And it ain’t us. Greg Fallis elaborates on the problem of Afghanistan:
Same shit, different invader. In almost every invasion, the Afghan tribes have been outgunned, out-technologied, out-resourced, and often out-fought. But they’ve never been out-waited. Never.
Why? Because they’re operating on a radically different understanding of time and place than the invaders. They live there. They know the invaders, regardless of who they are or where they’re from, will eventually want to leave. The simple fact is the Afghans don’t need to win; they only need to persist. If it takes a generation or two of low intensity guerrilla warfare until their enemies get fed up and find a reason to go home, they’re okay with that. They’ve done it before.
“Afghans will secure and build their own nation, and define their own future.”
That’s from Trump’s speech, and it’s a classic case of stupidity fed by willful blindness. The Afghans have been securing and building their own nation for a couple thousand years. They are defining their future. Right now that definition includes killing U.S. and NATO troops and booting us out of their country. There’s yet another reality we need to accept.
That’s the long view. But how does Greg tally up the Taliban? Were they purely an Afghan phenomenon? Or were they an incursion from Pakistan? I ask because, in my understanding, the Taliban more or less ran Afghanistan 1996-2001. And, yes, they no longer hold power – but only because of outside interference from the United States. And it fights on, hungering for power. Which is not to say the warlords who preceded them were any better.
