Taliban seize all major Afghan cities, except holdout Kabul

[pieter]

Jaga,

I know scary stories about the Taliban in Afghanistan from Afghan refugees in Arnhem. How the Taliban killed journalists, executed civilians, stoned women, tortured people, tore families apart and maintained a terror regime.

The Taliban allowed Afghanistan to be a haven for Islamic militants from throughout the world, including an exiled Saudi Arabian, Osama bin Laden, who, as leader of al-Qaeda.

The Taliban and the United States began meeting in 2018, with the help of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates, the only countries to have a diplomatic relationship with both parties. The discussions focused on the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, though the United States hoped to eventually push the Taliban to negotiate with the central government. In July 2019 the discussions included central government officials for the first time, who agreed with representatives of the Taliban on general principles for future reconciliation talks. The Taliban’s representatives were not authorized by the organization to negotiate in an official capacity, but observers considered the meeting a successful icebreaker.

By early September the United States and the Taliban had reportedly come to an agreement in principle and were narrowing in on the details of a signed deal when an attack by the Taliban in Kabul killed a U.S. service member. Days later a secret meeting between top U.S. and Taliban officials was called off by the U.S.; the cancellation was blamed on the attack.

A deal was struck in late February 2020. The Taliban agreed to begin talks with the central government within 10 days of signing the agreement and to prevent al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS]) from operating in Afghanistan. The United States, for its part, would phase out its troop presence in the country over a 14-month period; it began reducing troop levels in March. After a delay caused by the central government’s reluctance to carry out a prisoner swap promised to the Taliban by the United States, negotiations between the Taliban and the central government began on September 12. By April 2021, however, little progress had been made in the negotiations. Nevertheless, the United States reiterated its commitment to complete the withdrawal of its troops, although it delayed its deadline from May to September.

Emboldened by the withdrawal, the Taliban rapidly captured dozens of districts by late June and targeted provincial capitals. Although the group appeared to lack the manpower and firepower to hold its gains against the larger and better-equipped armed forces of the central government, the latter’s lack of coordination and lack of responsiveness to the insurgency allowed the Taliban to overrun the country within months. By mid-August the Taliban had captured nearly all of the country, including Kabul.

Cheers,
Pieter

Source: www.britannica.com/topic/Taliban
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban

[karl]

Pieter

In first, my self hold no vested interest in the Taliban for they are what they were, but now at the thresh hold of leadership of a nation they have fought for. With this, the Taliban were provided and given by the former government military, a fortune in military equipment and weapons that were provided to the former Government for the defense of their country by the American Government free of charge. But as events have shown, that former Government cut and ran as Taliban forces approached. Now, as a new Government will be formed, the responsibility will be upon their shoulders in world view. With this, these rag tag forces will by the reality of leadership, will be upon them to grow up and be responsible. For these people will rather they wish or not, will form in foreign relations, representatives to meet with other leaderships as part and partial to the reality of joining world leadership.

For as above, it is very real and present that Western nations form a training session for the Taliban leadership how to do so. For if not, this will be accomplished by such states as China and then another Communist state will then be formed.

www.fr24news.com/a/2021/08/billions-of-us-weapons-seized-by-the-taliban.html

Karl

[kaima]

OPINION
GUEST ESSAY

I Can’t Forget the Lessons of Vietnam. Neither Should You.
Aug. 19, 2021
www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/opinion/afghanistan-vietnam-war-refugees.html



South Vietnamese civilians scaling a U.S. Embassy wall in a desperate attempt to leave the country aboard evacuation flights from Saigon in 1975.
South Vietnamese civilians scaling a U.S. Embassy wall in a desperate attempt to leave the country aboard evacuation flights from Saigon in 1975.Credit...Neal Ulevich/Associated Press

692
Viet Thanh Nguyen
By Viet Thanh Nguyen

Mr. Nguyen is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer” and its sequel, “The Committed.” He is a professor of English, American studies and comparative literature at the University of Southern California.

