8 ms·

Fighting Like Taliban

215 points by robertwiblin 5y ago

forkLding 5y ago
Afghanistan was a war of attrition that the locals felt the most of. Likely one of those wars that your dad and granddad fought (if you trace it back from the Soviet invasion) and somehow you also ended up fighting in. After a while everyone gets tired and they want to live in peace and not die in a war. Can see why it ended the way it did.
- nullifidian 5y ago
  It wasn't anywhere near close to a war of attrition. It was a war of different value systems, and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war. For Taliban it was not a problem to hide among the civil population, and for the Americans it was problematic to commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas, to actually win this war.
  - forkLding 5y ago
    War of attrition encompasses guerrilla warfare which is what the Taliban used, see definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attrition_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attrition_warfare War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers, it means the goal of the war is to wear down the enemy so that their will to fight collapses which both the Taliban and the US tried to do, see: https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-talks-remain-extension-war-other-means https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-tal...
    - forz877 5y ago
      >War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers War of attrition almost certainly requires high continual casualty numbers, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article: > Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel.
  - kiba 5y ago
    I don't believe these measures contrary to our values would be something that helps us "win" the war, especially not in way that we would have liked. But I do believe that the American people's heart were not into the fight, especially when it became a "forgotten" war. If we commit our full effort and our mind, we might have won the way we would stomach. In the end, if this is not the kind of war the American people are willing to fight, then we shouldn't entered them.
    - merpnderp 5y ago
      Afghanistan has always been poor and its people fractured because it was cut off from the world by its topography, but topography can be overcome. If the US had spent the last 20 years building infrastructure, railroads, highways, mining operations, schools to train engineers, managers, and professionals, Afghanistan would likely look a lot different. But the US missed even low hanging fruit like making poppies a legitimate crop by giving Afghanistan a cut of the legal opioid market.
      - nemo44x 5y ago
        60% of Afghanistan is illiterate. An improvement from when NATO forces invaded 20 years ago, but not too much better. I don’t think your infrastructure dreams would have had any efficacy.
        merpnderp 5y ago
        What does someone working in a primitive mine need with literacy? It would be a job that paid a lot better than subsistence farming and might allow that person to send their kids to school to become engineers. Without railroads and highways, Afghanistan will never move forward. It should have been the first thing we did, and not only to link up cities, but to locations with large amounts of natural resources to build up some wealth and industry.
        watwut 5y ago
        It was making training army difficult for American troops for example. Soldiers complained about it. Such high illiteracy rates will make it impossible to build enough of management and general bureaucracy needed to build anything large. It will make it hard to train workers in technology. You won't build railroads nor roads, you won't mainten them either. Primitive mines are not competitive. They are not producing enough to feed you. And hungry people won't save money for school. You need technology.
  - xtian 5y ago
    You’re saying the US was constrained by its strong sense of morality? https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-to...
  - jeltz 5y ago
    Then why did the Americans not accept the Taliban surrender? No, this was not a war of value systems, this is just proof of how hard someone can fight if you do not allow them to surrender.
  - MichaelGroves 5y ago
    > commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas The PDPA and Soviets tried this, and it didn't work. Together they killed tens of thousands of combatants and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians. Millions more were displaced. And what did they get for that bloodshed? Certainly not the reform they sought. You may as well try to crush a fistful of water.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      The West had some influence over that, we were busy propping up the opposition.
  - darkerside 5y ago
    Much like the Napoleonic invasion of Moscow, the key was home field advantage. Not in the classic Russian winter sense. Once Napoleon's army arrived in Moscow, there was a "what now" aspect to the war. They'd accomplished the goal that was set out and defeated Russia, but they didn't actually want to live in Moscow. So, they eventually left to go fight the Russian army, which had seemingly and unbelievably abandoned its crown city to the invaders. But they hadn't. Because Moscow was home, whether it was filled with these unseemly visitors or not. There was no way Napoleon's forces could win unless the Russians actually decided to sign a piece of paper and let them.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    I can recommend 21st Century Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic Prophecy for the Modern Era, edited by B. A. Friedman. It is a collection of articles written by Ellis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Hancock_Ellis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Hancock_Ellis) starting with one on the Philippine-American War, an early example of a loose manual on how to handle counter-insurgency. It also contains his "Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia" which was essentially the US Marines portion of the Navy's plans for WWII in the Pacific.
  - zarzavat 5y ago
    That works if you want to win the land. China only wants the land in Xinjiang, they would be ecstatic if the whole place was Han Chinese. The US by contrast has enough territory already, they don't want or need Afghan soil. Instead they went to war so that Afghanistan would have their chosen government. The only way to do that is to colonize it and exert direct control. They never committed to that (it's kind of frowned upon internationally), so it was a failure.
  - ramblenode 5y ago
    > and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war. You are suggesting that it is the US's gentlemanly morals that puts it at such a disadvantage as to make "winning" impossible. But what is "winning" absent those values? More dead Taliban at the cost of more dead civilians? If that is "winning" for the US, it is almost certainly not "winning" for the Afghans who live in the country and would prefer to be alive. But say you kill more Taliban while generally tolerating civilian casualties, then what? The US is no longer a force protecting Afghans from the Taliban, but a force bent on conquering the land of Afghanistan. The Taliban will increasingly look like liberators against a bloodthirsty invader whose raison d'etre for occupying the country is not the livelihood of Afghans but to install a puppet government. The Taliban will regrow, resupplied by the friends and family of civilian dead, and emboldened with a moral mandate. The more you "win", the more enemies you create for tomorrow. At the strategic level, there is no winning, only various ways to lose more slowly. But eventually the outcome is the same, as it has been in all Western colonies. The difference is that in the old days, the goal was just to extract wealth from a place, not to reconstitute its population (though the French did try).
- NonContro 5y ago
  After reading this article, Afghanistan doesn't seem inherently like a war of attrition at all. "Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends" It seems more like renaissance Europe, where armies of Condottiero would parade against eachother, and the smaller or less extravagant side would back down. This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'. "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war" - Julian Assange, 2011 Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of dragged out death and destruction is a fair outcome for the country.
  - at-fates-hands 5y ago
