Sorry for the pedantry, but they weren’t actually - they were heavily Persianized Turkic foreigners. But the Ghaznavids based themselves out of Afghanistan and the Mughals eventually retreated there as a rump of the Timurid empire before re-expanding into India. So in both cases Afghanistan was the center of their operations (for a fairly brief period of time in the case of the Mughals).
Though there were a few “local” dynasties that emerged out of or were loosely based out of what is today Afghanistan from various origins (Saffarids, Samandids, Ghurids), these were pretty much all very heavily classically Persianate. I believe the first identifiable Pashtun dynasties didn’t emerge as rulers of a greater Afghanistan until the early 18th century.
The problem is that if enough people just lay down their arms then the folks who assisted us, like translators, WILL be summarily executed. The Taliban has already declared an intention to do this. If we just leave those translators there they are most likely doomed.
I think that’s a piss-poor return for them working for us, don’t you?
Which is absolutely something I can imagine in their minds: “Why should I expose the women and children of MY family and village to deprivation if I’m killed, and even to their own death in reprisal for my fighting, just so some Kabulites’ daughters that mean nothing to me can live their life their way?”
Plus I believe the ANA is made up of many who joined for a paycheck, or in support of a particular patron, not out of some commitment to a cause. The moment the patron looks weak… goodbye!
What we seem to be bad at is preparing these client regimes – not just the troops, the whole state apparatus – to stand without us around to directly back them up. To exist without the guarantee that A10s/F18s or a MLRS barrage can be called in as soon as you see heads poking over the ridge.
Everyone says “we should not get involved in nation-building”, which is true of us as occupiers, but the reality is that if someone doesn’t do some actual “nation building”, the troops of that client state will have nothing to stand for. And as Odesio points out that includes things like institutional culture.
That’s another. We have an outstanding record of saying, “now that you are not of use to us any more, goodbye, sucks 2 B U”.
That’s pretty much been history world-wide - women and children are the property of men, subject to the whims of the men in charge of them. I’m not saying it’s OK - I find it pretty repugnant - but that’s a historical norm pretty much everywhere and a present norm in quite a few places. How much American blood are you willing to spill to even attempt to change that?
The only thing we could realistically do is offer entry to our country to those willing to take it - but the men are the gatekeepers.
To be fair, the Iraqi military often deserted/surrendered when the US showed up (or a drone did, or foreign journalists) in 1990.
There’s a pattern here. I suspect that while the Iraqis may be willing to risk their lives for their homes they are less inclined to do so for a dictators in a distant city or for people from halfway around the world.
We did bring in a lot of the Hmong… after a delay… and there were all sorts of problems once they got here due to large cultural differences. And that was in an era more open to immigration than we currently have.
Which, to my mind, are not valid excuses for not offering asylum to Afghani translators and others who worked closely with the US over there.
The entire whole-ass US military presence in Afghanistan just got finished slinking out of the country with its tail between its legs, after not accomplishing jack shit for anybody.
Why do you expect a handful of riflemen to do what the most powerful military in the world couldn’t do? We should pay these people pensions forever for the inconvenience of signing on for our bullshit crusade and getting nothing for it but a target painted on their heads.
What does it say about us if we could do what we did to and in Afghanistan, then leave it as we did, and then somehow turn around and heap blame and shame on the people—even just the men—we left to hold the bag after our departure?
Having talked to a number of people who were in Afghanistan specifically to train Afghans in various skills including construction, engine maintenance, general infantry fighting and conventional operations, et cetera, one of the big problems (beyond the corruptions and provincialism) was just the fundamental lack of literacy among the population. Most Afghans have little formal education and so trying to teach any complex skill set starts with remedial training that is time consuming and frustrating. The notion that Afghans as a group will embrace and defend a fledgling democratic regime is patently absurd when their only experience with governance is at the tribal level and they don’t even have a basic understanding or appreciation for democracy.
It is worth noting that when we entered Afghanistan, the mission was never about nation-building (unlike Iraq where that was the explicit if badly misguided focus); it was about eradicating Al-Queda training bases and getting Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenants, even though by the time the Coalition forces were in Afghanistan en masse bin Laden was almost certainly already operating out of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. There has never been a clear mission or set of goals for Afghanistan besides taming the Taliban, and constantly shifting mission directives (destroy poppy fields, no protect poppy fields, liberate villages, no allow local warlords to govern villages, et cetera) meant that no record of progress or success could ever be made except for building roads and bridges that would eventually be mined, build schools and hospitals that were targets for suicide bombers, attack and take valleys and foothills only to abandon them a few weeks later; in short, a point for point repeat of every error made in the Viet Nam War (except conscription) down to the basic fact that we had no particular reason to be there at all. In fact, the CIA and US military had multiple opportunities to take out Osama bin Laden prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks and neglected to do so because of ‘bad optics’, as if killing a known terrorist financier would have somehow looked worse than being engaged in an 18 year long war in which nothing whatsoever was accomplished at the cost of trillions of dollars.
Brilliant plan; let’s just terrorize people endlessly with ineffectual drone strikes that will mostly kill noncombatants and create more generations of hopeless young men willing to engage in suicide bombing because how could that ever blowback on us? We’re the US of A, fuck yeah!
I understand the point of the sarcasm but sometimes - yes. Terrorizing people with drone strikes that will create hopeless more extremists may be the best thing in psychological warfare. It will undermine the Taliban’s image of strength when the militants hear day-in, day-out messages about “so-and-so- in our ranks got droned yesterday”. It takes 20-30 years to make a militant, but only 20-30 seconds to take him out.
But they weren’t, thats the issue. They abandoned their post when a numerically small group of ISIS fighters showed up. If the Iraqis who abandoned their posts are sunni I guess I can understand it, but if they were shi’ite they were allowing a group of people with a violent hostility towards them take over.
It would be like a heavily armed group of black soldiers taking off and running away when a small number of Klansmen showed up.
I have the feeling that quite a few of those Iraqis who were defending Mosul were NOT from Mosul. I imagine that enough of them said “fuck this noise, I am not defending this place that I have nothing to do with! If I have to defend some place, I am going to fight for my village!”. Tribal loyalty to their local village and place of origin, not to a nebulous greater idea of the “nation” of Iraq, is what motivates them.
And if enough people go away, the rest will follow, because they don’t want to be the last idiots left holding the bag in front of a nasty enemy that will want to kill them.
There’s actually some precedent for what you’ve described. We bombed the shit out of Cambodia and Laos, and it actually persuaded people the extremist regimes like the Khmer Rouge - responsible for killing close to 25% of Cambodia’s population - were better than the U.S.
Not really. They were basically convinced that their position was untenable, not helped by hysterical rumours of tens of thousands of ISIS fighters and a few adverse reverses… It was very similar to the French and British running away in May 1940 after Guderians breakthrough at Sedan (the second part is something that Anglo media likes to downplay), which also seems to be whats happening now in Afghanistan, at least from what I can glean from Afghan news sources. Garrisons are retreating since the feel wrongly or rightly they cannot hold out and need to withdraw to a “more defendable position”. But, a disorganised retreat leads to panic and panic leads to route.
