Since President Biden took office, his administration has been very hesitant on the Afghan peace deal, and is now to the point where reports say that the US is very likely to keep its troops in Afghanistan beyond May 1.
This comes just days after NATO reported that their own troops are staying in Afghanistan, and that came with calls for the US to stay for NATO. The May withdrawal of NATO and the US wasn’t some arbitrary figure, of course, and came as part of a peace deal with the Taliban.
Since the whole deal for the Taliban was getting rid of the foreign occupation, and they’re staying, the Taliban is now saying what should’ve been an obvious reaction, that if the troops don’t leave, the fight will continue.
The Taliban isn’t shocked by this development, and was putting Doha talks on hold surrounding the Biden inauguration just in case the US was no longer going through with the pullout that Trump’s Administration had nearly completed.
Keeping the war going, which is what all of this boils down to, is the predictable consequence of the US policy of the past week, which amounted to bad mouthing the peace process and scrapping the withdrawal.
Yes, the agreement centers on the US leaving and the Taliban guarantee for no threat to US security. . .here
It took many weeks to hammer that out and now the US tosses it.
The Afghans who bet on West aren’t getting any guarantees from Taliban. No one remembers Vietnam except for the insurgents. Oh well. Afghan immigrants will be the new Cubans.
The US leaving Afghanistan would be a big victory for Putin, and you would just be joyful about that.
It’s 2061 and Donald Trump Jr., age 83 and serving his first term as president, makes good on his campaign promise to end the Afghanistan war. His opponent in 2060, Chelsea Clinton-Mezvinsky, age 80, had also promised to end the Afghanistan war but wasn’t willing to continue the “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran.
the US will have disintegrated into a few new independent areas. I won’t even say nations. Nation states are on the way out. Literacy too.
Normally a couple thousand troops in a country of forty million people doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, except that in Afghanistan they are special forces assassins working with the CIA and mercs to do their deeds, along with stepped up aerial bombing, all of which the Taliban are correct in complaining about because the US promised to leave.
Nevertheless, the towns increasingly aren’t secure and the roads linking Kabul with the rest of the country are not safe. Thus commerce is impossible, and thus Afghanistan as a normal country can’t exist. This happened in China in 1945-1949, and in Vietnam 1968-1972. The only history you teach is critical race theory, and shit happens.
As in Vietnam the US will eventually leave with their tails between their legs.
The Vietnam war ended only because the US Army was “broken,” with conscripted soldiers (martyrs, to use an Islamic term) who rebelled in the ranks, with mission refusals, fragging, etc. Nowadays we have volunteer professional troops augmented to a high degree with volunteer weekend warriors (National Guard). We don’t know how many have been deployed, except by the casualty (i.e. death) reports.
In Vietnam the troops were dying (or “fallen” these days) by the hundreds a week, whereas now deaths are rare because of increased reliance on aerial attacks against a defenseless enemy, something the US excels at. The aerial attacks cause many civilian deaths, which helps increase enemy recruits to ensure an endless war because withdrawal is “condition-based.”
Nixon did one brilliant thing(well two, if you count the China trip). He ended the draft. Idiot LBJ didn’t get that the working and middle classes weren’t as worked up about “Communism’ as the old relics from the FDR and Truman yrs he relied on as Wise Men. LBJ was still terrified of the corpse of Drunk Joe McCarthy. What happens when you stop living in your hometown and spend your life in Washington.
Its BS, Taliban will continuer to fight even if the skinny US and NATO troops leave. Their goal is to overturn the elected Government of Afghanistan and install their former brutal Islamic Government were most people become slaves.
the tail and a bunch of mangled bodies to pay for and minds damaged so much that the war ends up here.
What people like Hillary and Jake Sullivan don’t get is that if the Taliban want to really get serious and hurt a lot of US advisors, NGO people etc, they can and they can do it without fantasy bonuses from Moscow. The over equipped and computer-satellite dependent US “soldiers” have been whipped by peasant soldiers constantly since Kennedy was bullied into putting advisors into Vietnam by Maxwell Taylor and the Harvard Mafia in 1961. The Pentagon became obsolete in the fall of 1965 at a place called Ia Drang Valley. 55 yrs and tens of trillions later, it still thinks “air superiority” and “firepower” outweigh motivation, mobility and support from local communities. That we don’t find the Taliban nice to feminists is irrelevant. They are willing to die more for their cause than our kids and soldiers are willing to die for a paycheck and lousy VA care.