Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Without something to juice the Afghan economy, the West is already playing the long game to lose. It can hold parts of Afghanistan at great cost for many years, but it can't indefinitely deny the Taliban influence or bases of operation. At some point, the West will simply lose the will to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into a bottomless hole.

Since there appears to be no stable economy in Afghanistan that is feasible to build, maintain, and defend, the Taliban's supporters have an incentive to invest, and its recruits have incentive to join up. Ambivalent forces in Afghanistan that might help thwart the Taliban are disincentivized to do so, because there's no path to victory, and they'd be subject to reprisals when the effort failed.

Vast mineral resources could change that. Saudi Arabia has approximately the same population as Afghanistan, but enjoys a massively better standard of living, a far stronger central government, and operates an effectively modern social safety net. If mineral investment can set that trend in motion in Afghanistan, the state may have an actual path to stability. Which alters the equation there in a way that disfavors the Taliban.

Everyone seems to be citing the case of the Congo. But the Congo isn't essentially occupied by the rest of Western Civilization. Apart from foreign corporations, which are agnostic to which regime controls the country, nobody has a stake in the Congo. That's not the case in Afghanistan.

This seems like a positive development.

* Saudi Arabia has approximately the same population as Afghanistan, but enjoys a massively better standard of living, a far stronger central government, and operates an effectively modern social safety net.*

IF you're a Saudi elite. Their economy relies on a huge population of foreign-workers that live as indentured serfs, are commonly brutalized, and enjoy no rights. It's also an Islamic absolute monarchy with less political freedom than China.

Which alters the equation there in a way that disfavors the Taliban.

I don't think this is true at all. The Taliban have significantly more military skill than the Afghan warlords they've been fighting for the last decade. Consider: if the warlords, after having gotten billions of dollars of aid from the US and tens of thousands of western soldiers helping them, still haven't been able to defeat the Taliban, how large must the disparity be. Plus, the Taliban have a reputation for being less corrupt than the warlords that currently comprise the government. There's a reason Afghanis turn to Taliban-run courts instead of going to the government ones: the justice might be crazy, but it will be impartial.

Before this find, the future of Afghanistan was pretty clear: sooner or later, there was going to be a negotiated settlement with the Taliban, culminating in some sort of power sharing agreement. Given the find, that will still probably happen, but my guess is that the Taliban get more power in the end.

From a western/Chinese companies perspective, who would you rather deal with? Religious fanatics that are honest and maintain order with horrific brutal efficiency? Or obscenely corrupt bumblers who couldn't administer their way out of a paper bag? Extraction industries have plenty of experience dealing with the former in Saudi Arabia. Given the choice, I can't imagine why they'd prefer the later.

i agree, except that a commodity trader will find a way to get the parties to the table and make everyone money. religious fanaticism and money aren't mutually exclusive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilat_Ashkelon_Pipeline_Company

if the warlords, after having gotten billions of dollars of aid from the US and tens of thousands of western soldiers helping them, still haven't been able to defeat the Taliban, how large must the disparity be

I don't think that's a fair statement. "Defeating" the Taliban, which are basically an insurgency, in a country twice the size of Germany and filled with mountains and deserts, takes a lot more than military skill or firepower. I think that the military skill is in fact secondary in that battle. The political skill is far more important. As long as the Taliban are effective in convincing local farmers to support them, they'll be there, no matter how skilled the handful of soldiers on the other side.

In a country twice the size of Germany plus another bit of countryside in Pakistan the same size. If the Taliban were able to be 100% contained within the borders of Afghanistan they would have been utterly smashed and destroyed as a movement of any consequence years ago.

How do you know?

Like gjm, I'd also like to know what makes you think this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashtunistan

+

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6e/Maj...

I understand that regions in Pakistan have offered refuge for the Taliban. What I don't understand is how one could be confident that this has been essential to the survival of the Taliban.

When the Taliban was smashed in the post-9/11 invasion, where do you think Osama bin Laden and the Taliban hierarchy escaped to, to rest & recuperate & reinfiltrate into Afghanistan?

Again, I just don't understand what the evidence is for the claim that Pakistan was key, vs. there being sub-optimal substitute hide-aways in Afghanistan.

In other words, just because I drive a Honda to work doesn't mean that if Honda went out of business I wouldn't be able to get to work. I'd just buy a different (perhaps less reliable) car.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora

What 'sub-optimal' hide-away was available to bin Laden?

Sure, the Taliban have far more political skill than the current warlord government. Which bodes well for their long term prospects.

The Taliban have a lower bar. If they create some violence, then by definition they're succeeding and the government's failing. The government has a much harder job to do.

I don't think this is true at all. There is a tendency amongst westerners to assume that the official government is inherently legitimate. But legitimacy is earned, not granted by the 101st Airborne Division. You are the legitimate government of an area if you have an effective monopoly on the use of force in the area, if you provide vital social services, if you perform dispute resolution, etc. In significant parts of Afghanistan, the Taliban are seen as the legitimate government while the children from Kabul are seen as inept crooks. In those areas, random violence undermines the Taliban's goals: once you've convinced people that you're the legitimate governing authority, you have to keep them satisfied, and random violence makes constituents very unhappy.

