Evil Wolf wrote:Gallia- wrote:It's the fact that no one raised an army to fight them when they were happily strolling through Jalalabad and Kabul without nary a shot fired. Lol.
At minimum the ANA suffered 2,000+ casualties in the 3 months of fighting during the 2021 Taliban Offensive.
That's nothing, so it really proves the point: They were a non-existent army.
Evil Wolf wrote:That's a lot of soldiers who died while supposedly not firing a shot.
No, it isn't, because the Taliban still won. Very similar results except the ANA dissolved instead of coming back.
The people "directly responsible" for 9/11 were a bunch of Hawala guys in the Gulf Coast (specifically, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia), bin Laden, and the hijackers. No one else. The Taliban were just some dudes that OBL happened to be crashing with at the time because the Qataris didn't want to deal with his antics. He may very well have planned 9/11 in Qatar or Kuwait with some prominent petrostate oligarchs and went to Afghanistan to take advantage of Pashtunwali. That would be kinda big brained actually, and hugely cynical, because it would be taking advantage of Pashtun hospitality to defend himself from the inevitable US punitive campaign.
Maybe he was thinking they'd go home after Tora Bora though?
Evil Wolf wrote:Their attacks on the people they supposedly wish to govern just ads fuel to the fire. They perpetuated 20 years of focused campaigns of terror against civilian populations. I don't think, for example, murdering a folk singer for basically existing is really something anyone should support and celebrate. Or bombing kids. The Taliban seemed to bomb a lot of kids when I was over there, and they didn't even have the excuse of it being airpower from 10,000 feet and all that "collateral damage" jazz. They likely had eyes on the child when they flipped that switch.
And Americans who bombed weddings didn't? GI Joe got plenty of heartache when he dropped Hellfires on random family gatherings, but whataboutism isn't important. The Taliban do nasty things. So does America. It doesn't make them any more or less competent at governing Afghans...
Evil Wolf wrote:Tell me again how the Taliban represent "all Afghans" and how you can just observe how popular they are. You seem to confuse just wanting the suffering to end with "popular support".
...but there it is.
Popular support is exactly what it says. Afghans vastly prefer being told to do something in a way they expect to have an outcome how they expect, and resolve things in manners they expect to happen, within a way to understand. This might be hard to understand since it goes both ways: Americans cannot really understand Pashtunwali and vice versa, and most of my understanding of the latter is from outdated travel booklets and CENTCOM's stupid JAG memos about jirgas and whatnot. I do know that the economic and social foundations of Afghanistan and America are so different that expecting them to have the same values or understanding of Western conceptualizations of the world is actual lunacy though.
The Taliban are preferred to Americans because most Afghans don't give a shit about women's rights in the Western sense, if they view it as anything other than pure hedonism or outright evil, in a manner similar to but more extreme than US evangelicals like Jerry Falwell. They also care about being told one thing and doing that thing and not getting killed. One of these simple. The other is hard.
The United States ran Afghanistan poorly. Incompetently, really, is a better word. The left hand was doing things without the right hand's knowledge, multiplied by about a million. It is not a large problem in of itself, by and large GI Joe was genuinely attempting to help with things he couldn't understand, like how irrigation ditches work and what Pashtuns do for seasonal work (hint: they worked on the poppy farms that the DEA burned). But he was hamstrung by the fact that he relied on imperfect information, that his leaders were bad at their jobs because they understood the problems and failed to address them (like the notorious pederast ANP officer), and the Americans just sorta bungled things innocently when they weren't actively supporting bad things happening.
The absolute worst part of this is the fact that the US was obsessed with not "losing time" or something with regards to nation building, because it looked bad on agencies heads' cover sheets if they had to purge like half the ANP police chiefs because they were fucking little kids or something, and the part that the US State Department decided it should make Afghanistan an ideological crusade without the consent or advice of the rest of the Executive Branch and the President went along with it. Oof.
The end result was that the US tried to do an Iraq in an economy that was "decades behind" Iraq, which had motorization and fossil fuels, and broadly relied on manual labor and animal power at the time of the invasion. It also lacked the muscular force of personality, and shooting people in the streets (this is more important than personal charisma), of real life nation builders like Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, and V.I. Lenin. Say what you want about these objectively aggro mass murderers, they at were able to forge countries that for the most part still resonate today, so it seems like mass murder is a part of nation building in the same sense that paving roads and employing people is.
But the USA was both effete in its efforts and Herculean in the task it set out to do: change the worldview of an entire nation of disparate peoples in the fictional land we call Afghanistan to turn them into something resembling Europeans or Americans. Because really, "Afghanistan" is just some random lines drawn on a map by the Russians and British Empire, and by all rights half of Pakistan should belong to it (but it doesn't because Britain fought a war to keep the Durand Line) but that's another story. The Leninists during the DRA were much more focused on the matter of what was to be done, they just wanted to raise local literacy rates at the end of the day so more people could fill out tax forms, and they still got blown out. That should have been a warning to the USA but I guess they didn't care or they underestimated just how primitive and backwards Afghanistan was to Iraq.
It takes a lot to build a nation and very little to break it. Of course, America wasn't trying to break Afghanistan, but I'd imagine if you asked people in Helmand or something (or some of the other more serious provinces where big fighting happened) they'd say their impressions of Americans would boil down to Special Forces or CIA guys coming into the village, breaking their furniture looking for guns, and the occasional drone strike at a neighbor's wedding three houses down (you don't know the neighbor well, but this is a village of like 800 people, so everyone knows everyone else through one or two degrees at most), or something of the sort. That's kinda the impression you get now that journalists from the NYT are walking around talking to people there.
America clearly didn't invade Afghanistan with an army of bearded commandos and drone airplanes, but they certainly were a big and vocal minority of the occupying force, and they fucked up a lot. Way more than the average guys, or even the senators or secretaries in charge of fighting the war, because they were actually in people's houses and breaking things. Because some dude from the 93rd Division of Helmand said they were Taliban when in reality all they were was some guy he owed a debt to and was using the commandos as a sort of mafia muscle.
The worst thing America did in Afghanistan was that it became so focused on protecting its little kleptocratic puppet state full of child rapists that it literally punished the people who pointed out that this was a bad thing. This basically destroyed its credibility in front of the Afghans, and arguably should have destroyed it in front of the American people at large because Americans consider rape to be a tremendous evil on a personal level, but it didn't happen in the latter case.
So do the Afghans prefer being told to do a thing and not get killed, and actually not get killed? Yes.
Is the Taliban the perfect, end all government that all Afghans want? No.
Is it good enough? Compared to the alternative, which was Ashraf Ghani's broken regime, absolutely.
Will the Taliban face some trouble down the road? Absolutely. Massoud might actually live out his LARP and actually restore the pre-communist monarchy using a plumber from Germany as his main claimant. Wouldn't be the first time some random blue collar guy in a Western country ended up ruling a country and fighting radical Islamists (although Hersi was a PRC attache and lieutenant general in Barre's time). Or he might just do what the actual Northern Alliance did and recreate the bachi baz pederast empire. Maybe Iran will wage a secret war between the Quds Force and the ISI in some guy's backyard? Maybe ISIS will finally be defeated in Afghanistan by the Taliban and Iran joining forces? Who can say. But what can be said is that, by evidence of showing no serious resistance despite all 20 years being poured into the inevitable final fight, the Afghans still came up a bit short.
That says more about which government they prefer than anything else IMO. You can disagree, but like I said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