    >> This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'. The role of the US went from hunting and killing Taliban to not allowing them a permanent base from which to launch terror attacks to "nation building" where the military was then building schools and gas stations. The US never wanted a "bloody war". If they did, they could end the Taliban in the span of a few weeks, just like they did ISIS. It wouldn't be a war, it would be a rampage for which many in the US population and politicians wouldn't have the stomach for. Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties. >> Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of death and destruction is actually the best possible outcome for the country. I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country."
    - watwut 5y ago
      > Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties. While US army is significantly better then Taliban, the surgical strikes killed civilians fairly regularly and wish to protect civilians is not exactly "above and beyond". > I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country." I think that OP meant "compare to 2 years long war after which Taliban takes power anyway". That was the estimation as America was leaving - that ANA will be able to hold off for two years. They were not expected to win, but they were not expected to fold that fast.
- clipradiowallet 5y ago
  > Can see why it ended the way it did. If we learn from all that history, I would imagine it has not ended at all.
kenty 5y ago
After US withdrawal the Taliban probably had a massive financial advantage. They probably used the last years to save up billions which they used to buy them a "critical mass" of fighters that would steamroll the country with no chance of resistance. Even when factoring out corruption, the government's ability to muster up funds for keeping it's own military is severely hindered by them having to upkeep basic services throughout the country and having to go through the usual government bureaucracy. Now the tables have turned somewhat and being faced with the cost of occupying the country, the Taliban will have trouble keeping their freckle allies.
steve76 5y ago
War is bad. We should try to limit it. War can easily kill us all. Sounds simple, but very few people believe that. They either see weakness and advance their own criminal leadership. Or they reject it outright, turn from human to animal, and settle contention through territory expansion, something the USA stopped doing a century ago. Fight enough, you find out wins mean nothing, and what matters are arthritic knuckles which cripple and kill you. I think the next step in this is leaders will not care if millions of their own followers are horribly murdered. They didn't care about the riots or the doubling murder rate. Why should they care about the terror, as long as they are in power? That is much more frightening than mindless loyalties or cold ambition. Along with curing disease and not giving people the cure, and geoengineering a planet just for your own needs. Now that will solve this problem quick.
YinglingLight 5y ago
Trump made a Peace deal with the Taliban, which involved releasing Baradar, whose currently in charge of the takeover. People need to understand the importance of the Border Wall. Between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It stops terrorists from ducking in and out of the country at will. It stops the drugs. It stops systemic child abuse/trafficking. The Afghanis are one of the most abused groups of people in Human History.
jeswin 5y ago
There was no way to defeat the Afghan Taliban without Pakistani help. The ideological reservoir from which Taliban recruits is bottomless; and with military and financial support from across the border, quite formidable. Over the last decade, the US had lost all leverage with Pakistan. Pakistan is now fully allied with China.
- cmurf 5y ago
  The Taliban could uave been defeated with the proper equivalent extremist commitment: kill all life within 1 km of any Taliban. No matter the country they are in. Tactical nukes. An non-violent alternative, grant permanent U.S. residency to all Afghan women and children. And evacuate anyone who wants out. Either would be cheaper, and involve less death and misery, than what has transpired.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    > An non-violent alternative, grant permanent U.S. residency to all Afghan women and children. And evacuate anyone who wants out. Did you live in 2001? There was severe distrust of "Al Qaeda cells", which were these hypothetical terrorists inside of the USA pretending to be a nice guy. But one phone call from Osama Bin Laden would turn them into a suicide bomber. ------- I'm glad that we've built up trust with the Afghan people and are able to accept them into our society today. But that kind of thinking you're talking about would have NOT worked in 2001. I think the Afghans have also learned to trust us to some extent. My friend had to kill a child girl soldier who fired upon him, hiding an AK47 in her Burka. It turns out that burkas are really good at hiding weapons. I don't think I've heard of any of those stories recently however. ---------- The US won the hearts of Afghan women and children because we built schools and universities for them. The trust did not exist in 2001, but the trust exists today thanks to literally millions of college-educated Afghan women telling our story and learning our values.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      "I'm glad that we've built up trust with the Afghan people and are able to accept them into our society today." Do we? We didn't as of the Trump Administration. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/trump-immigration-crackdown-visas/565949/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/trump-i... https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-admin-broke-law-visa-delays-afghans-iraqis-who-worked-n1057846 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-admin-bro...
tlogan 5y ago
British had a saying: you can rent an Afghan but you can't buy one I heard the above saying during Soviet invasion but I cannot find the origin.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  There's a broader version of that: "You can buy someone, but you can't make sure they stay bought." Applies widely to bribery, diplomacy, etc.
- vrc 5y ago
  The Soviet-era one was an Afghan saying, “you have watched but we have time”
pphysch 5y ago
"Our failure to understand [the Taliban's] dynamic has had consequences." There was no "failure to understand". This narrative that Afghanistan was a well-intentioned strategic/tactical failure is utterly misleading. The dynamic reality was very clear to every one involved (who cared to know), from servicepeople to 4-star generals, but the military's culture of careerism and corruption prevented these truths from being publicly acknowledged [1]. [1] - https://youtu.be/_bo7P_podIk https://youtu.be/_bo7P_podIk
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Please summarize your opinion of the dynamic instead of making us watch an hour long video that we don't even know we want to watch to find out.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    I strongly recommend you listen to the two veterans describe the dynamic (try 1.5x speed). It is worth more than a 1000 hours of the bloviating punditry that crowds the airwaves right now. The gist: * On the ground: "rebuilding Afghanistan" was a total farce. Major Sjursen (Ret.) describes handing out bags of money to "local contractors" with virtually no oversight. He suspects that the Taliban were among the "contractors" and were benefiting immensely from the inept American policy. * The US military/political leadership is entirely motivated by optics and self-interest. Virtually every report had to have a positive outlook; publicly recognizing the reality on the ground was forbidden, including using words like "insurgency".
    - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
      Bad management knows no bounds. If you don't accurately report the reality 'on the ground' then no actions will be approved from above to improve it.
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        I wouldn't call it bad management. It was just realistic management. We knew by 2002 we weren't going to turn it into a shining pillar of democracy. The next 19yr were just people covering their asses and biding their time while the American public came around to the same conclusion. It's kind of like letting your direct reports screw off and job hunt on the job because your all getting laid off but the termination date is next quarter. Not great, but doesn't really matter to the big picture.
wombatmobile 5y ago
