I guess the only question is whether Kabul falls.
Im guessing within the week. Who has the forces to stop them?
I think that China would be very capable of locking down their border with Afghanistan. But I could be wrong about their willingness to supply arms.
Its only 47 miles so I agree. But the right amount of money in the right hands…
Imo the proper policy toward the Taliban for the big powers is to leave them alone. If the Taliban do not repeat past mistakes then maybe things will work out internationally. Not so much for female Afghanis.
The Afghan standing army is all that’s left to protect the capital.
I agree. I also suspect that the Taliban have suffered their fare share in the past 20 years and will probably contain their bullshit to Afghani territories.
They will suffer the most.
You are right, but my background was meant to provide context for current events. This is never better than a detailed understanding, and something media rarely provides. (In part because it is hard, and they may believe most people are not interested).
It’s just possible they didn’t care, whether they knew or not, and they cared least of all about the well-being of the Afghan people, but found making their country “safe” to be a useful pretext for occupation in pursuit of Al Qaeda leaders.
I don’t really know that there will be tremendous strategic impact for the United States when the Afghan government falls. The Taliban is a Pashtun religious group that will be the dominant player in Afghanistan, it will not rule the country in any coherent sense outside of Pashtun dominated areas. Some border regions will be entirely outside of its control, and some other regions where Tajik or other tribal populations are high, will only be partially under its control.
We had someone in our State Department that did a pretty serious assessment of Afghanistan back in like 2006, and he correctly pointed out the many ways in which nothing we were doing there was actually going to be successful. The Bush Administration just shuffled his report into some folder and ignored it. A few years later a retired General was brought in to assess the situation, and he said that while the (then) military situation was fine because of our large troop presence, the state of the Afghan military and its domestic institutions was terrible. He basically said it would take 14 years or more (meaning out until 2020+) to fix it, we did not implement or even consider any of the suggestions he made. The Pentagon and three different Administrations basically kept pretend what we were doing was working, and then finally we decided we’d leave. Unsurprisingly this exposes what had been known by experts internally for years–nothing we had done was really working.
Why? To understand that you have to understand Afghanistan. Afghanistan is best understood as a pre-modern region. A feudal Kingdom would work fine in Afghanistan. A modern plural democracy? Very, very difficult. The reason is the word Afghanistan has no meaning tied to an ethnic group, language, culture etc. There is no one in the world who really identifies themselves as an “Afghan.” Now, to an outsider someone with Afghanistan nationality / citizenship might use that term, but in their day to day life, these people view themselves as being members of their tribe, after their tribe they view themselves as being part of their larger ethnic group–the major ethnic groups in Afghanistan are Pashtun (around 42% of the population), Tajik (27%), Hazara (9%), Uzbek (9%) those four make up almost 90% of the population, then there are many smaller ethnic groups as well.
The Pashtuns have historically dominated the region, and there was a time in the early 19th century when there was a Pashtun Empire called the Durrani Empire that controlled what is today Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are lots of Pashtuns in western Pakistan. However the Durrani Empire was pushed out of the region that makes up modern day Pakistan by a Punjabi Sikh Empire, who took over the Punjab and Kashmir regions. The Punjabi are the largest ethnic group in Pakistan–Pakistan is similar to Afghanistan in that it does not actually have any sort of national ethnic signifier.
How does all of this matter? It matters because we crafted a certain type of country when we setup Afghanistan’s national government, that is a government intended to function as a plural democracy. For that to function, you need a significant portion of the population who are not Pashtun first who are not Tajik first, but who are Afghan first. Think of the troubles the United States had until we firmly transitioned to a country where most people think of themselves as “Americans.” If you do not have a shared national identity, and your population does not value having a shared national state, things get very difficult.
For example, say you’re a Tajik that has joined the Afghan National Army. Your commander is a Pashtun. You do not like Pashtuns, do not want to take orders from them. You are stationed in a Pashtun area of Afghanistan. One day you hear the Taliban is coming. What do you do? You leave your post. You were just sticking with the job for the pay check. You, a Tajik, are not going to take orders from a Pashtun CO to fight a Pashtun military force in Pashtun territory.
