Dahla Dam is under Taliban control as of May 6.
It's clear that Biden has thrown the Afghan government under the bus. The only question is how long they last, and what happens afterward.
My Hair Provides Affordable Healthcare
Unless if he pulls an Obama and just reintroduces US forces to beat back the Taliban to an "acceptable" extent and then withdrawing them again. Expect a lot of air and missile strikes if that happens.
The US news media has been abuzz with stories about "Afghan schoolchildren and girls are worried about being killed if the US doesn't defend them".
Not to be ruining on anyone's parade, but women's right is a concern that I'd be worried about since the Taliban had tried to eradicate it so bad.
Edited by Ominae on May 11th 2021 at 11:05:15 AM
Cringe but free
The US already is channelling money and resources into local Afghan militias
in lieu of the military proper. The Taliban's traditional constituency is the conservative Pashtun rural belt in the south, bordering Pakistan, while the Kabul government is a minority-majority institution run by ex-Northern Alliance warlords whose power bases are in the Tajik/Uzbek-majority northern provinces.
I think the most likely scenario at this point is for the government to throw up its hands and accept the Taliban as a state-within-a-state who get to do whatever they want in their constituent regions, while they focus on shoring up their own power bases and ethnic militias in the north in case the Kabul government disintegrates altogether. The important thing is that Kabul is fighting itself at least as much as it's fighting the Taliban — plus both sides have IS-K as a common foe, at least for the moment.
Besides, it's not like the Taliban itself is a uniform movement. It's been pretty politically well-integrated on paper since the Quetta Shura (holding de facto overall leadership) accepted Sirajuddin Haqqani (scion to the Haqqani Network, the most senior affiliate dating back to the '80s) as its deputy leader. But it still holds differing visions with the Peshawar Shura and countless smaller splinter factions on the field, not all of whom are going to recognise the peace deal with the Kabul government.
Edited by eagleoftheninth on May 11th 2021 at 11:41:52 AM
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
As previously discussed before, the allied forces had the chance to wreck the Taliban in the early 2000s to the point that they can't reform.
Cringe but free
Really debatable. The groups that formed the nucleus of the Taliban insurgency were organised in Peshawar, Quetta and their other traditional hinterlands in the Pakistani tribal territories, well outside ISAF or the Kabul government's reach. Antonio Giustozzi's books, The Taliban at War and Empires of Mud, offer detailed looks into the development of the insurgency in the early-mid 2000s, based on interviews with the participants on the ground.
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
True for its origins. Most of the Afghan Taliban (last I heard) hid in Afghanistan, including Omar. He was pretty elusive for a time after a post-Taliban government was set up in Kabul.
FWIW, India's stepping up military assistance to the Afghan military/police, Pakistani complaints be damned.
I know a woman who's working in Afghanitan with a NGO. She's pretty upset that the Taliban (and likely IS-K) are stepping up attacks and she's criticizing them for taking advantage of the NATO withdrawal.
https://www.dw.com/en/afghanistan-taliban-captures-strategic-district-close-to-kabul/a-57503194
Taliban took control of Nirkh district, which is close to Kabul.
What makes this a black eye to Afghan intelligence/security forces is that... the area has the police headquarters, the intelligence department and a large army base. All captured.
This is according to Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid via Twitter.
Afghan troops are working now to recapture it before the incoming Eid ceasefire on Thursday, Afghan time.
This also sours more Afghans who aren't confident that Afghan troops can quell Taliban forces.
In recent weeks, Taliban is also targeting Afghan journalists and are accusing all of them of conducting intelligence on behalf of the National Directorate of Security.
Edited by Ominae on May 12th 2021 at 4:34:02 AM
Okay, real question: how does the Taliban have so many resources and manpower that they can compete with what is nominally a national military? Or, conversely, how is Afghanistan's military that weak?
A procrastination in of itself
Because the Taliban have more support from the population of Afghanistan. That’s due to a combination of ethnic divisions, power begetting power and rampant corruption amongst the Afghan government.
On top of that they’ve got foreign support from Pakistan.
Edited by Silasw on May 12th 2021 at 12:53:10 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Goku Black
The Afghanistan government is highly unstable as well in comparison which doesn't help matters.