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版


I was 4 years old when Saigon fell, so I do not remember any of it. I count myself lucky, since many Vietnamese who survived the end of that war were greatly traumatized by it. The collapse of the American-backed Southern regime began in my Central Highlands hometown, Ban Me Thuot, in March 1975. In less than two months, all of South Vietnam capitulated to the North Vietnamese. Soldiers fled in chaotic retreat among civilians. My mother, brother and I were among them. We left behind my adopted sister. After walking nearly 200 kilometers to escape the advancing North Vietnamese army, the three of us made it to the seaside city of Nha Trang, where we managed to find a boat to take us to Saigon where my father was.

We were lucky; many others weren’t. My brother remembers dead Southern paratroopers hanging from trees. In Nha Trang, some people fell to their deaths in the sea, trying to clamber onto boats. In Da Nang, desperate soldiers crammed into the luggage compartments of a plane, while the ones left behind threw grenades and fired at the plane.

Images of bodies falling, of people running desperately, are now with us again, from Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. Comparisons to Vietnam began early in America’s misadventure in Afghanistan: It was classic mission creep, a quagmire, another forever war. The pessimism was warranted. Two decades, billions of dollars and tens of thousands of deaths later, Taliban forces are now in Kabul, having secured control of the country with dizzying speed. As much as some American leaders resist it, the analogy presents itself again, with the fall of Saigon and resulting catastrophe foreshadowing the possible fate of tens of thousands of Afghans. It is not something the Biden administration is interested in hearing. “This is not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said over the weekend.

True, the Taliban are not the People’s Army of Vietnam, and the American evacuation of Saigon, chaotic as it was, was better planned than the American endgame for Kabul. But the Saigon analogy is important because the urgency and the human disaster are similar as is the role that the United States and other nations must play to shape those fates of Afghans. It was therefore disappointing to hear President Biden on Monday defend his Afghanistan policy by focusing on two alternatives — stay and fight or withdraw — while laying the blame primarily at the feet of the Afghan government and army. Blaming Afghans obscures a history of American miscalculation starting with President George W. Bush, and allows Mr. Biden to treat the evacuation of Afghan allies as an afterthought rather than a priority.



For these civilians, the war hasn’t ended, and won’t end for many years. Their future — and Mr. Biden’s role in determining whether it’s one of resettlement and new beginnings or one of fear and misery — is what will determine whether America can still claim it will always stand by its allies.

As a scholar of memory and a novelist who has written about the Vietnam War, I have often thought of 1975 and its consequences. I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee community so deeply shaped by the fall of Saigon that the community calls that month Black April, which is commemorated every year. So when I read this account by an anonymous Afghan journalist in recently captured Taliban territory, it resonated completely with all the stories I have heard from Vietnamese refugees: “My whole life has been obliterated in just a few days. I am so scared and I don’t know what will happen to me. Will I ever go home? Will I see my parents again? Where will I go? The highway is blocked in both directions. How will I survive?”

Her questions are especially haunting as images of Afghans trying to escape for their lives, crowding Kabul’s airport, fill the airwaves. Her questions were probably similar to ones my parents and many other Vietnamese refugees asked of themselves.

Again, we were the lucky ones: My family tried to flee by air but could not make it to Saigon’s airport. We tried the U.S. Embassy and could not get past the enormous crowd. Finally, we found a barge at the dock, left Saigon and eventually made it to the United States, where we restarted our lives. We were civilians, but this was a war story.




