Fighting Like Taliban
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Aside from all this, contrary to some sort of received chivalric ideal of loyalty and fighting-unto-death, a great number of military engagements in every part of the world were decided by bribery and deception. People don't want to risk their lives and are often tempted by monetary gain. Countless forts have fallen to people opening the doors from within. There's instances of Sufi leaders being admitted into forts only to open the gates. Hyderabad was conquered by Aurangazeb in great part due to bribery, too.
The calculus changes dramatically if the attacker has a history of lenient behavior toward those who surrender, versus massacre for those who do not. The Mughals regularly incorporated surrendering lords into their feudal system, with honors, income, and opportunities for social advancement. The Mongols razed the Khwarezmia because of their disastrous refusal of their envoys.
"A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon."
-Napoleon Bonaparte
And not even from a financial standpoint -- there simply wasn't enough excess goods or food to have them out of the workforce.
I think a similar story (this is in Ken Burn's doc, told by Shelby Foote) is when the Union forces at Fredericksburg took the city and then sent wave after wave of soldiers at the Confederate held hills with a wall at the base of them. I don't recall how many waves it was (10+), but it's difficult to imagine being in the sixth or seventh wave, watch man after man before you walk into a "wall of lead" and decide to do it anyway.
How many people today have that kind of conviction? We can't get people to wear masks.
If you look at American politics over the past 5 years, trump has almost become another napoleon in how fervent the support he has, and how the idea of 'freedom' has held.
if you believe wearing a mask benefits you then there is no need for "conviction", it is just a belief and the person is trying to maximize their own benefit
It's because we have weak, ineffective, self serving leadership, and have since probably LBJ.
People fight and die for a cause, what in the US is worth fighting and dying for for the average Joe? Constant surveillance, harassment by the state police, corrupt politicians, corrupt justice system, income inequality, shit healthcare, shit schools, shit housing, shit food, shit safety net, regressive taxes, massive debt given to the rich, bailouts for banks, foreclosures for the people, eroded civil rights, eroded constitutional rights? You have the American dream, then you have the American reality. I mean we reap what we've sewn for the last 40+ years. If we really had a serious existential military threat, where we had to reinstate the draft, I'm not sure how strong our response would be because of all this. Who wants to die for Amazon.com or Walmart or AT&T's profit? I mean the American way of life, as it stands today, how would you feel if you had to send your conscripted sons and daughters to die to protect it?
Here's the top 10 countries of origin for immigration to the US in 2018 (before COVID). We can assume people who immigrate to the US do it for a better life than the country they came from. Notice there aren't any "developed" countries in this list. Care to guess what that says about the US?
Mexico - 161,858, Cuba - 76,486, China - 65,214, India - 59,821, Dominican Republic - 57,413, Philippines - 47,238, Vietnam - 33,834, El Salvador - 28,326, Haiti - 21,360, Jamaica - 20,347
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/us-immigr...
Well, it says that there aren’t many “developed” countries where emigrants can walk to the US.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/sd-me-...
https://www.dw.com/en/entering-us-via-mexico-why-are-so-many...
You're getting your nomenclature discombobulated. During the Cold War, first world was US and her allies. Second world was the USSR and her allies. Third world was all the others. Third world got branded as "shitholes," because they didn't have support from the superpowers and the superpowers tended to intervene in their local politics, or steal resources, etc.
>There are certain cities in a "shithole" country that are far richer and better in certain neighborhoods in a "first-world" country around the world.
Yes, most of the US by land mass would be considered a "shithole," by many people including myself, that was my original point. People in non "shithole" countries come here far less than countries who are worse off than us. That puts us in a pretty low point on the "great countries to live" scale. Somewhere slightly above Cuba and China. In most of the US, the economic prospects are grim and the federal support is near non-existent. The US is ok if you are the top 20-30% of earners, otherwise, it's pretty crappy. It wasn't always like this.
https://www.google.com/search?q=boarded+up+small+town+usa&tb...
https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/...
Who the hell wants to kill and die for "still better than many countries?" If you think your country is worth keeping, you need a positive vision for that country.
Civil rights in the US have been massively improved since the 1960s and 1970s. Even the prison population has been declining, finally, for about 12 years now. The war on drugs is ending.
You actually think eg black people or gay people are worse off in the US today than they were 30, 50, 70 years ago? It's an absurd premise. Just 30 years ago you couldn't even be publicly gay in Hollywood (left leaning Hollywood) or your career was toast. Gay people were widely culturally oppressed as recently as the 1980s and 1990s. Today Ellen is just about the biggest TV host in the country. Black people in the 1960s had something closer to no civil rights at all. Today the US has widespread protected class status for minorities, which wasn't the case as recently as the 1980s. In 1970 you could fire someone specifically for being a woman, or black, or gay, or just about anything else. You were largely free to mistreat today's protected classes to almost any degree you saw fit. Sexism in the workplace wasn't frowned upon as recently as the 1980s, there was no serious legal recourse, it was the status quo and almost universally tolerated. Try operating an office or business that way today, see what happens.
Or if you want to test things out culturally (litmus test it), go on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and go on a bunch of racist tirades. Use your real name and professional networks. See what happens to you professionally over time. You'll become an instant pariah.
Nearly across the board things are far better from a civil rights standpoint than in decades past. Both culturally and in terms of government. The primary exception remaining is minimum mandatory sentencing laws, which have been around for decades now.
> income inequality
There's absolutely nothing new about that. Go back to 1890 or 1920, income inequality was higher then than it is now. The US had a very brief period of time, lasting roughly only 20 years, where income inequality dropped lower.
> foreclosures for the people
There's absolutely nothing new about that. If you don't pay your mortgage, you get foreclosed on. That was true in 1960. It's true now. It should be true. The opposite is insanity.
> corrupt justice system
Whatever that means.
> harassment by the state police
The police were even worse 50 years ago than they are today. They were more violent, far more oppressive to minorities, and 100% got away with it. Their margin for getting away with abuse has declined considerably, despite propaganda to the contrary.
> corrupt politicians
True in most any nation that has ever existed or will ever exist.
> shit healthcare
US healthcare quality is closer to the OECD median. It's in fact not shit. It is exceptionally expensive for being at the median however. In the US it's the value proposition due to cost that is shit, not the actual quality of the healthcare.
> shit food
A bizarre, empty claim. The US is one of the most diverse nations in world history with one of the most elaborate consumer markets. You can eat whatever food you like.
> shit safety net
The US spends more of its economy on its social safety net than Canada or Australia. It has a lower homelessness rate than many of its prominent peers, precisely because its safety net is not shit (even if it's also not in the top tier).