The other war that comes to mind that doesn't fit the standard model of black hat vs white hat is the Vietnam war. It was impossible to defeat the Viet Cong because they blended in with the citizenry. And so, despite superior technology and enormous wealth, America and its allies were unable to prevail in Vietnam. And yet, today, the socialist republic of Vietnam is hardly a pariah, or a communist menace, or a backwater or a threat to anyone. It is a rapidly developing economic power in South East Asia, with a dispersed diaspora that has integrated well with diverse cultures in Europe, North America, Australia and South America. Have you ever heard of a Vietnamese terrorist shooting up or bombing a public place in the west over the last 40 years? What does that tell you about the paradigm of us vs them?
- gotoeleven 5y ago
  That the Vietnamese don't follow a religion which they interpret as mandating the conversion or death of all non believers? The Taliban have moral clarity and that's a huge advantage against the relativist post-modern muddle brained thinking that characterizes most of western leadership these days.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Suprising amounts of conservative westerners seem to admire taliban.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      It can get pretty explicit on the fringes of alt-right. http://web.archive.org/web/20180108005721/http://vandalvoid.com/why-we-need-white-sharia/ http://web.archive.org/web/20180108005721/http://vandalvoid....
  - captain_price7 5y ago
    I think the entire point of the article was that Taliban doesn't really care about rigid ideology, it's their flexibility that has won them the war.
pradn 5y ago
Battles have rarely been massive charges from two sides of a flat battlefield, as we see in war movies. Historically, it's been really hard to get soldiers to charge to their deaths, which makes sense if you think for a second. Most armies throughout history were nonprofessionals levied by their lords or seasonal opportunists, who fought for extra income. Sometimes, the leaders would get the soldiers drunk before they went in, and they'd retreat and have to be coaxed into running in again. Aside from all this, contrary to some sort of received chivalric ideal of loyalty and fighting-unto-death, a great number of military engagements in every part of the world were decided by bribery and deception. People don't want to risk their lives and are often tempted by monetary gain. Countless forts have fallen to people opening the doors from within. There's instances of Sufi leaders being admitted into forts only to open the gates. Hyderabad was conquered by Aurangazeb in great part due to bribery, too. The calculus changes dramatically if the attacker has a history of lenient behavior toward those who surrender, versus massacre for those who do not. The Mughals regularly incorporated surrendering lords into their feudal system, with honors, income, and opportunities for social advancement. The Mongols razed the Khwarezmia because of their disastrous refusal of their envoys.
- nradov 5y ago
  The Napoleonic wars were full of massive charges, and long violent sieges against fortresses. Armies figured out how to instill enough discipline into soldiers to march straight into enemy fire. Casualties in the front ranks of the French army at Waterloo were horrific, yet they still kept attacking all day long. "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon." -Napoleon Bonaparte
  - pradn 5y ago
    Exactly, this is my point. Napoleon's professional standing armies are a relatively recent (~200 years) and exceptional compared to the historical norm. Even Napoleon was able to take lots of territory by just negotiating with actors who knew they had no chance. People don't want to just go die; this requires a large amount of training. Not wanting to kill someone is something like a universal.
g8oz 5y ago
"It was in the waning days of November 2001 that Taliban leaders began to reach out to Hamid Karzai, who would soon become the interim president of Afghanistan: They wanted to make a deal. “The Taliban were completely defeated, they had no demands, except amnesty,” recalled Barnett Rubin, who worked with the United Nations’ political team in Afghanistan at the time. Messengers shuttled back and forth between Mr. Karzai and the headquarters of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Kandahar. Mr. Karzai envisioned a Taliban surrender that would keep the militants from playing any significant role in the country’s future. But Washington, confident that the Taliban would be wiped out forever, was in no mood for a deal. “The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders,” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a news conference at the time, adding that the Americans had no interest in leaving Mullah Omar to live out his days anywhere in Afghanistan. The United States wanted him captured or dead." -- Did the War in Afghanistan Have to Happen? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/world/middleeast/afghanistan-taliban-deal-united-states.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/world/middleeast/afghanis...
- eschulz 5y ago
  To play Devil's Advocate, didn't the US have to label the Taliban as terrorists at that time? I think given their association with Bin Laden, and the 9/11 attacks, most people in the US considered the Taliban to be terrorists, and it would have completely destroyed the credibility of the Pentagon or Bush administration to be negotiating with them a mere 60 days after 9/11.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    The first ~thirty days after 9/11 were full of negotiations with the Taliban as they weren't terrorists but harboring terrorists. Even after the invasion, they could have labeled it as the Taliban agreeing to help bring Bin Laden to justice and they would have been able to save face. Hell, it might have helped prevent Bin Laden's flight into Pakistan, and have been a tremendous PR victory.
    - eschulz 5y ago
mariodiana 5y ago
My understanding is that medieval warfare, among the noble class, had similarities to this: specifically, nobles didn't necessarily fight to the death. Capture and ransom was a big thing. The term "parole" comes from the idea of giving one's word, after capture, that you would not return to fighting if you were released. The nobles of Europe, too, had an extended network of kin, some of whom might be on the "other side." I don't recall learning about switching sides with fluidity (as in Afghanistan), but I do recall learning that this little game got broken up once the common people were enlisted.
- int_19h 5y ago
  You might be interested in this: https://acoup.blog/2020/04/16/collections-a-trip-through-bertran-de-born-martial-values-in-the-12th-century-occitan-nobility/ https://acoup.blog/2020/04/16/collections-a-trip-through-ber... "... what seems to be the case is that, for people like Bertran, the chance of dying in all of that war remained relatively low. In the first case, the style of warfare of the 12th century, oriented around raids and sieges, with relatively few large set-battles and relatively smaller armies – tended towards lower casualties in comparison to the warfare of other eras." But do keep in mind that this is a particular period of medieval warfare; it's not universal.
- pradn 5y ago
  War rules are fascinating. They play a large role in the Mahabharata, which has an incredibly long battle sequence at the end, where the events of each day are detailed minutely. Part of the moral complexity of the epic comes from both sides breaking the rules, all of which are broken at some point and lead to pivotal shifts in the battle. These rule violations muddy the moral waters: what's usually seen as a "good guy"/"bad guy" story turns into a vicious tale of deception, violence, and senseless death. This martial epic contains within it both the call to duty, and, therefore, violence, but also a searing critique of where it leads to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma-yuddha#In_the_Mahabharata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma-yuddha#In_the_Mahabhara...
  - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
yawaworht1978 5y ago
No way to impose any sort of external order there. Russia was there, US/UK and half NATO have been there, the insurgent groups have financing via drugs and God knows what else(look at Colombia how much drug financed groups can hold back progress). All the foreign forces have done plenty of damage and lost credibility. Looking back, what in the world made Russia go there in the first place and then the USA? Why is this matter not settled yet? This has gone past many administrations and advisors, and yielded nothing. Does anyone know if the Taliban actually have some sort of popular support there or only by fringe groups?
- acjohnson55 5y ago
