Afghanistan Today

In My Humble Opinion
503

I don’t think 1 or 2 is true, it looks like it’s a mixture. I think they are going to try to pay some lip service to liberalization that has occurred in the major urban areas, they will probably continue the long-held practice of ignoring or minimally involving themselves in the day-to-day life of rural tribal areas (this is basically the only strategy that has ever seen such areas settle down vs become violent and hostile to the central government, whomever that government is.)

They have a leader of the Haqqani network in the government they have formed, which is a bad sign because they were always viewed as being more of an international terrorist group. I think the Taliban will likely actively fight ISIS-K–the ideology of ISIS-K is not actually compatible with Taliban governance. I think it’s hard to predict what they will do with groups like al-Qaeda, if they allow them to build training camps and etc with impunity, then it will all but mandate turning Afghanistan into Yemen–a country regularly targeted by U.S. drones and cruise missiles for exactly that reason.

It’s honestly very hard to say what will happen, keep in mind that the Taliban didn’t really rule from 1996-2001, they become the dominant group in the country in 1996, but were still mostly operating as a Mujahideen group. They were actually only just starting to build out some nascent bureaucratic functions of a real state by the time we invaded. Before that things were very ad hoc and chaotic in Taliban Afghanistan, with rules changing based on what the Taliban commanders in the field said they were, and that could change based on who was in charge of local Taliban forces.

504

That’s a laugh. So far their big concession is to warn women to stay indoors because otherwise their soldiers might rape them.

Anyone who thought this was going to be an ‘inclusive’ Taliban is an idiot. I’m looking at you, Anthony Blinken.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/30/asia/fawad-andarabi-afghan-folk-singer-killed-intl/index.html

One of the Taliban demands was that their soldiers be provided ‘brides’. How sweet.

The U.S. handed Afghanistan over to the most vicious, backwards religious fanatics in the world with perhaps the exception of ISIS. And now the Taliban are doing to the people what murderous religious fanatics do. And, the US gave them 85 billion in weaponry to extend their horrors and protect themselves. A tragedy.

505

We didn’t hand it over to them, the people of Afghanistan chose that as their government. It is not our job to chose different.

506

The US has been giving them weaponry all along, in effect. That’s part of why some of us were against the invasion plan twenty years ago (and have seen no good reason to change our minds about it since).

Let’s not forget what organizations like the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, the people who’ve been really standing up for Afghan women’s rights, thought about the whole invasion debacle, as I mentioned back in post #402.

507

They also were not given $85bn in weaponry. It’s another in a long list of just completely inaccurate incorrect things that @Sam_Stone has taken to saying about Afghanistan–note that he has been called out on some of these claims multiple times and typically his tactic is to not at all acknowledge his claims are clearly demonstrated to be non-factual. That suggests a deliberate choice to be dishonest.

For one, the actual number he’s cribbing is $88bn–or $88.6bn if you want to be picky. That’s the amount of money allocated for the Afghan National Army or Police. But as has been widely reported in every reputable news source out there, this amount was not an equipment budget. Equipment was disbursed with this money, but the money covered lots of other things. Large portions of the money went to–or at least was allocated to–direct cash payments to the Afghan National Army and Police, intended to maintain their salaries. Instead about $300m a year of that went to “ghost soldiers”, which is why some of the real soldiers had gone months without being paid.

While the accounting appears to not be perfect, most estimates suggest about $28bn of the $88bn had gone to material/equipment. The rest of it went to personnel costs, training, consumables (like fuel) etc. Note that is $28bn spent over 20 years. Very likely some of that equipment purchased 20 years ago no longer exists, things break down and get destroyed in war zones. Some of the aircraft we know were actually flown into Uzbekistan as the government fell, so we also know that not all of it is in the hands of the Taliban. There’s also been numerous posts dismissing most of the hyperbole about how much of a difference this equipment cache makes. To be frank if the Taliban is smart at all if they have stacked pallets of U.S. military equipment the best bang for their buck would actually be to resell it on the black market, the Taliban is starved for cash–they had financing to support an insurgent army, but have nowhere near the money needed to run Afghanistan’s government, and while humanitarian aid is going to be turned on, it’s already looking like it’ll be in the low hundreds of millions amount, and carefully directed to food aid and etc–not easily militarized. It is probably unlikely a patron steps in to subsidize the Afghan civil government to the degree the United States did. Maybe China or Russia will help some, at some lower level. But until then, say there’s just $10bn of equipment ready to sell, if they can move it that will help them quite a bit in the short term.

508

That was the number shown pretty much everywhere when I first said that. Now it appeara that it’s not that much, but still many billions of dollars worth of advanced weaponry. . Hooray.

And in other Afghanistan news…

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/politics/kabul-drone-strike-us-military-intl-hnk/index.html

Biden promised swift and furious reaction to the bombing, and miraculously the military had good enough intel to find the ‘planner’ of the bombing, even though its intel overall was so bad they didn’t have any warning of the bombing, or for that matter that the Taliban would take the country as fast as they did. But it was apparently good enough to specifically target someone who planned the attack they didn’t know about. Milley called it a ‘righteous’ drone strike.

Except it was a U.S. friendly Afghan worker and his family. Seven children killed.