Now, serving some Tajik warlord in Tajik territory? You might fight to the death against the Taliban coming into your territory.
Now imagine you are Pashtun in the Afghan National Army, you hear the Taliban is coming. Maybe you aren’t allied with the Taliban, but the Taliban are Pashtun. These are your brothers. You have some disagreements with some of their policies and ideas, but are you willing to shed Pashtun blood for the idea of an “Afghanistan”? An Afghanistan where you might have to some day share power with or take orders from a Tajik? Not likely.
As long as thinking like this is common, a plural democracy, and the military supporting it, is simply not possible in Afghanistan.
How do you transition to a society where that is possible? Good fucking question. But building schools roads, and funneling weapons and military training obviously isn’t close to enough.
The problem with Afghanistan is not that the Taliban is strong, it’s that the concept of Afghanistan is weak. The Afghan National Government will likely collapse sometime in the next 12 months. When that occurs, since the Taliban is associated with the largest ethnic group in the country and is the best supplied and equipped right now, they will become pre-eminent. Pre-eminent meaning the most powerful in an unstable and somewhat splintered system of rule. How long that will persist before the other ethnic groups break into massive civil war and we’re right back to where we’ve been historically is anyone’s guess. The Taliban had some advantages in the late 1990s in that they were receiving a very high level of support from Pakistan, militarily and financially. It is believed they’ve continued to receive low levels of support all along from Pakistan, but nothing like they were in the 1990s. To prop up any sort of stable Taliban rule, Pakistan will have to both risk angering the United States and be willing to get involved in the situation to push more money to the Taliban.
it’s an interesting question as to why the Punjabi-dominated country of Pakistan has ever supported the Pashtun Taliban–when Pakistan has issues in its own border regions with fairly lawless areas of Pashtun tribal people. The simple answer is kind of an “enemy you know” situation. Pakistan has no designs on occupying Afghanistan, it doesn’t even really care much to bother its own Pashtun tribal people more than is strictly necessary. They see it as basically “keeping the Pashtuns happy”, have a Pashtun group that Pakistan props up, and it helps general Pashtun agitation either stay lower, or cross over into Afghanistan and get directed at Tajiks and other ethnic groups instead of east toward Punjabi areas.
Its interesting that you mention the Afghan people,
but making both the West and Afghan women safe from the Taliban was a worthy objective.
For what it is worth, the most stable periods in Afghanistan’s history were the 19th century from about the 1820s until the late 1920s, then from the late 1920s up until the early 1970s.
The dynasty that founded the Durrani Empire in the early 19th century kept things pretty stable, when the Sikh Empire took away the eastern half of the Empire, they continued to rule what is today modern day Afghanistan fairly peacefully. They had a brief bit of internal strife and someone deposed the King for someone else, and the Sikh Empire with British support came in during the 1830s and defeated the usurper and put the deposed King back on his throne. A few years later local revolts pushed the British out and put the usurper back on the throne. Aside from that flare up things were pretty peaceful until 1878 when the British (now neighbors after annexation the Sikh Empire into the Raj) went to war with Afghanistan. The war was brief and the British wisely left Afghanistan mostly alone–they made them sign a treaty that let the British handle all their foreign diplomacy, but the Afghan King was otherwise free to run his country as he saw fit. During this period of time the British also drew the Durand Line, which is the modern day border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
After WWI, the Afghan King declared full independence and the British peacefully allowed it. However he got into trouble in the late 1920s when he started to try and modernize the country, including instituting secular reforms like ending the traditional head dress for women and things of that nature. That lead to a large popular revolt that turned into the 1928-1929 Afghan Civil War. The King abdicated, an extremist usurper took over, the old King’s cousin kept fighting and deposed him and took the throne. The new King rolled back all the secular/modern reforms to appease the people, but he was assassinated shortly afterward by a supporter of the original reformer King (who was his cousin.) After his assassination his son took over and we actually had what was probably the longest/most peaceful period, which ran from 1929 up until like 1972/74 or so. During this time the monarch worked to improve education, roads, tried to modernize the economy, built out foreign relations. There was a bit of a tribal revolt in the mid-1940s, but it didn’t get too out of hand. Then a military leader lead a coup and deposed the King, and established the Republic of Afghanistan with him as the leader (it was a one party dictatorship though, not a democratic republic), but he was deposed by Soviet backed communist groups around 5 years later, and then the Soviets came in and that’s when things got really, really bad in the country, and to some degree they’ve never been remotely right again.