  I'm no expert, but I'm fairly sure power there is fragmented, hierarchical, and transactional. Popular support does not figure in. According to Wikipedia, "As estimated by the CIA World Factbook, 26% of the population was urbanized as of 2020. This is one of the lowest figures in the world." It's probably a fair bet that the urbanized population does not support the Taliban, but they can't stand alone. The warlords and Taliban want control over the largest city, and Kabul depends on the countryside. Think about the urban-rural cultural divide in the US, but imagine that rural people vastly outnumbered urban and that there was no central monopoly on violent force. Another interesting question is why should the Taliban be stronger than any other potential leadership group? I suspect this comes down to their past success, their connections to Pakistan, and their appeal to international fighters.
- nickff 5y ago
  The Taliban are power-hungry and ruthless, while their external (Pakistan/ISI & China) supporters don't mind it. In an battle between kindness and ruthlessness, (especially where the former is less committed than the latter,) the ruthless will always win. Put another way, if you had one side giving you aid (food/medicine) in exchange for support, and the other (credibly) threatening to kill you for disloyalty, what would you do? You'd probably feign support for the former, and never betray the latter.
  - captain_price7 5y ago
    > if you had one side giving you aid (food/medicine) in exchange for support I'm afraid you have an awfully rosy version of what life was like for an average rural afghan under American rule. Here are some links to get started- - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-to... - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/09/us-soldiers-afghan-civilians-fingers https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/09/us-soldiers-af... - https://news.abs-cbn.com/global-filipino/world/01/12/12/outrage-over-video-marines-urinating-taliban-corpses https://news.abs-cbn.com/global-filipino/world/01/12/12/outr...
res0nat0r 5y ago
Note: Afghani is the currency, Afghans are the people.
TechBro8615 5y ago
For a (much longer) exploration of this idea, I recommend reading the book The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks [0] by Joshua Cooper Ramo. [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0196KYTA6 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0196KYTA6
sadfkhjasdf 5y ago
> After the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on September 27, 1996, Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abdul Rashid Dostum, two former enemies, created the United Front (Northern Alliance) against the Taliban, who were preparing offensives against the remaining areas under the control of Massoud and Dostum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan Amazing how it's almost an exact repeat of 25 years ago.
rags2riches 5y ago
One thing has visibly changed with the US occupation. Before, the typical Afghan fighter carried a Kalasjnikov. Now they will be carrying an M16.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  I just heard a veteran talk about all the weapons, vechicles the Taliban now have. "If they can keep those Humvees running---good luck."
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  ”All I want is the right to own the same weapons I paid for the Taliban to have.”
mcguire 5y ago
"Only the civilians seemed to lose." Yeah. Something to keep in mind with everyone repeating the old "Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires" dismissal.
dirtyid 5y ago
One statistic I think gets overlooked is the Afghan population almost doubled from 20M to 38M in the last 20 years. The massive young demographics growing up under occupation was going to come home to roost sooner or later. There's also the geographic reality that Afghanistan is a land locked country and US tenuous access via Pakisan or the even more perilous northern routes meant taming Afganistan was always going to be a long term losing proposition.
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  True. And a huge portion of that population has never seen real Taliban rule. Other nations can support their civil war for another decade easily.
ripe 5y ago
The consistent problem with most comments about the conflict in Afghanistan is they fail to fully account for the role of the Pakistan Army and ISI in all of this. They are the most important element in the conflict, not the Afghans, not us and not the Taliban. If they weren’t involved and the conflict were limited to Afghanistan and Afghans things like what Mr. Filkins describes would hold sway and accommodations and arrangements might be made. But that won’t happen because the Pak Army/ISI won’t let it. They have a mad idea of requiring Afghanistan for strategic depth (‘After the Indians beat us we can fall back on the tank factories of Kabul and regroup.’) and they require a compliant regime running the country. So they make it happen. As plucky as the Afghans can be, Afghanistan can’t handle Pakistan, especially a Pakistan that is a conduit for Gulf Arab money being sent to buy the donors a place in heaven. Handling the Pak Army/ISI was our job and we didn’t do it. We never really even tried to do it. If we had kept the Paks out and the conflict was contained within Afghanistan, the Afghans could have handled what would have been left of the Taliban through means such as those described by Mr. Filkins. But we didn’t. We got had by Pakistan and tales of the Raj and their special knowledge. We gave them money even, lots of it to kill us and Afghans. We did get something for this though. Hundreds of high ranking officers got their tickets punched. The spec ops community got their budgets and fanfare. Multitudes of State Dept. people got hazard pay and career points. Contracting companies and contractors galore got lots and lots of money over lots and lots of years. Several thousand of our guys died but they were mostly deplorable NASCAR fans and don’t much count. Now the party is over and the Afghans get to pay the final bill. Nice going Americans! This is the second time in my life where we’ve bugged out on people who trusted us when we told them we wouldn’t bug out on them. (The above comment was made by someone on the original article, but I think it's 100% accurate.)
- ngcc_hk 5y ago
  Foreign power is foreign. The affairs is internal. Ultimately it has to be decided for people on the ground. Unless you colonise it replacing the beings to be yours as one country did and do, I suspect even Pak or whoever will fail.
  - nickff 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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amriksohata 5y ago
The US image as the "brave" superpower has been heavily exposed. The US despite having the latest tech hardware and all these images of muscle pumped up soldiers in Hollywood movies were seen as fleeing the battlefield. It took the US 20 years to push Taliban to outer cities and the Taliban took 20 days to come back. It shows for me, the US is not a superpower when it comes to warfare, as we saw in Vietnam too. They are good when it comes to aerial combat where they do not engage on ground level but they are not trained or built for guerrilla warfare which many Asian countries employ. They would lost in most terrains like this.
- amriksohata 5y ago
  I noticed I have been downvoted by the very ones who probably still try to project the "team america" YEH image
anticodon 5y ago
One side is an occupation force that despite all the propaganda understands that it kills people for power and mineral resources. Propaganda is strong, but it's hard to fool people completely, some intuition for truth remains. On another side there're people defending their homes from foreign neo-colonial occupation. Doesn't it explain why the comprador forces working for the occupational administration failed so quickly?.. "Democracy" on bayonets doesn't work.
- DenisM 5y ago
  It does sometimes. South Korea and Japan come to mind.
  - ausudhz 5y ago
    You consider South Korea a success? They have been separated from the other half of the country for 70 years now. I wouldn't consider South Korea as an example of success. Remove the money that the US has pushed to South Korea and I'm not sure they'd get the same results. As for Japan, I remind you that they still have an emperor for example and they were a super power during WWII definitely not comparable to Afghanistan, Cuba or Vietnam
    - ppqqrr 5y ago
      To be fair, a number of countries might not have ended up as functioning democracies with free speech, backed by high tech economies, if it hadn’t been for US financial aids. Germany, for example.
    - eadmund 5y ago
      > You consider South Korea a success? Compared to North Korea, I sure do!
  - anticodon 5y ago
    South Korea and Japan are still occupied.

