Geopolitics in the 2020s.

[NotThePars]

I see no mention of the two elephants in the room - Pakistan & Saudi Arabia.

No it’s India that are the Hindus

[LongTimeLurker]

32 minutes ago, btb said:

I see no mention of the two elephants in the room - Pakistan & Saudi Arabia.

Mainly the former will be the dominant influence now along with China to a certain extent given Pakistan's role in its belt and road initiative. All part of the shift to a multipolar world that has been gathering steam ever since western attempts at regime change in Syria unravelled. Botham can't Imran Khan.

Edited August 14, 2021 by LongTimeLurker

[ICTChris]

[DiegoDiego]

I see no mention of the two elephants in the room - Pakistan & Saudi Arabia.

Iranian influence is huge, too.

[btb]

16 minutes ago, DiegoDiego said:

6 hours ago, btb said:

I see no mention of the two elephants in the room - Pakistan & Saudi Arabia.

Iranian influence is huge, too.

Well yeah, that's another reason I find the US losing interest in Afghanistan once the initial phase of the war was over puzzling, Ida thought it would've been in US interests to have a stable friendly government in Kabul - it's almost as if they (the US) didn't have a clue what they should be trying to achieve by remaining there.

[vikingTON]

You can't create a stable and friendly government by force alone and certainly not if that idea in ICTChris' post of a 'centralist multiethnic state' was at the forefront. That is an oxymoron in most advanced economies and stable societies, never mind applying it to the fucking nick Afghanistan was in by 2001-02. 

[LongTimeLurker]

Think hanging around after engineering the initial regime change was more about keeping Iran hemmed in if it served any larger geostrategic purpose. The west completely lost interest after the Soviet withdrawal when all the jihadist nutter factions they had armed battled it out in the aftermath so it is debatable whether it ever really did though. That disinterest helped create the conditions that made the Taliban look like a better alternative.

Pakistan worries about a lack of strategic depth against India so tend to be keen on the Taliban providing a stable Pashtun dominated regime that brings Afghanistan firmly into its sphere of influence. If Osama had behaved himself and poppy production had been kept in check Washington would probably have been fine with that.

Russia has some influence in Tajikistan but has no huge desire to move back into the five stans for demographic reasons ( i.e. too many Muslims unlike Belarus and the Russophone parts of Ukraine). In Syria there is a gas pipeline angle that explains their level of interest in propping up Assad. Afghanistan isn't really on their radar in strategic terms.

China's border with Afghanistan is very short and extremely mountanous. Basically only there for Victorian era Great Game reasons when Afghanistan formed a buffer state. China's way in to all the mineral wealth will be indirectly through Pakistan whether by land or sea. Given their policies in Xinjiang they are unlikely to get too close to the Taliban.

Edited August 14, 2021 by LongTimeLurker

[Ya Bezzer!]

So the War on Terror ends with Russia and Turkey in Syria, Iraq an ally of Iran and an actual base for sunni terrorists instead of a kid on one and Afghanistan back in the hands of the Taliban.

Oh and we sold the Kurds and progressive Afghans down the river.

All at the cost of 6.5 trillon dollars and almost 1,000,000 dead.

Nice work.

[ICTChris]

Taliban are in Kabul. Reports of the president leaving on a helicopter. Saigon 1975.

[101]

11 hours ago, Ya Bezzer! said:

All at the cost of 6.5 trillon dollars and almost 1,000,000 dead

Hard to tell if that's good value.

Joking aside really do feel for the families of the dead. They loved ones have died for f**k all.

[LongTimeLurker]

1 hour ago, ICTChris said:

Taliban are in Kabul. Reports of the president leaving on a helicopter. Saigon 1975.

Hopefully it's closer to the Saigon scenario than the Phnom Penh one. After the Uzbek militia in Mazar-e-Sharif ran away and Jalalabad and the road link to Pakistan fell yesterday it clealy wasn't going to take 30 days any more.

 

 

Edited August 15, 2021 by LongTimeLurker

[Lex]

The actual initial invasion and war itself was certainly justified.
As we know the Taliban harboured Bin Laden and Al Qaeda who murdered over 2000 American citizens on US soil. Out of all the foreign wars they have had throughout their history, this was probably the one that had the most justification.
Their problem was there was no out when the initial objective was achieved. Perhaps they naively believed they could leave after a couple of years and Afghanistan would become a democracy. It became pretty clear early on that this was never going to happen.
When one of the Taliban leaders was interviewed a few years ago he was asked what their strategy was now. He basically said the Americans won’t be here forever, so we will wait till they leave. He was right, and just a few weeks after they left the Taliban back in power.

[senorsoupe]

Meanwhile in Canada, our Prime Minister has decided to call a snap and opportunistic election while our country has abandoned interpreters in Afghanistan.

The optics are not great

[Savage Henry]

1 hour ago, senorsoupe said:

Meanwhile in Canada, our Prime Minister has decided to call a snap and opportunistic election while our country has abandoned interpreters in Afghanistan.

The optics are not great

Yup. I worked with translators in Iraq who served with US troops, and who can’t even get tourist visas for the US. It’s absolutely scandalous.  
 

