Afghan Conflict: “We Will Conquer Iran Soon” -Taliban

[Jeriga]

Speaking of passing the bag, Ashraf Ghani has gone live to announce his resignation and Afghanistan's surrender to the Taliban.

As with Najibullah, so with Ghani.

Fuck around with your agreements, everyone. Hope you don't find me grieving again.

Why are you grieving? This was a forgone conclusion.

[Baltenstein]

Speaking of passing the bag, Ashraf Ghani has gone live to announce his resignation and Afghanistan's surrender to the Taliban.

As with Najibullah, so with Ghani.

Fuck around with your agreements, everyone. Hope you don't find me grieving again.

Wait, what? He tweeted that he was going to rally the troops a literal hour ago. Even South Park characters have more integrity than that.

[Heloin]

Speaking of passing the bag, Ashraf Ghani has gone live to announce his resignation and Afghanistan's surrender to the Taliban.

As with Najibullah, so with Ghani.

Fuck around with your agreements, everyone. Hope you don't find me grieving again.

Wait, what? He tweeted that he was going to rally the troops a literal hour ago. Even South Park characters have more integrity than that.

He didn't resign.

[Gallia-]

Don't cut yourself on that edge. See, this is exactly your problem: thinking that the Hazaras should accept their own fate and die. Nihilistic handwaving at its finest.

I guess you can try rereading my post. Try to point out where I said that.

Hazaras were not being killed systematically in Afghanistan like the Holocaust. They were untouchable caste sure. Bullied, beaten, maybe even raped, but they weren't being liquidated with intent to remove them from the demographic landscape. They performed necessary functions in the Pashtun society, like butchering animals. They are treated badly because they're Mongolians who got lost among a bunch of West Asians and Caucasian mountain men I guess when Genghis rode through. They're also Shiites, who are nominal enemies of the Salafi Taliban, and they suffered what were more like reprisal killings than a genuine attempt at genocide.

These sort of tit for tat responses, i.e. you kill two of my village kin, I'll kill four of your sons, (or, you kill 1000 of my villagers, I'll kill 5,000 of yours), is par the course for Hazara-Pashtun relations for the past..500 years or so. Reprisal killings and the cycle of violence is basically ingrained at this point and unable to be broken. The Taliban won't help it, sure, but they also won't extinguish all Hazaras. For one thing, people can change between Shia and Sunni, and it's more likely if the Taliban wanted to demolish the Hazaras they would just bully them into converting into Sunni Islam. This is a lot more feasible. For another, a significant portion of Hazaras are Sunnis, and thus considered politically reliable, if kinda cringe, by the Taliban. But that's unlikely.

The Hazaras will just form another militia, get clapped by the Taliban (again), and then kowtow (again) to the new rulers. Such is life in Afghanistan.

Your own article says there was demonstrable progress in helping women under the new government lol. You just shot yourself in the foot.

Yes, they have jobs. They're still being raped, though, and that hasn't changed. If anything it's gone up overall, since the US is leery about prosecuting that sort of stuff because it's embarrassing.

Sorry if I assumed I could have a good-faith debate with you in the first place. Oops, I didn't.

Well, you're the only person arguing in bad faith. You are reading things I didn't write, assuming things without asking me about it, and generally not addressing the points that I'm making.

Why do you think the massacres of civilians should continue?

If you knew anything about Afghanistan you should know that Hazaras are similar to the untouchables in India. It's an ethnic caste system, with Pashtuns at the top, Hazaras at the bottom, and everywhere smattered in between. But you know nothing about what you are talking about. Which is probably why you think that Afghans should think that your imposed system of idealistic fantasy, in actuality a nepotistic kleptocracy of Kabul bureaucrats and occasional bandits, is the ideal form of government. Of course it's not, Pashtuns know this, and they seemingly prefer the Taliban, over ISIS or the United States, even today. That's a good thing.

This is even weirder lmao. Because atrocities are self-evident

No. Rather, because they are winning.

And how are you even sure the Taliban will embrace reforms and not stick to their own backward interpretation of Islam?

