So your argument is the US is not doing enough to protect people from its allies so it should allow the Taliban to run wild? I'm not sure I followed the logic from the link onward.
Or is it, "There's no point in trying to help people?"
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 14th 2021 at 12:27:22 PM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Bacha bazi has a long and ugly history in Afghanistan, and their pledge to eradicate it was a key factor in the rise of the Taliban - the victory that first put them on the map was deposing the paedophile warlord running Kandahar. The US occupation bringing Serial Rapist warlords like Dostum into the fold and letting bacha bazi go unpunished in the ANA was a grievous wound to its legitimacy and a major boost to Taliban recruitment.
What's precedent ever done for us?Actually, that's kind of a legit takeaway, in the sense that we'd have had more credibility if we crushed the warlords and the Taliban.
Edited by Ramidel on Aug 14th 2021 at 11:46:34 AM
The thing about the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is that considering it a sincere and well-intentioned but profoundly mistaken attempt to help the country rather than a cynical exercise in imperial violence isn't a useful analytical lens. The US put very little serious effort into nation-building (which is how the place ended up with a rentier economy and skyrocketing poverty), 'hearts and minds' as a strategy was rapidly abandoned (insofar as it ever existed at all) and replaced with brutal, indiscriminate violence, and several social ills that had been largely eradicated by the Taliban, including bacha bazi and the opium industry, came back in even greater force than before with tacit US sanction. The idea was to destroy perceived threats to US interests in the Middle East as defined by a bunch of psychotic, openly racist Cold Warriors. Nation-building was never a serious part of the agenda, as evidenced by the Rumsfeld Doctrine, which was specifically designed to disrupt and destabilise nations with the maximum use of firepower and the minimum use of personnel. Chaos and ruin was a policy objective, not an accidental side-effect.
What's precedent ever done for us?Yeah, certainly, the Taliban are not good rulers, but the speed and relative bloodlessness of the handover shows that few are upset enough about their return to fight it. Considering how drawn-out the fall of the DRA and the Taliban's war in the north against the warlords were, the speed with which a twenty-year-old national government has fallen (against a conscript army, no less) is absolutely astonishing.
What's precedent ever done for us?Actually, that's kind of a legit takeaway, in the sense that we'd have had more credibility if we crushed the warlords and the Taliban.
It definitely isn't a legit takeaway, if "crushing the Taliban" were so easy we would've done it already.
The entire reason the Taliban is doing so incredibly well is because the government is fundamentally rotten and unable to provide good governance. That's not a problem that bombs can fix.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Aug 14th 2021 at 2:58:49 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangWhile actual bombing can’t you very much can leverage military force as part of ensuring good governance for a national undergoing nation-building.
If leaders in Bosnia had tried half the crap leaders in Afghanistan have pulled they’d have been literally dragged out of office by NATO troops.
However no amount of force will fix the issue of the occupying international force not caring about ensuring good governance and respect for human rights. Well, not unless someone applied force to the occupying entity so as to make them care about good governance and human rights.
Edited by Silasw on Aug 14th 2021 at 11:04:27 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThe "bare minimum" has been the Afghan policy for a long while, to the point that many generals suggested that was a major contributing factor to the situation.
This is a good discussion about how the generals kept explaining how Trump's ideas about Afghanistan were wrong and stupid.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.![]()
I agree, that's my issue with the argument that more bombing would meaningfully make things better. It's not that military force has no role to play, it definitely does. It's just that you need to then follow up with a coherent civilian-directed nation-building effort and we have not done that.
At this juncture advocating for more bombing is pretty much just calling for a continuation of the status quo, which one look at the fate of the Kabul government should tell you the worth of that idea.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Aug 14th 2021 at 3:05:50 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangNote the lack of an option there titled “Apply US diplomatic and if necessary military power to either stop the current Afghan government engaging in egregious human rights abuses that empower the Taliban or to remove the current Afghan government and ensure that it is replaced with one that won’t engage in egregious human rights abuses that empower the Taliban”.
That’s always been the way to stabilise Afghanistan, it’s what we’ve done in Bosnia, Kosovo and other successful examples of nation building. To do successful nation building you have to ensure that the local government is led by people who want to build a nation, not a personal kingdom.
