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US forces in Afghanistan, 2020 and beyond

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Tannin Capricorn

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Joined: 06 Aug 2006
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 11, 2020 9:09 pm
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Not even close. Not even in the same league. The Taliban combines the worst aspects of (looking at places in your list) Chechnya and Saudi Arabia, but goes well beyond both.

None of those places are remotely as nasty as the Taliban.

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stui magpie Gemini

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 11, 2020 10:02 pm
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The Taliban is just fundamentalist Islam on peptides.

Yeah it's nasty. So is every other would be world dominating movement masquerading as a religion or other peaceful organisation.

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Pies4shaw Leo

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 11, 2020 10:22 pm
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Like the Republican party?
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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 11, 2020 11:28 pm
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Pies4shaw wrote:
Like the Republican party?


Now you mention it, it is entirely possible that the US have directly caused more human misery around the world in the past 20 years than the Taliban have. It's certainly helped that they've had a broader canvas to work with ...

Tannin wrote:
Not even close. Not even in the same league. The Taliban combines the worst aspects of (looking at places in your list) Chechnya and Saudi Arabia, but goes well beyond both.

None of those places are remotely as nasty as the Taliban.


I knew you'd say that, but on what grounds? The Taliban are hardly the epitome of human evil. Just as a random example, ISIS treated civilians much worse than the Taliban did in the areas they controlled, and they threw international terrorism into the bargain (which the Taliban doesn't really do). For there to be any point to these comparisons, you surely have to demonstrate that the Taliban are not just the worst bunch in the world but in their own league to such an extent that they warrant US intervention while other governments and pseudo-governments don't. Otherwise, I don't support continued US involvement in Afghanistan for the same reason I don't support a ground invasion in Syria, Saudi Arabia or North Korea: it's illegitimate, destructive and doesn't actually help the situation for a number of reasons that should be obvious post-Iraq.

We live in a multipolar world with a wide range of nation states with different values, different systems of government and, yes, sadly, different attitudes to human rights. Even if we were naive enough to think that America's global role is to help other countries stay on the straight and narrow (as opposed to what it actually does, which is ruthlessly look after its own economic and geopolitical interests), those problems are not going to be fixed by stationing American troops in every corner of the globe and maintaining weak puppet governments. Like, even if it were a good idea in theory, they can't actually do it competently, as they've proven time and time again. Do we really need another five, ten, twenty years in Afghanistan to demonstrate that?

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pietillidie 



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PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2020 2:08 am
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The only reason to support remaining in Afghanistan is to withdraw responsibly now the damage is done. Systems adapt; by now the forces there would be part of the furniture.

Speaking of which, does anyone know what the effects of withdrawal will be and what the current equation is?

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Tannin Capricorn

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Joined: 06 Aug 2006
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2020 7:55 am
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David wrote:
Just as a random example, ISIS treated civilians much worse than the Taliban did in the areas they controlled


Oh yeah? Tell that to Malala. Try being a woman anywhere they control or influence. In any case ISIS was powerfully influenced and supported by the Taliban.

David wrote:
, and they threw international terrorism into the bargain
Ditto the Taliban.

David wrote:
(which the Taliban doesn't really do

Yes it does. Very much so. ISIS itself is the obvious example.

David wrote:
). For there to be any point to these comparisons, you surely have to demonstrate that the Taliban are not just the worst bunch in the world but in their own league to such an extent that they warrant US intervention while other governments and pseudo-governments don't.


No I would not. I was not an advocate for US entry there in the first place and still think it was a very bad idea. Ditto the Russian invasion previous to the US one. (Ditto also the British invasion almost two centuries ago, though youngsters like you mightn't remember that one.)

What *you* have to demonstrate is that a sudden Trump-style US pullout wouldn't result in immediate bloody takeover by the Taliban. The reality is that the US has been in place for quite a while now and can't simply abandon its responsibilities. There needs to be an orderly transition - planned and orderly - because the alternative is a dreadful bloodbath, horrendous repression of all citizens but women in particular, many more murders of people like Malala, and a renewed surge in international terrorism.

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David Libra

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PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2020 9:32 am
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I'm not sure what you're talking about regarding international terrorism – the Taliban and ISIS are sworn enemies, and their goals have always been at odds: ISIS want a global caliphate, while the Taliban have few if any expansionist aims beyond controlling Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. This article is ten years old, but it sums up the basic situation well:

https://ctc.usma.edu/are-the-afghan-taliban-involved-in-international-terrorism-3/

Quote:
One might wonder why the Taliban have not sought to better exploit NATO’s weak points.

