saxitoxin wrote:bigtoughralf wrote:Is anyone else impressed with how smooth and bloodless this transition of Afghan leadership was? Not just smoother than the US overthrow of the Taliban but also smoother than the process of replacing Trump with Biden.
When there is popular support behind a leader, transitions are smooth; when there is not, there is not.
The Taliban have the support of the Afghan people despite what we want to delude ourselves into thinking. The Taliban and the ANA were both composed of Afghans, not some alien force. The Taliban (Afghans) chose to fight ferociously and the ANA (also Afghans) chose to unlock the gates to let them in.
Americans look at images of cosmopolitan Kabul and think it represents Afghanistan like Afghans look at images of West Hollywood and think it represent the United States. The forces of international liberalism tried to turn Afghanistan into Little Denmark and it blew-up in their faces.
I mean, they had quotas for women in the Afghan parliament, the puppet government was doing campaigns about climate change, the American embassy was flying Gay Pride and BLM flags ... who seriously thought any of that was going to go over well in an Iron Age society? At the first opportunity, the Afghans themselves swept 20 years and $1 Trillion of that neoliberal bullshit away in the course of a few hours. We should be inspired by the Taliban. They have shown us that we can, domestically, do the same.
Biden and his handlers are panicking not because they lost Afghanistan but because they realize they're about to lose the world. The experiment of the last 300 years is coming to an end!
One huge problem of Colonial powers and the USA too, is that they view a "nation" in name only to be of one mindset and does not recognize the diversity of tribes and groups living within the borders that are somewhat artificially created. They do not recognize that different groups have different agendas and are NOT going to adopt to the ways, desires, and values of the colonists and people MANY view as invaders. saxi makes the same mistakes, as demonstrated by the above quote.
Afghanistan's population is divided into several ethnolinguistic groups. Generally the four major ethnic groups are the Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks. A further 10 other ethnic groups are recognized and each are represented in the Afghan National Anthem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan#Ethnicity_and_languages
The Taliban is only of the major ethnic groups in Afghanistan and to think that nearly ALL those in Aghanistan are Taliban is a huge misunderstanding of the reality on the ground and in the mountains there.
The Taliban, or "students" in the Pashto language, emerged in the early 1990s in northern Pakistan following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. It is believed that the predominantly Pashtun movement first appeared in religious seminaries - mostly paid for by money from Saudi Arabia - which preached a hardline form of Sunni Islam.
The promise made by the Taliban - in Pashtun areas straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan - was to restore peace and security and enforce their own austere version of Sharia, or Islamic law, once in power.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-11451718
