Anyone in Vegas taking odds on how long before the Taliban regains control after the U.S. troops leave?
I’d bet a hundred buck that Karzi will be dead within a year and the Taliban in full control within 18 months.
None of the reports I’ve read indicate the so called Afghan army has any chance. Heck most of them will probably desert the day after the U.S. leaves. Members of the Afghan police are still routinely kidnapped and executed for supporting the government. I don’t see the police force sticking around either after we leave.
Pretty sickening to think of all the soldiers killed and wounded. We did kill a crap load of terrorists. Sadly, a new generation will rise up pretty fast.
They know our withdrawal timetable. All they have to do is chill out and wait until the troop planes leave.
I watched the same thing happen in Viet Nam. North Vietnam captured the South a few months after the last U.S. forces left.
From what I understand, a rebel group like the Taliban can’t exist without support from the local population. Either from fear or common ideals. There’s still large areas of that country that isn’t fully under the new governments control. The U.S. pulled out of some of the more dangerous areas last year because our troops were under constant attack.
The only way to stop the Taliban is for the local population to get fed up. Either fight them or at least provide intel so our troops can take them out. That sort of thing did happen in Iraq after the big surge. General Petraeus got support from many local tribes and they crushed the rebels. He had to make a lot of promises and payoffs to pull it off. But, it did work.
Unless a major commitment of troops are still in Afghanistan, it will be fairly quick. Obama will not want this to impact election 2012, which is why he talked about it tonight. But if the US really does pull out as many troops as he’s saying, I’d say within 2 years the Taliban will be right back where they were. After the election, don’t be surprised if the whole business doesn’t start right up again.
That’s my concern too. We got complacent around 2005 or 2006 and let the Taliban regroup & resupply. It’s cost a lot of our soldiers lives to get the situation back under control.
Now, we’re setting ourselves up for the same thing to happen all over again.
What same kind of thing? The Taliban isn’t going to get massacred for Al Quaeda again. They don’t give a rat’s ass about us. And neither do the rest of the Afghans our soldiers have been dying for.
Oh please. Have you heard any of the reporting about Bin Laden? He hadn’t been in Afghanistan in years. US forces spent a decade chasing shadows while Bin Laden was living under the protection of the Pakistanti intelligence service. It was the CIA who finally managed to track him down, and as far as we know Afghanistan really didn’t enter into it at all.