The Taliban Take Control Of Afghanistan

FWIW: trickle down culture. In my years working the American gig economy I found that direct employees had about as much loyalty towards their company as the Afghan army does towards Afghanistan. I’m aware of the whole rural-tribal-colonial history of that place, but maybe we might want to consider whatever the hell causes such disloyalties first before trying again to inspire the citizens of a country we invade to remake itself.

Of course, that assumes that American leaders aren’t into such adventures primarily for the personal profits.

Quite A Shit Show

What is transpiring in Afghanistan is the culmination of twenty years of endemic corruption at every level of American governance to include the complicity of America’s so-called “Free Press.”

Did Biden receive bad intelligence when he announced America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan a couple of months prior? Yes, he did. He was informed that the American-backed and barely sustained government would hold during the withdrawal process. It was clearly bad intelligence.

This is what happens though when you surround yourself with a bunch of manipulative Yes Men. You get lies. Fabrications. You get manipulative, cunning behavior and compromised loyalty. Hiden agendas. Sabotage, even, and this could be sabotage to get DeSantis or Pompeo elected in 2024 or sabotage by the CIA to get Biden to reverse course and double down in Afghanistan and yes, the CIA is this duplicitous and malevolently psychopathic as an organization and often at the individual agent level. Don’t rule that out because this fiasco is now a political albatross around Biden’s neck and it will rear its ugly head come 2024 and even in the Congressional Elections of 2022.

American “Free Press” Complicity

“Free Press” is in quotes for a reason. It’s sarcasm. America does not have a “Free Press.” The Press in America is captive to many interests and is not “free” in any way, shape or form.

Either way, the American Press, collectively as a whole and individually as various organizations, is guilty of complicity with the 20 year war crime that is the invasion and subsequent occupation of Afghanistan. During the entire 20 year duration of America’s occupation of Afghanistan, the American Press have been nothing more than stenographers reprinting the official line. There are a few scarce exceptions to this, but it’s still largely the rule that the American Press turned a blind eye to the reality of Afghanistan and merely parroted the official lies about America’s purpose and progress in Afghanistan. CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, you name it, all the Establishment Media are guilty as charged.

Most ironic of all is Mika Brzezinski wringing her hands day in and day out about the plight of the people of Afghanistan when the Taliban takes full control again. She has no sense of irony, does she? Her father is largely responsible for what is Afghanistan today. He set the whole Shit Show in motion. Don’t get me wrong, Afghanistan was no paradise before the Soviet invasion, but what America did to counter the Soviets in Afghanistan is inexcusable and unforgivable. Despicable. The record needs to be set straight once and for all. America aided and abetted the rise of the Taliban by stoking Fundamentalist Islam in Afghanistan in its duplicitous opposition to the Soviet occupation.

Here is Mika’s father giving a Pep Speech to the precursors to the Taliban. Mika’s father was the Chief Architect of Afghanistan’s ultimate demise and the current state of Afghanistan, a full-fledged Narco State, is largely a reflection of his demented mind and spirit. Repudiate your father, Mika, for the filth he was. He was a demon even worse than the demons that are the Taliban. He birthed this Golem.

My take:

1) One, a part of the tragedy of Afghans who cooperated with the US not being able to get out is our insistence (it’s been hinted it originates from Homeland Security) that they have all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed on their paperwork to get approved.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-uncomfortable-truth-of-bidens-rapid-afghanistan-withdrawal

On a recent morning, a glass-fronted office in a shopping mall was filled with anxious Afghan men clutching paperwork and waiting for their names to be called. The walls were adorned with signs promising “US immigration visa” and “SIV”—the abbreviation for the Special Immigrant Visa, which military translators and other U.S. Armed Forces employees can apply for. “I have to get an H.R. letter plus a recommendation letter from the supervisor that I work with,” one young man told me, in broken English. “But due to evacuation of Americans and due to leave of your supervisor to U.S.A. or any other places, you can’t reach them.” The young man, who asked not to be named, said that he had been frantically searching Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram for the contact information of the U.S. military officers who supervised him. He said that he was denied a visa in 2019, after almost three years of waiting, because his supervisor never responded to e-mails from American officials asking him to confirm the authenticity of a recommendation letter. “They didn’t answer,” the young man said. In the end, he told me, he was forced to find another American former military supervisor and start over again. Even now, he said, he is working for the U.S. Embassy as an interpreter, but staffers there offer no help in getting through the bewildering application process.

