A Few Words About the Taliban

It seems that what is opposed is in fact perpetually maintained.

To run a state, you need bureaucrats. And you need to do what those bureaucrats tell you to do. You need people to maintain the roads. And you need people who know how to maintain the roads. You need food because your country doesn’t produce enough to feed a third of its people and your population is young and expanding. Being God-warriors, taking a literal approach to a seventh century legal religious code, or making temporary deals on behalf of your tribe, none of this really guarantees or institutionalizes what you and your country need to function and survive. Rather the reverse.

So at the moment we are in the victory phase of the Taliban accession to power. It is a good time for Western embassies and their personnel to clear out, but after that comes the delivery phase where the Taliban needs to start delivering goods and services to the country, to the tribes it has made its deals with, and to the people generally. Announcing a few trade deals with the Chinese or whomever won’t begin to be the beginning of enough to run the country. And expecting food and other aid, especially long term, from the Western countries you have just run out of Afghanistan, well, good luck with that.

And too there is the status of women. Afghanistan is not an oil state rolling in money. It can’t afford to hire armies of foreign workers to fill in the gaps. It is extremely poor. So writing off half your workers, half your brain power is to be blunt suicidal.

I am willing to be surprised, but until I start seeing real results, I remain deeply pessimistic about Afghanistan.

Corollaries to Myanmar. I’ve been there four times in the two years before the pandemic and the coup. Their Supreme Court and trial courts were doing amazing and effective work. It’s gone, all staff have disappeared into the hills. I lost touch with some friends when they left their Northern villages being chased by the military. The trade routes through the six free trade zones along the border with China remain. China is not too bothered by the coup, as long as they get plenty of cheap labor for the factories they financed in the free trade zones. We will never fully understand the ruthlessness of the military junta in Myanmar or the ruthlessness of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Most of it we won’t see.

vid. Ian Welsh, no matter how competent at war-fighting the Taliban may be, they just lost their biggest legit source of ready hard currency, namely the international community.

Hell, the US held the prior regime’s treasury too, you know, for “safekeeping”.

Admittedly, the average frustrated Afghan deal deal with a lot of privation, but the “new” Afghanistan is starting off from a bad place.

why are they instead constantly terrifying, dividing, and asking us to spy on one another?

I should add, most importantly: why are they labeling large swaths of the domestic United States population as potential “terrorists? Where is the possible value in that?

This certainly isn’t an organization concerned with any semblance of internal domestic cohesion, which is desperately needed now, no matter how laughable the possibility of such may seem a this time.

I expect tomorrow the Taliban, as advanced and evolved as it is, will announce they are going to space like Musk and Bezos. But when the Taliban goes, it will be to institute Sharia Law for all the Cosmos.

America didn’t lose. It made tons of money off the Afghanistan project. Lots of money is winning.

It wasn’t a war. It was a boondoggle and now Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and China and Russia can have their Taliban.

Good questions all. How did the barbarians of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (they were called Gooks, remember?) defeat not just the French, but the God-blessed Americans as well? How could they? They’re not like us. They live in grass huts and chew betel nut. Come on. How did they do it?

How did the savages of Afghanistan bring down one empire (the Soviet Union) and bring two others (Britain and the US) to a full stop? No passing go. No collecting $200.

Who gave these illiterate peasants the ability to do this? How?

How did they do it so quickly, too?

It does make you wonder a bit about the utility of… well, other means of accomplishing political objectives.

How can these little backwater countries and their peoples bring empires down or cause them to stop dead in their tracks?

I’ve said the only way for empires to win in these conflicts is through all-out genocide and total destruction. An effort toward that end was made in Vietnam; it failed. It wasn’t tried in Afghanistan or any of the other countries invaded and/or bombed to smithereens after Afghanistan, but you best believe that all-out genocide and destruction were more than once on the minds of civilian and military leaders.

Don’t think they won’t do it somewhere just to prove they can.

Neither Hizbullah nor the Taliban are homogenous bodies (harder to see in the case of Hizbullah as they are about 20 times more brand savvy, but still true), nor are they 12 feet tall. The key takeaway is not the well-worn talking point of perceived relative competence – it’s how different the game is if you’re taking pain to keep your homeland vs. taking pain to be in someone else’s.

The Blob just lost a source of cash, too. Of course, they are discovering domestic terrorists! Bring it home, baby! And I don’t mean just PTSD. Accusing the Taliban of cowardice or corruption is surely an act of pathological projection coming from the class of folks who have driven 2+ trillion dollars of spending, the bulk of it not on Afghanistan but on their own bloody pig’s trough.

The war went on so long because Americans are too stupid to see their own poverty and precarity in such foolish, cruel, wasteful boondoggles. You want stupid, America’s has stocked up on that commodity!

@ Plague species

I won’t quibble with your definition of coward but if we apply it to America, America would be a coward nation. Bombing weddings, invading 3rd world nations, fighting peasants who lack even the internet, and overthrowing democracies. He’ll America has killed more women and children in the last 30 years than the Taliban.