Image
People struggled to cross the boundary wall of Hamid Karzai International Airport to flee the country after the Taliban took control of Kabul, Afghanistan.
People struggled to cross the boundary wall of Hamid Karzai International Airport to flee the country after the Taliban took control of Kabul, Afghanistan.Credit...EPA, via Shutterstock
Americans like to imagine war stories featuring their heroic soldiers, sailors and pilots. The reality is that refugee stories are also war stories. Yet despite a growing sense of antiwar sentiment in the country, the United States has found it hard to give up its habits of war, partly because of the military-industrial complex built for war, and partly because even antiwar stories featuring the military still center on the seductive glamour of firepower, hardware, heroism and masculinity. Anthony Swofford, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, recalls in his memoir, “Jarhead,” how he and his fellow Marines experienced an almost sexual ecstasy in watching the battle scenes from the movie “Apocalypse Now,” even the ones depicting the killing of American soldiers.


There is neither power nor glory in the stories of civilians killed or maimed or forced to flee or orphaned by war. It is in civilian experiences, similar to what many Afghans are now going through, that we truly find war stories. We keep hearing that Americans are suffering from war fatigue — but how many stories do we read or hear or see about American soldiers at war compared to stories of refugees created by wars led by the United States? Civilian war stories disturb our mind-set of conducting perpetual warfare as an unquestioned American privilege.

Americans also like to think that wars end when they are declared to end. But the aftereffects of war continue for years. In Vietnam, the victorious Vietnamese imprisoned untold numbers of South Vietnamese soldiers, politicians, priests, sex workers and other people in re-education camps, where many died of illness, starvation and overwork. Others were executed. Prison sentences ran from months to more than a decade.

Many of those prisoners probably felt like the Afghan journalist describing her bewilderment at being turned into a refugee and at the mercy of the Taliban: “I remember screaming and crying, women and children around me were running in every direction. It felt like we were all stuck in a boat and there was a big storm around us.” She is speaking metaphorically, but in the decades after the fall of Saigon, nearly a million Vietnamese fled by sea. Tens of thousands perished during the desperate attempts. The truly lucky ones made it to refugee camps and then to host countries. The less lucky ones lingered in those refugee camps for years and even decades. They are part of the human toll that continued to grow for years after the official end of the war. This is what the Afghan people face, with the certainty that as the Taliban seize Kabul, there will be potentially terrible recriminations for those who allied with the Americans.

One hoped that as we saw the increasingly desperate pleas of Afghans over the weekend that the comparison to the fall of Saigon would provoke greater urgency on the part of the Biden administration to do its duty and help its Afghan allies escape the country.

Yet, the danger of the Saigon analogy is that it could also simply allow Americans to view the tragedy in Afghanistan as many viewed the end of the Southern Vietnamese regime — as a spectacle, a singular moment in history.

In reality, the fall of Saigon ushered in many more years of fear and desperation for the defeated. With Afghanistan, Mr. Biden committed to evacuating an unspecified number of vulnerable Afghans to safety. And perhaps in response to anti-immigrant sentiment in the country, the United States is also trying to find homes for many Afghan refugees in other countries. This is not enough. “The people of Afghanistan do not deserve this,” the novelist Khaled Hosseini said on Twitter. “The United States has a moral obligation. Admit as many Afghan refugees as possible.”


History is happening again, and again as tragedy and farce. The wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan happened as a result of American hubris, and in both cases Americans mostly focused on the political costs of war for them. But in each case, the Vietnamese (and Laotians, Cambodians and Hmong), and now the Afghans, have paid the much greater toll in human suffering. In April 1975, the United States recognized its moral responsibility and evacuated about 130,000 Vietnamese people, and then accepted hundreds of thousands more from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in subsequent decades. This is what must happen now, and anything short of such a vision of responsibility and hospitality will compound the American failure in Afghanistan.

Joe Biden, a senator in 1975, surely remembers that the majority of Americans did not want to accept Southeast Asian refugees. Nevertheless, Congress did the right thing, and the subsequent flourishing of Southeast Asian American communities throughout the United States has shown the wisdom of that moral decision. While the politics of these two moments in America’s flawed wars differ, the morality does not. Tens of thousands of Afghans believed in the American promise of ushering in freedom, democracy and an open, tolerant society. And now, they’re stuck. For Afghans, the war hasn’t ended simply because we, the United States, declared it to be over.


