For a lot of people the Taliban is an alternative to a long bout of revenge killings. Not that the Taliban won’t do that too, but that will be a key feature of the war lord alternative that the US has embraced since it got there.
Retreating in the face of overwhelming firepower and melting into the defensible parts of the country is not ‘falling apart’. They retreated in remarkably good order and Afghans are arguably the best irregular troops in the world. It would make absolutely no sense for them to fight a single field battle with us ever.
The US military is very good at fighting a particular type of engagement, but we’ve lost every protracted conflict in your lifetime vs people who used so called irregular tactics.
This is easy for you to say your country hasn’t been occupied by the US military and their contractors for 20 years. If the people of Afghanistan didn’t, on average, want to be ruled by the Taliban they wouldn’t be. If there’s one thing the Afghan case proves definitively it’s that no matter how much firepower you have you can’t hold territory where the locals don’t fucking want you. This is extra true when dealing with battle hardened tribes from the Afghan sticks.
I hope the Taliban becomes more moderate than they have been, but at this point we are not in a good place to be pointing fingers at people about human rights abuses in Afghanistan. We routinely drone strike people and then drone strike their funerals to kill their friends and families.
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But, uh, Support The Troops!
Let’s face it, the main reason this is news is because the US finds it embarrassing to lose a war. No Americans actually care about strategy or cost of war or political dynamics in Afghanistan. Americans have an emotional investment in their identity as an unstoppable military force.
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We’re an unstoppable military force if you’re a conventional military force put in the field by a nation state with planes, tanks, and ships. But we shouldn’t take it too hard, the only way to actually take a place where the locals don’t want you in a world with cheap assault weapons with 30+ round clips, miniaturized explosives, and cheap consumer electronics is to kill or force out all the locals and replace them with your own settlers.
Damn who could have seen twenty years ago that this would be a complete disaster.
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This is unfair. See ameads post above.
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Yeah, I mean obviously the families of people that directly experienced the cost of war care about that. I am referring to people without a direct personal interest.
Not true. They completely fell apart in the early hours of the war. If all they were was an army, a military force, and not just part of the fabric of at least rural traditional Afghanistan, they would never have come back together at all.
Military victory was trivial. It still is. But it doesn’t automatically change Afghanistan. It’s not like it’s France occupied by Germany and we can just drive off some soldiers.
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I think one of the major obstacles that only gets little mentioning is the role of Pakistan. The taliban would be done if Pakistan hadnt openly supported them. I dont really understand how they were viewed as an ally in the fight against terror.
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Changing rural traditional Afghanistan is as easy as changing rural traditional parts of America.
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Really hard not to think the news is all a big cia psy op when this is all over and no one gives a fuck except the few people making money on the occupation
The perpetual-war is also good for a lot of people and forwards a lot of policy objectives domestically.
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War in Afghanistan and Iraq did a lot to change America, rural or otherwise, into a more patriotic/statist/authoritarian country.
But trying to make it less so? I don’t think military invasion by the liberal army of the managerial class would do the trick.
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I think that overstates the support the Taliban have among the Afghani people.
Source: https://asiafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2019_Afghan_Survey_Full-Report.pdf
Only half of Afghans wanted the US out of the country after(!) a peace deal with the Taliban was struck.
Anecdotally I can add that I remember asking an Afghani teenager what he was scribbling in the margins of his notebook. He didn’t want to tell me at first and I figured it must be bad. Turns out he was only embarrassed because it was a confession of his love for a girl he knew: “For me you are America” which as he explained to me is a line from a popular Afghani love song.
You can see that at least by some Afghanis the US are indeed seen as liberators and guardians of peace and freedom.
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What happens when you take a poll of all the 70+ yo men who run everything outside the biggest cities?
I don’t know. If I grant that they might overwhelmingly support the Taliban the question if why they should be the measuring stick.
The model for defeating a country militarily, occupying it for a while and leaving it more or less the way you want it is Germany. That would have meant hanging 10 people and then leaving the rest of the Taliban in charge, while supervised.
Sadam was buying yellowcake. Yellow cake! We had to go in.
“should”? Who said should? But ignoring facts and proceeding as if they aren’t there is a recipe for 20 years of war and going back to square one.