US unleashes B-52s in bid to stem Taliban advance | Hacker News Reader

US unleashes B-52s in bid to stem Taliban advance

thetimes.co.uk

32 pointsdrocer8881 comments

Open articleView on HN

The Taliban are now armed with American weapons. Entire bases were abandoned overnight, full of supplies and equipment:

https://youtu.be/f37xrmiqmnU?t=132

There are videos of Taliban rolling through cities in American humvees:

https://t.co/cdHsZgjSv8

Its a matter of time before they take Kabul.

$2.2trillion gifted to the Military Industrial Complex.

Too bad we couldn't at least have done some sabotage of equipment left behind. Hell, just slashing tires on the humvees for starters, would make a pretty big dent in their immediate usefulness. But there are probably other low-effort ways to make them difficult to repair.

Maybe it is by design.

Leave an unstable nation filled with weapons at the doorstep of China and Russia.

Our government put more effort into stopping poor people from having affordable vehicles than preventing the Taliban from getting military vehicles[1]. See engine disablement section, basically just replace oil with salt water.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System

Sounds bad for the environment. Or do you think all that motor oil would be captured in an environmentally responsible way?

Another decade of bombs and depleted uranium is bad for the environment too.

Besides, DoD is already the biggest polluter on the planet. Anything that slows the war machine will be a net positive.

Another illegitimate occupier defeated. Is anyone surprised?

AFAIK the Afghan commanders stole their soldiers pay so the soldiers sold their weapons to the Taliban. The Taliban taking it back over seems like a natural consequence.

I think a lot of that wage theft was actually from soldiers that didn't exist: upwards of 100,000 on the roles that can't be accounted for. As for the Afghan equipment that has ended up in Taliban hands, that appears to be the result of the Taliban capturing it. That is happening sometimes even without a fight as Afghan soldiers believe they're being abandoned by the US to an impossible fight.

Either way, a significant amount of Taliban weaponry was provided by Russia.

The Afghan Army is corrupt. The Taliban is authoritarian. Guess which will occupy the majority of the country in a month or two

Hey, a concert instead of bombs might promote goodwill and healing in a war town land. Though I'm not sure how well an Islamist group would take to 'Love Shack', it might actually further sour relations.

They'll be fine with it, as long as their wives don't sing along.

Might work better for Iraq: "There's a lot of ruins...in Mesopotamia".

Many interpretations of Islamic teachings prohibit listening to music. If the goal is to win hearts and minds, I don’t think imposing religiously forbidden entertainment would be helpful.

And at the same time the US enters deal with the Taliban for them to protect an oil pipeline.

Everyone, including the US, assumes the Taliban will rule all of Afghanistan within months.

The article describes the Afghan Air Force as struggling. But they literally don’t have anything close to a B-52 in their fleet, in fact they have no bombers at all.

From many other articles I’ve read, “struggling” refers to an inability to manage even rudimentary maintenance of their existing fleet or deploy what they have effectively. Note that the Taliban don’t have an air force at all.

No paywall:

https://www.theportal-center.com/2021/08/us-unleashes-b-52s-...

Is it possible the country has become so heavily dependent on western money that insurgence happens to bring back the flow of cash from returning western military presence there?

Is it possible that it’s just a proxy war? I imagine for 1 rouble invested by Russia arming the Talibans, it costs $10 to the West if we want to do something?

It’s really a question, I’m not knowledgeable.

Seems likely to me. It's what I'd do if I were Russia. It's not like we don't have a history of proxy war there, or something.

I wouldn't. Russia has enough of a problem with Islamists. Afghanistan isn't far away. They have many migrant workers from the central Asian countries. If more refugees flood into the nearby countries it could become even more serious.

The only reason I can see for Russia to support the Taliban is pure spite or profit from selling arms. But the new-Taliban is mainly equipped with captured or bought ANA weaponry.

Pakistan is broadly accused of bankrolling the Taliban, as supposedly they like their neighbour being a mess.

You already pulled out. Just give it up.

Except that there are still something like 300 marines in Kabul.

And they'll remain until the State Department gets scared and leaves. BTW I spent almost two years in Kabul and was friends with the Marines at the embassy there at the time.

You seem knowledgeable on the topic and have firsthand experience. Would you mind answering some of my questions here [1]? I'm genuinely curious.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28099710

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

The Taliban regime is going to be hostile to women. It'll be a return to violence, executions, and feudalism. Yet I see a lot of liberals that have no problem with a Taliban takeover and would rather see a US withdrawal.

I'm a liberal person, but I think Taliban takeover is a horrific outcome. What's the argument / angle here?