Image
An American official punching a man in an effort to knock him from the doorway of an airplane overloaded with refugees hoping to flee Nha Trang, Vietnam, on April 1, 1975.
An American official punching a man in an effort to knock him from the doorway of an airplane overloaded with refugees hoping to flee Nha Trang, Vietnam, on April 1, 1975.Credit...Bettmann, via Reuters



Image
A U.S. service member pointing his gun toward an Afghan man as thousands of people poured into the airport in Kabul in an effort to flee Afghanistan as it fell to the Taliban.
A U.S. service member pointing his gun toward an Afghan man as thousands of people poured into the airport in Kabul in an effort to flee Afghanistan as it fell to the Taliban.Credit...Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The nightmare doesn’t end for Afghans after the last American leaves. Our obligation to help Afghans in mortal danger extends beyond the present moment and well into the years ahead. The United States now must take the lead in evacuating and welcoming tens of thousands of its Afghan allies. Otherwise the words of another young Afghan woman contemplating the future of her country will be painfully true: “We don’t count because we were born in Afghanistan … No one cares about us. We’ll die slowly in history.”

[kaima]

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/what-i-learned-while-eavesdropping-on-the-taliban/619807/


The Atlantic

What I Learned While Eavesdropping on the Taliban
I spent 600 hours listening in on the people who now run Afghanistan. It wasn’t until the end of my tour that I understood what they were telling me.

By Ian Fritz


AUGUST 19, 2021
SHARE
About the author: Ian Fritz served in the U.S. Air Force from 2008-2013.

When people ask me what I did in Afghanistan, I tell them that I hung out in planes and listened to the Taliban. My job was to provide “threat warning” to allied forces, and so I spent most of my time trying to discern the Taliban’s plans. Before I started, I was cautioned that I would hear terrible things, and I most certainly did. But when you listen to people for hundreds of hours—even people who are trying to kill your friends—you hear ordinary things as well.

On rare occasions, they could even make me laugh. One winter in northern Afghanistan, where the average elevation is somewhere above 7,000 feet and the average temperature is somewhere below freezing, the following discussion took place:

“Go place the IED down there, at the bend; they won’t see it.”


“It can wait ’til morning.”

“No, it can’t. They [the Americans] could come early, and we need it down there to kill as many as we can.”

“I think I’ll wait.”

“No, you won’t! Go place it.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes! Go do it!”

“I don’t want to.”

“Brother, why not? We must jihad!”

“Brother … It’s too cold to jihad.”

Yes, this joke came in the middle of plans to kill the men I was supposed to protect, but it wasn’t any less absurd for it. And he wasn’t wrong. Even in our planes with our fleeces and hand warmers, it really was too darn cold for war.


Read: This is not the Taliban 2.0

In 2011, about 20 people in the world were trained to do the job I did. Technically, only two people had the exact training I had. We had been formally trained in Dari and Pashto, the two main languages spoken in Afghanistan, and then assigned to receive specialized training to become linguists aboard Air Force Special Operations Command aircraft. AFSOC had about a dozen types of aircraft, but I flew solely on gunships. These aircraft differ in their specifics, but they are all cargo planes that have been outfitted with various levels of weaponry that range in destructive capability. Some could damage a car at most; others could destroy a building. In Afghanistan, we used these weapons against people, and my job was to help decide which people. This is the non-euphemistic definition of providing threat warning.

RECOMMENDED READING
Illustration of an apple covered in "I got my COVID-19 vaccine" stickers
All Teachers Should Be Vaccinated
KATIE MOYLAN AND DAVID SCHEPARD
Bandoliers rest on sandbags in the foreground, overlooking a rocky valley.
Liberal Democracy Is Worth a Fight
ANNE APPLEBAUM
A magic eight ball with "United States Census 2020" in the viewfinder
Demography Is Not Destiny
ADAM SERWER
I flew 99 combat missions for a total of 600 hours. Maybe 20 of those missions and 50 of those hours involved actual firefights. Probably another 100 hours featured bad guys discussing their nefarious plans, or what we called “usable intelligence.” But the rest of the time, they were just talking, and I was just eavesdropping.

