America Decides to Ensure Afghanistan Will Be a Chinese and Russian Ally

We’ll see how the Taliban alliance with Russia and China works out. They can all have each other. Good riddance. I think China and Russia should help the Taliban secure Pakistan’s nukes. If the Taliban possessed nukes, Afghanistan would never be invaded again. Courting the Golem.

Pakistan’s nukes are the region’s nightmare in waiting. It’s not clear yet how much effective control the Taliban can exercise over Afghanistan. Chunks of it, yes. The whole of it, as I said, unclear. Afghanistan also needs a lot of money to feed its population and keep up what infrastructure it has. Russia doesn’t have any, and China has no history of being generous. At the same time, both are concerned about Taliban-inspired destabilization in areas of interest to them, for Russia it’s the old Central Asian SSRs and for China, Xinjiang.

Here’s a couple of good reads.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/08/forever-war-benefiting-afghans-follow-the-money/

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/08/23/strategic-apocalypse-afghanistan-seismic-shift-years-in-making/

Afghanistan will join Russia, China, Iran, and Pakistan. Pipe lines and rail lines aren’t not far behind.

Good thing there is no dynamite in Afghanistan to blow up a pipeline or rail line.

Roger, Chomsky thought that all the evil in the world some how came from the US and US foreign policy. What is funny about this is that this is just an inverted form of American exceptionalism, that a bunch of brown people are so helpless they could not manage even being corrupt without us. World history contradicts Chomsky. There was plenty of corruption, evil, and incompetence long before the US existed. The US was irrelevant to corruption in Afghanistan. It was there long before we got there and will be there long after we are gone.

Righteous Taliban? Wow. Always nice to be told what I think by clueless ideologues.

The USA has no strategic interest in Central Asia. None. Russia and China do. The stans are their neighborhood, just like Latin America is ours. It is that simple.

I don’t think Biden “stood up to the generals”. Remember he announced right after his inauguration no more US support for KSA’s war in Yemen. I suspect he got a briefing from the military which showed, in stark terms just how overextended they are and what can no longer be afforded. Now, I am no fan of Biden, but his working class roots are real, which means he has some experience dealing with reality, unlike the privileged internationalists who make up the higher echelons of the Democratic Party. I think Trump was waiting for an opportunity for withdrawal which would make him look good.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the inhabitants of Chinese only settlements find out that the Afghan government thinks they too are subject to Islamic law if they want to live in Afghanistan.

I suppose I do not care all that much whether the Taliban are murderers, liars and thieves . . . or not. Because they are Afghans, odds favor their caring about Afghanistan though there can be no counting on taste.

Are they Afgan? Chris Cuomo contends they are not. Some are, but the organization as a whole and a substantial number of its members are not Afghan. If what Chris Cuomo says is correct and it can be proven with supporting evidence, then the Taliban is as much a foreign occupying force as America was or the Soviet Union was.

Nothing proves a world turned upside down more than Afghanistan for the last 60 years. The Soviet Union was once a sworn enemy of Islam let alone radical Islam. Fast forward 60 years and now the husk of what was the Soviet Union, Putinstan or some call it Russia, is now a friend not only of Islam but an emphatic proponent of radical Jihadist Islam, so much so it is aligned with the Taliban.

Conversely, America, thanks to Mika’s father, embraced Islam and radical Islam to counter the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan over 40 years prior. Mika’s father implored the women-and-young-boy-and-girl-raping, knuckle-dragging Islamic cave dwellers, from Pakistan soil, to go and take back the land that rightfully belonged to them whether they were Afghan or not. Fast forward 60 years and those who America once created, coddled and enabled are now allegedly America’s sworn enemies and the Golem Mika’s father created is now considered a terrorist organization.

My question is, in the next 60 years will it reverse itself again in a manner very similar to how the planet reverses its poles periodically if human is still here 60 years from now?

How much we want to bet this is all going according to some dusty, half-baked “plan” or other, and that the outcome — whatever it turns out to be — is pretty much what a faction in the foreign policy shops have sought all along?

Seems to me we like to think of these things and write about them as if they were some sort of monolithic ideation of Them, whomever rules us, which we in our impotence oppose. But that’s not quite how government works, not in Our System anyway. At the top there are always contending factions, some of which we can see, much of which we don’t.