Furthermore, it seems to open the geopolitical sphere for China to step into the vacuum. It gives them more people to sell to, and a broader Belt and Road. It's strategic for their exports, too. That seems to not be in the interest of the United States.

Also, US troops in Afghanistan are positioned close to the Chinese border, which seems like a thing the US would want in order to apply pressure.

What's going on? I don't understand the withdrawal at all.

I think they should just do a South Korea type plan with airstrikes, which has basically been the last 5 years. There are 30,000 soldiers in SK. Is posting 10,000 in Afghanistan for logistical, medical, training, and airstrike purposes really that crazy?

You can keep letting the Afghan soldiers do the fighting as that is what is politically necessary, but give them a pile of support on the rear end.

Huh? South Korean airstrikes in the last 5 years? Where? Or did I misunderstand you?

The key word was 'plan,' although I can see how it can sound like it meant airstrikes were happening there.

The US has given significantly more military aid to Afghanistan than most other countries in the region spend and had many thousands of soldiers there for years.

Undoubtedly the general Afghan populace does not look forward to Taliban rule, but a big part of the problem is the Afghan government receiving all of this aid seems both corrupt & incompetent, unable to make the best use of the enormous resources put at their disposal.

In my eyes the withdrawal is an admission that 20 years of US occupation have not been able to resolve these issues, and trying to fight a war on behalf of a country whose government takes little interest in the welfare of its own people is close to impossible.

I think that about the best we can hope for is that going it alone with the prospect of losing the fruits of their corruption to the Taliban will encourage Afghan leadership to act. At least those leaders that won't be able to flee the country with their wealth intact.

We give me money to regimes that are oppressive to hostile to women.

>The Taliban regime is going to be hostile to women. It'll be a return to violence, executions, and feudalism. Yet I see a lot of liberals that have no problem with a Taliban takeover and would rather see a US withdrawal.

There are hundreds of countries where women are treated like shit, of which Afghanistan is but one.

Perhaps the people who want to see a withdrawal realize that America-as-World-Police isn't sustainable, and serves only to kill scores of American service members, to say nothing of countless Afghan civilians, while lining the pockets of executives at Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and General Dynamics.

Perhaps a better solution would be curbing domestic racism and xenophobia in the United States and inviting these women to immigrate.

America got crushed by a handful of 70 IQ inbred religious nutters after spending over $2 trillion. The alternative to withdrawal is permanent occupation, but the US might be the most incompetent colonial master of all time, so it doesn't really make any sense.

The unrelenting Taliban aggression into Afghanistan, the ancestral heartland of the United States which Americans have inhabited for millennia, is outrageous.

They should go back to their own country, IMO.

You realize that the Afghan people by and large do not want Taliban rule, right? Very few want to be ruled by a violent, oppressive theocracy. Personally I would like the US to leave Afghanistan as well, but I have sympathy for the people who may have to suffer Taliban rule. Ideally the international or at least regional community would step in.

Step in and do what? Occupy the country indefinitely? How many decades will it take for Afghanistan to stop being Afghanistan?

Why not? Americans haven't been engaged in ground combat operations for years now outside of special forces. They were just providing the weapons, logistics, training, and air power to contain the Taliban.

That seems reasonably sustainable. Make it into South Korea with airstrikes.

Afghanistan is about the same size as Texas, permanent occupation is technically manageable. However, it would bring hate upon the US. It’s also a proxy-war with Russia, who might be funding the opposite side, so the costs to colonization are not just occupation, but hedging the spendings of all other countries who don’t want USA to occupy the zone.

So, impossible if we don’t get others on board, among Arab countries in general, perhaps China or Russia too.

Many already (and will always) hate the US, and the US has the GDP to outlast declining Russia. If anything, this is a test bed for remote force projection.

If Afghans want US protection that doesn’t require boots on the ground, that seems reasonable considering capabilities already available. “Peace through superior firepower.”

Peace and allies through collateral damage.

Do nothing, do something, we lose in a way regardless.

> the US has the GDP to outlast declining Russia

I particularly look forward to Russia’s declining influence as the world transitions away from oil. As much as people like to criticize US leadership and government, the Kremlin is on a whole different level (and I’m glad that this isn’t such a controversial sentiment among liberals since 2016).

Counterpoint: Global warming can make most of Russian inhabitable, enable farming on vast regions, and the Northern Route of merchandise through the poles can make them a central actor in international commerce.