The answer may lie in the fact that the Afghan Taliban have strong disincentives for carrying out attacks abroad. Although not stated directly, the Afghan Taliban leadership is probably reluctant to carry out activities that would increase the pressure on its sanctuaries in Pakistan. Since 2001, the Pakistani government has been allied with the United States in the “war on terrorism,” but at the same time it is widely believed that the Afghan Taliban have enjoyed unofficial support from within Pakistan’s territory. This might explain why the presence of Afghan Taliban leaders on Pakistani soil has been somewhat “tolerated” by Pakistan since 2001, while a number of al-Qa`ida members have been actively pursued and arrested.


So not only are the Taliban not an international terrorist group, they are far less of a threat in that regard than Saudi Arabia (the place, as we now know, from where many of the 9/11 attackers originated), a country that is also run by extremists who oppress women and impose cruel punishments. Here's a brief summary from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia

Quote:
The totalitarian regime ruling the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is consistently ranked among the "worst of the worst" in Freedom House's annual survey of political and civil rights.

[…]

Saudi Arabia is one of approximately 30 countries in the world with judicial corporal punishment. In Saudi Arabia's case this includes amputations of hands and feet for robbery, and flogging for lesser crimes such as "sexual deviance" and drunkenness.

[…]

In the 2000s, it was reported that women were sentenced to lashes for adultery; the women were actually victims of rape, but because they could not prove who the perpetrators were, they were deemed guilty of committing adultery.

[…]

In July 2018, two prominent female human rights activists, Samar Badawi and Nassima al-Sada, were arrested for challenging Saudi Arabia's male guardianship laws. According to Amnesty International, several arrested women's rights activists detained without charge in Dhahban Prison are enduring torture by electrocution, flogging, hanging from the ceiling, sexual assault.


As you say, try being a woman there.

But to your main point:

Tannin wrote:
What *you* have to demonstrate is that a sudden Trump-style US pullout wouldn't result in immediate bloody takeover by the Taliban. The reality is that the US has been in place for quite a while now and can't simply abandon its responsibilities. There needs to be an orderly transition - planned and orderly - because the alternative is a dreadful bloodbath, horrendous repression of all citizens but women in particular, many more murders of people like Malala, and a renewed surge in international terrorism.


You have to be willing to entertain a third option here: that there is no safe transition plan on the table, and no long-term strategy to hold back the Taliban, because US presence there is unsustainable and merely delaying the inevitable. Just either an ongoing stalemate or "cutting and running" in some form, and that when the latter inevitably happens, the short-term consequences may well be violent (but that it also may result in less violence in the long-term, given US forces' active role in the conflict there) before, at worst, reverting to a Saudi-style dictatorship (again, a kind of government that we tolerate in many other places around the world and can't do all that much about).

As you well know, the US was in a similar situation in Vietnam in 1975 when they left, and there was indeed bloodshed and torture in the aftermath (Wikipedia, again, notes that 300,000 South Vietnamese were send to brutal reeducation camps after Saigon fell, and that's not even getting started on the tens of thousands who died in the Cambodian–Vietnamese War that followed). Maybe you think the US should have stuck around for another decade or so until they had a sustainable transition plan in place for the South Vietnamese government to safely take over when they left? Who knows? Maybe they could still be there today, propping up one half of a divided country with decades of ongoing bloodshed resulting, instead of the relatively peaceful and prosperous country that Vietnam is today.

But I think the biggest problem here, again, is to assess this question in moral terms when nothing about either the US occupation or the decision on whether or not to withdraw is being carried out according to a moral framework. They are not there to save x number of Afghans' lives, or to protect Afghan women from patriarchal oppression. Any good they do is purely incidental, and they will leave when they feel like leaving and when it suits their interests, not when it's the best moment for the Afghan people. So it stands to reason that their ongoing presence will have at best mixed results, i.e. cause a lot of unnecessary death and suffering even if they're temporarily holding worse forces at bay.

Of course we're not just talking about whether to pull out but also how to pull out. And I think it's worth noting that, for all your talk of a "Trump-style pullout", implying that forces are just going to leave unconditionally without notice, the fact is that Trump actually did participate in negotiations with the Taliban earlier this year on US withdrawal (a move that, again, Bidenites and neocons were outraged over because it broke the cardinal rule that you don't negotiate with terrorists):

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51689443

Now, you and I may not think much of Trump's negotiation skills and have good reason to suspect that whatever he does will be done incompetently. But given Biden has committed to staying there in some form for the indefinite future, a swift withdrawal might also be a rare opportunity to actually end this interminable conflict, which should never have lasted this long. And if that withdrawal signals a move away from disastrous invasions and occupations, then all the better.

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Tannin Capricorn

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PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2020 9:48 am
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So the Taliban aren't international terroriasts?

