You know which side I’m on here, Tim. Each regime since 9/11 made mistake after mistake, and nobody (much) bothered to look at what Afghanistan has been to successions of would-be conquerors since, I don’t know, the days of Alexander. The United States can get in line. Oh, wait. We’ve been in line for decades, and we just reached the front of it. You get no disagreement from me about the part US stupidity and cupidity played in where we are now. (Frankly, Biden can take the lumps, since he was in Congress and by Obama’s side for so many of those years.) But, but…there’s a callousness in the first part of this piece that does disturb me: So Afghani women who cobbled together an education or professions for themselves should now just hang in there, waiting for their “male guardians” to escort them to the weddings of girls under thirteen who used to be their students and still are their sisters to the new bosses (who are, of course, the oldest of the old bosses)? Tough luck for them, I guess, that they were once journalists or teachers or doctors or nurses (just noting that the first thing the triumphant Taliban did in the provinces was to shut down girls’ schools and women’s health centers). They’ll have to learn to get along, I guess. Sometimes you let your disdain for the recipients of neoliberal benefits get the better of you. And, just in the spirit of gender equality, you couldn’t have named Condi Rice in your rogue’s gallery there at the end? There weren’t many women at her level in the Bush 2 regime, but she surely ought to be recognized as one of the imperialists.
The Taliban were surprised at how quickly and easily they were able to take over. I'm not sure if this counts as everyone having an intelligence failure.
From what I've been reading, the Afghan military collapsed because they weren't getting food and ammunition. It wasn't a question of their loyalty being for sale. The Afghan *government* didn't have sufficient loyalty to even try to have a functioning military.
You know which side I’m on here, Tim. Each regime since 9/11 made mistake after mistake, and nobody (much) bothered to look at what Afghanistan has been to successions of would-be conquerors since, I don’t know, the days of Alexander. The United States can get in line. Oh, wait. We’ve been in line for decades, and we just reached the front of it. You get no disagreement from me about the part US stupidity and cupidity played in where we are now. (Frankly, Biden can take the lumps, since he was in Congress and by Obama’s side for so many of those years.) But, but…there’s a callousness in the first part of this piece that does disturb me: So Afghani women who cobbled together an education or professions for themselves should now just hang in there, waiting for their “male guardians” to escort them to the weddings of girls under thirteen who used to be their students and still are their sisters to the new bosses (who are, of course, the oldest of the old bosses)? Tough luck for them, I guess, that they were once journalists or teachers or doctors or nurses (just noting that the first thing the triumphant Taliban did in the provinces was to shut down girls’ schools and women’s health centers). They’ll have to learn to get along, I guess. Sometimes you let your disdain for the recipients of neoliberal benefits get the better of you. And, just in the spirit of gender equality, you couldn’t have named Condi Rice in your rogue’s gallery there at the end? There weren’t many women at her level in the Bush 2 regime, but she surely ought to be recognized as one of the imperialists.
The Taliban were surprised at how quickly and easily they were able to take over. I'm not sure if this counts as everyone having an intelligence failure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQtV9Pi0gM8
From what I've been reading, the Afghan military collapsed because they weren't getting food and ammunition. It wasn't a question of their loyalty being for sale. The Afghan *government* didn't have sufficient loyalty to even try to have a functioning military.