With the Taliban carrying out offensives against several provinces around the country at any given time, the Afghan government has been forced to prioritize who gets reinforcements. This weekend, that meant sending special forces to the Jaghori District of Ghazni. The Shi’ite dominated district was long seen as “safe.”
That’s not panning out, however, as the Taliban are not only routing Shi’ite militias, but defeating the reinforcements as well, killing at least 25 commandos and continuing to advance deeper into the district.
On the surface, the district is only important in that it gives the Taliban a route to attack the important provincial capital, which it has long contested. It may be more significant, however, in that the reinforcement strategy is failing.
The Afghan government has been losing territory at an alarming rate, but so long as they were able to reinforce the important areas, they were able to at least somewhat limit those defeats. If reinforcements are no longer able to check the Taliban, they may be about to inflict major losses on the Afghan government.
Sweet. Hopefully Kabul 2019 will be a replay of Saigon 1975–except this time the American war criminals won’t be able to escape so easily.
America is going to leave Afghanistan the same way the British did.
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier”
There is as Shiite country right next to Afghanistan but the Taliban knows well that that country would not dare to help the Afghan Shiites.
In fact Iran is aiding the Taliban. Taliban’s best fighters are being trained by Iran, and there have been recent Taliban successes in Farah Province, adjacent to Iran. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
As you stated above, there is no great Sunni-Shia divide.
They are happy to live and let live as they have for centuries.
The Saudi Wahhabi are not welcome anywhere and the fact that they were the forerunners of the Talib is a potential problem.
However the Afghan culture is in most ways more stringent than even the Wahhabi before anyone had invented the Taliban.
It will all work itself out inshallah.
There never was any great religious Muslim divide, there were political differences. The religion angle has been promoted by the US as a part of its overall divide-and-conquer strategy. A particular event was the US-supported Samarra mosque bombing in 2006 here. The US blamed AQ but the fact is that the US military completely controlled Samarra at that time. Because of the ensuing violence the US could not withdraw from Iraq as planned, they said.
As in the Middle East, Russia has taken over after the US failed. Now we can look for demands that the US military exit the country, as in Syria and Iraq.
“Elite Afghan Troops”
Seriously? That’s like saying “military intelligence” or “John McCain, war hero”.
They sent one company of 50 men, who had no other national forces in support, to confront over 1,000 attackers.
The only fighters on their side were unpaid militia civilians doing local defense of their home villages, like our protected villages in Vietnam but without the advisers or fire support.
Of course they had a disaster.
The Afghan fire brigade of special forces is actually pretty good, as such things go, but odds over 20-1 are just absurd.