Afghanistan - why is the Taliban takeover a surprise?

Politics
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Around 20 years ago - in the early months of US/UK involvement - I read a first-hand account of the fighting by an ordinary British soldier. He happened to see the faces of some of the enemy in a close encounter - then a few days later he came across the same men in a normal peaceful village gathering - it was a wedding or some such celebration. He did nothing about it, but learnt a clear lesson: the foreign troops were there trying to fight a war not really against an enemy army, but against the local people themselves - and they were therefore always going to lose.

It was the same lesson as the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968 - when the supposed enemy army suddenly emerged from every village and city street, because they weren’t substantially a separate professional army at all, but local people themselves.

So no - not a surprise at all.

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If it was no surprise to you & me, why was it such a surprise to the government advisors? It seems that those whose job it is to speculate on these matters got it spectacularly wrong (again).

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wasn’t Raab on holiday somewhere “on the continent” or on the toilet or something (as usual) with his knickers round his ankles?

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It certainly wasn’t a surprise to all US advisors.
There are numerous reports of advisors warning of the current and potential future situations and being ignores and/or side lined.

Call me a cynic, but my view is that the objectives of the majority of US interventions in the last 50 years or so were:

  • to ‘project’ US influence to maintain their status as THE world power;
  • impose US values on other countries;
  • control assets - primarily oil;
  • sell (and test) arms.
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Sadly it wasn’t a surprise, and it’s no surprise that the Taliban have stated today, that they are returning to the use of amputation, stoning and beheading for breaking Islamic law, as they will be returning to slavery of women, and the marriage of little girls to old men. The issue that the west has to look at now, is who is next, and how many ‘sleepers’ have crept into our countries among the illegal migrants, to spread death and mayhem ? Because you can be 100% sure that there will be a resurgence of Daesh very quickly.

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I suppose it is better than his usual abode, in the toilet, of UK politics. :rofl:

But I agree with @anon90504988 , the Yanks and Nato should not have been there in the first place, despite the fugitive Ben Laden, (who they demanded from the Afghan government who was investigating and asked for time, only for Bush to knee jerk the invasion immediately), it is never a good thing to mess in other peoples’ civil wars.

Charles II, desperate to save his crown treacherously brought in Catholic troops from Ireland in the English Civil War, and, once Cromwell had got his feet under the table, that didn’t end well for Ireland.

The Afghans were having a civil war in the '90s, several warlords were involved against each other when one group, ultra religious, started to emerge dominant. Perhaps because, like or loath their point of view, they were true to themselves without the corruption of the others. Be that as it may the Taliban became the government, as legitimate as any other revolutionary government, French? American? Then Nato got involved and they were toppled. Now Nato has gone and we are back to the status quo ante. What’s wrong with that (horrible policies aside, lots of countries have horrible policies but with which ‘normal’ relations are maintained) ? Why the scramble to get the embassies closed and get the staff out? Why not accept and continue relations with the new government?

Did make me laugh the other day when Johnson, trying to be sage said, Kabul is likely to fall within the next 30 days, or words to that effect. My thoughts were foot in mouth once again, more like 30 minutes. :rofl:

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Well volunteered David, off you go and staff the UK embassy, I’m sure the Tailban will welcome you with open arms and treat you kindly. :grinning:

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Regrettably, some Americans have very selective memories but right thinking Americans will prevail.
Apparently, Trump is already calling for Joe Biden to resign :roll_eyes:

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One of the clear takeaways from this is how wrong the politicians in UK …mainly right wing tory Brexiteers …are to advocate ever closer ties with the Yanks in their new global Britain.
The error of turning our backs on Europe for a future with Uncle Sam will become ever more evident.

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The movements which became the taliban had massive support from the US and Saudi Arabia going back to the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan essentially because they were seen as godly and good scripture reading boys by the politically illiterate evangelist biblebashers in the US.

Political parties which were more European-style modern socialist inclined were sidelined by the US and the KSA, they were very keen on going bumsucking to eg the Hizb-e Islami, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s gang (who were never going to refrain from giving the hand that fed them a good savaging as soon as it was opportune, and only a half-wit would have been surprised).

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I was hired by the US State Dept in 1988 to set up a colour darkroom in Peshawar, Pakistan, to process the film coming out of Afghanistan, shot by Afghan photographers trained by myself, after they had been into Afghanistan with a muj combat group.

We needed our own darkroom for colour because it was common knowledge that “Mister Chris, Kodak agency in bazaar is printing two sets of prints and selling one to the Russians”.

I also set up the archive of this material, which is now in The US Library of Congress in digital form

The US took the view that my enemies’ enemy is my friend. Fundamentalist proto-Taliban factions such as the party led by the revolting Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a party one of the seven accredited by the US, were supported because they fought the Russians - and won.

I was in Peshawar when Zia Ul Haq staged his military coup and declared Sharia Law superceded the constituitional legal system of Pakistan.

I was there when the only war-lord to stay in Afghanistan and hold out against the Russians, Ahmed Shah Massood, was assassinated when a suicide bomber from another Afghan party detonated a bomb packed into the casing of a video camera, whilst Massood was being ‘interviewed’.