I neither know, nor do I care. All I know is that the Taliban can be treated as a legitimate government, negotiated with, talked to, and brought to reasonable understanding with, and possibly even trusted, but the latter remains to be seen. Currently, it is the United States that is fairly untrustworthy to the Taliban, and that will take time to repair. This is important, because if the US allows the Taliban to become an international pariah like Iran, it's likely that it will slip closer to ISIS orbit. So America needs to start thinking with how it's going to deal with the Taliban as the sovereign of Afghanistan. Hopefully it does the right thing and offers to support them in a fight against ISIS.

That's all I care about. That's all anyone should demand from a state on the international stage: the ability to be reasoned with and assumed to be keeping some promises.

The Taliban understand the levers of the law. ISIS understands the levers of the law. The United States...might? But it hasn't shown it.

Nihilistic handwaving and indifference isn't a valid argument, you know. It just makes you look like a psychopath.

You keep using "nihilistic" but I don't know if you know what it means. I have my own opinions about the Taliban but they're terribly important, because it's not relevant and offending people is sort of gauche and churlish, even if you disagree with them it costs nothing to be polite. I'm also not in a position where the Taliban can injure me or do anything to anyone that I actually care about, and I understand that the Taliban are just people trying to rule a place the way they want according to what they believe. They are neither colonizers nor imperialists. That's admirable enough, given so many frozen conflicts around the world (Kashmir, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Ukraine, Korea, Congo, etc.) tend to result from post-colonialist wakes. It might be distasteful but I'm sure America is as equally unpleasant to them as they are to America. The fact that they don't act like America is proof of their intellectual maturity.

The fact that you can't get this is mind boggling to me though. I'd rather have the Taliban in charge of Afghanistan, give them airplanes to bomb ISIS with, and have them kill ISIS and be good at it, rather than let some weak Kabulites try to do the job when they can't even beat a dozen hillbilly fighters in a Toyota with a tank. There's no reason for the United States to allow another Iraq situation to happen, so it should really just drop Kabul like a hot potato if they haven't improved the situation in the next few weeks, assuming they aren't already doing that. Hopefully Biden's making plans to get a photo op with Akhundzada because I feel like that's gonna be necessary.

"Simply is" does not equal "best fit". You are contradicting your own logic, as insane as it seems.

It does. If something is, then it is the best fit in that environment, of all the available options. Are there better fits? Possibly, in the hypothetical realm, but nothing else comes close to how effective the Taliban is at spreading across the Afghan countryside. It's almost as if Pashtuns are welcoming them or something, however begrudgingly, because it's better to be a puppet state of a fellow Muslim country than a puppet state of some infidels. So says the Taliban, and so would many Pashtuns agree, obviously. Afghanistan is a great example of "as above, so below" because provinces and villages swap hands based on personal contacts and assumptions of who is stronger at the time. So many parts of the country have flipped that it's basically a light switch.

ISIS might be a better fit at some future date, for example, should Afghan Islam become more radicalized and conservative. Or the Ottoman Empire, should it become more liberalized. Or perhaps a resurgent Islamic Khaganate, but the Taliban are quite miffed about Xinjiang and seem willing to work with the PRC on that front, so I doubt it. Of the many choices that span Afghanistan's potential futures, and some of them are quite dire, concepts of all inclusive pluralistic democracy and Western conceptualizations like protecting minorities is not one of them. Pashtuns don't protect minorities, they enslave them, and have them do dirty jobs like clean latrines or butcher animals. That's just what they do, and that's something that you sort of have to accept if you want to deal with Afghanistan. Or even think about dealing with it. It's a rough place.

If we're lucky America will pull out of this with half its ass intact and manage to negotiate a major deal with the Taliban like the British did in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Internal suzerainty provided they shoot ISIS and keep Al-Qaeda out. Seems a square trade. Can America rub enough brain cells together to do it? Can the Taliban trust America as far as they can throw them (currently 6,000 miles and counting)? We'll see.

Elaborate.

I suggest you read the first post in this thread.

If they behaved like ISIS the whole world would be committed to seeing their eradication. Not even the ISI could afford to support medieval terrorists.