> regressive taxes
The US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the developed world. It's far more progressive than Scandinavia by comparison. The US middle class pays exceptionally low taxes, which is one of the reasons the US middle class also has among the world's highest disposable income figures - comparable only to nations like Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway.
> massive debt given to the rich
No idea what that's supposed to mean. US households are in good financial condition compared to most of their affluent peers around the world.
> shit schools
Obviously far too comprehensive of a claim. The US has 17 of the top 20 universities in the world, give or take a position. Its top 100 universities are collectively unrivaled by the rest of the world. There is nobody close. The rest of the world has spent the entire post WW2 era trying to catch up to and mimic the US university outcome.
> shit housing
Plain false. US housing remains more affordable than housing in peer nations. Americans are able to buy larger, cheaper housing than their peers can. When it comes to having a ridiculous amount of space at a decent price, only a few developed nations compare to the US.
I mean we don't lynch black people anymore, so hu-rah USA? We don't use child labor anymore (at least in country) so hu-rah USA? Instead of brutalizing black protestors, the police brutalize protestors in an equal opportunity fashion. Hu-rah USA. We're only as economically inequitable as the 1920's robber baron era, hu-rah USA. I suggest you try to expand your view a little and see what the WHOLE country really is like.
You can see that in Afghanistan: the Dutch embassy staff waved goodbye to the plebeians down on the Kabul airport when their military flight took off. Being a citizen of a country matters and it is worth fighting for.
"You tell me that class distinctions are baubles used by monarchs, I defy you to show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which distinctions have not existed. You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led.
I would not say this in public, but in a assembly of wise statesmen it should be said. I don't think that the French love liberty and equality: the French are not changed by ten years of revolution: they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They have one feeling: honour. We must nourish that feeling. The people clamour for distinction. See how the crowd is awed by the medals and orders worn by foreign diplomats. We must recreate these distinctions. There has been too much tearing down; we must rebuild. A government exists, yes and power, but the nation itself - what is it? Scattered grains of sand."
He went on that in order to ameliorate that sand, "We must plant a few masses of granite as anchors in the soil of France."
His phrase "it is with such baubles that men are led" (and your paraphrase) are often quoted out of context as something cynical, but Napoleon was actually commending these things as the physical manifestations of honor. If he's cynical about something, it's the liberty and equality bits.
https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Rfl9mwoQBzkC/page/n93/mod...
The line after "We must plant a few masses of granite as anchors in the soil of France" ("Nous sommes maîtres de la faire , mais nous ne l’avons pas, et nous ne l’aurons pas, si nous ne jetons pas, sur le sol de la France, quelques masses de granit.") is perhaps an even more cynical take in light of the French Revolution that directly preceded Napoleon's rise.
> Croyez-vous qu’il faille compter sur le peuple? Il crie indifféremment Vive le roi, vive la ligue! Il faut donc lui donner une direction, et avoir pour cela des instruments.
Still at play in most hierarchical structures imo
"Alp Arslan authorized his Turkmen generals to carve their own principalities out of formerly Byzantine Anatolia, as atabegs loyal to him. Within two years the Turkmens had established control as far as the Aegean Sea under numerous beghliks (modern Turkish beyliks): the Saltukids in Northeastern Anatolia, the Shah-Armens and the Mengujekids in Eastern Anatolia, Artuqids in Southeastern Anatolia, Danishmendis in Central Anatolia, Rum Seljuks (Beghlik of Suleyman, which later moved to Central Anatolia) in Western Anatolia, and the Beylik of Tzachas of Smyrna in İzmir (Smyrna)."
I'm def not an expert, but this seems to match my understanding that at least in the recently lost Byzantine lands in Anatolia and northern Syria, it was more of a warlord situation than conquering through a centralized state. To be fair, this is pretty similar to pre-Manzikert Byzantine Anatolia or the Western Europe the crusaders hailed from. My point is that as the Crusaders conquered their way through the Near East, they weren't facing a single Islamic empire, but different local rulers, who weren't always coordinating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Rum#/media/File:S...
The muslim world was certainly fragmented into small kingdoms, more like city states, that constantly fought each other and that for a long time could not find common cause enough to present a united front against the Crusaders - and sometimes even sided with them to fight each other. But I think of them as kingdoms rather than tribes, so I don't think of their rulers as "warlords" but as, well, kings. And sultans, emirs, caliphs, etc. Then of course there was Egypt, that was generally a centralised state (and that also fought the Crusaders with a little more focus than the rulers of Syria and Anatolia).
My source for all this is "Les Croisades Vues par les Arabes" by Amin Maalouf (French title: The Crusades through Arab eyes). So I may well be missing a wider context.
Strongly recommended!
In some historical periods that was true. In others, not so much. The Zulu at Isandlwana were seasonal warrior-farmers, but they sure charged the British lines with their goat's hide shields and short, thrusting spears, and massacred the British despite the latters' technological superiority. Alexander's army comprised regular professional soldiers and they sure marched in a phalanx (the phalanx didn't quite charge as it was too slow moving to do so) and Alexander himself of course charged at the head of his Hetairoi. The armies of medieval feudal lords were in their majority levies, as you say, but the Crusaders, in the same time period, were for the most part elite knights who fought with unending courage (and commited incredible atrocities) against enemies many times their numbers. And so it goes.
As to bribery, sure, many battles were fought with money or politics rather than swords. Yet again others were not. Think of WWI for example, or WWII. No chivalric ideals there, but the battles were bloody and the corpses piled on high.
Btw, thanks for reminding me to read about the Khwarazmians.
EDIT:
For the downvoters see
http://smu-facweb.smu.ca/~wmills/course316/9Zulu_Shaka.html
>units of unmarried females were assigned to each impi to prepare food and perform other domestic duties. However, Shaka insisted on abstinence from sexual activities among his warriors (like some football and soccer coaches today). Any woman who became pregnant, along with her lover, would be immediately put to death. Nor did Shaka allow his warriors to marry until he gave permission, which he did infrequently and only when the regiment was being retired. Then, he would order the entire regiment to marry and would specify the unit among the women that they were to marry (kind of like Rev. Moon).
Quite literally at times. Guadalcanal WWII:
> Enemy bodies were (literally) piling up so rapidly that he — or other Marines, depending on the story — had to vacate their defensive positions to knock over the growing wall of flesh so they could reestablish clear fields of fire.
Battles for a soldier were a few minutes of danger, followed by being pulled to the back of the line to rest and recover in relative safety: which makes sense of course. Anyone who's ever tried boxing knows how exhausting it becomes very quickly.