This reminds me of a deceased friend, who was having a heart attack and was stuck with his wife trying to fill out insurance forms to get treatment at one of our local hospitals. Luckily for him, a doctor chanced by, recognized that his symptoms fit a heart attack and yelled at the staff to “Screw the paperwork, get that man into the ER *NOW!*). There has not been the sense of urgency to treat this like the emergency it is for these people.

2) The reason why, I think, the Afghan military collapsed so suddenly is that once again, we built a mirror image of *our* “be all you can be” military, instead of building one more in keeping with Afghanistan’s human and resource infrastructure.

3) The ultimate error in Afghanistan dates back to Carter, and even more Reagan, who thought that anything justified the destruction of the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, which had a fair base of public support within the country (after all, it outlasted the fall of the USSR). If the DRA had survived, if we had not rushed in weapons to arm and train some of the worst elements of Afghan society, then I think Afghanistan would be in a much better place today.

What I wonder is what did everyone think was going to happen when we left Afghanistan? There seems to be a lot of wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth but what had objectively changed in a positive direction there anytime in the last ten years? What I see is a lot of Biden bashing by both conservatives and liberals for what was a rare display of common sense on his part. I see a lot of talk too about how all this was a big intelligence failure. But c’mon, man, it was blatantly, flagrantly, in your face obvious what was going to happen. The timetable of the collapse might have been off by a couple of weeks, but you’d have to be on drugs not to see it coming.

I suppose I should expect a lot of ducking of responsibility and blame shifting, but still…
all the who lost, Biden lost Afghanistan yawling seems ridiculous to me. And if we are going to talk responsibility, wouldn’t it be more to the point to ask who kept us in this idiot war for twenty years?

Yankee come home.

Let us first admit there will be a great deal of suffering. There will be murder. There will be rape including by the husbands that will line-up to take the prisoners called wives. Let us admitted each and every sin.

Now, let us admit that we can do nothing because Pakistan and Saudi Arabia will fund the Taliban. We won’t stop the funding. That means the Taliban will recruit the worst people with the slogan: “Wives for you and country for Allah.” The two imperial power will chip in to stop the third. That’s us.

Lesson: invade, get out, take some with us. We can’t fix what is wrong.

“Afghanistan is a Russian word. It means Afghanistan.”

all the who lost, Biden lost Afghanistan yawling seems ridiculous to me. And if we are going to talk responsibility, wouldn’t it be more to the point to ask who kept us in this idiot war for twenty years?

Yeah, I agree with this. Biden is awful, but to hang this all on him is a joke (even if he didn’t have any dementia.)

Steve Bannon has declared, unequivocally, that the Pentagon was lying to Trump about Afghanistan. Well, I really doubt they could have lied to Trump for 4 years, and not lied to Biden, too. Or does anybody believe that the Pentagon told him they were on a course for such an embarrassing collapse, and Biden (and his handlers) said they were OK with that?

And if Trump couldn’t figure out, after 3 years, that he was getting lied to, he was part of the problem.

This is not just an inevitable failure of empire, but an avoidable failure of staging a military retreat. (Well, Bannon is blaming an intelligence failure, but that would just put more of the blame on the IC, taking it from both the DoD and Biden.)

Another thought: the IC and Pentagon saw this coming, but wanted to blame it on Biden, since their preference is to stay there, forever. So, they kept Biden in the dark, basically to strike a blow in favor of their ‘philosophy’ of empire.

Recall that Obama and Kerry had negotiated an agreement with Russia, that the Pentagon promptly blew up by attacking Deir Ezzor(?) Obama should have thrown a fit, and fired somebody, to protect the office of the President’s constitutional authority.