Judging by your prior statements and beliefs you'd shared, I'm pretty skeptical. The United States would bomb them, sure, but that might be about it. America needs to make allies with people like Bashir al-Assad, Hibatullah Akhundzada, and whoever else they can find. That's a tall order, because it means bringing together a United Front against a massive threat that might potentially be able to turn large swathes of population by simply being good at ruling the people the conquer.

Al-Qaeda also despises ISIS

"Al-Qaeda" no longer exists. Who would fund them? Who cares about them? ISIS seems to be a lot better for average Muslims (hence why they were popular, they did things for ordinary people, like solving ordinary crimes, enforcing laws, and reducing the cost of marriage) and more successful in their relative ideological ideas. Al-Qaeda has had relatively weak influence on the post-2001 discourse towards America. Most Muslims do not really believe in pan-Arabism or establishing a caliphate across the Middle East, nor do they care about the Gulf Coast and US relations too much. Saudi Arabia has back pedaled a lot from its Wahhabist bits as well. It's all a bit airy fairy and highfalutin and no one really cares about the geopolitical implications of thirteen car bombs in Beruit in 1981. Osama was a foreign policy wonk and a over-educated law student. He had no real knowledge of practical life for the average person because he was a rich scion.

Imagine if Bill Gates's son led some sort of capitalist insurgency to make bitcoin the universal currency of the globe and drove airliners into the WTO headquarters I guess. That's Osama.

ISIS did something astounding though. They addressed people's fundamental grievances with their governments...and people liked it. America's had to make some tough calls these past couple of decades, between smashing a potential ally against Wahhabist/Salafist jihadis to protect said jihadis and carpet bombing another potential ally against Bin Laden on the basis of "no negotiate with terrorists", but somehow creating ISIS in the power vacuum of the Middle East that was otherwise kept stable by Saddam and Assad's Ba'athist armies ended up sparking a radical shift in the world back to the era of feudal warlords, foederati, and Danegelds. Pretty wacky.

Taliban isn't moderate compared to ISIS, merely less bad.

The definition of moderate.

It's not like clear borders have failed to stop sectarian violence or something, otherwise the Balkans and the Pakistani-Indian relationship wouldn't be such gigantic clusterfucks.

The point is that if there is violence, the borders are wrong, and they need to change to reflect reality.

Speaking of passing the bag, Ashraf Ghani has gone live to announce his resignation and Afghanistan's surrender to the Taliban.

As with Najibullah, so with Ghani.

Fuck around with your agreements, everyone. Hope you don't find me grieving again.

Does the Taliban have a concern troll army on NSG?

[Saiwania]

Now might be a good time for the military historians to research how the 20 years in Afghanistan fully played out. It isn't as simple as, the Taliban was always going to win. Decisions and factors probably went into it. In any case, am looking forward to future Youtube documentaries covering it. Maybe it'll make it to Kings and Generals or an even better channel.

What I gathered so far, is that the Iraq war drew resources away from Afghanistan in the early crucial period from 2002 until 2006 when Taliban was most weakened and wasn't regrouped just yet. And the creation and training of the new Afghan military was mismanaged the entire time. With Trump and Biden's sudden withdrawal doing the most to give all of the momentum to the Taliban coming back over the mountains from Pakistan in force. From the power vacuum being noticed because the national military was ineffective or unpopular, the local warlords all cut deals with the Taliban the more they were convinced that the Taliban return was inevitable.

If the Afghan military was successfully built up early on and the US pullout happened in the dead of winter with no announcement, the outcome may've been different if the Afghan forces would of had time to prepare defenses before any new spring/summer offensives. The peace treaty with Taliban is said to have been poorly negotiated and that Taliban is actually upholding their end of the deal but that Afghan government/US side got nothing from agreement in terms of concessions.

Taliban has all the cards now and nothing can now delay the situation in terms of changing the outcome temporarily, other than new sustained aerial carpet bombing of Taliban convoys.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58187410

[Federation of American States]

although I still want the US troops out of Afghanistan, if you didn't see this coming you need glasses.