As with Iraq, the intervention in and of itself wasn’t so much the issue as the chronic attempts at “nation building” and the rushed evacuation. 

[welshbairn]

Bit surprising that the usual frontmen in the Culture Wars against the liberal urban elites aren't getting full scale behind the Taliban as yet. 

[Theroadlesstravelled]

When does Jezza Corbyn arrive in Afghanistan to join in the Taliban celebrations?

Subjugating those “stupid women” is the first thing on his agenda.

[Jim McLean's Ghost]

11 hours ago, Lex said:

The actual initial invasion and war itself was certainly justified.
As we know the Taliban harboured Bin Laden and Al Qaeda who murdered over 2000 American citizens on US soil. Out of all the foreign wars they have had throughout their history, this was probably the one that had the most justification.
Their problem was there was no out when the initial objective was achieved. Perhaps they naively believed they could leave after a couple of years and Afghanistan would become a democracy. It became pretty clear early on that this was never going to happen.
When one of the Taliban leaders was interviewed a few years ago he was asked what their strategy was now. He basically said the Americans won’t be here forever, so we will wait till they leave. He was right, and just a few weeks after they left the Taliban back in power.

I think you have memory holed the beginning of the conflict

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5

A month after 9/11 the Taliban were willing to negotiate a deal where Bin Laden would be handed over to the US. The US refused point blank to negotiate and branded the Taliban govt terrorists.

So the opportunity for a peace deal was there but the West had no intention of trying to negotiate a settlement or even agree to a cease fire to begin negotiations.

And that was before the Invasion happened and there were a large number of boots on the ground.

[GordonS]

13 hours ago, Lex said:

The actual initial invasion and war itself was certainly justified.
As we know the Taliban harboured Bin Laden and Al Qaeda who murdered over 2000 American citizens on US soil. Out of all the foreign wars they have had throughout their history, this was probably the one that had the most justification.
Their problem was there was no out when the initial objective was achieved. Perhaps they naively believed they could leave after a couple of years and Afghanistan would become a democracy. It became pretty clear early on that this was never going to happen.
When one of the Taliban leaders was interviewed a few years ago he was asked what their strategy was now. He basically said the Americans won’t be here forever, so we will wait till they leave. He was right, and just a few weeks after they left the Taliban back in power.

I'd say the whole Pearl Harbor thing was even more justified, but I agree the war was easily justified and legal too.

The barrier to pulling out early was that the primary objective was to capture or kill bin Laden, and that didn't happen for nearly 10 years. Ever since then pulling out has always meant what is happening now - the Taliban recovering the country. Nobody was willing to do that until Biden, and America generally didn't want to do it until it became clear that the only options were that or stay indefinitely.

1 hour ago, Jim McLean's Ghost said:

I think you have memory holed the beginning of the conflict

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5

A month after 9/11 the Taliban were willing to negotiate a deal where Bin Laden would be handed over to the US. The US refused point blank to negotiate and branded the Taliban govt terrorists.

So the opportunity for a peace deal was there but the West had no intention of trying to negotiate a settlement or even agree to a cease fire to begin negotiations.

And that was before the Invasion happened and there were a large number of boots on the ground.

That's revisionism, and requires you to take the word of the 2001 Taliban in good faith.

The Taliban said they would be willing to talk about handing bin Laden to a third country, not the USA, and not hand over anyone else, if the USA stopped bombing them. Jut talk, and only if the US stopped first. There's no reason to believe they weren't lying and it was obviously a tactic.

Given what happened it was never unreasonable for the USA to say "hand him and the Al Qadea leadership over or eat bombs."

Fact is, if the Taliban had launched bin Laden onto a plane to the Netherlands the bombing would have stopped.

Falling for American propaganda is bad, but falling for Taliban propaganda is worse.

[Jim McLean's Ghost]

2 minutes ago, GordonS said:

That's revisionism, and requires you to take the word of the 2001 Taliban in good faith.

The Taliban said they would be willing to talk about handing bin Laden to a third country, not the USA, and not hand over anyone else, if the USA stopped bombing them. Jut talk, and only if the US stopped first. There's no reason to believe they weren't lying and it was obviously a tactic.

Given what happened it was never unreasonable for the USA to say "hand him and the Al Qadea leadership over or eat bombs."

Fact is, if the Taliban had launched bin Laden onto a plane to the Netherlands the bombing would have stopped.

Falling for American propaganda is bad, but falling for Taliban propaganda is worse.

Why not negotiate and find out? unless the US just wanted the war.

There was zero operation reasons why there could not have been a temporary cease fire.

[GordonS]

4 minutes ago, Jim McLean's Ghost said:

Why not negotiate and find out? unless the US just wanted the war.

There was zero operation reasons why there could not have been a temporary cease fire.

Aye, maybe we should have stopped bombing Iwo Jima and asked if they fancied stopping pulling the fingernails off our PoWs.

To answer your question, because it would have been a massive sign of weakness, an invitation to have the piss taken out of you and a grotesque insult to the families of those who died in 9/11.

Why didn't the Taliban put him on a plane?