True, most people have about 30 seconds of actual fight in them, if that. You really don’t want to go to the ground with someone who does it often, you will not win.
Or look up a Judo match, particularly during tournaments. You can see these guys are often wrecked after a particularly long match, and typically matches last only a few minutes. Just see Judo matches in the last Olympics, guys who typically have 3 to 5 training sessions a day, 7 days a week, for 2 decades.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee(Former Prime Minister of India) said at one point in several key wars, there were more people sitting on the hills watching battles than actually participate in them. Most of it has to do with the Caste system barring participation, but the general point stands. A large section of people don't mind any political master ruling them as long as they are allowed to live in peace. This is why a general amnesty and treating local populations with respect, and just letting them be goes a long way in establishing your legitimacy over them.
In many cases when the political systems bought by an invading political force is better than existing political entity ruling them. Taxes are lower and they bring better ideas. In the case of India's independence. Watching movies and reading popular stories feels like the Independence movement was in peak intensity everywhere. In reality only major urban centers, and a few states saw these peak movements. Everywhere else it was business as usual. In states like Karnataka post the original wars between the Mysore Kingdoms and British, you barely hear any other stories. Even in the those wars, post defeat, the administration of Mysore Kingdoms moved in their entirety to British administrated political systems. The local public didn't really mind anything at all.
>>Aside from all this, contrary to some sort of received chivalric ideal of loyalty and fighting-unto-death, a great number of military engagements in every part of the world were decided by bribery and deception. People don't want to risk their lives and are often tempted by monetary gain. Countless forts have fallen to people opening the doors from within. There's instances of Sufi leaders being admitted into forts only to open the gates. Hyderabad was conquered by Aurangazeb in great part due to bribery, too.
Yup this is what happened in Mysore Kingdom. It is easy to label this treason or whatever. But people like Purnaiah and Mir Sadiq quite literally took money and made the British victory happen. Same thing happened in Bengal with Mir Jafar.
A European feudal monarch might only have a few thousand men under his direct command, with the rest coming from levies from his vassals. This limits the amount of strength one person can hold on a battlefield, though the issue of lower-level leaders is already solved (this problem will always be present.) Compare this to nation-states being able to field massive armies under the control of one person.
In the same way, not being able to take advantage of all of the people in a society is a problem too. I am unsure to what effect caste inflected military participation. I doubt it was ever so strict as to prevent farmers from taking up arms. I'm unsure how many peasant rebellions happened in India, relative to other areas. China certainly had many. AFAIK, for much of Indian history there was more land than people to till it, so lords had to be careful to induce them to stay, lest they run away to better areas, with lower taxation and such.
Except e.g. WW1, which was just waves of senseless charging into machine-guns. It's hard to convince soldiers to charge into almost certain death but in war on an industrial scale (to which I would also count the napoleonic wars) it's possible. War can be unbelievable cruel, just compare the practice of decimating your army in roman times. You just kill every tenth soldier of your own army, because an army nine tenth its size that follows your orders is more useful than an army in full strength that does not.
Remember that this war started with cavalry charges and ended with tanks and airplanes.
There was no "failure to understand". This narrative that Afghanistan was a well-intentioned strategic/tactical failure is utterly misleading. The dynamic reality was very clear to every one involved (who cared to know), from servicepeople to 4-star generals, but the military's culture of careerism and corruption prevented these truths from being publicly acknowledged [1].
The gist:
* On the ground: "rebuilding Afghanistan" was a total farce. Major Sjursen (Ret.) describes handing out bags of money to "local contractors" with virtually no oversight. He suspects that the Taliban were among the "contractors" and were benefiting immensely from the inept American policy.
* The US military/political leadership is entirely motivated by optics and self-interest. Virtually every report had to have a positive outlook; publicly recognizing the reality on the ground was forbidden, including using words like "insurgency".
If you don't accurately report the reality 'on the ground' then no actions will be approved from above to improve it.
We knew by 2002 we weren't going to turn it into a shining pillar of democracy. The next 19yr were just people covering their asses and biding their time while the American public came around to the same conclusion.
It's kind of like letting your direct reports screw off and job hunt on the job because your all getting laid off but the termination date is next quarter. Not great, but doesn't really matter to the big picture.
> The US military/political leadership is entirely motivated by optics and self-interest. Virtually every report had to have a positive outlook; publicly recognizing the reality on the ground was forbidden, including using words like "insurgency".
I would say this half-thought out. While it is true to some degree, the military is largely beholden to the DOD, State Department, various intelligence agencies and the President. Senior Leaders self interest is staying employed and that is done by appeasing their bosses. If you're going to blame military leaders it's always a good idea to ask, "Where'd they get their orders from?" That may sound like a trope, but it's not.
When I went to Afghanistan I cannot tell you how many times we ran into bad intel on the ground. This makes operations run inefficiently, it causes accidents, it affects morale, etc... This literally because the military had a very difficult time, even then, understanding multi-celled non-central organizations like terrorist cells who were smart enough to insert bad intel where it needed to be.
I heard the President at the time telling the American citizens that we were training troops in Afghanistan, all the while I kept seeing report after report saying that troops are being shot in the back on patrol. Sure, we're training them but they're smoking hash on post because four years of ANA or AP pay is equivalent to a dowery. Most of those people didn't want to be there to save their country, they were there to have a better life. Very different motivations and they certainly play a distinct difference in how you'll serve. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/11/six-us-soldier...
We had an entirely ineffective rules of engagement that allowed the Taliban to run amuck as long as they didn't shoot at us. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/5/increase-in-...
You can bet that some of the best generals of the time operated over at CENTCOM and were fired for being very real with the President [https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Obama-fire-General-Mattis].
Edit:
I don't have any concrete thoughts on who to blame, be it generals, Presidents, or government officials. Maybe there is no blame. There's also room in my mind that the Taliban and other terrorist organizations are just formidable, well-equipped, and well-educated foes who use ideology as a viral weapon in areas that lack the defensive resources of opportunity and education to combat them. In purpose they are no different from cartels -- their main export is heroin (https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/inl/rls/rm/72241.htm). It's not only how they fund themselves, but it's how they get rich and garner more power to enable their ideology.
> I don't have any concrete thoughts on who to blame, be it generals, Presidents, or government officials. Maybe there is no blame. There's also room in my mind that the Taliban and other terrorist organizations are just formidable, well-equipped, and well-educated foes who use ideology as a viral weapon in areas that lack the defensive resources of opportunity and education to combat them.