[Hakinda Herseyi Duymak istiyorum]

although I still want the US troops out of Afghanistan, if you didn't see this coming you need glasses.

What Afghanistan needs is a social democratic secular Afghan civic nationalist party and its independent armed forces. The people of Afghanistan do not need the United States and their imperialist forces in Afghanistan, because the United States and its bad policies are doing the same damage as the Taliban.

[New haven america]

although I still want the US troops out of Afghanistan, if you didn't see this coming you need glasses.

What Afghanistan needs is a social democratic secular Afghan civic nationalist party and its independent armed forces. The people of Afghanistan do not need the United States and their imperialist forces in Afghanistan, because the United States and its bad policies are doing the same damage as the Taliban.

After the US went there the average lifespan rose to 65 from 59, women and LGBT people actually got some semblance of rights (Moreso the former, the latter did get their status raised from "Death" to "Life imprisonment"...), QoL was increased in general with infrastructure projects and the like (Building schools, expanding medical care, etc...), and non-Islamic historical sites that the Taliban didn't get ahold of were spared destruction. (Minus the multi thousand year old Buddha statues from when Afghanistan was Buddhist. The government did actually have plans on rebuilding them or at least finding and preserving as much of the usable rubble as possible. Yeah...)

[Kowani]

Asadabad, the capital of Kunar province has also fallen to the Taliban, bringing them into control of 20 provinces

or 21
disinfo is everywhere

[Gigaia]

This just shows you how inefficient and shitty the US military is nowadays.
They couldn't stop a mere civil war in Syria, and, considering that the US military is by far the most powerful in the world, that should have been a piece of cake for them.
And now they let the Taliban win and occupy almost all of Afghanistan.

[Federation of American States]

although I still want the US troops out of Afghanistan, if you didn't see this coming you need glasses.

What Afghanistan needs is a social democratic secular Afghan civic nationalist party and its independent armed forces. The people of Afghanistan do not need the United States and their imperialist forces in Afghanistan, because the United States and its bad policies are doing the same damage as the Taliban.

I want the Troops out of Afghanistan, I think they should never of been sent in the first place.
but I doubt that a Western style Social Democratic Secular Civic Nationalist Party would get elected, after the soviets left it
was an "Islamic State" then it became a "Islamic Emirate" under the Taliban, then it became the "Islamic Republic of Afghanistan" so Secularism is highly unlikely.

[Kowani]

Asadabad, the capital of Kunar province has also fallen to the Taliban, bringing them into control of 20 provinces

or 21
disinfo is everywhere

with the fall of Paktika province, it's at 21 now

[Saiwania]

So TYT and all the far left channels on Youtube I know of, don't appear to be covering the Afghanistan situation at all. Its strange, they usually don't hesitate to bash the US some more and say crazy stuff like how the US efforts were worse than the Taliban ever was, how the US only ever broke their country more, complaints about contractors having made money, all the typical dove pacifist crap.

[Gallia-]

This just shows you how inefficient and shitty the US military is nowadays.
They couldn't stop a mere civil war in Syria, and, considering that the US military is by far the most powerful in the world, that should have been a piece of cake for them.
And now they let the Taliban win and occupy almost all of Afghanistan.

The Taliban were going to win the moment the US decided it needed to replace them with a Pashtun United States.

The US military is built to win WW2 a second time, which is fine as far as militaries go. Fighting cabinet wars isn't something modern armies are good at, or any army for that matter, because it requires the finesse of a genuinely good statesman, not an empty suit who gets by on civil servant inertia and a big name. It's a cyclical thing too, there's periods where armies are good at winning periods, and periods where statesmen are good at winning wars. We're past the latter and back in the former at the moment, but few people have realized it.

The real problem is that the US leadership (the State Department and President and his Cabinet) thought it could turn Afghanistan into something it's not. Instead of trying to understand who they were fighting, and why these people are fighting, or even what they believe, they tried to mold Afghanistan into something that pretty much guaranteed this outcome from the start. The same thing happened in Iraq too, with similar results as Afghanistan, although ISIS was eventually destroyed because literally everyone disliked them. Iraq has now turned into a Shiite bastion because democracy works well enough to express what most people want, and most Iraqis are Shiites, so they are a Iranian ally now.