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
The 2019 Asia foundation survey showed a substantial drop in support for the Taliban though (although people did believe a peace deal is possible)
This year, the proportion of respondents who have a lot or a little sympathy with the Taliban is 13.4%, similar to 2018 (15.9%). Respondents who say they have no sympathy with the Taliban have increased almost 3 percentage points, to 85.1%, since 2018 (82.4%). Urban respondents (88.6%) are more inclined than rural respondents (83.9%) to claim to have no sympathy at all. Respondents from Zabul (56.1%) and Uruzgan (50.5%) express the highest levels of sympathy with the Taliban. Despite being the highest, however, sympathy for the Taliban among Zabul respondents is still 20 percentage points lower than the 2018 level of 65.9%....
At the same time, they say they have little sympathy, optimism surrounding the U.S.-Taliban peace talks is reflected in the increased number of Afghans who say that reconciliation is possible. Among those surveyed, 64.0% say reconciliation is possible, a 10 percentage point increase over 2018 (53.5%). Males (69.6%) are more optimistic than females (58.5%) by over 10 percentage points.
By province, respondents in Uruzgan (84.8%), Kunar (83.8%), and Paktika (80.1%) report the highest levels of optimism. Continuing trends observed in 2018, the lowest levels of optimism for reconciliation are reported in the provinces of Daikundi (31.5%), Panjshir (42.6%), and Bamyan (44.1%). However, the fi gure of 42.6% in Panjshir is notable, because it represents almost a 300% increase in optimism over 2018 (11.3%).
Edited by xyzt on May 12th 2021 at 5:37:35 PM
Righto. So on one end, we have a misogynistic death cult. On the other, a corrupt, functionally illegitimate government.
I'm honestly thinking it might just be better to let them fight it out amongst themselves. Yes, the Taliban would win, and that would be all kinds of awful, but clearly foreign-imposed "democracy" isn't working either and is just prolonging the conflict.
Well some people involved in the peace talks are calling for the mainstream Taliban to talk, but none so far with the response to Kabul...
A procrastination in of itself
The slap-dash nature with which the Bush-era US carried out state building in Afghanistan (and Iraq) is a legacy problem that nobody wants to address.
State building takes time, you have to establish peace, establish services, establish legitimacy and gradually build respect between opposing groups while have safeguards in palace to prevent sectarian violence and a “I’ve won the election, so I’m gonna screw over the people who voted for the other guy” mindset.
You can’t just throw elections at an unable country and call it a day.
The problem with letting the Afghan government and the Taliban fight it out is that once the Taliban win they will turn their attention back to the rest of the world, countries don’t want to violence in Afghanistan coming to their doorstep.
I’ve said for a while, but the long-term solution might be to withdraw and let the Taliban inevitably overthrow the Afghan government, then invade again with a proper plan from the start.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Cringe but free
You're looking at the logic of insurgency versus counter-insurgency. To maintain its legitimacy, the Afghan government has to be strong and present everywhere. And to hurt that legitimacy, the Taliban just have to turn the screws where they hurt. Sure, they didn't have the numbers to mount big setpiece offensives on the NATO militaries. But what they had was enough to go after the weak links in the chain: local cops, civil administrators, schools and electoral processes.
They could always find hillside villages where the security forces aren't present, and make them pay taxes to the "Islamic Emirate" instead of the government. They could send "night letters" warning people not to go to the polls and cut off a finger or two to make their point, and people would be too scared to go unless the government could make a strong enough display of security to reassure them, at huge costs in cash and political favours. A roadside bomb here and there won't deliver them a smashing victory, like the Rebel Alliance against the Empire, but it would be terrifying enough to push the government forces to stay in their bases and civil administrators to stay out of town; and if they're not there in the area, interacting with the locals and asserting their legitimacy, the Taliban will be.
Contrary to what Hollywood believes, counter-insurgency work in real life isn't mostly about high-speed low-drag black ops raids to kill off terrorist leaders. A lot of it is just about being present, ensuring that the other side isn't, and being prepared to lose people (soldiers and civilian supporters alike) when they come out to contest the turf in force. And the Kabul government lacks the coherence and willpower to do that because at heart, it's still the same collection of quibbling warlords that the Northern Alliance was, a couple of decades ago. Dostum, Sayyaf, Hekmatyar and Massoud (before his assassination) — before they fought the Taliban, they were landing rocket artillery on Kabul and sending death squads to sweep through civilian neighbourhoods. The US-backed administration never truly managed to unify the powerful cults interest groups that clustered around these personalities. Afghanistan has been at war non-stop for over four decades; as far as most people are concerned, a just and functioning national government for all is little more than a pipe dream.
