Afghanistan Today

In My Humble Opinion
102

I think the fact all these provincial political and military leaders have handed over their capitals without a fight is evidence we had not, in fact, made any progress at all. The people of Afghanistan have made a choice to not fight. That in itself is telling.

And I’m saying you just literally have a lack of knowledge of this situation. You’re talking about the Taliban like they are some sort of “viral extremist ideological group”, I guess because you just know they’re “bad Muslims” so you assume that means they operate like ISIS and al-Qaeda. They do not. ISIS and al-Qaeda are founded on principles of using violence to advance extremist Islamic ideology, and both groups happily accept anyone, be they Indonesian, Chechen, Arab, Turkish, Pashtun, Punjabi, Tajik etc who is willing to pick up a gun and spread their brand of insanity.

The Taliban is not like this at all. The Taliban is a Pashtun Mujahadeen group. They have conservative Islamic views, but they are first and foremost a Pashtun ethnic army. They do almost none of the “outreach” and ideas growing activities of groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. They don’t recruit young Westerners of Muslim background on YouTube and Facebook. The Taliban have very little history of any activities outside of Afghanistan and western Pakistan. There is little evidence they even seek to engage in such activities.

This isn’t me saying the Taliban are “good guys”, it’s just me saying they are the same people who rose up in rebellion in 1928 when the Afghan King tried to implement western reforms (like liberalization of the treatment of women) or again in 1944, or in 1979 when the USSR invaded Afghanistan and started to try to disrupt traditional tribal religious and cultural customs.

Pakistan is a trillion dollar economy with the sixth largest military, it has nuclear weapons. It also has few of the moral qualms and reservations the West do at fighting insurgents. Pakistan has 225 million residents, Afghanistan has around 30m. The Taliban is the predominant Mujahadeen group solely because Pakistan has chosen them to be, when Pakistan switched support from Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin to the Taliban in the mid-1990s that is what enabled the Taliban to become the dominant Mujahadeen group. If Pakistan chose to switch its support to another group, that group would likely become dominant.

Pakistan saw a situation with lots of Mujahadeen groups and sought to consolidate them into a single group, and to exercise leverage over them. For basic geopolitical reasons. Pakistan is who controls the situation, the idea that the Taliban is somehow going to change Paksitan’s domestics politics is frankly bizarre and unhinged. A Pashtun conservative religious movement has minimal influence in Pakistan aside from some support in Pashtun tribal areas in Pakistan (which make up a small part of the country.)

The original genesis of the Taliban, a group whose name means “The Students” was conservative religious Pashtuns educated in Pakistani religious schools along the Afghan border. In the 1990s they actually formed allegiances with Tajik and Hazar groups which helped them consolidate power (in the years since those other groups have largely eschewed them again, as the traditional ethnic divisions in Afghanistan remain significant.)

103

Just wanted to say that this has been a very helpful thread for those like me who don’t have a clear understanding of what constitutes the state of Afghanistan.

Having said that, I believe we will see Chinese involvement in the decades to come, only in a very different manner than what’s been done before by others.

104

Is it too early to speculate about where the global superpowers go from here wrt to Afghanistan?

105

So President Ghani has fled the country… military helicopters are ferrying embassy staff to the airport… documents are being burned on the roof on the embassy… the airport is apparently taking fire…

US secretary of state Blinken says ‘This is not Saigon’, but it certainly seems to be a close approximation.

106

Taliban announcement:

‘All your base are belong to us.’

107

I’m kinda upset that Biden ‘lost’ Afghanistan (in reality, he really didn’t), but I’m more upset by the apparent unwillingness to own up to the fact that they completely miscalculated this situation. Either that, or they didn’t miscalculate but said one thing in public but felt in private that it doesn’t matter of Afghanistan falls like a house of cards, which I would find equally deserving of rebuke if that was their analysis. FTR, I think the Biden admin believed what they wanted to believe, which was that the Afghan government would hold up and only gradually deteriorate over a period of a year or so.

108

Blinken says this is not Saigon, and I would agree with this, though have only read and seen documentaries about that.