The Taliban OTOH are pretty popular among most rural folks, and most of Afghanistan are Sunni rural farmers, so that goes about as well as you would expect it, too.

[Page]

So TYT and all the far left channels on Youtube I know of, don't appear to be covering the Afghanistan situation at all. Its strange, they usually don't hesitate to bash the US some more and say crazy stuff like how the US efforts were worse than the Taliban ever was, how the US only ever broke their country more, complaints about contractors having made money, all the typical dove pacifist crap.

TYT is not a far-left channel. It's barely a left channel. The military-industrialist complex shills like CNN and The Economist are saying plenty. Indeed, they have been extremely successful in exploiting Trump's relative non-interventionism to turn liberals into McCain-tier warmongers. Most mainstream Democrats are still lamenting that the US failed to overthrow Assad even though that would result in every non-Sunni in Syria being butchered.

[Saiwania]

TYT is not a far-left channel. It's barely a left channel. The military-industrialist complex shills like CNN and The Economist are saying plenty. Indeed, they have been extremely successful in exploiting Trump's relative non-interventionism to turn liberals into McCain-tier warmongers. Most mainstream Democrats are still lamenting that the US failed to overthrow Assad even though that would result in every non-Sunni in Syria being butchered.

By US standards, TYT is as far left as you can get. Cenk and Ana are moonbats, but entertaining ones.

[Heloin]

TYT is not a far-left channel. It's barely a left channel. The military-industrialist complex shills like CNN and The Economist are saying plenty. Indeed, they have been extremely successful in exploiting Trump's relative non-interventionism to turn liberals into McCain-tier warmongers. Most mainstream Democrats are still lamenting that the US failed to overthrow Assad even though that would result in every non-Sunni in Syria being butchered.

By US standards, TYT is as far left as you can get. Cenk and Ana are moonbats, but entertaining ones.

By US standards is just the American far right pretending they aren't as far right as they are.

[Page]

By US standards, TYT is as far left as you can get. Cenk and Ana are moonbats, but entertaining ones.

By US standards is just the American far right pretending they aren't as far right as they are.

Yeah, I don't really think we should ever be looking to US standards when six year old migrant children in America are incarcerated in worse conditions than mass murderers in Norway and the Justice Department considers socialists to be the same as ISIS.

[Picairn]

I guess you can try rereading my post. Try to point out where I said that.

What part of "there's not much to do" isn't nihilistic handwaving?

Hazaras were not being killed systematically in Afghanistan like the Holocaust. They were untouchable caste sure. Bullied, beaten, maybe even raped, but they weren't being liquidated with intent to remove them from the demographic landscape. They performed necessary functions in the Pashtun society, like butchering animals. They are treated badly because they're Mongolians who got lost among a bunch of West Asians and Caucasian mountain men I guess when Genghis rode through. They're also Shiites, who are nominal enemies of the Salafi Taliban, and they suffered what were more like reprisal killings than a genuine attempt at genocide.

Holy crap comparing massacres of Hazaras to the Holocaust to downplay them. How low can you get? Comparing to a relatively worse mass murder doesn't make these mass murders any less diabolical. They were rounded up like cattle and gunned down with no remorse from the Taliban. Elders who tried to compromise got killed during negotiations, something that not even Genghis Khan will do, as much a monster as he was. He was actually outraged at the Khwarizmi Shah murdering his messengers that he went full scorched earth on the whole empire.

These sort of tit for tat responses, i.e. you kill two of my village kin, I'll kill four of your sons, is par the course for Hazara-Pashtun relations. Reprisal killings and the cycle of violence is basically ingrained at this point and unable to be broken. The Taliban won't help it, sure, but they also won't extinguish all Hazaras. For one thing, people can change between Shia and Sunni, and it's more likely if the Taliban wanted to demolish the Hazaras they would just bully them into converting into Sunni Islam. This is a lot more feasible. For another, a significant portion of Hazaras are Sunnis, and thus considered politically reliable, if kinda cringe, by the Taliban. But that's unlikely.