Besides making jokes about jihad, they talked about many of the same things you and your neighbors talk about: lunch plans, neighborhood gossip, crappy road conditions, how the weather isn’t conforming to your exact desires. There was infighting, name-calling, generalized whining. They daydreamed about the future, made plans for when the Americans would leave, and reveled in the idea of retaking their country.

But mostly, there was a lot of bullshitting.

Pashto and Dari naturally lend themselves to puns and insults—there is a lot of rhyming inherent to the languages, and many words share double meanings. Part of this bullshitting stemmed from a penchant for repetition. The Afghans I met would repeat a name or statement, or anything really, dozens of times to make a point. But this repetition intensified when talking over radios. A man named Kalima taught me this. None of us know who Kalima was, though it’s generally accepted that he wasn’t anyone important. But someone—we don’t know who—really wanted to talk to him. So he called his name.


“Kalima! Kaliiiiiiima. Kalimaaaaaaa. Kalima Kalima Kalima Kalima Kalima.”

He called his name again and again, at least 50 times, in every possible combination of syllabic emphasis. I listened the whole time, but Kalima never responded. Maybe his radio was off. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk to this guy. Maybe he was dead. It’s possible that I had killed him. I never heard a Kalima answer the radio after that.

All this bullshitting flowed naturally into the Taliban’s other great verbal talent, the pep talk. No sales meeting, movie set, or locker room has ever seen the level of hyper-enthusiastic preparation that the Taliban demonstrated before, during, and after every battle. Maybe it was because they were well practiced, having been at war for the majority of their lives. Maybe it was because they genuinely believed in the sanctity of their mission. But the more I listened to them, the more I understood that this perpetual peacocking was something they had to do in order to keep fighting.

Read: Why the Afghan army folded

How else would they continue to battle an enemy that doesn’t think twice about using bombs designed for buildings against individual men? This isn’t an exaggeration. Days before my 22nd birthday, I watched fighter jets drop 500-pound bombs into the middle of a battle, turning 20 men into dust. As I took in the new landscape, full of craters instead of people, there was a lull in the noise, and I thought, Surely now we’ve killed enough of them. We hadn’t.


When two more attack helicopters arrived, I heard them yelling, “Keep shooting. They will retreat!”

As we continued our attack, they repeated, “Brothers, we are winning. This is a glorious day.”

And as I watched six Americans die, what felt like 20 Taliban rejoiced in my ears, “Waaaaallahu akbar, they’re dying!”

It didn’t matter that they were unarmored men, with 30-year-old guns, fighting against gunships, fighter jets, helicopters, and a far-better-equipped ground team. It also didn’t matter that 100 of them died that day. Through all that noise, the sounds of bombs and bullets exploding behind them, their fellow fighters being killed, the Taliban kept their spirits high, kept encouraging one another, kept insisting that not only were they winning, but that they’d get us again—even better—next time.

That was my first mission in Afghanistan.

Time went by, and as I learned what different code words meant and how to pick voices out of the sounds of gunfire, I got better at listening. And the Taliban started telling me more. In the spring of 2011, I was on a mission supporting a Special Forces team that had recently been ambushed in a village in northern Afghanistan. We were sent in to do reconnaissance, which sounds impressive, but logistically means flying in a circle for hours on end, watching and listening to locals. We came across some men farming, working a plot of recently tilled land. Or so we thought. The ground team was sure that these were the guys who had attacked them, and that instead of farming, they were in fact hiding weapons in the field.