This feels like a cop-out. If the wealthiest nation with the most powerful military in the world wasn't able to achieve the outcome they wanted, something's gone wrong somewhere. I'm happy to entertain a theory like, maybe the DoD put yes-men at the top, but that still begs the question of what went wrong and why that didn't happen in previous wars. Is our state capacity actually much weaker than it was in previous decades? Is the real problem that the public wasn't committed to the war? Maybe - but in that case why weren't we able to realise that earlier?
Ultimately this shouldn't have happened the way it did. I'm sure there are multiple causes rather than a neat single reason, but something is rotten in the US.
something is rotten in the US.
Specifically, I'm talking about the challenges faced by a wealthy, technologically superior nation-state seeking to subdue a remote, decentralized coalition of irregular military forces whose fighters can blend in with the general populace when needed.
The birth of the USA was something somewhat similar, with the colonies' "ragtag" army defeating the British.
It's also something the Roman Empire struggled with. They conquered city-states with relative ease, rolling them into their empire with a combination of carrot and stick. Decentralized peoples were often another story.
It's also not like there's a shortage of writings about how Afghanistan is essentially unconquerable, thanks to geography and culture. "Graveyard of empires," indeed.
https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/why-is-afghanistan-the-grave...
The US Marine Corps can do anything it sets its mind to. Marines are an amazing and rare breed of people with a culture to boot. To this day, outside of SOCOM, they are one of the only fighting forces that I know of that continue the legacy, lifestyle, and traditions of a warrior culture. In this capacity, yes, I think if you cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war they will do exactly what they are meant to do with zeal and tenacity.
On the other hand, I think the Marine Corps is bound by tricky circumstances, including in Afghanistan. When guerrilla warfare becomes the standard a uniformed military is at a strategic disadvantage. We are bound to things like the Law of Land and Warfare and the Geneva Convention while the enemy is not. They'll blow up a truck in the middle of a convoy and start firing on your position as you try to rescue your friends from burning alive. They'll plant multi-decompression IED's which explode after having been stepped on multiple times because they know watching your best friend or squad leader getting blown up is a shattering experience. They'll have you chase them through a town, backlaying IED's in buildings that you fought from because they know when they really bring the heat and you retreat that you'll go places that you think you've already cleared as safe. They'll pick fights in crowded markets because they know that having to assess a crowd of targets and picking the wrong target is damning both personally and in PR. They'll send kids to fuck with you, throw rocks at your helmet so you take your eyes off your surroundings -- and they know because the folks at home will ask questions that you won't do anything.
The Taliban, and other groups like them, know that folks back home in America are always watching and forming opinions -- many of them in their favor. They know that the more frustrating they make the war, and the harder and more drawn out they make it the more frustrated the American people become. They don't really need to do much; blow up a bridge here, destroy some cellphone towers, set off a couple IED's in crowded spaces, etc... It's the epitome of slow and steady wins the race.
Can a war be won against such people? I think so. The British beat the IRA into submission and they used most of the tactics the Taliban/ISIS/Al Queda use. The difference is they had popular support and it was much closer to home.
Your impression of the Northern Ireland peace process seems wildly at odds with my recollection. The various Republican and Unionist groups killed and injured more people than the government did. The Provos forced the other parties to the negotiating table with the Docklands and Manchester bombings, and the resulting Good Friday agreement was approved by 97% of Catholic voters because it established local government and made it possible for Ireland to be reunited based on future votes. IRA was no more "beaten into submission" than Taliban were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_A...
On 9 February 1996 a statement from the Army Council was delivered to the Irish national broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann announcing the end of the ceasefire, and just over 90 minutes later the Docklands bombing killed two people and caused an estimated £100–150 million damage to some of London's more expensive commercial property.[183][184] Three weeks later the British and Irish governments issued a joint statement announcing multi-party talks would begin on 10 June, with Sinn Féin excluded unless the IRA called a new ceasefire.[185] The IRA's campaign continued with the Manchester bombing on 15 June, which injured over 200 people and caused an estimated £400 million of damage to the city centre.[186] Attacks were mostly in England apart from the Osnabrück mortar attack on a British Army base in Germany.[185][187] The IRA's first attack in Northern Ireland since the end of the ceasefire was not until October 1996, when the Thiepval barracks bombing killed a British soldier.[188] In February 1997 an IRA sniper team killed Lance Bombadier Stephen Restorick, the last British soldier to be killed by the IRA.[189]
Following the May 1997 UK general election Major was replaced as prime minister by Tony Blair of the Labour Party.[190] The new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam, had announced prior to the election she would be willing to include Sinn Féin in multi-party talks without prior decommissioning of weapons within two months of an IRA ceasefire.[190] After the IRA declared a new ceasefire in July 1997, Sinn Féin was admitted into multi-party talks, which produced the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998.[191][192]That is, until we invaded. Then they needed the money, and suddenly it was okay.
It will be interesting to see what happens now. Apparently the official stance is that they're going to suppress it again, but we'll see how that translates to real actions.
To be honest, I'm shocked that people are deluding themselves that anybody ever thought otherwise.
I can't ever remember reading an article in any mainstream news outlet that suggested nation building in Afghanistan was going well. The "peace deal" that Trump signed with the Taliban last year literally assumed the Taliban would quickly takeover the country once the U.S. withdrew, and I don't remember anybody seriously disputing that basic assumption. At best people just ignored thinking about the issue entirely; any American who gave it any serious consideration would have to fend off some serious cognitive dissonance to believe it was going well.
This has been the state of affairs for 5, maybe 10 years, at least. But we live in an age of outrage culture where hoards of people seem to spontaneously develop amnesia whenever there's something to get upset over.
The withdrawal seems to have been problematic, though because of rage culture and collective amnesia it's rather difficult to judge the magnitude of the logistical errs from the press. That said, the withdrawals were ongoing for years; the U.S. was down to 2500 personnel as long ago as January. Considering that so-called nation-building is an art that no polity has yet cracked, it's not surprising that the U.S. would also fail to foresee how spectacularly they fell short in their endeavor--i.e. that the Taliban would take mere days or even hours, rather than months, to control the country.
And I fail to see how careerism in the military could be blamed for any of this, at least at a strategic level. Again, who the heck believed Afghanistan wasn't a lost cause? Nobody. The occupation was interminable because nobody had the political guts to pull out completely (especially considering rage culture), even though everybody knew full well that the U.S. could never commit more to get the job done (assuming anybody even knew what or how much it would take to get the job done, which in fact nobody did and there was hardly any pretense otherwise, at least not in the past several years).