Just because the Taliban *won't* kill all Hazaras, there will likely be more senseless killings and murders. And that doesn't bother you in the slightest?

The Hazaras will just form another militia, get clapped by the Taliban (again), and then kowtow (again) to the new rulers. Such is life in Afghanistan.

I'm getting rather tired of your nihilistic handwaving. Do you have any original argument other than "It is what it is and we must accept it"?

Yes, they have jobs. They're still being raped, though, and that hasn't changed. If anything it's gone up overall, since the US is leery about prosecuting that sort of stuff because it's embarrassing.

Despite its limitations and weak implementation, the EVAW law represents a landmark legislative tool for combatting discriminatory and violent offenses against women and girls in Afghanistan. That it has withstood opposition from conservative detractors in parliament is a testament of shifting attitudes. Among some jurists, the EVAW law has given other progressive laws, like the anti-harassment law, a foothold and has begun to change perceptions about the need to address violence in the home and in larger Afghan society.

Lel. I mean, there are still rapes and issues with the law, but progress is being made. Kind of a blow to your "theory". Not to mention, girls were getting a proper education again without fear of the Taliban dragging them out and publicly execute them.

Well, you're the only person arguing in bad faith. You are reading things I didn't write, assuming things without asking me about it, and generally not addressing the points that I'm making.

Oh really? I was under a different impression. Your whole shtick of this debate has been downplaying Taliban crimes, then tries to justify it with different forms of "It is what it is" indifference, and making vastly overblown predictions coupled with insane troll logic.

If you knew anything about Afghanistan you should know that Hazaras are similar to the untouchables in India. It's an ethnic caste system, with Pashtuns at the top, Hazaras at the bottom, and everywhere smattered in between. But you know nothing about what you are talking about. Which is probably why you think that Afghans should think that your imposed system of idealistic fantasy, in actuality a nepotistic kleptocracy of Kabul bureaucrats and occasional bandits, is the ideal form of government. Of course it's not, Pashtuns know this, and they seemingly prefer the Taliban, over ISIS or the United States, even today. That's a good thing.

Ah yes, the mask has fallen off. You were LARPing so hard as a psychopath, that you have finally made yourself into one. Congratulations on your superb acting. A justification of the caste system will make a lovely top-10 on a list of my experiences on NSG.

A justification of the caste system doesn't make you intellectually superior, it makes you a depraved monster. Let this quote be the proof of it. It is a good thing, then, that the broader NSG community doesn't share your insanely diabolical views. If you had known better, you would learn that, surprise, massacres of civilians and segregation of ethnic groups are almost universally loathed. Don't even attempt to speak on behalf of Afghans if you think Hazaras are not people.

No. Rather, because they are winning.

Winning doesn't equal "best fit". You need to up your game in logical argumentation.

I neither know, nor do I care.

Good to know, I suppose the rest is irrelevant if you won't even care about what I say.

You keep using "nihilistic" but I don't know if you know what it means.

I don't think you even know that different forms of "It is what it is" have existed before you. Your arguments aren't even original, merely a repetition of the same lazy excuse "It's a fact and we can do nothing about it".

I have my own opinions about the Taliban but they're terribly important, because it's not relevant and offending people is sort of gauche and churlish, even if you disagree with them it costs nothing to be polite.

I reserve my politeness to those who deserve it, those who display indifference towards innocent civilians don't. You may call it "gauche and churlish", but I find indifference to be a worse offence than rudeness.

I'm also not in a position where the Taliban can injure me or do anything to anyone that I actually care about, and I understand that the Taliban are just people trying to rule a place the way they want according to what they believe.

Not all beliefs are equal. We have largely repudiated fascism, Nazism, absolute monarchy, slavery, and other evil ideologies, because we view them as morally reprehensible and corrupt.

They are neither colonizers nor imperialists.

Mass murderers and rapists, absolutely.