The same confusion often erupts when people consider southern Lebanon.

I certainly didn't say that the government is inherently legitimate -- I was agreeing with you, and the comparison to Lebanon's government is a decent one (although nothing is as ridiculous as the confessional system).

Regarding random violence in the places that the Taliban hold sway.. well ok. But highly specific violence is certainly a part of their toolkit.

Fighting the Taliban is very different to fighting the types of armies that modern tactics are designed for,

I can't speak for the US, but from what I have heard from serving UK soldiers the british easily win almost all firefights simply because they are so much better equipped and better trained.

The problem comes when we have to start fighting against unpredictable IED blasts and a sizeable portion of the populous who are willing to give up their own lives to kill relatively small numbers of people.

It's reported in The Times that the problem isn't taking territory, but holding it.

If you can't hold the territory, then surely it wasn't really "taken" to begin with? More like "visited"?

It is probably a symptom of our ill-calibrated tactics that even the lexicon we use to talk about this is illogical.

I disagree. I think the problem is that in some parts of Afghanistan, the Taliban represent authentic Afghani nationalism whereas the warlord government in Kabul is seen as incompetent quislings. If the populace thinks you're a joke controlled from DC, then it doesn't matter how many American soldiers you have helping you; firefights are irrelevant.

Look, the US has spent upwards of $250 billion in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has a GDP of maybe $21 billion. If we can't bring about a government that the population sees as legitimate after blowing a decade and ten times GDP, maybe we should just accept the fact that our military is not capable of transforming alien societies in the way that we wish it could.

The Taliban have significantly more military skill than the Afghan warlords they've been fighting for the last decade.

A contrary view was posted to HN just yesterday, as I recall.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1427866

When the national population is largely in the thralls of tribal superstition, it's easy for people who share that fanaticism (the Taliban) to gain a kind of superficial control over much of the population, but it's not clear that "religious fanatics" (your term) of the Taliban kind will retain the support of the population over the long term.

Note the distinction between competence of terrorist attacks (especially attacks against targets in the US/Europe) and basic government functions. The fact that the Taliban can't run a suicide bombing operation in NYC to save its life matters a lot less than the fact that lots of people in some parts of Afghanistan prefer taking their disputes to the shadow court system run by the Taliban. The skills you need to be a good jurist have little to do with the skills you need to be a good tactician, and may very well be more significant.

Americans focus on terrorism because everything is always always always about us, no matter what, but the Taliban can and does do many things besides terrorist attacks against western targets. Incompetence in one area does not mean that the institution is incompetent in all areas.

> if the warlords, after having gotten billions of dollars of aid from the US

I think you made the point. If they completely defeat the Taliban, the aid will cease and they will have to deal with all their problems at the same time they will have no enemy to blame for them.

The only winning solution for them is to keep the Taliban around.

From a western/Chinese companies perspective, who would you rather deal with?

Companies and governemnts would prefer efficient fanatics until they play host to violent extremists who act to destabilize neighboring regimes and export violence on a large scale in pursuit of political/religious goals. You may view the war in Afghanistan as an exercise in corruption by the military-industrial complex, but it is also a valid application of the theory of forward defense to directly engage these extremists on their own territory and force them to consume their limited resources on self defense instead of using them aggressively. If a deal could be reached with the Taliban that would, with certainty, end their alliance with extremists and the export of violence to the tribal regions of Pakistan and the rest of the world, then that deal would be enthusiastically embraced just as it has been with the Saudis, but such a deal seems unlikely given the current state of the Taliban's ideology and certain ingrained Afghan cultural traits.

The Taliban have significantly more military skill than the Afghan warlords they've been fighting for the last decade.

Documentation? Plus what does "war lord" mean in this context?

As I understand it, the Taliban would simply represent one faction of rural lords and clerics within Afghanistan. The former-northern alliance was simply another with the groups distinguished a bit by ideology but mostly by the Taliban being comprised of the dominant peshtoon ethnicity.

I mean, both the Northern Alliance (war lords presently making up the Afghan state) and the Taliban were groups origianly brought into existence by CIA interventions in the 1980s. Each faction becomes more or less corrupt, makes one or another alliance depending on the shift tides of war.

The Taliban would have the same difficulty controlling the entire country that the US and its allies currently have

"Apart from foreign corporations, which are agnostic to which regime controls the country, nobody has a stake in the Congo."

Corporations are going to prefer regimes that enforce the rule of law. The Congo's primary problem (from a business standpoint) is it's lack of stability. If legal matters are not handled in a predictable way, then it's impossible for to do business in a predictable way.

While I agree that it seems like a positive development, what worries me is that Afghanistan already has a huge problem with government corruption (bribes, graft, etc). This will only make that problem worse. However, even businesses that could benefit their economy in the long run will tolerate some level of graft as long as the rule of law is enforced in a predictable manner.

The tl;dr version being: You can't have stable governments and institutions without having a viable economy underpinning the whole thing. In this respect, this find is very good, and will encourage outside investment.

It's good that Afghanistan has a resource potentially more valuable than the drug trade and its inputs.

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