“Taliban, as advanced and evolved as it is, will announce they are going to space like Musk and Bezos.”

Is that after or before the Bezos of humanity destroy the world with pollution and greed?

@ Steward M

The right person at the right time in the right circumstances. People good at winning a war have certain skills and attributes needed to win wars. People good at creating a rich prosperous nation will have different skills and attributes. This is partly why most revolutions won by war turn dark after. If you spent the last decade+ fighting a brutal war your mind and skill set hasn’t been selected for governing but rather killing.

In case Mr. Welsh or anyone here does not already know about Rania Khalek, she runs a YouTube channel with interviews that offer rare information and insights on Middle East that counters the mainstream narrative. She is also not bad on the eyes. She has just uploaded an interview video about the current situation Taliban:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbgfVznNB-c

Now that the initial panic and hysteria has subsided some, there is at least a bare possibility that the forever warmongers will finally sit down and shut up.

Ché Pasa is emblematic of what has become of the “left.” It’s sad. Pathetic. Tragic. Perhaps it isn’t even a matter of becoming but was always what the “left” was and is. For him to call what the people of Afghanistan have suffered under for the past 40 years hysteria, beggars belief for its callous disregard of human suffering and the fear and loathing of the terrorized.

Believing the words of the Taliban is as idiotic as Biden saying he believed Ghani and the ANA when they promised him they would fight the Taliban and hold the country. And I’m not saying any of this or purporting it because the American Establishment says so, I’m saying it because it’s plainly obvious fact and it matters not whether the Establishment usurps said facts for it’s own misinformational purposes.

That’s a false narrative — that America was trying to foist Democracy on Afghanistan and Nation Build. That was not the reason for the invasion and occupation. There was never any true justification for any of it. There is only the cover story and the cover story is a fabrication.

Afghanistan was a projection of power coupled with a boondoggle by all those who stood to benefit from it, be it defense contractors in more revenue and profit or military leaders ascending the hierarchical ladder and the same goes for political careers.

Afghanistan was always a prop. A foil. Used and abused for an end that never took the fate of Afghanis into account. America never gave a shit about the people of Afghanistan and neither do those who are and have been funding the Taliban and those who are now parroting Taliban propaganda.

Who do you think is aiding the Taliban with this Propaganda Campaign? That’s right, the KSA. Get real, people. If you have any principles and morality at all, there is no side to pick in this Shit Show. The majority of the people of Afghanistan caught in the crossfire have no representation and they will continue to be persecuted and tragically suffer.

Land Of Endless War

“Usavory” indeed. Not sure what PS and some others are on about, but the panic and hysteria I referred to is almost all being generated by the forever-warmongers and their media running dogs. They are in crisis, melting down in their brownstones and bunkers, and yet there are people on the ground in Kabul and especially in the countryside who are saying “Wait. Hold on. You’re not getting the full picture, and you do not even begin to understand what the last twenty years have been like for the people of Afghanistan if all you hear, see and ‘know’ comes only from the forever-warmongers, the generals, and the politicians in DC or the puppets in Kabul.”

No, Taliban are not “savory” — they are a reactionary radical religious brotherhood who were and potentially still are intent on returning Afghanistan to the 13th century through an interpretation of Islam and Sharia that at best is anachronistic, at worst is evil in the modern world.

Much like the Saudi regime which as we know gets away with head-chopping and hand-chopping and all the other choppings prescribed by old-line Sharia and it suppresses women and girls, husbands beat their wives and wives kill their slaves, and it gets away with murdering journalists and it is reactionary and on and on and on, committing all the horrors ascribed to the Taliban and then some, and yet… they’ve got oil, don’t they? Right? So what goes on in Saudi or under Saudi authority is their business, not ours. Right?

I have no truck with Taliban or Saudi rule. Taliban showed themselves to be catastrophic for civil society, arts and culture, and basic human rights more than 20 years ago in Afghanistan throwing the whole concept of “progress” there into the shitter.

Their withdrawal from governance (they did not go away though) upon the US/NATO/exiled Warlord invasion was at the time a welcome respite from their stupidity — but not from their brutality which only redoubled under occupation and rule by the warlords.

Get out of Kabul where the Taliban are rightly feared and loathed by many. Go to the countryside where most Afghanis live, and listen to them talk about and cry over the relentless bombings, dronings, assassinations, kidnappings, night raids and on and on and on done by the so-called “government,” and by the raiders and occupiers and their many. many contracted mercenaries. Listen to them. Taliban are bad? Often yes. But you know what else? As often, maybe more often, the Taliban have been the protectors of the people in the countryside. They are, after all, the same people. They’re not strange invaders. They’re family. Often from families that have lost many loved ones to the so-called “government” of US/NATO puppets.