That's admirable enough, given so many frozen conflicts around the world (Kashmir, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Ukraine, Korea, Congo, etc.) tend to result from post-colonialist wakes. It might be distasteful but I'm sure America is as equally unpleasant to them as they are to America. The fact that they don't act like America is proof of their intellectual maturity.

No, they are simply far worse. Slicing a girl's ears and nose for running away, gunning down Hazaras, banning women from employment and education, executing people in public, etc. speaks more about deranged psychopathy than intellectual maturity.

The fact that you can't get this is mind boggling to me though.

What I cannot comprehend is how you keep downplaying and shrugging off Taliban atrocities as if they were nothing.

I'd rather have the Taliban in charge of Afghanistan, give them airplanes to bomb ISIS with, and have them kill ISIS and be good at it, rather than let some weak Kabulites try to do the job when they can't even beat a dozen hillbilly fighters in a Toyota with a tank. There's no reason for the United States to allow another Iraq situation to happen, so it should really just drop Kabul like a hot potato if they haven't improved the situation in the next few weeks. Hopefully Biden's making plans to get a photo op with Akhundzada because I feel like that's gonna be necessary.

Photo-op with a terrorist, what a great way to boost the polls! And letting the terrorists drag women out into the night and shoot them again, what could possibly go wrong?

It does.

It doesn't. This:

If something is,

And this:

then it is the best fit in that environment, of all the available options.

Does not follow.

Are there better fits? Possibly. But nothing else comes close to how effective the Taliban is at spreading across the Afghan countryside. It's almost as if Pashtuns are welcoming them or something, however begrudgingly, because it's better to be a puppet state of a fellow Muslim country than a puppet state of some infidels. So says the Taliban, and so would many Pashtuns agree.

Does your concept of Afghans constitute only Pashtuns and no one else? Seems likely.

ISIS might be a better fit at some future date, for example, should Afghan Islam become more radicalized and conservative.

Medieval monsters beheading civilians in public. Great choice!

Or the Ottoman Empire, should it become more liberalized.

There's zero chance that Turkey can reestablish the Ottoman Empire.

Or perhaps a resurgent Islamic Khaganate

A fantasy.

Of the many choices that span Afghanistan's potential futures, and some of them are quite dire, concepts of all inclusive pluralistic democracy and Western conceptualizations like protecting minorities is not one of them. Pashtuns don't protect minorities, they enslave them, and have them do dirty jobs like clean latrines or butcher animals. That's just what they do, and that's something that you sort of have to accept if you want to deal with Afghanistan.

See? You keep giving me the same nihilistic handwaving without a hint of self-awareness. I don't even have to paraphrase at this point, a quote and it's evidence.

If we're lucky America will pull out of this with half its ass intact and manage to negotiate a major deal with the Taliban like the British did in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Internal suzerainty provided they shoot ISIS and keep Al-Qaeda out. Seems a square trade. Can America rub enough brain cells together to do it? We'll see.

Right, while they kill civilians and women behind the scenes. You aren't Bismarck, you should probably wipe that smug smile off your face and stop embarrassing yourself with these pseudo-intellectual analyses soaked in a large dose of armchair diplomacy.

I suggest you read the first post in this thread.

I suggest you review the historical effectiveness of aerial warfare in strategic battles.

Judging by your prior statements and beliefs you'd shared, I'm pretty skeptical. The United States would bomb them, sure, but that might be about it. America needs to make allies with people like Bashir al-Assad, Hibatullah Akhundzada, and whoever else they can find. That's a tall order, because it means bringing together a United Front against a massive threat that might potentially be able to turn large swathes of population by simply being good at ruling the people the conquer.

If they start to terrorize the population with ISIS-level tactics then the people would be in revolt. The Kurds have displayed courageous and persistent resistance against ISIS, because they know that once they fall into the hands of ISIS, their life would be over.

"Al-Qaeda" no longer exists. Who would fund them? Who cares about them?

Are you sure about that? They still exist, albeit in small numbers. But who's to say they won't utilize the current power vacuum to rebuild? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/mideast/po ... s-n1276614

ISIS seems to be a lot better for average Muslims (hence why they were popular, they did things for ordinary people, like solving ordinary crimes, enforcing laws, and reducing the cost of marriage) and more successful in their relative ideological ideas.