If there’s any lesson to learn from the long and mostly peaceful rule of Afghan monarchs from 1929-1974, it’s that they primarily maintained the peace by not trying to tell tribal groups what to do. The King functioned as the “top dog” in a loose, quasi-feudal arrangement. The King worked to build infrastructure and modern organs of a state out in areas that were less rural, more educated etc, but didn’t do things to start shit with the many rural and conservative tribal peoples. One of the immediate mistakes the Soviets made is trying to do what they’d done in neighboring stans they controlled, which was start various systems of indoctrination and Sovietization, which violated local customs and beliefs, and lead to massive resistance.
Historically these tribes don’t have a problem bending the knee to some sort of leader, as long as they leader doesn’t get into their business. Unfortunately, a setup like that means allowing tribal governments to mostly run themselves, and they are going to do things that, by modern first world standards, we would view as abject barbarism and monstrosities.
Despite the propaganda you may have heard over the years, protecting women (and children) was never an objective of the US occupation of Afghanistan and little more than token efforts for the cameras were made in this regard. Nor was stopping the opium production, capturing Osama bin Laden (which the US could have done at multiple instances prior to 11 September 2001), or routing al Qaeda. It wasn’t even about pipelines, petroleum, or mineral resources, although I’m sure that had the occupation been more successful American businesses would have vied to control and sell access to those resources. It was fundamentally about having a military presence in a strategic area of the world that the US does not otherwise have ready access to, and specifically about bracketing Iran (between Afghanistan and Iraq) as being the biggest organized ‘troublemaker’ in the Middle East region. Everything else, including the failed nation-building exercises, is window-dressing to that neocon objective of bringing Iran to heel, an effort that already failed when Iraq was overrun by ISIL.
The collapse of the Afghan as a unified republic was predictable, and while it is heartbreaking to see people fleeing in fear after the promises of security and stability made by Western powers led by the US, this was going to happen when foreign powers withdrew, whether now, ten years ago (when we should have withdrawn), or decades later after more money, resources, and the lives of American servicepeople were poured into the region. The only reason to remain there is to maintain that military presence at great cost and to questionable advantage even if you believe that the US should lead the fight against Islamic fundamentalism. The Taliban is not any kind of threat outside of Pashtun regions and are uninterested in allying with Salafi militants seeking a pan-Arab/North African state, much less Shia, Wahhabist, Qutbist, and other transnational or global jihadism movements.
With any luck and some amount of subterfuge, we can persuade the Chinese to involve themselves in the region and bring the same drain of resources, funding, and international prestige upon their burgeoning empire as has been experienced by every ‘great nation’ that has come before with the thought it could break the streak and tame Ariyanem. Such a prize has defeated and often destroyed empires from antiquity through today, but there is no reason that China shouldn’t take a shot at it.
Stranger
Doesn’t that beg the question? The thrust of my criticism is that I am not satisfied that that was, in fact the objective, protestations to that effect notwithstanding. Not even as it relates to "the West"in general.
The wellbeing of Americans, ie to not be killed by terrorists trained within their borders was the obvious main objective. The dismantling of the medieval social system was a welcome side effect.
that’s not what your link says. The offer was to try OBL themselves under Islamic law.
WASHINGTON (CNN) – The White House on Sunday rejected an offer from Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban to try suspected terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan under Islamic law.
That could have been had without the occupation, or at least without the prolonged efforts at nation-building that led to Afghans taking a stake in our presence and hazarding their own positions in life on the gamble that we actually did want to put in the effort to create lasting improvements in their society.
Was it dismantled, though? Certainly doesn’t seem that way in the news.
For the record, I think the US invaded Afghanistan and stayed there so President Bush could have half a chance in hell at re-election after 9/11, and the US stayed there as long as it did because neither he nor Obama nor, as it turns out, Trump wanted to pull the rug out from under that house of cards.