Why don’t we “nation-build” Saudi Arabia? Oh. We are already extracting the wealth? Right.
It simultaneously delegitimizes the current / former government (not "a nation") and casts the outcome in unimpeachable terms (more democracy, more freedom, more nation).
But in a lot of ways, it's a tautology. Because nation building really means "more like us."
And what country would disagree that the rest of the world would be so lucky as to be made more like it?
5. All Members shall give the United Nations every assistance in any action it takes in accordance with the present Charter, and shall refrain from giving assistance to any state against which the United Nations is taking preventive or enforcement action.
6. The Organization shall ensure that states which are not Members of the United Nations act in accordance with these Principles so far as may be necessary for the maintenance of international peace and security.
"natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, chromite, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, zinc, iron ore, salt, precious and semiprecious stones, arable land" https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/afghanistan...
Is that what we were doing in Afghanistan? We
were there to build a democracy of institutions?
Or were we there to pillage a country?
Of course, the US military-industrial complex profited nicely. That's not quite the same as pillaging, though.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.htm...
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/afghanistan-taliban-to-reap-1-trillion...
Actually, no. Trump's Doha agreement implied a 14 month staged, gradual, condition based withdrawal, with no people or materiel left behind. Which, on top of that, would be aborted if Taliban tried to pull off what they pulled off over the past couple of weeks.
But Trump's Doha agreement would not allow Biden to take credit "by 9/11", so he scrapped it and withdrew haphazardly, without any conditions, leaving thousands of people and billions in materiel behind enemy lines. He owns this now.
I
There’s the main contingent, which is interested in being recognized as the legitimate government of the country and participating on the global stage. They comprise the leadership of the forces that took the major cities and are mostly interested in organizing a working civil authority at the moment.
Then there’s a hardline group. They’re mostly “tribal” leaders and leaders of smaller bands of fighters specifically in rural areas. They’re more similar to the Taliban from before the US invaded; they care little for how things look to the rest of the world and are enforcing their edicts vigorously.
This aligns with what I’ve seen from the outside. Not much seems to be happening in Kabul or Kandahar, but there are videos coming from the outlying areas of door-to-door raids resulting in the executions of “collaborators”.
I have my doubts but I truly hope the taliban somehow came out the other side as a more moderate organization. It would be so incredibly amazing to know that half of their massive population would not be oppressed. I will be keeping my fingers crossed but it seems unlikely to me that a battle hardened group like theirs could be anything but hardline and this seems like the perfect thing to say so that no one gets second thoughts about leaving.
I heard the above saying during Soviet invasion but I cannot find the origin.
I don't recall learning about switching sides with fluidity (as in Afghanistan), but I do recall learning that this little game got broken up once the common people were enlisted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma-yuddha#In_the_Mahabhara...
Is there a good English translation? Or a French one maybe?
I'm not quite sure which translation is the best for the whole work as a verse epic. The fragments I've read were so dry it wasn't fun to read.
Rules of war hold up only in certain cases, like:
1. You're so much stronger than your opponent that you can unilaterally uphold rules that disadvantage you in combat.
Example: USA in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. Both sides expect to survive the fighting and possibly engage again in the future, so it makes sense for both sides to play by the rulebook to reduce costs of ongoing conflict.
Example: not shooting at enemy medical transports, and not using yours for combat operations, lest the enemy starts shooting your medics. Extreme example: MAD doctrine - nuclear powers are bound by the ultimate rulebook, breaking which will annihilate them all. That's what kept USA and USSR from engaging in full-scale warfare. That's what keeping China, Russia and USA from direct confrontation today.
3. There are powerful third parties willing to intervene against the side that breaks the rules.
Example: Geneva Conventions, to some extent (I don't think anyone got actually pounded over breaking them). Also sports.
No high-minded rule can overcome the fear of death. So, for a warring party to hold themselves to a standard, the stakes either have to be so low that they can do it out of virtue (or PR considerations), or breaking the rules must be more dangerous than upholding them.
Video of the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeeoEpmyb2Y
https://acoup.blog/2020/04/16/collections-a-trip-through-ber...
"... what seems to be the case is that, for people like Bertran, the chance of dying in all of that war remained relatively low. In the first case, the style of warfare of the 12th century, oriented around raids and sieges, with relatively few large set-battles and relatively smaller armies – tended towards lower casualties in comparison to the warfare of other eras."
But do keep in mind that this is a particular period of medieval warfare; it's not universal.
Handling the Pak Army/ISI was our job and we didn’t do it. We never really even tried to do it. If we had kept the Paks out and the conflict was contained within Afghanistan, the Afghans could have handled what would have been left of the Taliban through means such as those described by Mr. Filkins. But we didn’t. We got had by Pakistan and tales of the Raj and their special knowledge. We gave them money even, lots of it to kill us and Afghans.
We did get something for this though. Hundreds of high ranking officers got their tickets punched. The spec ops community got their budgets and fanfare. Multitudes of State Dept. people got hazard pay and career points. Contracting companies and contractors galore got lots and lots of money over lots and lots of years. Several thousand of our guys died but they were mostly deplorable NASCAR fans and don’t much count. Now the party is over and the Afghans get to pay the final bill.
Nice going Americans! This is the second time in my life where we’ve bugged out on people who trusted us when we told them we wouldn’t bug out on them.
(The above comment was made by someone on the original article, but I think it's 100% accurate.)
Can see why it ended the way it did.
War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers, it means the goal of the war is to wear down the enemy so that their will to fight collapses which both the Taliban and the US tried to do, see: https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-tal...
War of attrition almost certainly requires high continual casualty numbers, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article:
> Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel.
But I do believe that the American people's heart were not into the fight, especially when it became a "forgotten" war. If we commit our full effort and our mind, we might have won the way we would stomach.
In the end, if this is not the kind of war the American people are willing to fight, then we shouldn't entered them.
If the US had spent the last 20 years building infrastructure, railroads, highways, mining operations, schools to train engineers, managers, and professionals, Afghanistan would likely look a lot different.
But the US missed even low hanging fruit like making poppies a legitimate crop by giving Afghanistan a cut of the legal opioid market.
Without railroads and highways, Afghanistan will never move forward. It should have been the first thing we did, and not only to link up cities, but to locations with large amounts of natural resources to build up some wealth and industry.
Such high illiteracy rates will make it impossible to build enough of management and general bureaucracy needed to build anything large. It will make it hard to train workers in technology. You won't build railroads nor roads, you won't mainten them either.
Primitive mines are not competitive. They are not producing enough to feed you. And hungry people won't save money for school. You need technology.