So if you were a district head, an army commander or a development contractor receiving US aid, you did what you could: channel whatever resources you could to protect and enrich yourself and your in-group. If you thought that the country was closer to collapse than it was to stability, then it makes more sense to prepare for the former than the latter. The Afghan military is disproportionately made up by minority groups like the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara; why would these recruits want to lay down their lives for the rural Pashtun districts on the border, where as far as they're concerned, the locals already hated their guts and were talking to the Taliban behind their backs?
And if you're one of the locally-recruited cops or militiamen who do most of the day-to-day security work, you'd probably know the local Taliban yourself; some families would even hedge their bets by sending one son to join the government forces and another to join the Taliban. You'd know that they could probably track down your entire family through Facebook and WhatsApp if they want to get real nasty. Why pick a fight with them for a government that only barely cares to give your people education, jobs and health care? That's how you end up with scenarios where the security forces just plain lack the willpower to fight, and the government that's supposed to run the area just stops existing. And when the Kabul government isn't there to enforce the law and sort out civil disputes, the Taliban are more than happy to pick up the slack, if only to render themselves legitimate in the eyes of the populace.
Worth noting here that the provinces most optimistic for reconciliation are the ones where the Taliban are already strong, whereas the least optimistic ones are the traditional bastions of ethnic minority resistance against the Pashtun-dominated Taliban. And "support" is an illusory statistic because it's not about how the people feel about them, per se. It's about who they'll obey when the chips are down. You can have a town say that it "supports" law enforcement and still be too scared to rat out the powerful local drug gang.
Edited by eagleoftheninth on May 12th 2021 at 5:28:34 AM
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
I'm not sure if letting the Taliban (or IS-K) get rid of Kabul and reinvade Afghanistan is a good idea...
Edited by Ominae on May 12th 2021 at 5:41:50 AM
A procrastination in of itself
For Afghanistan to stabilise and be rebuilt the current government in Kabul has to go. It then has to be replaced by something with international oversight to remove corruption and keep it removed.
The other option is for the US/NATO/the UN to depose the Kabul government itself, which isn't going to happen.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Better if the elections are underway there, but the Taliban’s too proactive to make it safe.
Stop Killing My Titles
Belgium: A manhunt for a far-right soldier:
The suspect has been named as Jurgen Conings, a military shooting instructor who took weapons from a barracks.
He is said to have made threats in the past against virologist Marc Van Ranst, who led Belgium's public health response to coronavirus.
Mr Van Ranst and his family have been taken to a safe place.
Latest reports say about 250 officers have been deployed in and around a national park near the Dutch border. Six shots or "detonations" were reportedly heard in the area at 18:35 local time (17:35 BST) but it is unclear if this was gunfire.
Questions are now being asked why a known far-right sympathiser was allowed access to military weapons. Reports said he had taken the arms from the base at Leopoldsburg on the pretext of organising target practice.
Police appealed to the public not to approach the suspect but to get in touch if he was spotted. Authorities say he represents the highest level of threat on their scale of four and may have plans to attack either individuals or institutions.
For hours a forest was searched near the town of Dilsen-Stokkem, not far from his home in the northern province of Limburg, after a car said to belong to the soldier was spotted containing heavy weapons.
Inside the car they found four anti-tank rocket-launchers and ammunition but believe the suspect is still armed with other guns, including a sub-machinegun, and carrying a bulletproof vest. [...]
The suspect has in the past threatened Mr Van Ranst, considered Belgium's best-known virologist.
Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne told Flemish TV there were indications that Jurgen Conings was "violent and in the course of the past 24 hours, evidence has emerged the man poses an acute threat".
At least 30 soldiers with far-right views are being monitored by Belgium's threat analysis unit, and the suspect is said to be one of them.
Stay safe, Belgian/Dutch tropers.
grah
Cringe but free
Washington Post: Is Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau dead this time? The Nigerian military is investigating.
“We are looking into it carefully,” Nigerian Army spokesman Mohammed Yerima said. “In the past, we have reported that he is dead and then he comes back. It has been embarrassing.”