215 points by robertwiblin 5y ago

Afghanistan was a war of attrition that the locals felt the most of. Likely one of those wars that your dad and granddad fought (if you trace it back from the Soviet invasion) and somehow you also ended up fighting in. After a while everyone gets tired and they want to live in peace and not die in a war. Can see why it ended the way it did.

nullifidian 5y ago
It wasn't anywhere near close to a war of attrition. It was a war of different value systems, and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war. For Taliban it was not a problem to hide among the civil population, and for the Americans it was problematic to commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas, to actually win this war.
- forkLding 5y ago
  War of attrition encompasses guerrilla warfare which is what the Taliban used, see definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attrition_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attrition_warfare War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers, it means the goal of the war is to wear down the enemy so that their will to fight collapses which both the Taliban and the US tried to do, see: https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-talks-remain-extension-war-other-means https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-tal...
  - forz877 5y ago
    >War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers War of attrition almost certainly requires high continual casualty numbers, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article: > Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel.
- kiba 5y ago
  I don't believe these measures contrary to our values would be something that helps us "win" the war, especially not in way that we would have liked. But I do believe that the American people's heart were not into the fight, especially when it became a "forgotten" war. If we commit our full effort and our mind, we might have won the way we would stomach. In the end, if this is not the kind of war the American people are willing to fight, then we shouldn't entered them.
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    Afghanistan has always been poor and its people fractured because it was cut off from the world by its topography, but topography can be overcome. If the US had spent the last 20 years building infrastructure, railroads, highways, mining operations, schools to train engineers, managers, and professionals, Afghanistan would likely look a lot different. But the US missed even low hanging fruit like making poppies a legitimate crop by giving Afghanistan a cut of the legal opioid market.
    - nemo44x 5y ago
      60% of Afghanistan is illiterate. An improvement from when NATO forces invaded 20 years ago, but not too much better. I don’t think your infrastructure dreams would have had any efficacy.
      - merpnderp 5y ago
        What does someone working in a primitive mine need with literacy? It would be a job that paid a lot better than subsistence farming and might allow that person to send their kids to school to become engineers. Without railroads and highways, Afghanistan will never move forward. It should have been the first thing we did, and not only to link up cities, but to locations with large amounts of natural resources to build up some wealth and industry.
        watwut 5y ago
        It was making training army difficult for American troops for example. Soldiers complained about it. Such high illiteracy rates will make it impossible to build enough of management and general bureaucracy needed to build anything large. It will make it hard to train workers in technology. You won't build railroads nor roads, you won't mainten them either. Primitive mines are not competitive. They are not producing enough to feed you. And hungry people won't save money for school. You need technology.
- xtian 5y ago
  You’re saying the US was constrained by its strong sense of morality? https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-to...
- jeltz 5y ago
  Then why did the Americans not accept the Taliban surrender? No, this was not a war of value systems, this is just proof of how hard someone can fight if you do not allow them to surrender.
- MichaelGroves 5y ago
  > commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas The PDPA and Soviets tried this, and it didn't work. Together they killed tens of thousands of combatants and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians. Millions more were displaced. And what did they get for that bloodshed? Certainly not the reform they sought. You may as well try to crush a fistful of water.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    The West had some influence over that, we were busy propping up the opposition.
- darkerside 5y ago
  Much like the Napoleonic invasion of Moscow, the key was home field advantage. Not in the classic Russian winter sense. Once Napoleon's army arrived in Moscow, there was a "what now" aspect to the war. They'd accomplished the goal that was set out and defeated Russia, but they didn't actually want to live in Moscow. So, they eventually left to go fight the Russian army, which had seemingly and unbelievably abandoned its crown city to the invaders. But they hadn't. Because Moscow was home, whether it was filled with these unseemly visitors or not. There was no way Napoleon's forces could win unless the Russians actually decided to sign a piece of paper and let them.
- mcguire 5y ago
  I can recommend 21st Century Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic Prophecy for the Modern Era, edited by B. A. Friedman. It is a collection of articles written by Ellis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Hancock_Ellis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Hancock_Ellis) starting with one on the Philippine-American War, an early example of a loose manual on how to handle counter-insurgency. It also contains his "Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia" which was essentially the US Marines portion of the Navy's plans for WWII in the Pacific.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  That works if you want to win the land. China only wants the land in Xinjiang, they would be ecstatic if the whole place was Han Chinese. The US by contrast has enough territory already, they don't want or need Afghan soil. Instead they went to war so that Afghanistan would have their chosen government. The only way to do that is to colonize it and exert direct control. They never committed to that (it's kind of frowned upon internationally), so it was a failure.
- ramblenode 5y ago
  > and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war. You are suggesting that it is the US's gentlemanly morals that puts it at such a disadvantage as to make "winning" impossible. But what is "winning" absent those values? More dead Taliban at the cost of more dead civilians? If that is "winning" for the US, it is almost certainly not "winning" for the Afghans who live in the country and would prefer to be alive. But say you kill more Taliban while generally tolerating civilian casualties, then what? The US is no longer a force protecting Afghans from the Taliban, but a force bent on conquering the land of Afghanistan. The Taliban will increasingly look like liberators against a bloodthirsty invader whose raison d'etre for occupying the country is not the livelihood of Afghans but to install a puppet government. The Taliban will regrow, resupplied by the friends and family of civilian dead, and emboldened with a moral mandate. The more you "win", the more enemies you create for tomorrow. At the strategic level, there is no winning, only various ways to lose more slowly. But eventually the outcome is the same, as it has been in all Western colonies. The difference is that in the old days, the goal was just to extract wealth from a place, not to reconstitute its population (though the French did try).
NonContro 5y ago
After reading this article, Afghanistan doesn't seem inherently like a war of attrition at all. "Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends" It seems more like renaissance Europe, where armies of Condottiero would parade against eachother, and the smaller or less extravagant side would back down. This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'. "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war" - Julian Assange, 2011 Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of dragged out death and destruction is a fair outcome for the country.
- at-fates-hands 5y ago
  >> This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'. The role of the US went from hunting and killing Taliban to not allowing them a permanent base from which to launch terror attacks to "nation building" where the military was then building schools and gas stations. The US never wanted a "bloody war". If they did, they could end the Taliban in the span of a few weeks, just like they did ISIS. It wouldn't be a war, it would be a rampage for which many in the US population and politicians wouldn't have the stomach for. Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties. >> Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of death and destruction is actually the best possible outcome for the country. I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country."
  - watwut 5y ago
    > Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties. While US army is significantly better then Taliban, the surgical strikes killed civilians fairly regularly and wish to protect civilians is not exactly "above and beyond". > I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country." I think that OP meant "compare to 2 years long war after which Taliban takes power anyway". That was the estimation as America was leaving - that ANA will be able to hold off for two years. They were not expected to win, but they were not expected to fold that fast.
clipradiowallet 5y ago
> Can see why it ended the way it did. If we learn from all that history, I would imagine it has not ended at all.