Alas, it looks like the DoD and the IC are 4th and 5th branches of government.

Listening to “the Five”, it was stated that both the Pentagon and the IC leaked that they were pushing Biden to do a massive airlift, from a few weeks ago, and he refused.

If that’s so, I got it 100% backwards. And this argues that Biden’s dementia is the ‘guiding light’ of behind this debacle. Either that, or he’s unusually incompetent.

For more than a decade, there was so little interest in Afghanistan in the U.S. that there were few to no profiles of the American military leaders or the Afghan puppets or even the happy occupied in the Media.

I remember vividly the Paul Bremer, viceroy of Iraq, profiled by Frontline years ago.— the ideological empty-headedness of the Bush Administration was breathtaking in its depth.There were several journalistic books written detailing how incompetently the reconstruction of Iraq was conducted; I can only imagine Afghanistan was worse. If, after 20 years and a trillion dollars, the state was a hollow reed dried in a drought-striken marsh, that seems the responsibility of the U.S.

I had slight acquaintance 20 years ago with some connected to the Afghanistan diaspora and I remember how hopeful they were, with plans to return and help rebuild the country. Not objectively realistic, perhaps, given the poverty of the place, including the paucity of natural resources, and the absurd overpopulation. Still there was faith in American competence and intention. Misplaced, obviously.

I think most Americans believe in our own mythos of competence and benign intention, and are also unwilling to contemplate treating the “professionals” who regularly prove themselves to be idiots with scorn, let alone demand prosecution for more egregious misbehavior, gross or petty. But, maybe most Americans are themselves idiots, unable as well as unwilling to exercise intelligence or imagination enough to even superficially review the probable consequences and implications of forever war for a very poor country. Are we all Paul Bremer now, lost in our own ignorance and self-flattering belief that we know best and are doing good by unleashing drones or “free markets” or other weapons of mass destruction willy nilly?

All the guys who gave us twenty years of failed Afghanistan policy are coming out of the woodwork as Afghanistan experts. They’re all explaining how everything was better and going forward back when they were running things. With all that progress, it’s a little mystifying how everything went to hell so fast. But as these are all CYA exercises, I suppose that’s to be expected. As bruce says, as in Iraq, Afghanistan was a case where ignorance and incompetence were the core foundations of US policy. And of course, it wasn’t just us. Look at corrupt goofs like Hamid Karzai who was our man in Kabul from 2001-2014. I mean if you wanted to ensure failure, he and his cronies were definitely the way to go. Afghanistan was just this idea, a delusion we had, that faded away before we are out the door.

It was always going to come to this. That was clear in late 2001, not because history says so or Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires but because the US was never going to win a counter-insurgency. Not one that ran for two years or twenty. We don’t have the patience or way of thinking to address an insurgency, regardless of where it is. But Blinken’s right. It isn’t Saigon, it’s way worse. Saigon was a stinging black eye for the world’s most powerful nation. Kabul will mark the end of the empire in the history books, because they need an event. All empires die from self-inflicted wounds. This one won’t be any different.

Matthew Yglesias:

The idea . . . — that the Blob can never fail, only be failed by a recalcitrant public that deserves to be constantly lied to and manipulated — is the central idea of American foreign policy.

That’s it. Manipulation is power and lies manipulate, while truth in full does not, so those who value power above any ends to which power might be applied, have little practical use for the appreciation of reality.

It isn’t necessary to do good or have any effect at all, really, as the lie about your intention is enough. I do not know how many times the “solution” offered by our military will be to “train security forces” to “stand up on their own” so Americans (so needed otherwise) can go home in some hopeful tomorrow.

I particularly love the opinionators who are sure the whole thing was hopeless, futile, impossible, because of the way the Afghans were — illiterate, perhaps, tribal, obdurate, corrupt. The students have to have been impossible to teach, never that the teachers were lazy fools and corrupt, incompetent liars.

Come on, bruce, take the next step and say what you believe, that the Taliban of today is not the Taliban of yesterday, that the Taliban has evolved and now they are a band of educated sophisticates perfectly capable of leading Afghanistan into the 22nd century. This is the latest from the insane commentary at Naked Capitalism. It smells Russian to me.