But what do Winken and Nod think?

109

They’re in free-fall because the Afghan government was much weaker than we realized. There was a good report on today’s NPR weekend addition, which featured an Irish journalist who’s covered the conflict for a while. She pointed out that there was significant government corruption - something later echoed by some of the other guests, including a former commander there and a former ambassador during the Bush years. The corruption was so bad it was to the point where soldiers were either not getting paid or getting paid late, and history makes it pretty clear what happens to a country when an army doesn’t get paid.

Afghanistan’s Taliban has zero influence on Pakistani elections. As @Martin_Hyde pointed out to you, Pakistanis supported the Taliban because even though the Taliban are Pashtun, they have not supported the idea of Pashtun nationalism. The Pashtun nationalism threat that Turkey deals with is somewhat similar to the Kurdish “problem” that Turkey and Iran have. Pakistan was never comfortable with a Pashtun democratic nation-state to its north for fear of inspiring unrest in their own country.

110

I think the Biden admin fully thought the Ghani government would collapse, I do think he thought it would take longer because I think the internal intelligence probably showed it would take longer. But I also think Biden has known Afghanistan was going to end up like this for a long time. As recently as 2014 I was still saying that just due to how large and how much money we’d funneled into the Afghan National Army, even if things got rough after we left there’s no way the government would just collapse. That’s because I was going off intelligence assessments and reports from our military, as in I was actually reading through some of those massive documents.

What we now know, and the Washington Post has done good reporting on this, is our government knew since 2006 that none of the training and equipping efforts was actually working, and the entire thing was a house of card. By the late Obama Administration we the people had been systematically lied to for over a decade about the state of the war. It ends up many people on the inside knew how bad it was for ages. Biden wanted Obama to pull out in 2011, Biden had the highest level access to all of this information, so he knew full well before he became President that much of our Afghan National Government was a paper fiction.

The Washington Post has a pretty good series up right now on it, called the “Afghanistan Papers” (a reference to the Pentagon Papers leak back in the Vietnam War that revealed our government had known for years Vietnam was an unwinnable mess, and that they had no idea what they were doing), it’s a pretty good series and highlights how after an initial 5 year period of bumbling ignorance, we actually did deep research and study and found out just how bad the situation in Afghanistan really was. The government’s response was to hide this information and just keep doing what the top brass wanted (which always boils down to more, troops, more money for training the Afghan allies.) None of the underlying issues were ever meaningfully addressed.

111

As usual, good post, Martin. Bang on.

112

Biden’s quotes about “I have confidence in the better trained, better equipped, Afghan military” are going to be memed against him for a long time.

113

I imagine there’s a lot of laughter in the Kremlin right now.

114

Not just female Afghans, but young men as well, most of whom want nothing to do with the Taliban either but face kidnapping by them, etc.

115

Afghanistan’s military collapse: Illicit deals with Taliban and mass desertions - The Washington Post

Well this article paints a picture of an Afghan National Government so rotten to the core it even shocks me–and I’ve been consuming a lot of information about how corrupt and incompetent this government was. There is no way that American intelligence and decision makers was unaware things were this bad, considering how easily the Washington Post was able to secure this information. If they somehow did not know, a lot of people in our intelligence agencies need fired. Since I think it is likely it did know, it’s yet more exposure of how significantly our government has just lied about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan.

From what this article says about the only thing we could have done would have been, many years ago, ripped up the Afghan National Government from the ground up and started with something new. I can’t help but think our endorsing Hamid Karzai’s election win 2009 may have set the stage for it, albeit it’s hard to deny that corruption has always been pervasive in regions like this. But we basically knew Karzai had won a fraudulent election, and by endorsing it we probably should have known we were setting the stage for a government built on corruption. The fact we went 12 years after that without addressing or even acknowledging these issues publicly is reprehensible.

I have little real reason to blame the Afghans who cut deals with the Taliban, in an environment like that it’s hard to justify being the one to step up and die when so many of your countrymen are deeply corrupt.