kenty 5y ago

After US withdrawal the Taliban probably had a massive financial advantage. They probably used the last years to save up billions which they used to buy them a "critical mass" of fighters that would steamroll the country with no chance of resistance. Even when factoring out corruption, the government's ability to muster up funds for keeping it's own military is severely hindered by them having to upkeep basic services throughout the country and having to go through the usual government bureaucracy. Now the tables have turned somewhat and being faced with the cost of occupying the country, the Taliban will have trouble keeping their freckle allies.

steve76 5y ago

War is bad. We should try to limit it. War can easily kill us all. Sounds simple, but very few people believe that. They either see weakness and advance their own criminal leadership. Or they reject it outright, turn from human to animal, and settle contention through territory expansion, something the USA stopped doing a century ago. Fight enough, you find out wins mean nothing, and what matters are arthritic knuckles which cripple and kill you. I think the next step in this is leaders will not care if millions of their own followers are horribly murdered. They didn't care about the riots or the doubling murder rate. Why should they care about the terror, as long as they are in power? That is much more frightening than mindless loyalties or cold ambition. Along with curing disease and not giving people the cure, and geoengineering a planet just for your own needs. Now that will solve this problem quick.

YinglingLight 5y ago

Trump made a Peace deal with the Taliban, which involved releasing Baradar, whose currently in charge of the takeover. People need to understand the importance of the Border Wall. Between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It stops terrorists from ducking in and out of the country at will. It stops the drugs. It stops systemic child abuse/trafficking. The Afghanis are one of the most abused groups of people in Human History.

jeswin 5y ago

There was no way to defeat the Afghan Taliban without Pakistani help. The ideological reservoir from which Taliban recruits is bottomless; and with military and financial support from across the border, quite formidable. Over the last decade, the US had lost all leverage with Pakistan. Pakistan is now fully allied with China.

cmurf 5y ago
The Taliban could uave been defeated with the proper equivalent extremist commitment: kill all life within 1 km of any Taliban. No matter the country they are in. Tactical nukes. An non-violent alternative, grant permanent U.S. residency to all Afghan women and children. And evacuate anyone who wants out. Either would be cheaper, and involve less death and misery, than what has transpired.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  > An non-violent alternative, grant permanent U.S. residency to all Afghan women and children. And evacuate anyone who wants out. Did you live in 2001? There was severe distrust of "Al Qaeda cells", which were these hypothetical terrorists inside of the USA pretending to be a nice guy. But one phone call from Osama Bin Laden would turn them into a suicide bomber. ------- I'm glad that we've built up trust with the Afghan people and are able to accept them into our society today. But that kind of thinking you're talking about would have NOT worked in 2001. I think the Afghans have also learned to trust us to some extent. My friend had to kill a child girl soldier who fired upon him, hiding an AK47 in her Burka. It turns out that burkas are really good at hiding weapons. I don't think I've heard of any of those stories recently however. ---------- The US won the hearts of Afghan women and children because we built schools and universities for them. The trust did not exist in 2001, but the trust exists today thanks to literally millions of college-educated Afghan women telling our story and learning our values.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    "I'm glad that we've built up trust with the Afghan people and are able to accept them into our society today." Do we? We didn't as of the Trump Administration. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/trump-immigration-crackdown-visas/565949/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/trump-i... https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-admin-broke-law-visa-delays-afghans-iraqis-who-worked-n1057846 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-admin-bro...

tlogan 5y ago

British had a saying: you can rent an Afghan but you can't buy one I heard the above saying during Soviet invasion but I cannot find the origin.

Clewza313 5y ago
There's a broader version of that: "You can buy someone, but you can't make sure they stay bought." Applies widely to bribery, diplomacy, etc.
vrc 5y ago
The Soviet-era one was an Afghan saying, “you have watched but we have time”

pphysch 5y ago

"Our failure to understand [the Taliban's] dynamic has had consequences." There was no "failure to understand". This narrative that Afghanistan was a well-intentioned strategic/tactical failure is utterly misleading. The dynamic reality was very clear to every one involved (who cared to know), from servicepeople to 4-star generals, but the military's culture of careerism and corruption prevented these truths from being publicly acknowledged [1]. [1] - https://youtu.be/_bo7P_podIk https://youtu.be/_bo7P_podIk

guerrilla 5y ago
Please summarize your opinion of the dynamic instead of making us watch an hour long video that we don't even know we want to watch to find out.
- pphysch 5y ago
  I strongly recommend you listen to the two veterans describe the dynamic (try 1.5x speed). It is worth more than a 1000 hours of the bloviating punditry that crowds the airwaves right now. The gist: * On the ground: "rebuilding Afghanistan" was a total farce. Major Sjursen (Ret.) describes handing out bags of money to "local contractors" with virtually no oversight. He suspects that the Taliban were among the "contractors" and were benefiting immensely from the inept American policy. * The US military/political leadership is entirely motivated by optics and self-interest. Virtually every report had to have a positive outlook; publicly recognizing the reality on the ground was forbidden, including using words like "insurgency".
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    Bad management knows no bounds. If you don't accurately report the reality 'on the ground' then no actions will be approved from above to improve it.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      I wouldn't call it bad management. It was just realistic management. We knew by 2002 we weren't going to turn it into a shining pillar of democracy. The next 19yr were just people covering their asses and biding their time while the American public came around to the same conclusion. It's kind of like letting your direct reports screw off and job hunt on the job because your all getting laid off but the termination date is next quarter. Not great, but doesn't really matter to the big picture.

wombatmobile 5y ago

The other war that comes to mind that doesn't fit the standard model of black hat vs white hat is the Vietnam war. It was impossible to defeat the Viet Cong because they blended in with the citizenry. And so, despite superior technology and enormous wealth, America and its allies were unable to prevail in Vietnam. And yet, today, the socialist republic of Vietnam is hardly a pariah, or a communist menace, or a backwater or a threat to anyone. It is a rapidly developing economic power in South East Asia, with a dispersed diaspora that has integrated well with diverse cultures in Europe, North America, Australia and South America. Have you ever heard of a Vietnamese terrorist shooting up or bombing a public place in the west over the last 40 years? What does that tell you about the paradigm of us vs them?