When is Biden going to bomb Saudi Arabia and drone strike its leadership back to the Stone Age? Saudi Arabia funds the Taliban. So does Pakistan. So does Iran. So do ALL of the Gulf States. In this sense, the Taliban is as much their Golem as it is America’s Golem, or I should say was America’s Golem. It’s their neck of the woods, and now they have their Golem. I can’t wait to see what comes of it now that Biden has rightly extracted America from the equation.

Don’t forget Russia. They have been supporting the Taliban too and China wants the Afghanistan mining operations connected to their Belt & Road initiative. If terrorist activity is directed at America that emanates from Afghanistan, I submit it is those who fund and support the Taliban who should be attacked in retaliation, not Afghanistan. Nothing can happen without funding and weapons. Those providing the funding and weapons for attacks against America are the enemy. So, if there is a terrorist attack that originates in Afghanistan, America should bomb Saudi Arabia back to the Stone Age. Same goes for Iran. Same goes for Pakistan. Same goes for Russia. All of them are scum and cowardly scum at that. Attacking and undermining a withdrawal. What a bunch of cowards. They would never fight fair and square.

Wow, Ché Pasa, you’re really something. One of the few reporters in Kabul who dared to venture into the streets noted there are NO WOMEN outside. They are all hiding indoors. Sure, that’s indicative of a new Taliban showing surprising reticence and modesty. An older and wiser Taliban that’s generally better advised. Or perhaps it’s a population that is scared to death of the Taliban and is incapable of providing any resistance whatsoever to these gangster thugs. I’m going with the latter. What the population isn’t doing, is greeting the Taliban with red carpets and roses thrown at their feet. Capitulation by a terrorized population shouldn’t be construed as Taliban reticence and modesty. That is a cold and callous insult to those who are understandably cowed by these bully thugs.

There’s a Standard Narrative that Afghanistan fell to the Taliban because the Afghan security forces who were stood up and trained and funded by the United States for decades failed to fight for their country. There’s a counter narrative that says the situation is more complicated than that. There is a counter narrative that says the civilian leadership in the provinces and ultimately in Kabul negotiated the handover of power to the Taliban and withdrew. There was essentially no fighting to be done; the Taliban did not engage in a military takeover of Afghanistan. The Taliban takeover was negotiated and agreed-to by the various leaders involved.

The counter narrative which is beginning a long march forward — and should be deeply troubling to the forever-warriors — is that the vast majority of women in Afghanistan feel safer under Taliban authority than they ever did under US and NATO bombings and wet work by mercenaries. The Taliban in many cases are family members out to protect their families — women included — from the constant bombing, assassinations, kidnappings, and night raids of the Americans, NATO and so-called “government” installed by the Americans.

The counter-narrative is that the Taliban and the US/NATO forces have agreed not to attack one another during the evacuation. The counter-narrative is that women and ethnic minorities (not to forget them, after all) will continue to enjoy most of the rights had under the previous reign, without the terror of being bombed and droned and raided by the forces who had granted them their “liberties.”

3/4th of the population of Afghanistan is rural and very conservative. Taliban rule is in many ways a comfort compared to the American-sponsored rule of rapacious and corrupt warlords. Taliban version of Islamic rule is not much different than that of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni gulf states, strict and severe, brutal, and oppressive to women.

The Taliban are poorer, not necessarily worse than their Sunni cousins in the Gulf.

Are they committing massacres like the US allied warlords did? Do they send their drones to turn random white-clad men standing by the road into pink mist as the US did in its Hunt for bin Laden?

Will there be peace in Afghanistan once the current panic is over? That’s what they say they want. We’ll see if it happens. I have no great faith that this phase of history in Afghanistan will turn out well. Too many factors lead me to believe otherwise.

At the same time, much of the forever-warrior hysteria over it is absurd.

*IF* (and this is a big “if”) the Taliban presser today is anything to go by, they’re already a lot more tolerant than the Saudis.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-asia-58219963