It was clear from the outset that the United States empire has little or no strategic interest in the Stans, including the Afghanistan. The region is of primary interest to those in the region including India, Pakistan, China and Russia. The excuses for invading and occupying Afghanistan were always tissue thin. The idea that it was a “terrorist training center” was and is contemptible.

The attackers on 9/11 did not come from Afghanistan; they mostly came from Saudi Arabia and they were trained in the United States.

So that excuse for attacking Afghanistan was horseshit. There were other, mostly unstated, reasons, though, and those were the reasons that kept the bloodshed and destruction — and the looting — going for 20 years. And would have kept it going forever if not for intervention from the top.

It wasn’t the mineral wealth supposed to exist in Afghanistan. All the wealth looted during the occupation came from the US, some filtered through Nato, in a massive grift that will probably continue under different guise. The idea was to establish a permanent base in the region and basically launder money through it while trying out various ways of violently suppressing people in the way. This is modern imperialism in a nutshell.

Gangsterism. But then, imperialism has always been that, right?

And there was always internal opposition to this vision on both sides of the aisle. Those who promoted and kept it going were finally undone by (of all people) another gangster, DJ Trump. Biden took advantage — to his credit. The struggle between the factions hasn’t concluded. But it will, and I for one hope that China and Russia can be the stabilizing influences in the region, even if they too are run by gangsters.

Ummm, fair enough, but the Taliban is Gangsterism too. America should remove itself entirely from the equation. No sanctions, but also no aid. No drone strikes. No embassy. America should proceed as if Afghanistan doesn’t exist because, in reality it doesn’t exist except on paper.

Amidst all the hand-wringing, not a word about COVFEFE-45 and the Delta variant in “Afghanistan.” Apparently, the Taliban and “Afghans” are naturally immune from the virus and the pandemic doesn’t apply to any of them and therefore is no cause for concern. Yet another example of how the myopic, compartmentalized press cannot view the world integratively and holistically and therefore each spectacle they hype must be separate but equal but NEVER combined.

Normal? The Taliban’s seizure of power has pretty much frozen Afghanistan’s economy which was highly dependent on foreign aid and US money. There are also many Afghans dependent on foreign food aid which has stopped and healthcare workers who have left or are leaving.

I notice that the MSM, many prominent Democrats, many prominent G7 Leaders, etc. are demanding that Biden order US troops to stay in – around Kabul Airport beyond August 31 in order to “provide time to evacuate everyone needing-deserving evacuation”. And the Taliban has already said that if Biden does that, there will be “consequences and repercussions”.

Here’s what the people saying “stay a little longer” hope to achieve. They know very well that the American majority welcomes the surrender-by-any-other-name to the Taliban because most Americans are weary at the futility of it all. The weary futilitarians will not be moved by appeals to “womens rights” and ” but what about the little girls !?” and etc. to send the Big Army back into Afghanistan for a whole nother round of war.

But maybe if they can get Biden to leave troops around Kabul airport for just a few days into September, then maybe . . . just maybe . . . . the Taliban will attack American troops so severely and atrociously that the American public mood can be de-transformed back to rage and hate. And the establishment will use that rage and hate to “go back in” and ” do it really right this time”. That is what all the Democrats, foreign leaders, etc. demanding Biden authorise American troops stay in place beyond Aug 31 are hoping will happen. That is why they are demanding for Biden to leave the troops there.

If Biden caves in to elite demands and leaves the troops there, will the Taliban be such reflexive behavior machines as to super-attack the American troops the way the elite want them to, in order to bring America right back into the war bigly? I hope not, but I don’t know.

@Warvigilent,

Ahh . . . . . the old “Gliewicz” trick, eh?

Our allies are asking for more time because the US has frozen them out of evacuating people. The civilian side of Karzai airport is a no man’s land and the military side is dedicated to US interests. Every time the news said “civilian air traffic stopped” it meant “the flights our allies arranged to remove their nationals have been blocked by the US”. Now there’s a good chance the Taliban has said it will allow non-US nationals to leave peacefully after 8/31 (there have been high level, direct talks), but there’s the same chance that the US knows an airport attack will happen if it’s not gone by then. Still leaving our “allies” hung out to dry. Always was “america first”.