20 years? Zahir Shah tried this for 40 years. Amanullah Khan also tried, as did several others. Numerous would-be reformers have thought as you do and tried to impose change on Afghanistan, and all their efforts have culminated in the situation we have now. It's been approached from a number of ideological/political directions. Some were monarchs, others proponents of republics. The PDPA/Soviets tried it from a Marxist/Leninist angle with lots of bloodshed, while Zahir Shah tried to create a constitutional monarchy and refrained from murdering his political opponents. Neither succeeded in the end.
What would you bring to the table that hasn't been tried before?
This was a largely failing effort even years ago, considering that most of the afghan army were made up of people from the north of Afghanistan and previous geopolitics (north/south) play a role. The people in the south would at times trust the taliban over sympathisers for the previous northern warlords which had influence over members of the afghan army.
See this documentary (from 8 years ago) about how utterly lost and helpless this situation has always been: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI
If we do not know our goals, and not willing to spend blood and treasure, then what are we doing there?
In a land were so many self-appointed technocrats clamor for censorship, soon discussion of the real hefty topics at play will become badspeak and premptively banned, removed, silenced.
For example,have fun trying to say one thing about how Israel and Suadi Arabia both had more involvement in 9/11 than Afghanistan did without immediatedly being attacked.
Its easier to talk about 3-letter motivations like continued drug, gun money going into black book coffers so they dont have to account to congress only because its something more in the mainstream mind.
Another topic thats generally forbidden? Analysis of the media machine that pushed us into war(s) in the first place.
I could go on. The point is the real goals are not the presented goals. If you understand that you have a much better chance at real insight.
And we've done just that.
We're just not willing to admit that at the 11th hour we threw up our hands, said fuck it and decided that army would be the Taliban.
We literally handed them a country and all the shit they need to not be somebody's puppet.
If we had accepted that we'd just be turning over the country to the same old bunch of hard line jerks 10yr ago we could have better prepped for this moment but leaving the place on unstable footing is simply the price of deluding ourselves. I hope for everyone's sake it doesn't turn into a war torn shithole again.
He said that Taliban were dangerous religious fanatics, but at least they were predictable fanatics - they had a set of laws, some very harsh, that you had to follow, or else. On the other hand, the Northern Alliance forces, in his telling, were basically just looters - they didn't bring better laws so much so as no laws, just a free-for-all where the guy with the gun takes whatever he wants. So his solution to that dilemma was to emigrate, but he told me that if he couldn't do that, he'd prefer Taliban.
The war in Afghanistan was started badly, continued thoughtlessly, and, naturally, ended poorly. As it was originally destined to do.
The PDPA and Soviets tried this, and it didn't work. Together they killed tens of thousands of combatants and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians. Millions more were displaced. And what did they get for that bloodshed? Certainly not the reform they sought.
You may as well try to crush a fistful of water.
Once Napoleon's army arrived in Moscow, there was a "what now" aspect to the war. They'd accomplished the goal that was set out and defeated Russia, but they didn't actually want to live in Moscow. So, they eventually left to go fight the Russian army, which had seemingly and unbelievably abandoned its crown city to the invaders. But they hadn't. Because Moscow was home, whether it was filled with these unseemly visitors or not. There was no way Napoleon's forces could win unless the Russians actually decided to sign a piece of paper and let them.
It also contains his "Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia" which was essentially the US Marines portion of the Navy's plans for WWII in the Pacific.
The US by contrast has enough territory already, they don't want or need Afghan soil. Instead they went to war so that Afghanistan would have their chosen government. The only way to do that is to colonize it and exert direct control. They never committed to that (it's kind of frowned upon internationally), so it was a failure.
You are suggesting that it is the US's gentlemanly morals that puts it at such a disadvantage as to make "winning" impossible. But what is "winning" absent those values? More dead Taliban at the cost of more dead civilians? If that is "winning" for the US, it is almost certainly not "winning" for the Afghans who live in the country and would prefer to be alive.
But say you kill more Taliban while generally tolerating civilian casualties, then what? The US is no longer a force protecting Afghans from the Taliban, but a force bent on conquering the land of Afghanistan. The Taliban will increasingly look like liberators against a bloodthirsty invader whose raison d'etre for occupying the country is not the livelihood of Afghans but to install a puppet government. The Taliban will regrow, resupplied by the friends and family of civilian dead, and emboldened with a moral mandate.
The more you "win", the more enemies you create for tomorrow. At the strategic level, there is no winning, only various ways to lose more slowly. But eventually the outcome is the same, as it has been in all Western colonies. The difference is that in the old days, the goal was just to extract wealth from a place, not to reconstitute its population (though the French did try).
"Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends"
It seems more like renaissance Europe, where armies of Condottiero would parade against eachother, and the smaller or less extravagant side would back down.
This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'.
"The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war"
- Julian Assange, 2011
Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of dragged out death and destruction is a fair outcome for the country.
The role of the US went from hunting and killing Taliban to not allowing them a permanent base from which to launch terror attacks to "nation building" where the military was then building schools and gas stations. The US never wanted a "bloody war". If they did, they could end the Taliban in the span of a few weeks, just like they did ISIS. It wouldn't be a war, it would be a rampage for which many in the US population and politicians wouldn't have the stomach for. Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties.
>> Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of death and destruction is actually the best possible outcome for the country.
I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country."
While US army is significantly better then Taliban, the surgical strikes killed civilians fairly regularly and wish to protect civilians is not exactly "above and beyond".
> I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country."
I think that OP meant "compare to 2 years long war after which Taliban takes power anyway". That was the estimation as America was leaving - that ANA will be able to hold off for two years. They were not expected to win, but they were not expected to fold that fast.
There was no way they did not know US assessment of the capabilities. Why would you fight a war that you know you're not likely to win anyway?
Only if you genuinely believe US advisers are delusional and your side will certainly prevail.
I mean, I agree with that logic, theoretically. Theoretically, if you know you will loose in 2 years, it is better to not fight and hope your treatment will be better as result.
But, groups did hold up and fought lost or seemingly lost wars. It is not just that they logically concluded it is all helpless and gave up. That does not seem to be the only or primary factor here.
The numbers the military were giving them were completely inaccurate.
Biden said the Afghan army was 400K strong. It was not. It wasn't even close. The most recent figures put the Afghan army conservatively at 170K. Imagine touting a 4:1 advantage and then realizing, it's more like a 1:1 contest.
The Taliban numbers were way off too. The media and politicians were saying they had 50-75K, when in reality their numbers are closer to 100K if not more. Even back in 2018 they were saying they were 85K+.
