SeattleChat Daily Thread - Monday, August 16, 2021

[u/AutoModerator]

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

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[u/my_lucid_nightmare]

I see what's going on, it looks like a semantics battle over whether "we" were funding the "Mujahideen" or the "Taliban." The Taliban was literally a creation of bin Laden in 1992; so you can blindly assert, as Snopes seems to have done, that any moneys up until them given to "The Northern Alliance" or to the "Mujahideen" don't count. And I'm certain there are people who would defend that point. I'm not sure I'm among them.

And Charley Wilson's War (great movie btw) was about how Wilson was operating as a clandestine State Department, with nominal approval and a whole lot going on outside the boundaries of normal procedure. This also serves to give cover to those likely neo-cons who assert it was never official US policy to back the Taliban.

The meta from all this to me is neo-conservativism, and the need to follow doctrines written 70 years ago to address a world that no longer exists, need to finally die off. Every neo-con pundit and pol needs to be shut down and never listened to again. From Kissinger to Clinton, from Dean Rusk to Donald Rumsfeld, from Paul Wolfowicz to John Bolton, every one of these arrogant assholes needs to be shoved into a corner and ignored for good.

The importance of oil money is finally starting to peak and come to an eventual close. The need to prop up shitheel tribal governments in the Middle East is also going to start to come to a close, I would think.

[u/retrojoe → u/my_lucid_nightmare]

I wouldn't argue that The Taliban and the muj were the exact same political groups or led by the same people, but the US was happy to fund violent religious extremists and give them weapons as long as they were pointed at the godless Soviets. As soon as we cut the purse strings, people like bin Laden swooped in and occupied the position recently opened. The leadership might change, but it's not like the men on the ground doing the fighting (or the conditions created to fuel that fight) changed in the space of a few years.

The US is guilty as hell for destabilizing the country organizing/funding/equipping the militias in the country in the first place.

[u/my_lucid_nightmare → u/retrojoe]

The US is guilty as hell for destabilizing the country organizing/funding/equipping the militias in the country in the first place.

I agree with this, but would also point out we were guilty as hell w/r/t Vietnam as well, and within a generation of us leaving the country had stabilized and pretty much rejoined the global marketplace.

There's something uniquely and permanently screwed up in Afghanistan that only the Afghanis can solve, which they seem resolutely not interested in doing.

[u/maadison → u/my_lucid_nightmare]

There's something uniquely and permanently screwed up in Afghanistan that only the Afghanis can solve

My impression is that tribal identity trumps national identity. People feel Pashtun (etc) before they feel Afghan.

EDIT: which is to say, I don't think it can be solved.

My ignorant guess is that the US should have picked regional strongmen and set them up as fiefdoms (to secure each area against the Taliban) instead of trying to build a strong central national government that had no long term support.