It is always worth remembering that if the Taliban disappeared in a puff of smoke and the current Afghan government stood firm without international aid, there would be compelling grounds to stage a humanitarian intervention into Afghanistan and remove the current government on human rights grounds.
Edited by Silasw on Aug 14th 2021 at 11:13:09 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
This is why a military lead nation-building effort is such a terrible idea, they don't understand the importance of good governance.
That's why you'll see them talking about ROE and troop surges, the military is just the wrong tool for this job.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Aug 14th 2021 at 3:19:45 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangHas there been any time this century where any nation has staged a humanitarian intervention on human rights grounds? Even against Daesh the best we got was supplying logistics and air support, while largely ignoring all the abuses Syria was doing at the same time in the same area.
Military leaders can acknowledge that they need to either engage in nation building (Japan) or that they exist simply to hold things together until a political settlement can be reached (towards the end of things in Northern Ireland). Even some military commanders given control over areas of Iraq were able to avoid the obvious pitfalls that happened with civilian leadership.
An actual military led nation-building would have gone much better, because the US military has some respect for human rights and desire to not have insurgents popping up every five minutes.
Afghanistan is nation-building led by a corrupt Afghan government that has the US military act as muscle.
This century or in the last century? Also, on human rights grounds or only on human rights grounds?
All interventions have geopolitical and strategic reasons as an element to them, but that doesn’t mean the humanitarian reasons (when present) aren’t a genuine part of the decision process.
Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Somalia (though it was a failure), Libya (success level still subject to debate), the peacekeeping work in Macedonia, the UN in Croatia.
Edited by Silasw on Aug 14th 2021 at 11:40:29 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThis whole episode didn't happen overnight. The Taliban had already been making territorial gains and inflicting unsustainable casualties on the ANDSF's core units since the withdrawal of the bulk of US and Coalition forces in 2014. Even at the beginning of the Obama presidency in 2009, NATO/ISAF were already losing the war. Not "we're not making progress" losing — "actively getting kicked out of eastern Kunar, Nuristan and Helmand" losing. The losses of US outposts at Korengal Valley and Kamdesh are pretty well-known in pop culture by now; I'm still not through Simon Akam's The Changing of the Guard yet, but so far it's giving the impression that the British experience in Helmand was somehow even worse.
The US troop surge put that on ice for a few years until the 2014 withdrawal and ensuing "drawdown" to a strategy of air strikes and special forces raids, which put on an illusion that the US was no longer doing "real" fighting. At least, until the Taliban seized Kunduz in 2015, leading in turn to the infamous US air strike on the city's MSF hospital that killed 42 non-combatants. That's why I find any assertion that the pre-Doha scale of US troop deployment was a sustainable way to stabilise the country to be rather questionable. What went on then was not a stable stalemate; the Taliban were making progress and surrounding the cities the whole time, and what's happening now basically amounts to a Coup de Grâce.
Anyway, Charles: We get it. Taliban bad. Nobody in this thread is questioning that. What we're trying to understand is how they're winning the morale war in spite of that.
See, in real life, "killing everyone who resists" is not how you seize power. It's what you get to do after you've seized power and support. The Taliban are clearly not doing that through plot contrivance. And if you don't feel inclined to read through all the links brought up since the beginning of the thread, then lucky for you, I've got just the bibliography for the authorial types:
- The Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan (2002) by Neamatollah Nojumi. It's a detailed account of the group's rise during the Afghan civil war in the '90s by a scholar (and former mujahid) with close personal ties to the events on the ground. Nojumi was markedly unafraid of criticising his own "side" — despite his ties to Ismail Khan, he brought up the abuses carried out by the Jamiat-e Islami militias (among other factions of the civil war) as the reason why the Taliban's "law and order" platform had so much appeal to the war-weary Afghan populace.
- The Taliban at War (2019) by Antonio Giustozzi is a much more recent book that covers the rise of the Taliban (and later IS-K) in its iteration as a post-2001 insurgency. The book is a collection of interviews carried out by Afghan researchers on fighters and civilians on the ground, which highlight how ideological unity and hatred for the "puppet" government in Kabul (for justified reasons or otherwise) keeps the group together despite its fragmented leadership.