Meanwhile “every country has a reason to hate US”, hating the US is often the easy game to play in local politics, and maybe all of them are joining the tipping jar to pay those who can make us decline. Loss of trust towards media and institutions, judges ruling that monopolies can keep rolling or judges “not acting” when clearly facing criminal activity, loss of trust towards police, activism groups which I’d wonder how they remain out of prison, that requires funding and bribes; if I were the Talibans, China, Russia, or any country of the middle east really, I would fund them until the US collapses or loses its dominant position. It’s all hypothesis but it’s easy to implement.

It’s not a given that USA doesn’t decline in front of other, less hated superpowers.

> It’s also a proxy-war with Russia

If that's the case, it's a recent development in the last several years. Possibly since the Ukraine incident. Russia and the Taliban have been enemies for decades before.

Take a look at the territory controlled by the Taliban vs time while we were at this level. They were not contained. We just were keeping them out of a few urban areas.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57933979

> We just were keeping them out of a few urban areas.

How is that not containment if they can’t take major areas?

I skimming your link, it seems the Taliban didn’t take significant territory until the US pulled out altogether. In the time during which the US was not actively fighting on the ground but was providing logistic support and air strikes and so on, the Taliban were effectively kept at bay.

You need to look a bit more carefully, and ideally at more than just at the one link. The US and gov controlled the country entirely at one point. By 2017 The large swaths of the country are contested.

61% by 2018. The writing was on the wall.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/08/world/asia/us...

I’m an American, so my taxes have footed the bill for Afghanistan’s security and liberty for the last twenty years. I don’t like that this is the cost (and I’m sympathetic to people who are frustrated at the expense), but seeing how quickly the Taliban have swept in, I would rather maintain a minimal force for another two decades, especially if the burden could be shared by the International community and perhaps specifically the regional community who have the most to gain from a free Afghanistan. It’s probably not reasonable to expect a country to effectively adopt democracy in just a few years’ time, so maybe we should anticipate longer time horizons.

Occupying Afghanistan is just throwing money and blood down a hole for what exactly? For people who don't want us there? Because we're too embarrassed to admit there are problems we can't solve with M16s and Coca-Cola? It's the graveyard of empires for a reason. Even if you snapped your fingers and right now political violence was forever ended in Afghanistan it still wouldn't have been worth the cost. A foreign occupying force isn't "fixing" Afghanistan any more than an orderly is fixing a violent mental patient by sitting on his chest.

where do new taliban come from? It's been 20 years since the original invasion and the Taliban from back then are probably either all dead or too old to fight.

So it must be a popular ideology for some.

If wikipedia is to be believed, there are something like 60K Taliban. Out of a country of over 30 million. It's pretty easy to recruit that small of a force from that large of a population. What seems more noteworthy is that the Afghan military can't seem to defend effectively against them even with 3x the personnel.

Or it could be that the Taliban just pays fighters better [0] compared to the central government in Kabul. Their annual revenue from drug trafficking, extortion, and donations exceeds $1.5B USD [1]. Private citizens from Pakistan and Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar give hundreds of millions of dollars to the Taliban each year [2]. Taliban fighters are also funded and trained directly by the Pakistani government [3]. Little wonder that they're able to take whole towns and cities without fighting, especially when the central government's fighters are underpaid when they're paid at all [4].

[0] https://afghanistan.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/09/taliban-pay-vs-...

[1] https://theconversation.com/the-taliban-are-megarich-heres-w...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-46554097

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/10302946

[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-security-idUS...

Going off 2009 numbers, the US spent $5.8 billion in foreign aid on the Afghan Security Forces Fund, and about a billion more on various counternarcotics programs [0]. This funding went up to around $10 billion in 2011, and slowly declined to around $3.6 billion in 2019. This also doesn't include the air support, troop advisors, special forces, etc. that we provided to supplement Afghanistan's government, or the international aid provided by other coalition partners. So they clearly have a massive financial advantage over the Taliban, as this doesn't even include tax revenue and other standard military funding sources.

Also, your [4] link is specifically talking about the police being underpaid and undertrained, not the army. My guess is that it primarily comes down to a huge motivation gap. The Afghani soldiers and police are in it for a paycheck, not to get shot, while the Taliban are fighting for an ideological cause they perceive to be just.

[0] - https://foreignassistance.gov/cd/AFG?measure=Obligations&fis...

That funding must flow through the massively corrupt Afghan bureaucracy before soldiers or police ever see it. Much of it gets skimmed, wasted, and embezzled. Many nice houses in the D.C. area have been built with that money, not including the palatial mansions and homes of American defense contractors.