I was there when the last Russian troops left Afghan soil. I was there when Zia Ul Haq and most of the cabinet were assassinated by a bomb in a plane. Three days later I left.

I lived this conflict every day for 8 months.

Stepping into the Air France 747 at Karachi I almost ‘did a Pope’ - down on my knees kissing the floor of a small piece of western civilisation and sanity.

I went back in 1989 to collate a folio of photographs for an exhibition of the work of Afghan photographers of The Afghan Media Resource Centre.

The fatwa had just been declared against Salman Rushdie. That made for an interesting conversation with my former colleagues. I told them it was a stupid idea because God does not exist - and I’m still here to tell the tale!

What I do recall saying - and I don’t take any credit for being a wise-guy because it seemed inevitable - was that when AMRC moved from Peshawar to Kabul they would find the 7 parties and others already there, tearing each other’s throats out. They were.

By pulling out, the US and the west has made a very difficult position much worse. It is not acceptable to say, “Let them get on with it themselves” It’s too late for that.

Pakistan has nuclear capability. So does India. Pakistan has been ruled by the military for as long or longer than a civilian government. As Zia Ul Haq showed when he staged his 1988 coup, the miltary are aligned with Islamic fundamentalists.

There is a real danger that the conflict in Kashmir, which is as much a sectarian conflict as was the problem in Ulster, could lead to an escalation of tension between India and Pakistan that gets out of control. Having Afghanistan as its neighbour to the west run by the Taliban can only exacerbate that situation.

And the likelihood of trouble coming out of Afghanistan itself will not be confined to the Middle East/Saudi, as has been suggested. The fundamentalists who believe in the worlwide domination of The Caliphate will practice what they believe in - jihad.

As a British Army officer, later to be killed in Afghanistan said, “We are doing it here because if we don’t do it here we will have to do it on the streets of Britain”

Me on a day off

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Despite my above post I agree that, having inflamed the situation, to just b****r off abruptly is about the worst thing we could do.

You seem to have insight into this part of the world - what would you have done differently over the last 20 years?

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I don’t disagree with that, but neither do I think the answer is what your British officer said. Perhaps I am more of a fatalist, but I believe it is best to look to home, not interfere elsewhere.
I like to think that if I was alive in the 30s I would have preferred Chamberlain to Churchill. Hitler may never have attacked Britain, but if he had at least the country would have been better prepared to resist.

I too have travelled in that region, from London to Delhi by road and train, but in the 60s, when my view of the world was a kinder place. :slightly_smiling_face:

I read an interesting book a while back, I think it was called ‘Invasion’, and was in the early days of Daesh. A fascinating tale and an unusual novel in that

SPOILER ALERT coming up !!!

despite all the effort of the heros, Britain and most of the rest of the world was still an Islamic State 100 years later. Which is my point, everybody had got used to it, they weren’t all Moslems, they just got on with their lives not knowing anything different. :roll_eyes:

You may not agree with my fatalist view but think of this, unlike the French liberation from German domination after 5 years, Britain never did defeat the Romans or the Normans after more than a thousand years.

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I probably saw you there!

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David, I know you are a decent guy and think the best of people but the notion that Britain should have seriously tried to negotiate with Hitler is (as people say today) ‘for the birds’. The man was a maniac and had to be stopped before he destroyed Europe.

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I think the world just got quite a bit less safe.

On another topic, does anyone know how is Afghanistan coping with Covid?

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Badly it seems…and now it’s unlikely to improve. So as well as jihadists, they’ll be jihadists with new variants.

The news tonight about people trying to hang onto the fuselage of planes was sickening. How desperate must you be to do that? I can’t face reading more.

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It’s vital to understand the nature of these people. The Afghans are the most intractable people on the planet. Dealing with them must take into account the gist of this joke.

A Pakistani minister is visiting a prison. The prisoners are kept in large pits in the ground covered by steel bars.

“Here, Minister, is the pit with the Punjabis. And here, the pit with the Baluchis. This pit is for the Sindhis. This pit …”

“Who are these people and why are there no bars over their pit?”

“Ah, Minister! These prisoners are from Afghanistan. No need for bars. If any Afghan is climbing out, the others will pull him down!”

The US was suckered into dealing with some exceedingly nasty people. The rest were simply impossible. But all were united against the Russians and for the US, that sufficed. What was to happen after the Russians had pulled out and the Afghan party leaders returned from Peshawar to Kabul?

I think the US administration of the day had no more idea how to play it than Bojo and Co had any inkling of dealing with the realities of Brexit. But the consequences of this ignorance have been appallingly costly and the situation now no better than at any other time.

The British Major was correct. The murder of Fusilier Rigby may ‘only’ have been a single event but the motivation, inculcated in the mudrassas and training camps in Afghanistan, has and will result in more incidents, from single events like the death of Rigby to the destruction of the Twin Towers.

The frightening thing to remember is that a mujahiddin who has taken on board the complete package believes that to die in the cause results in instant ascension to heaven and the provision of however many virgins it is … I can’t recall. It is very difficult - impossible - to have an effective strategy which has to take into account a manifestation of insanity in the opppostion

The comment above that Hitler was insane is correct. You can’t treat with a mad person.

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