Originally published at: Afghanistan government falling to Taliban faster than expected | Boing Boing
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It’s almost as if the Taliban had 20 years to plan this. Sun Tzu would be shooting blood through his eyes if he saw how badly this went.
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Yeah, right.
Absolutely no way to see that coming.
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it looks like the things are turning out really ugly. 
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And meanwhile, China is ready to wade into the vacuum. You know, because minerals.
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It is going exactly to plan, this what was going to happen regardless of the trillions of US taxpayers money being fettered away on this disgusting quagmire.
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They’re too smart to wade in. Maybe a little nudging by proxy via Pakistan.
The deal is China gets whatever resources they want and pays a good price for it, the Taliban don’t mention the Uighurs. And it was agreed upon a while ago.
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“Faster than expected”? This was expected… just slower? What the eff does that even mean?
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An actual tyrannical patriarchy. Bleak.
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The Americans were setting fire to cash in the trillions of dollars for so long, it doesn’t register as real money any more. Who does not remember the literal pallets of $100 bills waiting to be distributed to tribal chiefs?
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Exactly what it sounds like. It means that even the experts who predicted the Taliban would overthrow the U.S.-backed government after the withdrawal of American troops have been surprised at how quickly the Taliban has been making those territorial gains.
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All that opium had to be paid for to keep the supply running. Some people and organizations sure made a lot of money.
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Yes, but great photo-ops for American patriarchal tyrants.
How soon, do you suppose, until Hungary is “too liberal” for FoxNews, and Tucker Carlson interviews the Taliban?
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It means that after nearly 20 years in the region, they never fully destroyed the Taliban. The border with Pakistan is porous and they could travel back and forth with ease and get resupplied as well as being able to continue to recruit.
The Afghan government and army set up never had any thing resembling cohesion or a recognition of authority through most of the country.
It was clear that with out direct US and allied support, that a determined force like the Taliban would re-capture and control Afghanistan.
No one has a solution for this. And unfortunately most of the region is going to be under direct Sharia law soon.
Though I do wonder if the concept of “Afghanistan” was dissolved, and new regions build up along ethnic lines would lead to a more stable region.
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Wow, who could have ever predicted that the U.S. would waste $ trillions of dollars, sacrifice thousands of lives and basically end up exactly where we started? Oh wait: A lot of us predicted this exact situation when the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan!
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I get that… By way of analogy… There’s a murderous thug let out into the public space because well, we are tired of keeping him in jail for 20 years, just doesn’t seem to be worth the effort and money. He starts murdering folks, right away (duh) and instead of murdering “just a few”, he murders “a lot”… So everyone starts freaking out and the headline is, “he was let out and is murdering faster than expected”.
If we knew that he was going to murder after he was let out and we knew that he was going to murder a lot of folks (sooner or later) and that was expected, WHAT THE EFF DOES IT MATTER if he does it “faster than expected”!!!
If the Taliban were to just slow their roll and space things out, all would be good?
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Everybody saw this coming. It is, indeed, somewhat surprising how fast the country is reverting. I mean, I at least thought our troops would have finished leaving before they took over again. But everybody on the entire planet knew perfectly well the US troops presence was the only thing [just barely] keeping the taliban suppressed. To have had any hope of anything more lasting would have been required targeting the source of the taliban in pakistan, and no one was willing to invade pakistan and overthrow it’s government to stop them.
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There was never any path available to us that would produce a “good” outcome in Afghanistan, just an array of different bad outcomes.
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Imagine that Afghanistan is a river and US intervention was a dam. Building the dam flooded a reservoir that killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of people in addition to being incredibly expensive, and it became apparent only a few years after construction that it was going to continually leak unless an endless spigot of money and violence was applied to keep the dam in place.
A month ago, the American government finally gave up and stopped supporting the dam project. Now the dam is collapsing. This collapse will cause death destruction, and eventually things will return to more or less how they were before the dam was built. All of these deaths are tragedy, but that doesn’t mean that keeping the dam standing was in any way better in the long run.
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