from Peter Galbraith: I watch the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan with disbelief and horror.

[tenderfoot]

I watch the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan with disbelief and horror. I first visited the country with the mujaheddin on February 14, 1989--the day the Soviets withdrew --and served there as Deputy Head of the UN mission in 2009. So much went wrong but here is my very partial list of those most responsible for the fiasco.

1. The Afghan political and military leaders who were more interested in staying in power than doing anything while in office except for stealing as much as they could.

2. The US government which pumped so much money into Afghanistan that there was a lot to steal and it was easily stolen.

3. Hamid Karzai--Afghanistan's first president was corrupt, ineffective, weird, and--after the massive fraud that accompanied his reelection, illegitimate. In 2009, he organized the fraud that got him a second term. That enabled him and his cronies to steal everything else.

4. Ban ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General who tolerated the massive fraud in the UN sponsored (and paid for) Afghanistan 2009 presidential elections. This undermined Obama's surge which may have been the last chance to get it right.

5. David Petraeus, the other US military commanders and the so called strategic thinkers who all declared the Afghanistan War to be a counter-insurgency and also stated that successful counter-insurgencies require a local partner. They then pretended the corrupt Afghan government was a real partner when they knew it wasn't.

6. USAID which built roads intended to raise rural incomes by getting farm products to market but actually enabled corrupt police to shakedown farmers. This won the Taliban new supporters and the new roads gave the Taliban speedy access to previously defensible areas like the Pansjir Valley (which neither the Soviets or the pre 2001 Taliban ever took).

7. Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan second president, who was a victim of Karzai's fraud in the 2009 presidential elections and willingly took office--twice--thanks to massive electoral fraud. Ashraf is personally honest but when you come into office thanks to a stolen election, it is hard to crack down on the corrupt power brokers who got you there.

8. The US and UN architects of Afghanistan's highly centralized constitution that was utterly inappropriate for a country that is as ethnically and geographically diverse as Afghanistan. Not only did the Constitution concentrate all power in Kabul at the expense of the provinces and districts but it also gave all power within Kabul to a Pashtun president as opposed to sharing power with an ethnically diverse parliament.

The rapid collapse follows a surrender agreement negotiated by Donald Trump and implemented by the Biden Administration. There is no reason to think the outcome would be any different if the US took another ten years to withdraw.

https://www.facebook.com/peter.galbraith.522/posts/4514778401912498

[billh58]

1. The American Taliban

takeover of the United States, and the destruction of its democratic government, is more horrible and will have longer-lasting repercussions.

[FoxNewsSucks]

2. It will.

I have sympathy for the Afghans, but I fear a lot more about what the American Taliban have in store for us.

[Chainfire]

3. And may be far bloodier.

Our previous Civil War was the bloodiest war Americans ever participated in. A new war, that part of our population believe would be our salvation, would make the 1861 war look like a Sunday School Picnic. The United States, as we know it, would not emerge from such a conflict. The percentage of Americans killed in the Civil war, if repeated today, would be 6,000,000. Keep in mind that the American Civil War was fought between opposing armies with few civilian deaths. Today, a civil war would not differentiate civilians from soldiers.

There are people, today, who are actively training and preparing for a new American Civil War. The consider themselves to be patriots cut from the cloth of Washington and the Minutemen. These people are supported by the organized party calling themselves Republicans. We may have seen the first skirmish on Jan. 6. We certainly have not seen the last skirmish.

[malaise]

4. Tell them n/t