509

Oh, now they tell us it’s okay to get upset about the US killing Afghan civilians. What a difference twenty years makes.

510

Yeah, I kmew you’d go personal. Anyway, there’s a huge difference between that and a rush job to find a terrorist to kill, and get it wrong and kill an innocent family.

511

I criticized the inconsistency of your rhetoric in two separate posts that you made about the decidedly non-personal topic of the US tragically killing civilians in Afghanistan. Sorry if you’re sensitive about it, but I don’t think it’s in any way an unfairly “personal” observation to make.

You’re saying that none of the earlier killings of civilians by US forces in Afghanistan were the result of “a rush job to find a terrorist to kill, and get it wrong and kill an innocent family”?

Because I rather doubt that. ISTM that the US has been making a lot of these tragic and avoidable errors, with fatal consequences for Afghans, right from the get-go.

512

Is the recent mosque bombing by ISIS an indication that Afghanistan will continue down the terrorist rabbit hole?

I found this AP story interesting

In its claim of responsibility, the region’s IS affiliate identified the bomber as a Uygher Muslim, saying the attack targeted both Shiites and the Taliban for their purported willingness to expel Uyghers to meet demands from China. The statement was carried by the IS-linked Aamaq news agency.

So according to the article China is demanding Uyghers be turned over to them.

That’s disturbing.

513
514

Curious to see what Dopers think of this story in The Atlantic. In essence it says there was a popular ironic veteran T-shirt: We were winning when I left. The article accuses generals of taking this seriously, suggesting the billions of dollars spent was not proof of a serious generational commitment. Do the generals have a point or is this an attempt to make burnish bullshyte?

515

I think that we lost in Afghanistan as soon as we started talking about invading Iraq and once we installed Karzai, a corrupt puppet, so we could declare victory and move on to destabilizing the Middle East, we dealt our efforts in Afghanistan a fatal blow.

516

We lost Afghanistan when Zbigniew Brzeziński decided that Afghan lives and the future of Afghanistan as a nation was less important than playing Cold Wars games and giving the Soviet Union it’s very own ‘Vietnam war’.

517

Afghanistan was never ‘winnable’. There was no middle class with a vested interest in peace, little infrastructure investment to protect, and a fractured population that is less ‘Afghani’ than it is a collection of peoples of different tribes existing in the same region.

That said, America and the coalition owned it when they went in and upset the status quo. Giving young women the hope of a better future and an education and a glimpse of a modern life, only to throw them to the barbarian warlords was a despicable act. As General Powell said, if you break it, you own it. You are responsible for it.

America gave those women false hope. It re-organized the government forces to learn to fight with American air power, then took it away. It exposed thousands of Afghanis to retribution by the Taliban by getting them to work for the occupation, then withdrew its protection. It promised tens of thousands of people who exposed themselves to retribution safe passage out of the country in case of withdrawal - and then reneged on the deal. And it withdrew in such a haphazard, botched way that it looked weak and left the Taliban with billions in weaponry and normalized them on the world stage. The Taliban are now significantly more powerful than they were before 2001. And as we’ve seen, they’ve already begun harboring terrorists again.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan, especially the way it was done, is IMO the most shameful thing America has done at least since Vietnam.

Future stability of Afghanistan will be like the past - a failed state with warlords running things and a fig leaf of a central government in Kabul. I suspect it will be ‘stable’ in its horrific treatment of women and children for a very long time. I don’t see anyone else trying to occupy that country and pacify it any time soon.

For the U.S. military it hurt morale badly, and Bagram Air Force Base was the largest, most heavily defended airbase in the world, located right in the heart of a very troubled and dangerous part of the world. It sure would be nice to have that these days.

The sudden withdrawal and reneging on commitments also demonstrated to future international partners that America is not to be trusted, which will hamper future coalition building and push more countries in that region into the Russia/China axis. Hell, I’m about as pro-American as a foreigner can be, and I’d be leery of my country entering into a coalition with the U.S. right now without some serious, hard guarantees with penalties for screwing us over.

Afghanistan will go back to being the place where women are abused and empires go to die. The U.S., on the other hand, has suffered a severe blow to its credibility and military.

The only personal connection I had was some military friends who had done a tour over there a long time ago.

518

And yet, America went into Afghanistan having learned nothing from Vietnam, and ignoring the Powell Doctrine (as apparently I previously mentioned).

519

How did Canada withdraw? Did you guys do better?

520

I’m not sure what you are asking. ‘Canada’ didn’t withdraw. Biden withdrew without approval of any of the other coalition partners, who were surprised and angered by the move.

That’s from the UK report, released jointly with Canada. Our language was more muted but of the same vein:

BTW, in case you think this is just an excuse to bash Biden, I thnk Trump is just as responsible. He’s the one who started the ball rolling. His later claim that he would not have completely withdrawn (or done it ‘perfectly’ if he did) was typical Trump ass-covering.

521

I think the poster means when Canadian forces left back in 2014. Per wiki, it was done with “little fanfare”: Canada in the War in Afghanistan - Wikipedia

522

What, even, would “winning” have meant? Leaving the country as a free democracy? That would have been possible, but it would have required an American-controlled government for at least a generation, during which time we guaranteed schooling to everyone, and cracked down hard on the religious extremists. Which I don’t think anyone in America was willing to do.