Lol where does this fantasy come from? Living under ISIS is one of a person's worst nightmares.

Al-Qaeda has had relatively weak influence on the post-2001 discourse towards America. Most Muslims do not really believe in pan-Arabism or establishing a caliphate across the Middle East, nor do they care about the Gulf Coast and US relations too much. Saudi Arabia has back pedaled a lot from its Wahhabist bits as well. It's all a bit airy fairy and highfalutin and no one really cares about the geopolitical implications of thirteen car bombs in Beruit in 1981. Osama was a foreign policy wonk and a over-educated law student. He had no real knowledge of practical life for the average person because he was a rich scion.

Imagine if Bill Gates's son led some sort of capitalist insurgency to make bitcoin the universal currency of the globe and drove airliners into the WTO headquarters I guess. That's Osama.

If Bill Gates' son got the backing of Ancapistan and manages to pull one of the worst attacks on US soil then he's pretty much a high-level threat. It's not like 9/11 has changed the geopolitical landscape for the past 20 years or something, amirite?

ISIS did something astounding though. They addressed people's fundamental grievances with their governments...and people liked it.

I guess the "people" really liked torture, murder, rape, and public executions.

America's had to make some tough calls, but somehow creating ISIS in the power vacuum of the Middle East that was otherwise kept stable by Saddam and Assad's Ba'athist armies ended up sparking a radical shift in the world back to the era of feudal warlords, foederati, and Danegelds.

The definition of moderate.

It isn't. Fascist Italy is less bad than the Nazis, but they were in no way "moderate". Their atrocities in Ethiopia should leave any reasonable person horrified and appalled.

The point is that if there is violence, the borders are wrong, and they need to change to reflect reality.

How do you realistically draw borders in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural country where different ethnic groups of different faiths have lived together in harmony for decades like Iraq?

[Chess Guys]

America is so certain of the importance of bringing Usama to justice for striking a wartime target in an aggressing nation. Do they think all the butchery they did in Iraq should have no justice? That they should not be held accountable in just the same fashion?

[Page]

America is so certain of the importance of bringing Usama to justice for striking a wartime target in an aggressing nation. Do they think all the butchery they did in Iraq should have no justice? That they should not be held accountable in just the same fashion?

"Wartime target", yikes.

There has been no justice for butchery, just more butchery. Saddam was a killer, the US is a killer, and ISIS are killers.

But you can't claim moral superiority while stating that you consider civilians to be acceptable targets.

[Picairn]

America is so certain of the importance of bringing Usama to justice for striking a wartime target in an aggressing nation. Do they think all the butchery they did in Iraq should have no justice? That they should not be held accountable in just the same fashion?

The US wasn't at war with Afghanistan before 9/11 lol. Given that you are a literal Taliban supporter, no one should take your "moral" outrage seriously.

[Chess Guys]

Bombing infrastructure that directly supports a war effort, like factories, isn't considered objectionable by any nation afaik. As Shaykh Usama said, he didn't target houses or schools. He targeted three things that day

[Chess Guys]

America is so certain of the importance of bringing Usama to justice for striking a wartime target in an aggressing nation. Do they think all the butchery they did in Iraq should have no justice? That they should not be held accountable in just the same fashion?

The US wasn't at war with Afghanistan before 9/11 lol. Given that you are a literal Taliban supporter, no one should take your "moral" outrage seriously.

When America sanctioned Iraq and half a million people starved to death, did you bat an eye? This is why I don't take your outrage seriously

[Picairn]

Bombing infrastructure that directly supports a war effort, like factories, isn't considered objectionable by any nation afaik. As Shaykh Usama said, he didn't target houses or schools. He targeted three things that day

The Twin Towers aren't factories.

When America sanctioned Iraq and half a million people starved to death, did you bat an eye? This is why I don't take your outrage seriously

Did you bat an eye when the Taliban massacred Hazaras? This is why I don't take your outrage seriously.