Hillenbrand concluded that the Taliban have arisen from those US-Saudi-Pakistan-supported mujahideen: "The West helped the Taliban to fight the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan".

[Howel]

Here is the kicker: Modern day Democratic governments are not capable of power projecting or changing foreign regimes for the better.
It is literally the price you pay for being a freedom loving people, that you're no longer able to enforce proper change in foreign nations through military action, which is one of the main reasons why the EU overall stopped doing it.

Yeah, we should go back to being tyrannical colonial oppressors, that'll be totally different from the Taliban.

[Jaransan]

At the end of the day, you have to assess the following:

Does the region hold strategic value to the US.
Are the people of the region a significant threat to the US, or the US’s interest.
Is there anything obligating the US to be there - treaties, agreements, etc.

If the answer to all those questions is no, then get out, stay out, and let the chips fall where they may. You tried - lord knows you tried - but if the above three things aren’t factors, then you just have to cut your losses.

And this is not to say going in at all was bad because obviously the place could use some help - but going in and leaving don’t have to be unilaterally good or bad things. Its not all column A or column B. Anyone saying America should respect other cultures or what have you clearly doesnt care about the human rights abuses going on in these places enough to learn about them in the first place, but at the same time, the problem is so vast that nobody could be reasonably expected to actually solve it without going to some obviously evil extremes.

So you went in, you tried, it failed, and now you’re leaving. Keep an eye on the situation to see how it develops, and make decisions as the situation evolves.

Very… well not simple, but certainly more realistic than being one hundred percent for or against it.

[Rennadrel]

More proof that you can't kill an ideology. These people will continue to exist and it would take drastic and frankly abhorrent measures in order to eliminate an ideology.

[Adamas102]

One of the biggest, if not the biggest mistake done by USA was, imho, the reduction of troop count from the so called surge numbers. Go in and stay in, as long as it is needed, to grow a new generation which is educated and does not really wanna go die in mountains because bearded farts said so.
We can argue a lot about people back at home, or, more precisely, voters back at home, but all that is pointless now. Though Biden's recent words were idiotic.

That's simply not what our military (or any military for that matter) is designed to do. Any sort of meaningful change would have required a colossal investment of time, money, and resources, not just an occupying military force. The idea that our mere presence was going to lead to stability and massive cultural shifts after only a few decades was arrogant. While it's sad to see things quickly devolving again, our prior strategies were doomed to fail.

- - - Updated - - -

More proof that you can't kill an ideology. These people will continue to exist and it would take drastic and frankly abhorrent measures in order to eliminate an ideology.

I wouldn't say it's impossible, nor does it require abhorrent measures. You just need to provide a better alternative. Unfortunately, as much as we Americans love to tout the awesomeness of freedom and liberty, that's just not good enough. Stationing an army in their backyard is certainly not going to lead to ideological change.

If we'd invested more money and effort into not only helping to expanding access to education, but also building up their infrastructure and improving the groundwork for a strong economic foundation, maybe that would have made a difference. Spending all that time training their soldiers to fight for themselves without giving them something they'd want to truly fight for was never going to work. We sat an army in their country for decades and still left it as one of the lease developed countries in the world.

[Mihalik]

Glad the US left. Handle your own shit.

The thing is, it's not their "own shit". Afghanistan as we (as in people outside Afghanistan, especially in the West) define it, as just not a thing. It has never really been a thing. Even in the brief interludes when it functioned as a nation state, it did so through a complex system of alliances between various tribes, clerics, (this is before the Saudis and the CIA spread Salafism to Afghanistan) oligarchs (nobles and the wealthy) and colonial power brokers.

People there just aren't interested in the social and governmental model we are trying to force on them. It's not their own. They don't care about it.

The most ironic bit will be this...If the Taliban take Kabul, they'll control more of Afghanistan after the US departure than they had before the US's arrival, as before 2001 vast areas of the country were controlled by rival warlords/tribes.

[Howel]

Who would've thought that Warcraft's Illidan storyline could've been so relevant to this topic.

You must be willing to do -anything- and sacrifice everything to protect your world.

Go ahead, there is currently a power vaccum being generated, prime for the taking. Really, you're actually doing a disservices, endangering the world, by not leaving this very instance.