And if you set aside your prejudices and watch what the Taliban are doing, listen to what they say, pay attention to how they’ve been behaving since they took over, you start to see that they’re not the way they were before 2001. This was not a military take over. Shots were not fired. Civil so-called “government” withdrew. Afghan military did not fight. Taliban moved in swiftly where they did not already control the government because they were not opposed. They made agreements, not only with local and provincial level civil and military heads but with the national “government” — and more importantly for the evacuations with the US military, whom they have not molested or fired a shot.

They have said they will govern according to the tenets of Islam and Sharia law. Pretty typical throughout the Muslim world. They have also said they will not disturb the rights of women under Sharia. They will not govern the way they did prior to 2001. They will not try to harm civil society, the arts and culture, or the people of Afghanistan. They seek peace.

How that will play out remains to be seen, but so far people are starting to breathe a little easier, life is resuming relatively unchanged, and the chaos at the airport is mostly under control. The Taliban have agreed to let the evacuations proceed unmolested, and at least in places civil society is returning to something like normal.

The position of women and girls is still very much in turmoil — except in the countryside where the position of women and girls has not changed for centuries and its not good.

Again, how it will play out remains to be seen. That there are few women on the streets at this time of crisis is hardly unusual. Go to any Muslim country and you will see few or no women on the streets when there is civil unrest, trouble, or during many kinds of protests. It’s right to be concerned and fearful of what might happen, but so far the worst hasn’t happened. Which now and then media personalities have mentioned.

PS, you are a hypocrite given how often you attack commenters with female screen names here, and elsewhere.

Ha! Too funny. There is no male and female on The Net. Only bits and bytes pretending to be as much when it’s just a screen name. Go marry a Taliban member already, whether you’re male or female and yes, I mean male too since the new and improved and sophisticated and enlightened Taliban now has no problem with gay relationships and gay marriage.

I don’t think the notion of Self-Determination jibes with the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam. In fact, it’s anathema to it. Allah’s will is your will. There’s no self-direction in that equation.

Peace without freedom is neither peace nor freedom. It’s a big fat zero.

@Plague Species

“If you live the Taliban so much, why don’t you go marry one!”

What are you, twelve?

Anyway, yes, that you refuse to treat people on the internet as people is something I’ve noticed with you. Anyone who says something you don’t like is an ‘it’.

You’ve got a lot of problems, PS, and I’m done engaging with you.

@Soredemos,

The only thing that makes poppy and its opiate-ingredients and derivatives high priced . . . is the laws “against” them making them “illegal”. The purpose of these laws is to keep the poppy high-priced enough that it can generate billions of dollars for the “crime networks” who handle the product at all its stages. The reason the establishment leaders want to keep the the poppy illegal for the crime networks to make billions of dollars from it is so that they have billions of dollars which have to be laundered through the International Money Laundry banks.

Make the poppy legal and crash the price and then Afghan-specific poppy won’t be such a money maker. Nor will golden triangle poppy from Myanmar.

Someone in my family was once married to someone who worked in graphical-information-presentation for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. My family-member’s wife had a friend who also worked at the Fed. I happened to be in the right-place-right-time to get invited to a “Fed folks’s party” at someone’s nice house and yard in the leafy green suburbs of Connecticut. ( The leafy-greenest green I’ve ever seen in the US).

As I was just talking to people, I asked one person what he/she did at the Fed. He/she worked in tracking various huge money flows for various sectors around the world. I thought I would be funny and suggest that the Fed could track international illegal drug money flows, but the Fed wouldn’t dare, because the amounts involved would be so embarrassingly huge. He/she replied that, all joking aside, the Fed did not at that time ( and maybe still doesn’t) track international illegal drug money flows.
The reason she/she guessed is that the amounts are so embarrassingly huge. There’s money in keeping drugs illegal.

Here’s a joke I read once about courage.

An Army General and a Marine General were arguing about who had the braver troops under his command.

They put their respective privates through various tests and displays of courage.

Finally, the Army General ordered one of his soldiers to ” remove your helmet, climb to the top of that cliff, jump off and land on your head.” Which the soldier did, and of course died.

The Army General looked at the Marine General and said . . .” well?”

The Marine General said . . . ” you call that courage? I’ll show you courage.”

He orders one of his privates . . . ” You! Private Marine! Remove your helmet , climb to the top of that cliff, jump off and land on your head! That’s an ORDER!”

And the Marine Private looked at the Marine General and said . . . ” Sir! Fuck You, Sir!”

So the Marine General looked at the Army General and said . . . ” Now THAT’S courage.”

Che, if you meant me, I worded my comment poorly. It was too terse because I was in too much of a hurry.

What I meant is that your hopefulness literally makes me nostalgic for prior days when hopefulness had a place in my life. I’m at the point where I expect the worst, full stop. I no longer hope for the best. I’m losing all hope. It was about me, not you.

Meanwhile, somebody parked a vehicle near the Library of Congress today and claimed it was a bomb. People have had enough. We’ve all had enough, methinks.