For those who are paywalled out of WaPo–what the article covers is that after the Trump Administration signed the Doha Agreement, local government officials started to receive offers (cash offers) from the Taliban. These offers were basically agreements to turn over weapons and surrender. The Afghan National Government knew this was going on, and did nothing. Instead they would report these buyouts as “cease fires” and not acknowledge they actually represented local control being passed over to the Taliban.

As more and more villages had leaders sell out, things started to “roll up” to the district level, as more and more district leaders took these deals, it started to roll up to the provincial level. It seems highly likely that the Taliban had actually won this battle six months ago or more, having simply bought out most of the police, political and military leadership across the country. The fact that we are only learning about this publicly now is a disgrace. The fact that the Taliban was able to buy a country for likely pennies compared to the vast treasure we sunk into it, should be a major lesson for America going forward.

As to the question of why people were so willing to sell out? It sounds like the Afghan National Government has gone months and months without paying its people, sometimes six months or more. It’s not surprising these people see that, and then see that the Trump Administration signs an agreement with the Taliban…and the mindset becomes “get while the getting is good.” I have to give a lot of blame to the Trump Administration, these deals were going on for a year under their nose, and it seems highly unlikely they didn’t know about it. I also have to blame Biden for misrepresenting the situation in the country when he justified his withdrawal. There is little doubt in my mind now Biden knew the country was going to collapse imminently, he should have been forthright about that and said he was choosing to withdraw anyway. It is very duplicitous for him to act like he was withdrawing to let Afghanistan “decide its own fate”, when he almost certainly had information that this was already a done deal.

116

I don’t think there will be much going forward; the apex of American power has been reached and the world knows it.

117

What’s crazy about it is the Taliban essentially “bought” the country. I wonder how much the total value was of all their buyouts of local officials. It wouldn’t shock me at all if it is less than $10m. Compare that to the vast sums of money we basically sent to that country for nothing.

I think some of the conceptions of power involved also just don’t make sense. No one is doing shit like this. Like Russia and China have their fingers in some overseas pies, but all of their overseas activities combined represent like 1/10th of the money and men we involved in Afghanistan the last 20 years. We also were involved in Iraq for much of that time as well. During WWII and the Cold War there was some strategic justification for being so heavily invested with our resources into the affairs of other countries. I don’t really see that this is true any longer. There is also frankly, a high level moral issue to address–we don’t actually have any inherent right to tell other countries how they should be governed.

118

Not sure what you mean by this. I am from India, can you please specify where in India have you seen tribal customs dominate like Afghanistan ?

119

It’s a long article. Here is the initial bit.

By Susannah George, WaPo: 8/15/21

“KABUL — The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s military that allowed Taliban fighters to walk into the Afghan capital Sunday despite 20 years of training and billions of dollars in American aid began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s lowest-ranking officials.

The deals, initially offered early last year,
were often described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a U.S. official.

Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces, according to interviews with more than a dozen Afghan officers, police, special operations troops and other soldiers.

Within a little more than a week, Taliban fighters overran more than a dozen provincial capitals and entered Kabul with no resistance, triggering the departure of Afghanistan’s president and the collapse of his government. Afghan security forces in the districts ringing Kabul and in the city itself simply melted away. By nightfall, police checkpoints were left abandoned and the militants roamed the streets freely.“

It goes on and on, so this is only a brief part, which I hope is okay.

120

Making clear that I don’t think this thread is or should be about India, a very simple case in point would be the various tribes of the Andaman Islands which are in some cases completely self-governing by tribal practice. I suspect (but could be mistaken) you would protest the point, but something like 8% of India’s population are made up of constitutionally defined “Scheduled Tribes” who generally have their own cultural and language background, depending on which region of India we are talking about they have varying degrees of both official and unofficial autonomy.

121

That would have been best achieved by keeping India out of it - don’t you think so ?

So you mean - like the Innuit are self governed. Or there are 574 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages.

So, by your logic Afghanistan is like the US or Canada because it has Tribes just like the US / Canada does ?