Garbage.

Who, for all those years after 911, sheltered Osama Bin Laden himself? Who do you think he did his basic training with, back in the late 1970s before they had their current name.

Yep: the Taliban.

And you want to hand them power over an entire country once again. That is insane, pure and simple.

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David Libra

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PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2020 5:12 pm
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Sheltering terrorists or even sponsoring international terrorism isn't necessarily the same as directly engaging in it. I think we all understand the difference: for instance, the Saudis are sponsors; Al-Qaeda and ISIS are the actual international terrorist organisations that they sponsor. Bin Laden himself was, just in case anyone's confused, never actually himself a member of the Taliban. Wikipedia lays this basic relationship out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden

Quote:
By 1984, bin Laden and Azzam established Maktab al-Khidamat, which funneled money, arms, and fighters from around the Arab world into Afghanistan. Through al-Khadamat, bin Laden's inherited family fortune paid for air tickets and accommodation, paid for paperwork with Pakistani authorities and provided other such services for the jihadi fighters. Bin Laden established camps inside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan and trained volunteers from across the Muslim world to fight against the Soviet-backed regime, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Between 1986 and 1987, bin Laden set up a base in eastern Afghanistan for several dozen of his own Arab soldiers.

[…]

In Afghanistan, bin Laden and al-Qaeda raised money from donors from the days of the Soviet jihad, and from the Pakistani ISI to establish more training camps for Mujahideen fighters. Bin Laden effectively took over Ariana Afghan Airlines, which ferried Islamic militants, arms, cash, and opium through the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, as well as provided false identifications to members of bin Laden's terrorist network. The arms smuggler Viktor Bout helped to run the airline, maintaining planes and loading cargo. Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, concluded that Ariana was being used as a terrorist taxi service.

[…]

Another successful attack was carried out in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan. Bin Laden helped cement his alliance with the Taliban by sending several hundred Afghan Arab fighters along to help the Taliban kill between five and six thousand Hazaras overrunning the city.


The nature of the atrocity described in that last paragraph above reminds us of the nature of the relationship and their respective goals (and, I hope, once again makes it clear that I'm not saying that the Taliban are anything other than a disgusting, mass-murdering organisation). The Taliban's goals are explicitly local. They're not trying to create a caliphate and they're not particularly interested in bombing Westerners. That's just a fact.

(Another factual inaccuracy in your post is the claim that Bin Laden trained with the Taliban in the 1970s. The Taliban were in fact only formed in 1994, and are not interchangeable with the Afghan Mujahideen, who were an explicitly ethnocentric, warlord-run movement formed to combat the Soviets, and actually ended up in direct conflict with the Taliban in the '90s, who – formed from some breakaway elements – effectively wrested power from them. None of this is splitting hairs, because these factions exist in Afghanistan to this day and their various alliances and rivalries will largely dictate what happens to the country after US withdrawal.)

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Tannin Capricorn

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PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2020 6:30 pm
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Nonsense. He cut his teeth with the religious extremist, ultra-nationalists in Afghanistan. The fact that they change their name from time to time, and splintered into factions - as extremist groups so very often do - is irrelevant.

You still haven't named a single group even worse than the Taliban. I very much doubt that there is one, all things considered, though I can think of several that run it close.

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David Libra

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PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2020 6:41 pm
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Well, I did, but you just didn’t accept them (without citing any evidence for why). I maintain that the Saudis are just as bad, and ISIS were categorically worse (and that’s not even getting started on the Lord’s Resistance Army, Boko Haram, etc.)
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think positive Libra

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PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2020 11:40 am
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Tannin wrote:
So the Taliban aren't international terroriasts?

Garbage.

Who, for all those years after 911, sheltered Osama Bin Laden himself? Who do you think he did his basic training with, back in the late 1970s before they had their current name.

Yep: the Taliban.

And you want to hand them power over an entire country once again. That is insane, pure and simple.


gees even i know this - David you need to expand your movie watching habits!!

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stui magpie Gemini

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.


Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 15, 2021 5:14 pm
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So now Biden is taking care of Trump's election promises, including withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/15/politics/joe-biden-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal/index.html

Does that mean he now has Taliban approval?

Anyone change their view now that Biden is doing it rather than Trump?

Here's one case for the No. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/13/opinions/biden-major-mistake-afghanistan-andelman/index.html

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Jezza Taurus

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PostPosted: Thu Apr 15, 2021 5:22 pm
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Don't like Biden, but credit where it's due here.

This is a good decision.

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David Libra

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PostPosted: Thu Apr 15, 2021 6:11 pm
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Good news, and the fact Biden as opposed to Trump is doing it has no bearing on my view of the decision.
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