More about the attack. At least 133 dead, according to #Russia reports. #Islamic_State affiliate in #Afghanistan believed involved as revenge for 2015 intervention in #Syria.
As anyone who has thought about the past few decades of Russian invasions should notice, the only way to be sure this doesn't recur is to defeat them so soundly that it spurs internal political change.
This happened when #Afghanistan militias, armed with US-supplied weapons, sent the USSR scurrying home with its tail between its legs.
If we stay the course, Russia may be transformed into a good citizen on the world stage.
> ... there is growing evidence that the reality on ground is different to the rhetoric coming from Taliban leaders and spokesmen. It was not lost on some watching the press conference in Kabul that Mr Mujahid made his declaration from the seat of the former government spokesman Dawa Khan Menapal, who had been killed by the group just weeks earlier, as "punishment for his deeds".
> Now sources inside Afghanistan, as well as some who recently fled, have told the BBC that Taliban fighters are searching for, and allegedly killing, people they pledged they would leave in peace.
Not just interesting with regard to the errors and mistakes of two administrations, but also instructive in its depiction of the prowess and skills of the Taliban. Good that Zalmay Khalilzad is mentioned, this old fellow from the "Project for a New American Century", one of the neo-cons who once advocated for the second Iraq war... Good links too.
« "Battles were often decided this way, not by actual fighting, but by flipping gangs of soldiers. One day, the Taliban might have four thousand soldiers, and the next, only half that, with the warlords of the Northern Alliance suddenly larger by a similar amount. The fighting began when the bargaining stopped, and the bargaining went right up until the end. The losers were the ones who were too stubborn, too stupid or too fanatical to make a deal. Suddenly, they would find themselves outnumbered, and then they would die. It was a kind of natural selection." »
« It was not just the village elders who were ready to sign on to Karzai’s project–both in the immediate aftermath of his 2001 victories and sporadically in 2002 Taliban leaders offered to quit armed resistance and join in with the new Afghani government. Karzai was in favor. Washington was not. »
« Many people have blamed the United States for trying to create a modern democracy in Afghanistan. But the problem lay in the prior decision [at the Bonn Conference, Germany, of 2001] to create an Afghan state in the first place—that is, a Weberian state that aspired to a monopoly of legitimate force over a defined territory. There was another available alternative, which was to stabilize the country under a coalition of local warlords and tribal militias. »
« Following the U.S. intervention there in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States presided over two countries whose states had completely collapsed. It struck me that contemporary political science had virtually nothing to say about how states were built out of such chaotic situations. The discipline’s entire focus assumed the existence of states [...] »
The important lesson from the #Afghanistan debacle: Over 20 years and US$ 88 billion expenditure, the U.S. armed forces created the wrong type of Afghan military and security forces, one heavily relient on high tech, air support, stable supply chains.
The incompetence of the U.S. armed forces command, its fetishisation of technological superiority and solutionism, its utter denial of realities on the ground over such a long time is astounding — and a disgrace that others have to pay the price for. As always.
But the most egregious aspect: Those decision-makers in the U.S. armed forces obviously didn't learn shit from their failures in Iraq, Syria, and, way back, Vietnam. Why are these yokels from the military, naval, and air academies still allowed to act out their figments?
Russia and China have a field day with this breakdown in U.S. military prowess.
No shit! But you did it anyway, and now the Taliban is in possession of all the military equipment the U.S. provided to Afghans in the attempt to buy exactly this will to fight. Not only did the U.S. fail once but twice.