The military chiefs saying they had trained that many Afghans was also wildly inaccurate. One of my family members was part of the Marines who were tasked with training the Afghans. He said it was nearly impossible to train them because they never took it seriously. They never expected the US to leave them. For many, it was a cushy paycheck that put them on easy street - it was never about defending their country, or having a sense of patriotism or duty. He repeatedly called them "clowns" and after a year, he asked to be reassigned and told his superiors the training was useless and there was no way these men would fight anybody, even with the best equipment and training they provided.
The assessments being made were incredibly off base and not even close to being accurate. The information that should've been coming out of there was the Afghan force was very small, barely trainable, and would never fight the Taliban or any other group regardless of how much you pay them or equip them or train them. Instead, politicians were repeatedly fed a fantasy about how the Afghans had a huge force, were trained by the best and fully capable to defend their country when the draw down or withdrawal happened.
When you talk to people who were over there and ask them what they saw and experienced? None of them are surprised by what happened. When you ask the Joint Chiefs and politicians in Washington? Total confusion and shock.
And on US side, it resembles corporations in a way. The more optimistic report you give, the more you are rewarded. If you talk about issues, you are sidelined. So people down on hierarchy know there are issues and high on hierarchy get to pretend how good everything is.
On afghan side, it amounts to organization capable people who have choice won't join. You join it to get free meal, to steal a thing or two. You join it if you don't have much perspective otherwise.
Patriotism can't be motivation either, because Afghan would be joining American led army. And expectations that US will be there forever was fairly reasonable too. It is atypical for US to leave I they can have influence.
To be fair, it's hard to imagine any person with a sense of patriotism or duty accepting to be trained by the invaders of their country to become a kind of native garrison for them.
Although I don't pretend to understand how Afghans saw the war, the US, their allies, or the Taliban, or anything else. It can't have been simple.
This whole paragraph seems utterly bizarre.
US did NOT "end" ISIS, certainly not alone. Most of the fighting and dying was done by Shia and Kurdi forces inside Iraq whose lives literally depended on stopping ISIS. US failed in Afghanistan precisely because no such ally existed.
And, what exactly do you mean by "rampage"? There seems to be an awful implication- "if US forces didn't bother about civilian casualties, Taliban could be surely defeated". Which I suppose is true, there can't be any Taliban if there isn't any more afghan.
These are soldiers who don't wear uniforms. There is no standing army or targets to "rampage" through, unless you mean entire villages. You're saying if the US had just been less tolerant of civilians, more Taliban would be dead. And what of the relatives of the civilian dead? Now they are your enemy, and the Taliban regrows like a hydra. Keep killing without regard, and now whole tribes side with the Taliban against the clear enemy. Provinces flip, and eventually the whole country is filled with an enemy you created.
The mission changes character once a critical mass of the country supports the other side. Certainly it would not be "nation building", just outright occupation, which works exactly as long as an overwhelming force is present. The conclusion would have been the same in the end.
ObL might have been at "Tora Bora" at some point in 2001. After that, he wasn't even in Afghanistan. How hard could they really have been looking, if they didn't even look in the right country?
If we learn from all that history, I would imagine it has not ended at all.
Other nations can support their civil war for another decade easily.
"If they can keep those Humvees running---good luck."
And yet, today, the socialist republic of Vietnam is hardly a pariah, or a communist menace, or a backwater or a threat to anyone. It is a rapidly developing economic power in South East Asia, with a dispersed diaspora that has integrated well with diverse cultures in Europe, North America, Australia and South America.
Have you ever heard of a Vietnamese terrorist shooting up or bombing a public place in the west over the last 40 years?
What does that tell you about the paradigm of us vs them?
The Taliban have moral clarity and that's a huge advantage against the relativist post-modern muddle brained thinking that characterizes most of western leadership these days.
http://web.archive.org/web/20180108005721/http://vandalvoid....
If it turns out that Afghanistan has substantial mineral resources, as some claim, that could happen to Afghanistan. With substantial help from China.
Perhaps China will build a road and rail link to Afghanistan. There's a narrow corridor that connects the two nations. No roads. No rail. Mountains. But it's a shortcut for the Belt and Road Initiative, so it might happen.
A Chinese investment in the region seems pretty reasonable in my uneducated opinion.
Over the last decade, the US had lost all leverage with Pakistan. Pakistan is now fully allied with China.
This has gone past many administrations and advisors, and yielded nothing.
Does anyone know if the Taliban actually have some sort of popular support there or only by fringe groups?
It's probably a fair bet that the urbanized population does not support the Taliban, but they can't stand alone. The warlords and Taliban want control over the largest city, and Kabul depends on the countryside. Think about the urban-rural cultural divide in the US, but imagine that rural people vastly outnumbered urban and that there was no central monopoly on violent force.
Another interesting question is why should the Taliban be stronger than any other potential leadership group? I suspect this comes down to their past success, their connections to Pakistan, and their appeal to international fighters.
In an battle between kindness and ruthlessness, (especially where the former is less committed than the latter,) the ruthless will always win. Put another way, if you had one side giving you aid (food/medicine) in exchange for support, and the other (credibly) threatening to kill you for disloyalty, what would you do? You'd probably feign support for the former, and never betray the latter.
I'm afraid you have an awfully rosy version of what life was like for an average rural afghan under American rule.
Here are some links to get started-
- https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-to...
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/09/us-soldiers-af...
- https://news.abs-cbn.com/global-filipino/world/01/12/12/outr...
In addition to all of these atrocities, there are a number of outliers, such as those you pointed out.
Too many pampered Americans like to think we can solve all problems by petitioning the government and talking. Vocal ignorant influencers love to believe we can solve all problems peacefully at all times and all situations are the same because they grew up in a nice little suburb. In reality globally, it only uniquely works in cultures where that has been integral to the establishment of the actual nation. I mean South Korea and much of Central and South America has been governed by Military Juntas for decades and they have become far more freer than any place that was given democracy outright like Afghanistan and Iraq. The tight grip and control on people is meant to get them adjusted to the new way of life. As time progresses, reforms occur to ensure stability and people don't go rioting in the streets to establish another government that totally undermines all the work done to ensure the system continues.
Those are not mutually exclusive. You write about it as if there was contradiction and they somehow were not women hating as proven by them being religious.
They are exactly that. Besides, misogyny and authoritarianism/violence are related almost everywhere.