gotoeleven 5y ago
That the Vietnamese don't follow a religion which they interpret as mandating the conversion or death of all non believers? The Taliban have moral clarity and that's a huge advantage against the relativist post-modern muddle brained thinking that characterizes most of western leadership these days.
- watwut 5y ago
  Suprising amounts of conservative westerners seem to admire taliban.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    It can get pretty explicit on the fringes of alt-right. http://web.archive.org/web/20180108005721/http://vandalvoid.com/why-we-need-white-sharia/ http://web.archive.org/web/20180108005721/http://vandalvoid....
- captain_price7 5y ago
  I think the entire point of the article was that Taliban doesn't really care about rigid ideology, it's their flexibility that has won them the war.

pradn 5y ago

Battles have rarely been massive charges from two sides of a flat battlefield, as we see in war movies. Historically, it's been really hard to get soldiers to charge to their deaths, which makes sense if you think for a second. Most armies throughout history were nonprofessionals levied by their lords or seasonal opportunists, who fought for extra income. Sometimes, the leaders would get the soldiers drunk before they went in, and they'd retreat and have to be coaxed into running in again. Aside from all this, contrary to some sort of received chivalric ideal of loyalty and fighting-unto-death, a great number of military engagements in every part of the world were decided by bribery and deception. People don't want to risk their lives and are often tempted by monetary gain. Countless forts have fallen to people opening the doors from within. There's instances of Sufi leaders being admitted into forts only to open the gates. Hyderabad was conquered by Aurangazeb in great part due to bribery, too. The calculus changes dramatically if the attacker has a history of lenient behavior toward those who surrender, versus massacre for those who do not. The Mughals regularly incorporated surrendering lords into their feudal system, with honors, income, and opportunities for social advancement. The Mongols razed the Khwarezmia because of their disastrous refusal of their envoys.

nradov 5y ago
The Napoleonic wars were full of massive charges, and long violent sieges against fortresses. Armies figured out how to instill enough discipline into soldiers to march straight into enemy fire. Casualties in the front ranks of the French army at Waterloo were horrific, yet they still kept attacking all day long. "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon." -Napoleon Bonaparte
- pradn 5y ago
  Exactly, this is my point. Napoleon's professional standing armies are a relatively recent (~200 years) and exceptional compared to the historical norm. Even Napoleon was able to take lots of territory by just negotiating with actors who knew they had no chance. People don't want to just go die; this requires a large amount of training. Not wanting to kill someone is something like a universal.

g8oz 5y ago

"It was in the waning days of November 2001 that Taliban leaders began to reach out to Hamid Karzai, who would soon become the interim president of Afghanistan: They wanted to make a deal. “The Taliban were completely defeated, they had no demands, except amnesty,” recalled Barnett Rubin, who worked with the United Nations’ political team in Afghanistan at the time. Messengers shuttled back and forth between Mr. Karzai and the headquarters of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Kandahar. Mr. Karzai envisioned a Taliban surrender that would keep the militants from playing any significant role in the country’s future. But Washington, confident that the Taliban would be wiped out forever, was in no mood for a deal. “The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders,” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a news conference at the time, adding that the Americans had no interest in leaving Mullah Omar to live out his days anywhere in Afghanistan. The United States wanted him captured or dead." -- Did the War in Afghanistan Have to Happen? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/world/middleeast/afghanistan-taliban-deal-united-states.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/world/middleeast/afghanis...

eschulz 5y ago
To play Devil's Advocate, didn't the US have to label the Taliban as terrorists at that time? I think given their association with Bin Laden, and the 9/11 attacks, most people in the US considered the Taliban to be terrorists, and it would have completely destroyed the credibility of the Pentagon or Bush administration to be negotiating with them a mere 60 days after 9/11.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  The first ~thirty days after 9/11 were full of negotiations with the Taliban as they weren't terrorists but harboring terrorists. Even after the invasion, they could have labeled it as the Taliban agreeing to help bring Bin Laden to justice and they would have been able to save face. Hell, it might have helped prevent Bin Laden's flight into Pakistan, and have been a tremendous PR victory.
  - eschulz 5y ago

mariodiana 5y ago

My understanding is that medieval warfare, among the noble class, had similarities to this: specifically, nobles didn't necessarily fight to the death. Capture and ransom was a big thing. The term "parole" comes from the idea of giving one's word, after capture, that you would not return to fighting if you were released. The nobles of Europe, too, had an extended network of kin, some of whom might be on the "other side." I don't recall learning about switching sides with fluidity (as in Afghanistan), but I do recall learning that this little game got broken up once the common people were enlisted.

int_19h 5y ago
You might be interested in this: https://acoup.blog/2020/04/16/collections-a-trip-through-bertran-de-born-martial-values-in-the-12th-century-occitan-nobility/ https://acoup.blog/2020/04/16/collections-a-trip-through-ber... "... what seems to be the case is that, for people like Bertran, the chance of dying in all of that war remained relatively low. In the first case, the style of warfare of the 12th century, oriented around raids and sieges, with relatively few large set-battles and relatively smaller armies – tended towards lower casualties in comparison to the warfare of other eras." But do keep in mind that this is a particular period of medieval warfare; it's not universal.
pradn 5y ago
War rules are fascinating. They play a large role in the Mahabharata, which has an incredibly long battle sequence at the end, where the events of each day are detailed minutely. Part of the moral complexity of the epic comes from both sides breaking the rules, all of which are broken at some point and lead to pivotal shifts in the battle. These rule violations muddy the moral waters: what's usually seen as a "good guy"/"bad guy" story turns into a vicious tale of deception, violence, and senseless death. This martial epic contains within it both the call to duty, and, therefore, violence, but also a searing critique of where it leads to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma-yuddha#In_the_Mahabharata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma-yuddha#In_the_Mahabhara...
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

yawaworht1978 5y ago

No way to impose any sort of external order there. Russia was there, US/UK and half NATO have been there, the insurgent groups have financing via drugs and God knows what else(look at Colombia how much drug financed groups can hold back progress). All the foreign forces have done plenty of damage and lost credibility. Looking back, what in the world made Russia go there in the first place and then the USA? Why is this matter not settled yet? This has gone past many administrations and advisors, and yielded nothing. Does anyone know if the Taliban actually have some sort of popular support there or only by fringe groups?