An internal report by Nigeria’s intelligence agency said the militant commander — known for his grisly videos and use of child suicide bombers in massacres across the Lake Chad Basin — detonated explosives that killed him Wednesday when fighters with the Islamic State West Africa Province, or ISWAP, tried to capture him in his Sambisa Forest hideout.
The report was obtained by The Washington Post and confirmed as authentic by two Nigerian officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The Nigerian military and regional forces have declared Shekau dead at least four times since 2009. After such announcements, Shekau released video messages, mocking the government while firing bullets into the air.
The deaths of extremist commanders are notoriously hard to verify — especially in the dense bush where Boko Haram has carved out its stronghold. If a body turns up, Yerima said, the Nigerian authorities will rely on genetic testing before issuing any confirmation.
By Friday, local media outlets were mixed on whether Nigeria’s most wanted man was dead or just injured.
“We should take this with a pinch of salt because this is the fifth time Shekau has been officially killed,” said Bulama Bukarti, a Nigerian conflict researcher in London focused on Boko Haram.
In previous cases, military officials have taken credit for Shekau’s death. This is the first time his demise has been linked to extremist adversaries.
ISWAP — an offshoot that split from Shekau in 2016 — has long taken issue with Shekau’s pattern of brutalizing civilians. When Boko Haram stormed villages over the last 11 years, fighters tended to kill most residents, largely Muslims, and kidnap the rest.
Battles have periodically erupted between the factions, killing hundreds of fighters on both sides.
ISWAP is known to govern remote areas and collect taxes from residents in exchange for protection while striking at primarily military targets. (The organization has also punished people for cooperating with the government, researchers say.)
Shekau’s faction outraged those extremists over the years by staging attacks on what they viewed as their territory. In one 2018 statement, ISWAP called Shekau a “tumour” to extract.
That tension threatened his reign. Shekau commanded between 1,500 and 2,000 militants, according to a 2019 estimate from the International Crisis Group, while ISWAP had as many as 5,000.
Lately the larger force had been expanding its reach across northern Nigeria and into Cameroon, said Yan St-Pierre, a counterterrorism adviser and head of the Modern Security Consulting Group in Berlin.
“The last remaining domino was the Sambisa forest,” he said — Shekau’s stronghold.
Since the conflict began, Boko Haram and its offshoot have killed 30,000 people around the Lake Chad Basin. The group’s violence has driven more than 2 million people from their homes in Nigeria and neighboring countries.
Shekau took control in 2009 after the death of Boko Haram founder Mohammed Yusuf.
Yusuf had been a firebrand preacher, calling for the strict application of Islamic law. He drew massive crowds in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state, advocating against Western education — Boko Haram’s name loosely translates to “Western education is forbidden” — but did not openly coach his followers to embrace violence.
Then Nigerian security forces killed Yusuf during an uprising, and Shekau assumed power, steering the movement into a bloody insurgency.
Fighters stormed villages, torched dwellings and drafted people into their ranks. Men became soldiers. Women were forced into marriage and endured a culture of sexual assault.
Shekau exploited children as suicide bombers on a large scale. Boko Haram routinely strapped bombs onto girls and sent them into crowds.
The group was behind the 2014 kidnappings of the Chibok girls — a mass abduction of 276 students from their school — and has inspired a slew of copycat captors across Nigeria’s north.
If Shekau is indeed dead, the insecurity rocking life in the region is still far from over, said Matthew Page, formerly the U.S. intelligence community’s top Nigeria expert.
Boko Haram fighters may defect to ISWAP, creating more unity between the militants. Or the infighting could intensify, which carries the risk of further uprooting communities.
“Just taking out one person isn’t a curtain call on the group,” Page said. “Over time, you may see degradation because there are junior terrorists running the show. But there can be volatile, unpredictable scenarios going forward.”
Looks like there's some work being done to expedite visas for Afghans who worked alongside American troops to relocate them to America to prevent the Taliban from getting ideas of assassinating them.
The Australian Embassy is going to be closed temporarily. Some other embassies are scaling back the staff or sending those non-essential back home.
The Taliban says that they won't target foreigners who work with the diplomatic community.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57040713
"There's a bomb attack near a school at the Dasht-e-Barchi area."
A pretty bad one. A lot of young girls were targeted and killed.
Edited by DeMarquis on May 10th 2021 at 6:20:07 AM