If there is something that can be done to alleviate the suffering of the people of Afghanistan, then the US and it’s NATO allies should do it. We bear moral blame for a large part of what is happening now regardless.
This is silly. What is happening now is a product of hundreds of years of history. If we bare any blame its for leaving too early. Nation building has been successful (Germany and Japan) but a nation has to want to evolve.
It seems that the Great Game is actually the Kobayashi Maru.
Hundreds of years of history, the last 20 of which occurred in light of a US-led occupation. Literally EVERYTHING that has occurred in history has been the product of hundreds of years (and so many more) of prior history, even into pre-history and the archeological record.
You cannot pretend the last 20 years didn’t happen or even just that it wasn’t of great significance in establishing present conditions by appealing to “hundreds of years” of prior history. The US did not have to spend 20 years occupying Afghanistan. That’s the point. That’s where a share of the moral blame lies.
Except this was neither the objective nor the outcome, nor did the United States take serious measures to prevent airliner hijacking prior to 11 September 2001 in the interest of national security. As noted above, the Taliban were quite willing to negotiate the elimination of Osama bin Laden and his senior leadership prior to the US invasion of Afghanistan, and the invasion itself did not produce the target which eventually had to be captured via extralegal rendition from a third sovereign nation and summary execution without even the pretense of trial. The occupation of Afghanistan continued long after bin Laden was eliminated and all Al Qaeda forces were forced from Afghanistan. Over US$2,200B was spent in the attempt of “dismantling of the medieval social system” and construction of infrastructure to turn Afghanistan into a model nation, virtually none of which remains intact or had any effect upon altering social structures.
As for “the wellbeing of Americans”, the United States had numerous opportunities to take out “UBL” prior to the 2001 attacks and neglected to do so. The Bush Administration infamously relegated counterterrorism and the specific credible threats of another attack on the World Trade Center to backburner status prior to 11 September 2001. The FBI failed to share intelligence about young Arab men attending flight schools to learn how to fly but not land commercial airliners. And the security measure that counterterrorist experts had been recommending for decades—securing the cockpit from intrusion while in flight—was not instituted for no explicable reason other than the paltry cost to add security features to the cockpit door. Post-9/11, the most obvious measures taken were purely security theatre, and particularly the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, a quasi-law enforcement agency employing mall cops to wantonly root through luggage and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on X-ray scanners and explosive detectors that were found to be ineffective.
Meanwhile, the twin occupations of Afghanistan (under the nominal purpose of capturing UBL and beheading Al Qaeda) and Iraq (with the manufactured justification of those infamous “Weapons of Mass Destruction” of which no evidence was ever found) have more than doubled the US national debt while fostering a new generation of angry young men who have every reason to believe that the United States is the “Greater Satan”, all done in an attempt to force regime change in Iran. That is the actual objective which we are no closer to achieving after twenty years and somewhere north of US$5T.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan is at least as medieval as it was in the pre-2001 era, and the Taliban are now likely better equipped and have a greater following than they did then. If this is what success looks like, I don’t think we can afford continued failure.
Stranger
There you said it: “the nation has to want to evolve.”
Implying: there IS a cohesive nation to want to evolve.
In those two examples, some of us would refuse to call it Nation Building. There was a need for a rebuilding of social institutions and the physical components of the economy, but the nations Germany and Japan existed through the cataclysm and emerged on the other side. There were leaders to whom the Allied occupiers could go with some confidence they’d get with the plan and get things done. You don’t have that in Afghanistan.
Earlier today I heard an interview with Gen. Petraeus. In his statements he let out that part of the problem is that not just did the Afghan military lose its coalition backup for heavy duty fights, but that as the US withdrew, many of the 16,000 “contractors” who were the ones keeping the technology, modern weapons and command systems, transportation and aviation assets of ANA running, were, in my own paraphrase, exercising their right as a private contractor to quit and GTFO and thus the assets were “degrading”. IOW, the US “prepared and trained” a hollow Afghan “national” military that could not stand w/o outsiders holding their hand. Yet another case of astonishingly low ROI.