Yup. Once we chose to step in, the least we could do was try to get the 7th-century folks there to stop stoning women to death.
Sadly, that’s all failed now, and I greatly fear the headlines we’re likely to see out of there in the coming weeks and months.
That was the most maddening and aching part of having to watch it happen.
There has to be something in it for the individual tribes - probably peace plus a cut of whatever economic prosperity the Taliban is offering. If all they’re offering is brutality and religion, the Taliban will face the same fate as all the previous usurpers. It is interesting to watch these practically prehistoric political entities try to operate in the modern world. It makes me wonder how much longer the people will put up with it.
The thing I find endlessly baffling and fascinating is that this is one of those situations where lots and lots of people are gonna soon know they lied to them, they played down the seriousness, and that many more people died needlessly as a result. Trump could skate by because, I think, folks were exhausted with the restrictions. The previous variant seemed to mostly kill older people and people the base didn’t care about while mostly sparing children. This is going to become a tale of two Americas with the sickest and dying being people with whom the base most readily identifies. I just don’t see how this goes well for these guys. I really don’t.
Over and over and over again.
You forgot Rummy.
Honestly, I reject that premise. Pre-1979, Afghanistan was a functional democratic society. Kabul was a liberal, modern city, very much like Tehran of the 1970s.
Democratic ideals are sustainable and workable in Afghanistan… but you need functioning infrastructure, end to end, to provide the benefits of a liberal democratic society, and that’s something the country hasn’t had for decades. We could have provided that. We had the opportunity when the Soviets left. We had the opportunity when we invaded. And we could have done it, if we hadn’t sent all that focus over to Iraq.
Somebody made money from the excursion into Afghanistan. It created jobs for military contractors.
Afghanistan saw what Democracy looked like and decided they weren’t interested. As long as they don’t export their terrorism I not too concerned. You can’t give them something they don’t want.
I fear you are right, @castor_troy.
Unfortunately, we have one hell of a lot of people in this country who would love to go back to stoning women. It remains everywhere, unfortunately. Just more open in some places. Like Afghanistan.
In a shared geography, the Taliban would not put up with Cali or Zeta or MS-13 heresy.
That strategy works in a conventional total war, which we haven’t engaged in since the end of WW2. The problem is civilians. We could bring in the B-52’s and cruise missiles to make big smoking craters wherever the Taliban moves around in Kabul, if we wanted to accept thousands of civilian casualties like we did in WW2.
The Taliban seem to have fared pretty well the last time they took over the country. When they have more capacity for violence than any of the individual polities, and the individual polities mistrust one another as much as they fear reprisal… yeah, don’t expect the Taliban to have any difficulty ruling by fear… again.
The BBC just had a very interesting interview with conservative Chris Alexander, former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan. He has, for me, a surprising take on what is happening is the hot phase of Pakistan’s proxy war, a de facto annexation, and he even names names as to who should in Pakistan’s military should receive international sanctions. In his view, the US Congress, which should be focused on sanctioning Pakistan seems more interested in pointing fingers elsewhere. Pakistan has the world’s sixth largest military. About 20 million people, or half of the Afghan population speaks Pashto, and about 25 million Pashto speakers in Pakistan, about 15% of that country’s population.
There won’t be. Mazar-i-Sharif showed that. The warlords fled because the afghan army refused to fight.
They’re coming back, just need to regroup and re-equip.
It’s always been city mice versus country mice.
So to sum things up: in the end Iran won the Iraq war and now China just won the War in Afghanistan?
…this idiocy is every where - even here in NJ where on the whole, things have been generally better managed than in other parts of the country -
Friday, Aug. 6 - New Jersey’s Gov. Phil Murphy stepped up by announcing , that students, teachers, staff and visitors will be required to wear face masks indoors again when school resumes in September.
… and then predictably …
Republican Jack Ciattarelli, Murphy’s GOP (now - RABID TRUMP SYCOPHANT) opponent for this fall’s election, immediately called the action “a bewildering reversal’’ of his position from a few weeks earlier.
[Ciattarelli in his standard obtuse state says “bewildering” ?.. yeah …- convincingly demonstrating his total ignorance of the changes that have occurred in the battle against the virus - the emergence of the Delta variant & the much greater peril that children are now in because of this mutated strain and then further takes his basic Bile-for-Brains approach & ignores prevailing medical expert views and says … ]
and adds -
"The decision on whether a child wears a mask should be up to their parents, not the government"
This JACK-ASS was once almost a “never-Trumper” but now he’s gone GQP crazy & is injecting the toxins of Trumpism directly into his veins in a desperate attempt to reel in the hate-filled base …
for example - he is on the attack AGAINST things that may be in anyway favorable toward the LGBT portion of the population
“You won’t have to deal with it when I’m governor, but we’re not teaching gender ID and sexual orientation to kindergarteners,” he said in a video “We’re not teaching sodomy in sixth grade. And we’re going to roll back the LGBTQ curriculum. It goes too far.”
There is no winning wars in these places, it’s just one chapter in a millenia-long book of war. The cycle never breaks.
And military hardware manufacturers. Every time a drone fires a Hellfire missile, that’s a $160,000 explosion on the receiving end. Every time the ground crew loads a new magazine of GAU-8A ammo into an A-10 Warthog, that’s $150,000 worth of big-ass ammo to rip up the ground with. Sweet deal for the suppliers as long as the war drags on.
How would you test that? If religious fanaticism is so compelling why IS there Cali, Zeta, and MS -13?
What makes you think Wahhabism is so powerful?
China hasn’t won shit. The Taliban isn’t anything China wants out there, either.