Kabul Afghanistan is Falling to the Taliban

[stryder]

How is it possible that the Taliban could still be this strong, after 20 years of fighting them? That doesn't make sense.

I'd assume with the help of foreign actors. It's possible initially they fled to neighbouring countries, perhaps to continue fighting wars (e.g. Syria) as to gain the support of foreign actors that would bolster their troops and give them arms/munitions.

It's so heart breaking and I can't help but wonder if American troops were in there for another 20 years, if the outcome would have been different. (This seemed sadly inevitable.)

Could something different (from the US side) have been done, maybe the military angle wasn't the best strategy?

To be honest I thought initially that the press output was done to get the Taliban to outstretch their resources. The more ground they hold, the more fighters they need to keep it. It's part of the reason they've beelined to the cities, to install panick and chaos, enough to make the defensive forces feel like they are overrun. Guerrilla tactics would have been the only way to keep them from "steamrolling" in that fashion.

[Zinjanthropos]

Whether or not we ignore history, it repeats.

[Yazata]

Shooting at Kabul airport. Unclear if it's warning shots

https://twitter.com/RandaHabib/status/14...8061213700

[Syne]

20 years, lost lives, and something like 2.6 trillion dollars all wasted overnight.

[Magical Realist]

"Despite the fact that we spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars to give the best equipment, the best training, and the best capacity to the Afghan national security forces, we could not give them the will," Jake Sullivan said.

[C C]

20 years, lost lives, and something like 2.6 trillion dollars all wasted overnight.

Bottom line is if a Democrat president was ultimately going to close down shop, either directly or indirectly, and leave the Afghans to the Taliban, then it should have happened when Obama took office. To save 12 more years gone to waste for everybody concerned.

Contrast to American presence in South Korea for seven decades.

Ironically, Biden in deed if not in words basically assessed the country as like one of Trump's category ####holes, here on the basis of having no strategic and other value to the US. So to warrant enough presence to satisfactorily deter. Throwing the Afghans under the bus.

Arguably consistent if one usually applies that category to some places on the international map, but not if facade-wise one does not.

[Leigha]

To be honest I thought initially that the press output was done to get the Taliban to outstretch their resources. The more ground they hold, the more fighters they need to keep it.  It's part of the reason they've beelined to the cities, to install panick and chaos, enough to make the defensive forces feel like they are overrun.  Guerrilla tactics would have been the only way to keep them from "steamrolling" in that fashion.

Yea, interesting thought.

Also, the Taliban was suppressed to an extent while US military was present, so all the training from the US, couldn’t have prepared Afghanistan to actually defend itself on its own. Not because the training was inadequate, rather they would now have to stand alone and defend themselves - which they haven’t been tested to do. In the end, their will wasn't there, and that's something you can't train.

[confused2]

From: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/16/how-afgh...ickly.html

“There was a fundamental failure to understand what the Afghans wanted,” Zacchea, who trained an Iraqi battalion in 2004, said. “We assumed they wanted what we had — liberal democracy, Judeo-Christian values ... And think they’d just automatically convert. And that is not the case.”

Tribal alliances in Afghanistan very often supersede national ones, or loyalties follow money and power. And part of the Taliban’s strength lay in the fact that as Pashtuns, they belonged to the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.

“Meanwhile,” the former U.S. intelligence official said, “we basically supported a hodgepodge of ethnic minorities, who never had the capability of unifying the country.”

Link (again) https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/16/how-afgh...ickly.html
Being true to your beliefs cuts both ways. Those who tried and failed can at least say 'We tried' which is more honourable than a lot of things.

[Magical Realist]

Afghans with nothing but the clothes on their backs packed into an American C17 cargo plane as it takes off from Kabul..

[Image: im-386490?width=700&height=888]

[Syne]

Biden not only pulled the military out suddenly but also pulled the US contractors, including those providing aircraft maintenance for the Afghan military. They were forced to try solving maintenance issues over Skype.
The Afghan military was trained to rely on air support, just like the US military.