acjohnson55 5y ago
I'm no expert, but I'm fairly sure power there is fragmented, hierarchical, and transactional. Popular support does not figure in. According to Wikipedia, "As estimated by the CIA World Factbook, 26% of the population was urbanized as of 2020. This is one of the lowest figures in the world." It's probably a fair bet that the urbanized population does not support the Taliban, but they can't stand alone. The warlords and Taliban want control over the largest city, and Kabul depends on the countryside. Think about the urban-rural cultural divide in the US, but imagine that rural people vastly outnumbered urban and that there was no central monopoly on violent force. Another interesting question is why should the Taliban be stronger than any other potential leadership group? I suspect this comes down to their past success, their connections to Pakistan, and their appeal to international fighters.
nickff 5y ago
The Taliban are power-hungry and ruthless, while their external (Pakistan/ISI & China) supporters don't mind it. In an battle between kindness and ruthlessness, (especially where the former is less committed than the latter,) the ruthless will always win. Put another way, if you had one side giving you aid (food/medicine) in exchange for support, and the other (credibly) threatening to kill you for disloyalty, what would you do? You'd probably feign support for the former, and never betray the latter.
- captain_price7 5y ago
  > if you had one side giving you aid (food/medicine) in exchange for support I'm afraid you have an awfully rosy version of what life was like for an average rural afghan under American rule. Here are some links to get started- - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-to... - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/09/us-soldiers-afghan-civilians-fingers https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/09/us-soldiers-af... - https://news.abs-cbn.com/global-filipino/world/01/12/12/outrage-over-video-marines-urinating-taliban-corpses https://news.abs-cbn.com/global-filipino/world/01/12/12/outr...

res0nat0r 5y ago

Note: Afghani is the currency, Afghans are the people.

TechBro8615 5y ago

For a (much longer) exploration of this idea, I recommend reading the book The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks [0] by Joshua Cooper Ramo. [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0196KYTA6 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0196KYTA6

sadfkhjasdf 5y ago

> After the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on September 27, 1996, Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abdul Rashid Dostum, two former enemies, created the United Front (Northern Alliance) against the Taliban, who were preparing offensives against the remaining areas under the control of Massoud and Dostum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan Amazing how it's almost an exact repeat of 25 years ago.

rags2riches 5y ago

One thing has visibly changed with the US occupation. Before, the typical Afghan fighter carried a Kalasjnikov. Now they will be carrying an M16.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
I just heard a veteran talk about all the weapons, vechicles the Taliban now have. "If they can keep those Humvees running---good luck."
SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
”All I want is the right to own the same weapons I paid for the Taliban to have.”

mcguire 5y ago

"Only the civilians seemed to lose." Yeah. Something to keep in mind with everyone repeating the old "Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires" dismissal.

dirtyid 5y ago

One statistic I think gets overlooked is the Afghan population almost doubled from 20M to 38M in the last 20 years. The massive young demographics growing up under occupation was going to come home to roost sooner or later. There's also the geographic reality that Afghanistan is a land locked country and US tenuous access via Pakisan or the even more perilous northern routes meant taming Afganistan was always going to be a long term losing proposition.

kumarvvr 5y ago
True. And a huge portion of that population has never seen real Taliban rule. Other nations can support their civil war for another decade easily.

ripe 5y ago

The consistent problem with most comments about the conflict in Afghanistan is they fail to fully account for the role of the Pakistan Army and ISI in all of this. They are the most important element in the conflict, not the Afghans, not us and not the Taliban. If they weren’t involved and the conflict were limited to Afghanistan and Afghans things like what Mr. Filkins describes would hold sway and accommodations and arrangements might be made. But that won’t happen because the Pak Army/ISI won’t let it. They have a mad idea of requiring Afghanistan for strategic depth (‘After the Indians beat us we can fall back on the tank factories of Kabul and regroup.’) and they require a compliant regime running the country. So they make it happen. As plucky as the Afghans can be, Afghanistan can’t handle Pakistan, especially a Pakistan that is a conduit for Gulf Arab money being sent to buy the donors a place in heaven. Handling the Pak Army/ISI was our job and we didn’t do it. We never really even tried to do it. If we had kept the Paks out and the conflict was contained within Afghanistan, the Afghans could have handled what would have been left of the Taliban through means such as those described by Mr. Filkins. But we didn’t. We got had by Pakistan and tales of the Raj and their special knowledge. We gave them money even, lots of it to kill us and Afghans. We did get something for this though. Hundreds of high ranking officers got their tickets punched. The spec ops community got their budgets and fanfare. Multitudes of State Dept. people got hazard pay and career points. Contracting companies and contractors galore got lots and lots of money over lots and lots of years. Several thousand of our guys died but they were mostly deplorable NASCAR fans and don’t much count. Now the party is over and the Afghans get to pay the final bill. Nice going Americans! This is the second time in my life where we’ve bugged out on people who trusted us when we told them we wouldn’t bug out on them. (The above comment was made by someone on the original article, but I think it's 100% accurate.)

ngcc_hk 5y ago
Foreign power is foreign. The affairs is internal. Ultimately it has to be decided for people on the ground. Unless you colonise it replacing the beings to be yours as one country did and do, I suspect even Pak or whoever will fail.
- nickff 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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amriksohata 5y ago

The US image as the "brave" superpower has been heavily exposed. The US despite having the latest tech hardware and all these images of muscle pumped up soldiers in Hollywood movies were seen as fleeing the battlefield. It took the US 20 years to push Taliban to outer cities and the Taliban took 20 days to come back. It shows for me, the US is not a superpower when it comes to warfare, as we saw in Vietnam too. They are good when it comes to aerial combat where they do not engage on ground level but they are not trained or built for guerrilla warfare which many Asian countries employ. They would lost in most terrains like this.

amriksohata 5y ago
I noticed I have been downvoted by the very ones who probably still try to project the "team america" YEH image

anticodon 5y ago

One side is an occupation force that despite all the propaganda understands that it kills people for power and mineral resources. Propaganda is strong, but it's hard to fool people completely, some intuition for truth remains. On another side there're people defending their homes from foreign neo-colonial occupation. Doesn't it explain why the comprador forces working for the occupational administration failed so quickly?.. "Democracy" on bayonets doesn't work.

DenisM 5y ago
It does sometimes. South Korea and Japan come to mind.
- ausudhz 5y ago
  You consider South Korea a success? They have been separated from the other half of the country for 70 years now. I wouldn't consider South Korea as an example of success. Remove the money that the US has pushed to South Korea and I'm not sure they'd get the same results. As for Japan, I remind you that they still have an emperor for example and they were a super power during WWII definitely not comparable to Afghanistan, Cuba or Vietnam
  - ppqqrr 5y ago
    To be fair, a number of countries might not have ended up as functioning democracies with free speech, backed by high tech economies, if it hadn’t been for US financial aids. Germany, for example.
  - eadmund 5y ago
    > You consider South Korea a success? Compared to North Korea, I sure do!
- anticodon 5y ago
  South Korea and Japan are still occupied.