>The Afghani soldiers and police are in it for a paycheck

I think you meant, "Afghan soldiers and police." Afghani is (fittingly) the Afghan unit of currency.

>...while the Taliban are fighting for an ideological cause they perceive to be just.

It's not a matter of how many Afghans perceive a certain cause to be just. It's a matter of how many are willing to suffer and die for their cause to come out on top. Even if only a minority support the Taliban, as recent polling shows to be the case, they can impose their will on the majority if they're more willing to suffer and kill. Of course, suffering is easier to endure when you're getting paid.

> That funding must flow through the massively corrupt Afghan bureaucracy before soldiers or police ever see it. Much of it gets skimmed, wasted, and embezzled.

This isn't exactly a compelling argument for our continued support of Afghanistan's government... We've been funding them to the tune of $3-10 billion a year in defense funding, and the corruption is so extreme that they are failing against the Taliban, with estimated total funding of $300 million to $1.6 billion [0]? That's an obscene level of graft. If 20 years on we still haven't reduced corruption to a manageable level, is it realistically even achievable?

> It's not a matter of how many Afghans perceive a certain cause to be just. It's a matter of how many are willing to suffer and die for their cause to come out on top. Even if only a minority support the Taliban, as recent polling shows to be the case, they can impose their will on the majority if they're more willing to suffer and kill. Of course, suffering is easier to endure when you're getting paid.

I saw the 13.4% statistic that you cited elsewhere, but I'm inclined to think that's either a low estimate or there are an awful lot of people who are ambivalent as long as basic government services continue. If the Taliban were truly culturally incompatible with the average citizen, surely there would be more organized resistance? From the news reports I've seen, the Taliban typically move into a new area, the local government rolls over, basic services continue, and the average person shrugs and moves on with their life.

[0] - https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/taliban-afghanistan

Large external funding tends to build corrupt governments due to bad incentives. It's possible that the Afghan government was effectively built to simply appease American advisors and convince them to request more money rather than actually servicing the needs of Afghans.

You don't get a renewed 10 billion dollars in defense grants by showing well maintained equipment and a well disciplined army.

>This isn't exactly a compelling argument for our continued support of Afghanistan's government...

I haven't made such an argument. Just outlining the problems.

Some new fighters might come from the families and friends of people the US and allies have killed.

Edit: Also, I recall hearing that many fighters are foreign. I imagine there's a greater than zero amount of people willing to go to Afghanistan and fight the US.

> fight the US

To be clear, they aren’t fighting the US, they’re fighting the Afghani government.

Sorry I wasn't clear, I had heard this was the case in the past, before the latest withdraw.

> where do new taliban come from?

You can say this about any abhorrent, oppressive belief system. This is insufficient grounds to subject the whole population to said oppression.

> So it must be a popular ideology for some.

hHow do you get from there to “thus it should be the law of the land for every Afghan”? If it’s so popular, why can’t it win in free elections?

No, he doesn't realize that. And no, the international community should not step in. They already did. This administration gave up on that friendship. Many will die because of that.

Maybe they should try putting up a fight, then.

Who should?

The Afghan people who by and large do not want Taliban rule.

Motivation alone is insufficient for ordinary citizens to assemble into an effective fighting force. You need competent leadership, training, and experience. The Taliban has those qualities and by all appearances the Afghan military does not.

America's withdrawal is, in my view, an inevitable conclusion and the best out of many bad options. However, let's not pretend that the Taliban represent many or most Afghans. Their return to power is a tragedy. The atrocities they have committed before and are sure to commit again do not deserve applause.

>But in 2019, a response to the same survey found that only 13.4 percent of Afghans had sympathy for the Taliban [PDF]. As intra-Afghan peace talks stalled in early 2021, an overwhelming majority surveyed said it was important to protect [PDF] women’s rights, freedom of speech, and the current constitution. Around 44 percent of Afghans surveyed said they believed that Afghanistan could achieve peace in the next two years.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/taliban-afghanistan

What surprises me the most about the US withdrawing is that Biden didn't remember what happened when the US left Iraq when he was VP. Military commentators were almost universally saying withdrawing was a bad idea, especially with how few US resources were in Afghanistan.

How many more US lives and dollars must we spend to satisfy everyone?

Why is that surprising? Have you not been paying attention to Biden's lack of mental capacity the past couple years?

War is stupid.

Peace is the success of war. Failure of war is anarchism and more war.

Peace is not always the success of war.

War is not the only path to peace.

Failure of war is not always anarchism and more war.

These are all possible outcomes, and some may be more likely than others, but rarely is the outcome a thing that can be described simply as “success”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com