Taliban enters Kabul, Afghan president flees, surrender negotiations underway

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I’m not sure that I buy the premise of that argument.

  1. There’s a lot that the Biden administration could and should have done better, especially in helping to evacuate the many Afghan translators, aid workers etc. that supported the US effort and are now at great risk, but the August departure is already several months past the May departure time that the Trump administration has already negotiated with the Taliban in exchange for the Taliban not attacking American forces. Saying that the US could unilaterally extend that departure by yet another month without consequences is assuming a lot.

  2. As awful as the situation is, at this point in time the transition of power was already about as “peaceful” as could be expected. No large scale battles occurred, because most of the Afghan military basically chose to not resist at all.

  3. I’ve got no idea what the “political leverage” is that Ms. Koofi is referring to here:

It’s pretty clear the Taliban could see the writing on the wall and knew that the US wasn’t prepared to keep fighting indefinitely. What was their motivation to keep negotiating? Especially after having already successfully negotiated a withdrawal with the previous administration?

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But this would have been the magic month after 20 years that one month would have made all the difference!
/S

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But in addition to understanding the US and Nato forces’ war crimes, we must understand why capital and democratic processes rarely reached rural Afghans. This will allow us to understand why it was that they could so easily undermine the Ghani administration’s legitimacy.

Ghani did not represent Afghanistan – 923,592 Afghans, that’s 2.5% of the population, voted for him. Only 4.75% of the population felt engaged and/or safe enough to even vote in the last election.

Furthermore, Kabul and other Afghan cities are not representative of where Afghans live – 28 million of the total 38 million Afghans live in rural areas. The urban elite are not representative of Afghans – 80% of Afghans rely on rain-fed agriculture and cattle-grazing for their incomes.

Appalling levels of economic, social and political inequality persist between urban and rural Afghans. This inequality is a known fact; it only took the Taliban, in a manner similar to communists in the 1970s, to exploit it and overthrow Ghani’s administration.

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Turns out that the attempt at reconstructing Afghanistan had an inspector general that has constantly been reporting on all the fuckups. Here is their final report titled:

WHAT WE NEED TO LEARN:
LESSONS FROM TWENTY YEARS OF AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION

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Good Nationalism.

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