Ian Welsh

Because sometimes it is important to say you said it.

This does mean the Taliban will almost certainly wind up ruling the country again; the Kabul government is not going to stand without US and NATO support.

That’s unfortunate, but the Taliban is the natural ruling party of Afghanistan. That’s just how it is. Probably the US shouldn’t have supported Islamic hardliners even before the Russian invasion (under Carter), but that’s a long-ago decision.

Biden’s going to be under immense pressure from the military and much of the media to not withdraw. He needs to hold firm. It would be best to do this as quickly as possible.

And yeah, this means there will be a “fall of Saigon” moment some time after the US leaves.

Nobody gets everything right (I’m bad on elections, in particular), but there are reasons its worth reading me: I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like this, and I’ve spent decades working on my models of the world so that I’m more likely to get stuff like this right.

Contrary to what I’m seeing that “no one could have predicted,” this was easily predicted. It was obvious.

Nor was I the only one. Two others.

June 21st: Moon of Alabama.

May 11th, The Saker.

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One of the cardinal sins of American propaganda and thinking is that they often seem to want to assume their enemies are stupid, cowards, corrupt, immoral, blah, blah, blah. (This is weird, because if your enemies are shit, then there’s little to be proud of if you win and a lot to be ashamed of if you lose.) My favorite was calling the 9/11 bombers cowards, when they were willing to die. (Insert idiots talking about virgins in heaven here.)

One thing to understand about the Taliban is that they’ve been at war now for decades. The US military has the best e-lint in the world, a fleet of drones, bombers and an army of special force assassins.

You fuck up even once as a member of the Taliban and you may get dead. Since the US likes bombs and doesn’t care about how many people they kill to get one “terrorist,” you won’t just get dead, you’ll take some of your friends and family with you.

You fuck up serially, and you WILL get dead, and you WILL cause the death of your friends and family. (Being captured, of course, is much worse. If anyone reading this thinks the US doesn’t still torture, well…)

Because of this, the Taliban leadership and even its lower ranks is made up of competent people who are true believers. It’s a harsh life in which you cannot make mistakes. Only brave, competent, true believers sign up and survive.

The Taliban, like Hezbollah, does not tolerate people who are serial fuck-ups. In this they are the exact opposite of US elites, who not only tolerate serial fuck-ups, but promote them.

The Taliban will rule Afghanistan effectively, in line with their beliefs and goals. Before the invasion they ended 99 percent of Afghanistan’s poppy production in areas they controlled. These are serious people, in ways that American leaders haven’t been since the ’50s.

I say this without any pleasure. The Taliban are my ideological enemies and I want religious fundamentalism wiped from the world. But it is what it is, and people need to take their blinkers off.

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As I noted recently, once the US left Afghanistan, the Taliban would rule. This was obvious, and only completely delusional fools thought otherwise. Anyone who thought so should never say anything about military affairs ever again. Yes, the government army was larger and better equipped, but they have zero legitimacy and the Taliban are better fighters.

Not that being better fighters was needed, in most cases there was hardly any fighting and “government” forces just surrendered because of that whole “zero legitimacy” thing. (Also, they’re corrupt from bottom to top. They weren’t in it to fight, they were in it to be on the take.)

There is a lot of hand wringing among the usual liberal suspects about the bad shit that is now going down: collaborators being killed, women being beaten, the end of women’s rights, and so on.

All of this is true, and not irrelevant, but not sufficient to argue the US should have stayed in Afghanistan indefinitely, and let a guerilla war rage on while Americans used drones to kill 90 percent innocents.

It’s hard to say how many Afghans have PTSD and depression, but it’s certainly a large number. In 2002, PTSD was 42 percent (thanks to the war with the USSR, and the period of civil war, and the anarchy afterwards). As the linked article says, it’s hard to imagine that further war and invasion has lessened.

As for deaths, we’ll never know. The US, as in Iraq, deliberately never counted and I haven’t been able to find a good population study. One very careful analysis from 2015, by Physicians for Social responsibility, came up with 1,400 a month, but noted that number was almost certainly an under-count. (It seems low to me. Remember deaths in war/occupation are rarely, to use the modern world’s lovely euphemism, “kinetic.’)

The point here is that what Afghanistan needs is peace.

It will be a bad peace for a lot of people, there is no question. The Taliban are nasty and medieval. But it will be peace and people will mostly be safe. If the US decides to stop shooting stuff up, maybe Afghans can even have safe weddings and funerals.

The US occupation of Afghanistan was not, ever, in any way comparable to the US occupations of Germany, Japan, or Korea because in none of those cases was there any ongoing multi-decade guerilla war.

Instead, the US occupation was the cause of an ongoing war against invaders.

It is true, that as usual, the US has betrayed the collaborators who helped it rule Afghanistan. They should have shipped them out and to the US before leaving.

The vast majority will be fine, mind you: the Taliban knows how to rule and is just telling almost everyone to go back to work (unless they are a woman). But the key collaborators will be killed or otherwise punished.

This is exactly what Americans would have done if the USSR had invaded and conquered America, then left. Translators and Vichy collaborators would not be treated kindly.

But it’s not in the US’s interest. After all, no doubt the US will need collaborators for its next overseas war and occupation, and they will be less willing seeing how Afghan collaborators were treated.

As for Americans, I’m extremely disheartened though entirely unsurprised to see prominent liberals arguing for forever-war. There’s this weird idea in the US that you are somehow, still, in any way, “good” when it comes to invading and destroying other people’s countries, that you have a right to take such actions and that the US doesn’t need its own Nuremberg trials.

Finally, it was never possible to leave “well.” The US military-political complex is incompetent to its core. You can’t do stupid smart, and Afghanistan has been stupid all the way through. (The smart policy would have been to follow the Clinton plan of going in, then leaving.)

Afghanistan’s peace will suck. It’s better than endless war.

For an American Veteran’s perspective I found compelling, see: “Afghanistan Meant Nothing.”

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