[Mihalik]

Here is the kicker: Modern day Democratic governments are not capable of power projecting

Here's the kicker: Both the largest colonial empire and the largest authoritarian state in history failed to project power into Afghanistan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Afghan_War (the British have been trying for 200 years if we count every British military deployment to Afghanistan as part of a series)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovi...0%93Afghan_War

This has fuck all to do with being capable or not of power projection.

or changing foreign regimes for the better.

Regime changes imposed externally rarely produce "better" regimes for the locals, as such impositions are usually not meant to benefit the locals. Also, "better" is subjective.

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More proof that you can't kill an ideology. These people will continue to exist and it would take drastic and frankly abhorrent measures in order to eliminate an ideology.

You are literally contradicting yourself.

We don't need to do anything abhorrent to end extremism. We just need to stop using it when it's convenient and eliminate the root causes which drive people towards extremism.

The fundamental problem here is that we spent 60 years helping the spread of Salafism to counteract the spread of socialism. Now we're reaping what we have sown.

[muto]

Sadly I think the only way for Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries to move forward is for them to go at their own pace like what is slowly happening in Saudi Arabia.

Things might be different if the Soviets didn’t invade Afghanistan, and Bush jr. didn’t destabilize Iraq, but who knows.

[Jastall]

It has everything to do with it. Your example of the Soviet-Afghan war was a cold war proxy war between two empire states, perhaps even a third. It can not be compared to the UK or the USA fighting a low power state.

The Afghan war of 2001 was a proxy as well, lol. Nobody in Washington at the time gave a shit about Afghanistan proper, it's a pile of rocks, but it's a pile of rocks sitting near to Pakistan and not too far from Iran. Just like the invasion of Iraq was about Iran when it came down to it. Not to say going to these two places was a good idea mind you, the results speak for themselves after all, but it very much was a proxy war and the targets weren't chosen at random or because Donald Rumsfeld felt like having his own pile of rocks.

It's not about democracy or anything like that. America was quite happy and able to enforce regimes changes regardless of being a democracy (see Argentina for exhibit 1 of many). It's about Afghanistan being a nation only on paper when in practice it's more like a very loose collection of set-in-their-ways clans and tribes who have no interest in unification unless somebody's trying to conquer them, after which they go back to their usual ways. There's no regime to change unless you invest a truly disproportionate amount of resources to build one from scratch, which nobody wants to do because again it's a pile of rocks. A bunch of African countries have the same problems, where States created wholecloth by colonization and/or decolonization are barely recognized by their own citizens who care more about tribal/racial affiliations than anything else, so there's no central government to take over in the first place.

[Kreuger]

Seems both Kandahar and Herat (third largest city) has fallen today.

[jonnysensible]

the russians left them loads of AK's and now the americans have left them loads of humvees, nice.

I'm still proud of how i served my country in the Afgan conflict.

[Edge-]

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/...liban-official

Decades of war, trillions of dollars, thousands of Americans, tens of thousands of Afghan citizens, and were looking at a power-sharing agreement between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

Man, we should like, never spread democracy and liberate countries ever again. We really, really, really, really, really, really fuckin suck at it.

[Fugus]

Anyone paying any attention knew this would happen, we just never realized just how quickly it would happen.

We let the group responsible for this ideological shift have a hold on them for decades and decades, it would take us even longer to clean up our mess and we know it.

The ONLY way we could actually effect the changes that we claim we want would to have an occupation there for decades as well and would have to be relentless and stamping out that ideology while we were there while also making sure the Saudi's don't spread it either. Good luck with any part of that.

About the best we could hope to do out there would have been to pack up and willingly take the women and children who wanted out of there with us along with any others who wanted to flee that regime and then let those who choose to remain to sit and enjoy their sausage fest there that no one wants to deal with.

[Rustedsaint]

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/...liban-official

Decades of war, trillions of dollars, thousands of Americans, tens of thousands of Afghan citizens, and were looking at a power-sharing agreement between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

Man, we should like, never spread democracy and liberate countries ever again. We really, really, really, really, really, really fuckin suck at it.

Can’t liberate or spread democracy to people that don’t want it.