That is what I'm getting at. These systems have been around longer than westerners have been able to argue about them. And they will definitely be here to stay. Also, in a decentralized and failing state that is Afghanistan, a theological junta wouldn't be so bad for them now seeing as it's a structure many know. Injustices happen everywhere worldwide. The system the Taliban is reinforcing (yet again...) is hardly something as unethical as a corrupt and failing democracy where women can't even trust the law to protect them.
First of all, Afghanistan was not always Taliban country. There was huge amount of people living completely different lifestyle - women in miniskirts were normal. Until invasion of Russian armies in the process of exporting communism and eventual victory of Taliban via arms.
> If western ideology is correct, why not let them sort it themselves out and get to the point where we are?
This is not fight of ideologies, but of violence. Second, this is an odd theory of history in which "right" ideology wins and nothing in history confirms that. As good feel this theory is, it is not how world works.
> Also, in a decentralized and failing state that is Afghanistan, a theological junta wouldn't be so bad for them now seeing as it's a structure many know.
This is not theological junta tho.
> Injustices happen everywhere worldwide. The system the Taliban is reinforcing (yet again...) is hardly something as unethical as a corrupt and failing democracy where women can't even trust the law to protect them.
It is hard to parse this. Injustices happen everywhere, some places more then others. Some places are more cruel and unjust than others. Taliban is among those more oppressive and unjust.
> where women can't even trust the law to protect them.
Women have better protection ... pretty much everywhere else. For instance, forced marriages to taliban fighters are still a thing, for instance. It is absurd how you minimize level of violence and basically slavery half population is subject of.
Just because Americans failed to achieve goals does not mean that Taliban is not as cruel, injust or oppressive toward half of population as it is. Pretending otherwise might make you feel better, but it does not make it reality.
Besides, it's a repeating leitmotif of history that whenever a foreign power invades a far-away land, they find the locals more preoccupied with their internecine power struggle. It happened in the Crusades and in the conquest of Peru and Mexico by the Conquistadores. It has probably happened in every major empire-building campaign before and since. The locals fight the invaders only to the extent that the foreigners interfere with the locals' plans, and often the locals attempt to use the invaders as pawns (often only to find to their great dismay that the "pawns" then turn around and take their king- as famously happened with Moctezuma and Atahualpa).
It's more that they hate the corrupt Afghan government the U.S. was propping up. From what I've read, the Taliban is predictably corrupt and somewhat fair, provided you aren't a woman or gay and they don't find a reason to kill you. You pay one bribe for whatever you want to achieve at that moment and get a receipt that other Taliban people honor.
The U.S.-supported Afghan government was unpredictably corrupt and very greedy—you had to bribe every policeman, soldier, checkpoint guard, and official you came into contact with. Both options suck but one sucks less, and, for most Afghans trying to live their lives, that matters more than airy ideals about democratic liberalism and sexual equality.
Look at the outcomes for Karzai and Ghani as an indicator - I don’t know that ‘popular support’ is something to attribute to the Taliban but we ought to entertain the notion that the framing of Afghanistan for domestic consumption in the U.S. distorts a useful, realist analysis. How could we arrive at the current state of things if, outside of Kabul, the dynamics were as simple as painting a target on the Taliban?
“The Taliban were completely defeated, they had no demands, except amnesty,” recalled Barnett Rubin, who worked with the United Nations’ political team in Afghanistan at the time.
Messengers shuttled back and forth between Mr. Karzai and the headquarters of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Kandahar. Mr. Karzai envisioned a Taliban surrender that would keep the militants from playing any significant role in the country’s future.
But Washington, confident that the Taliban would be wiped out forever, was in no mood for a deal.
“The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders,” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a news conference at the time, adding that the Americans had no interest in leaving Mullah Omar to live out his days anywhere in Afghanistan. The United States wanted him captured or dead."
-- Did the War in Afghanistan Have to Happen? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/world/middleeast/afghanis...
Hell, it might have helped prevent Bin Laden's flight into Pakistan, and have been a tremendous PR victory.
"Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait. There is nothing stronger than those two: patience and time, they will do it all." - Tolstoy, War and Peace
They could have negotiated the kinds of overt military support CIA installed South American despots could only dream of for the low, low price of treating Al Qaeda the way western democracies who are accountable to western voters could never treat them.
With the US's "aid" they could have consolidated power over the nation and legitimized themselves on the world stage. All they had to do was say "we'll turn over the terrorists but we need your help". We'd have gladly held our noses and given them training and equipment so long as they rooted out Al Qaeda. Of course the Taliban didn't want to be a puppet state or a client state. But we didn't want to engage in nation building. It would have been a perfect one night stand.
Hindsight is 20-20.
Seeing what the Taliban were able to do after being “completely defeated” makes me wonder if Karzai’s vision was realistic at all
Therefore it's not so surprising that the Taliban regained a lot of popular support, especially given the oft mentioned corruption of the prior government.
Of course now the boot is on the other foot, and the Taliban must provide the security and economic guarantees of a civil society, and the jury is out on both their willingness and ability to do so.
If they fail because they are too fixated on waging a puritanical religious war both within and without Afghanistan, financed by wealthy outside countries with their own agendas, they will be overthrown again, either from within, or from outside.
Violent oppressive dictatorships can last very long tho.
The Taliban themselves are motivated by the rather modern goal of uniting the country's fractious and diverse ethnic landscape ... albeit under the banner of their extreme interpretation of Islam.
As per the opinion of the author, the Afghanistanis have no permanent affiliation. There is no ideological or ethical adherence to a particular side.
Sure, the top leaders might be so, but ground level fighters consider it a job. So, having a large number of fighters given amnesty and absorbed into the govt. would have, it is speculated, reduced a lot of expenses of running the country.
Apparently, there is also no retribution for ground level soldiers if they switch sides and switch back and what not.
Personally I suspect that ethnic and tribal lines are the ones not to be crossed.
It's certainly not a risk I'd have taken without the hindsight that we have now.
Amazing how it's almost an exact repeat of 25 years ago.
Yeah.
Something to keep in mind with everyone repeating the old "Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires" dismissal.
On another side there're people defending their homes from foreign neo-colonial occupation.
Doesn't it explain why the comprador forces working for the occupational administration failed so quickly?.. "Democracy" on bayonets doesn't work.
As for Japan, I remind you that they still have an emperor for example and they were a super power during WWII definitely not comparable to Afghanistan, Cuba or Vietnam
Compared to North Korea, I sure do!
Even when factoring out corruption, the government's ability to muster up funds for keeping it's own military is severely hindered by them having to upkeep basic services throughout the country and having to go through the usual government bureaucracy.
Now the tables have turned somewhat and being faced with the cost of occupying the country, the Taliban will have trouble keeping their freckle allies.