I'm sure the answers would be different according to which way they lean politically, or rather how their parents/teachers lean.
General So that didn't take long.... AFGHANISTAN
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My oldest daughter (soon to be 18, heading off to college next week) is right here with me. She is probably the exception to the rule because she reads a variety of news sources. Her take was basically: “we have been there for around 20 years but I’m not sure why we went there - ‘did it have something to do with 9/11?’; whatever we were trying to do wasn’t working so it made sense to leave but how we left seems to have made things worse; now the Taliban has taken over the country and people are trying to escape by getting on our military planes including some people who tried to hang onto the outside.” Most impressive, she said she knew enough to know she didn’t know everything about the situation unlike her best friend who just reads headlines.
My younger daughter 15 has very little interest in news so I have had to prompt her to pay attention to what is happening as this is historic.
I work with a 28 yr old leftist weirdo. He is a political science student. I said Afghanistan hey........? Fucking guy says I just read about that last night.pretty cool how the Taliban negotiated with each and every tribe individually and peacefully took over the country........I'm like fuck buddy do you not remember the soccer stadium beheadings and shit last time they were in power. He goes I was 7 years old last time they were in power .I start telling him about the Taliban and he doesn't want to hear it.america is the bad guys no matter what.young people are fucked.this guy would get thrown off a rooftop day one but he thinks this is some kind of peaceful populist uprising.everything is utopian .I don't think we ever should have been there in the first place but the Taliban is definitely not some peaceful group altruisticly taking over the country
Now you mention it, it's probably not bad I'm off work at the minute.i work with people younger than this, lord knows the stupid shit they might say.
And while a lot of this is true, I'm sure the utter contempt the US soldiers displayed for their 'allies' in this video also had nothing to do with their poor performance. Bad teachers blame their students.
I remember reading that most of the 'green on blue' attacks weren't Taliban insiders, but simply Afghans who were tired of being treated like shit by foreign soldiers.
It's time to own up to your own failures, doc.
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We should have armed and trained all the women. Should have given up training the local men 15 years ago. The level of visceral emotion against the Taliban is likely much higher in women who have the most to lose with a Taliban return and the most gain and a free independent Afghanistan.
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Where did you read that the Afghan army fought the Taliban's most recent advance?
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They're not Kurdish YPJ soldiers willing to die to save their homeland. No amount of time or money could have prepared anyone in Afghanistan, man or woman, to fight a determined, disciplined Taliban force.
Nobody is disputing the poor performance of the Afghan army (even if it is exaggerated).
What I am saying is that it's absurd to absolve the puppet master for the failure of its puppets.
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Probably. But if you tell me that we have to pick which 300k individuals in Afghanistan to spend the time and training on, I'd say there's a high chance you get better recruits out of the women than the men.
There's no nationalism to be sold to a distributed village culture. They get no piece of the democratic pie and the leadership is all corrupt fleecing the country. There's no great origin and future mythos for anyone to hang on outside of Islam, which the Taliban clearly uses better than anyone else in fomenting a fight to the death. Then men pulling an ANA paycheck will just go pull a Taliban paycheck and the lowest status men get a boost in societal position under the Taliban. None of that is true for the women and while I'm mostly just waxing philosophical as an exercise, there's of course the issue that even the most liberal Afghanistan society in the last 20 years shits on women and would likely revolt against the vision and prospect of 100,000's of professional female soldier.
But hey, then we would have a civil war on our hands and the average men losing their position to women would....join the Taliban...oh...
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300k well funded and armed troops in a defense position lose to 70k with nearly no shots fired.
It's hard to exaggerate that.
It was also mostly a political strategy. The Taliban smartly softened the entire country up for the last two years buying off and making deals with leadership in even previous ANA strong holds. Coups were set and it worked remarkably well. And why wouldn't it? The only thing that binds anyone on each end of Afghanistan is the flag of Islam and that's what the Taliban is selling.
You are misinformed and making simplistic arguments. There was no 300,000-man army, as some lizard humping Floridian on here can also explain to you.
The final Taliban offensive was swift. But it was built on the back of years of brutal fighting in which 10s of thousands of brave Afghan soldiers gave their lives.
Yes, as a whole, the Afghan army turned out to be a pile of shit. But the fish rots from the head. That head wasn't in Kabul, but in DC.
Why do you hate America, dipshit?
It's also worth pointing out that the YPJ are also unified by ideology, just as the Afghan Soviet puppet regime who held out for 3 years vs the Mujahideen was.
It's just not reasonable to expect people to fight and die for a completely corrupt regime that offers them nothing to fight for.
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I'm aware that the reality is probably half that number actually was serving at any time. I am aware it's a paper number.
But I think you and I are talking two different things.
Funding and training was provided for 300,000. Even at 150 or 200, The comical abject failure of the Afghan army remains the same. Superior Force in a defense position give zero fight. The Afghan government did not lose due to ability. It lost due to leadership and numerous societal dynamics.
My only point was that the pure military ability to beat the Taliban was there and such a fall was not inevitable. There was zero attempt to defend and that's not exaggerated.
But as I've said multiple times above the inability to train this contingent into an actual fighting force started with Afghanistan culture before any of us were alive.
I hate you limey cunts much more than Americans.
You ever been stabbed??!
Is this a political thread? Did I somehow fall into one I created.
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Informed sources have put the figure closer to 50k. And the Taliban allegedly have 60-80k fighters.
So despite being outgunned (and even that is questionable due to purported ammunition shortages caused by corruption), the Taliban had 10-30k more men. That 20-60% advantage, paired with a stronger will to fight, meant the ADF never had a chance.
Sounds familiar….
Taliban Spokesman Accuses Facebook of Stifling Free Speech by Banning Group
theintercept.com
THE TALIBAN SPOKESMAN, Zabihullah Mujahid, emerged from the shadows on Tuesday and devoted part of his first press conference to a rant about Facebook, in which he accused the tech giant of violating the Islamist group’s right to free speech by banning them from all its platforms.
Speaking to reporters in the Afghan capital, Kabul, Mujahid offered vague assurances that women’s rights would be respected, “within the limits of Islam,” before attacking the social media company, which removed user accounts linked to him by the New York Times on Monday.
Taliban Spokesman Accuses Facebook of Stifling Free Speech by Banning Group
Taliban Spokesman Accuses Facebook of Stifling Free Speech by Banning Group
At his first press conference in 20 years, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid joined the techlash, by complaining about Facebook censorship.
theintercept.com
Speaking to reporters in the Afghan capital, Kabul, Mujahid offered vague assurances that women’s rights would be respected, “within the limits of Islam,” before attacking the social media company, which removed user accounts linked to him by the New York Times on Monday.