- The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (1995) by Barnett R. Rubin is an older title, but also my go-to recommendation on the "big picture" of Afghan society, from the mid-20th century to the time of the writing (later editions go up to the fall of the Taliban). Rubin was a UN special adviser on Afghanistan who was on the ground for parts of the civil war, as well as actively researching the refugee community in Pakistan during the Soviet war alongside several Afghan scholars. His writing is quite damning on the part that the international community played on the issue: among other things, it brings up how imperial powers, from the British Empire to the USSR, all contributed to the "rentier state" issue by shaping Afghan regimes whose power came from parcelling out foreign aid, making them more accountable to their foreign patrons than their own people. The Taliban weren't free from that issue — they had extensive Pakistani backing versus the Russian and Iranian-backed Northern Alliance — but they rooted their legitimacy in their ability to bring order to a land torn by civil war, which made them quite palatable to a war-weary populace on the outset.
- Ghost Wars (2004) by Steve Coll is a Pulitzer-winning work that looks at the broader US involvement in Afghanistan from the Carter era onwards. Among other things, it offers the perspectives of the Saudis and the Pakistanis, both US allies in the Soviet war, and why they picked the Afghan clients they did. "America founded the Taliban" is a well-worn meme, but the Reagan admin's uncritical support of any Afghan armed group the ISI pointed at did contribute to the infighting and civil war that paved the way for the Taliban's rise. All the while, benefactors from the Gulf states were bankrolling the religious seminaries in Pakistan where Afghan refugee boys were getting all their education (sometimes with money raised on US soil), creating the demographic base that the Taliban would rise out from.
My reading is skewed towards the Soviet war, so I've got more recommendations on that subject (Rodric Braithwaite's Afgantsy is a really good English-language primer on the Soviet perspective). But again, if you're genuinely curious about how the conflict got to that point, these are all pretty good looks at both the Taliban and the people that the US invasion put in power, and that they're now winning over.
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer."“Apply US diplomatic and if necessary military power to either stop the current Afghan government engaging in egregious human rights abuses that empower the Taliban or to remove the current Afghan government and ensure that it is replaced with one that won’t engage in egregious human rights abuses that empower the Taliban”."
QFT. Unfortunately, in many ways the rivalry between Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah undermined the ability of the Afghan government to get anything done.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.It looks like the troops will largely be an honour guard for evacuating personnel - while there are big questions over how well the Taliban can control their troops (not least because there's been so many defections that it's hard to say who presently counts as 'their troops'), everyone of any seniority in the region seems reasonably OK with the Americans taking their toys and going home, and then the Taliban rolling in and taking over.
Except Ghani, but nobody seems to care about Ghani any more.
What's precedent ever done for us?It is worth remembering that both Kosovo and Bosnia are still quite dysfunctional and dominated by very dubious figures, including those who are suspected of ha ing comitted war crimes. Kosovo seems to habe gotten better with its' new president, but for many years it was a hot spot for organized crime, including organ trafficking.
The symbolism is really coming out strong today, huh. Which reminds me of a bit I liked from the Tale of Rudabeh, Princess of Kabul. It's from when her parents, King Mehrab and Queen Sindokht, are having a heart-to-heart about Rudabeh's upcoming marriage to her suitor, Zal, and the queen says to calm her worried husband:
Its darkness shall not last forever;
Night will turn into day, sparkling like a spring,
And the earth will shine like the jewels of Badakhshan.
Probably too much to ask from this cursed world, but maybe in another time. Maybe in another Afghanistan.
That's because the Clinton admin decided to hold back the Bosniak forces right as they were on the verge of besieging the Republika Srpska genocidaires at Banja Luka and pressured them to sign the Dayton Accords, which led to the bifurcated federal entity and uneasy coexistence we're seeing today. The deal basically gave those responsible for the ethnic cleansing everything they wanted.
Edited by eagleoftheninth on Aug 14th 2021 at 5:08:57 AM
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.Morning. Just got up.
Looks like the north is now under Taliban control. Symbolic now for them after 2001. Those who were able to flee went for the Uzbek land border. Atta said on social media something happened in Mazar-I-Sharif that resulted in the Taliban taking the city.
Word is coming from Arg that Ghani is agreeing to get teams formed up for negotiations. TOLO just broke it.
Qatar is now pulling its weigh on the Taliban…
Edited by Ominae on Aug 14th 2021 at 5:09:34 AM

The US has informed the Taliban that allowing their personnel to evacuate will increase their odds of taking Kabul without a fight.
What's precedent ever done for us?