So we shot them. Of the three men in that field, one had his legs blown off. Another died where he stood. The last was blasted 10 feet away, presumed to be dead from the shock wave obliterating his internal organs. Until he got up and ran away. He and his friends came back, loaded the newly amputated man into a wheelbarrow, and carted him off to a car waiting nearby. It seemed that they were trying to escape, but revenge was just as likely a scenario, and the ground team was worried that they would get more men, or more weapons, and retaliate. But I could hear them, and they didn’t sound interested in retribution.

“Go, drive! We are coming. Abdul was hit. We have him in the car.”

“Keep going! Don’t let them shoot us!”

“Yes, we are coming. We will save him.”

They were trying to get their friend to a doctor, or at least someone who could save his life. And then their car slowed down.

“No, brother. He’s dead.”

The rest of them were no longer a threat, so we let them go.


Throughout my deployment, time and again, our kills outnumbered theirs, they lost ground, and we won. This happened so regularly that I began developing a sense of déjà vu. This feeling isn’t uncommon when you’re deployed; you see the same people, follow the same schedule, and do the same activities day in and day out. But I wasn’t imagining it. We really were flying the same missions, in the same places, re-liberating the same villages we had fought in three years ago. I was listening to the same bullshitting, the same pep talks, and the same planning, often by the same men, that I’d heard before.

On yet another interminable mission, we were supporting a ground team that had gone to a small village to talk with the elder. Together, they were establishing plans to build a well nearby. We circled overhead for a few hours, and nothing interesting happened. No one was doing anything suspicious on the ground; no one was talking about anything remotely militant on the radios. The meeting was successful, so the team headed back to its helicopters. And then the Taliban attacked.

“Move up, they’ve gone to the eastern ditch. They’re running, move up!”

“Bring the big gun; get it ready. They’ll be moving again soon.”


The ground team had to sit and wait for its helicopters to be safe to take off.

“Hey, gunship, where are they, what are they doi—f***, I’m hit.”

The Taliban knew that they’d hit the team leader. I know because while I listened to his scream, I heard them celebrating.

“Brother, you got one. Keep going; keep shooting. We can get more!”

“Yes, we will, the gun is work—”

They stopped celebrating, because my plane shot them. This was the worst day of my life. It wasn’t the shooting or the screams or the death that made the day so terrible; I’d seen plenty of that by then. But that day, I finally understood what the Taliban had been trying to tell me.

On every mission, they knew I was overhead, monitoring their every word. They knew I could hear them bragging about how many Americans they’d managed to kill, or how many RPGs they’d procured, or when and where they were going to place an IED. But amid all that hearing, I hadn’t been listening. It finally dawned on me that the bullshitting wasn’t just for fun; it was how they distracted themselves from the same boredom I was feeling as they went through another battle, in the same place, against yet another invading force. But unlike me, when they went home, it would be to the next village over, not 6,000 miles away. Those men in the field may have just been farmers, or maybe they really were hiding the evidence of their assault. Either way, our bombs and bullets meant the young boys in their village were now that much more likely to join the Taliban. And those pep talks? They weren’t just empty rhetoric. They were self-fulfilling prophecies.


Because when it was too cold to jihad, that IED still got planted. When they had 30-year-old AK-47s and we had $100 million war planes, they kept fighting. When we left a village, they took it back. No matter what we did, where we went, or how many of them we killed, they came back.

Read: What we got wrong in Afghanistan

Ten years after my last deployment, and after 20 years of combat with the world’s richest, most advanced military, the Taliban has reclaimed Afghanistan. Whatever delusions existed about whether this would happen or how long it might take have been dispatched as efficiently as the Afghan security forces were by the Taliban over a single week. What little gains have been achieved in women’s rights, education, and poverty will be systematically eradicated. Any semblance of democracy will be lost. And while there might be “peace,” it will come only after any remaining forces of opposition are overwhelmed or dead. The Taliban told us this. Or at least they told me.

They told me about their plans, their hopes and dreams. They told me exactly how they would accomplish these goals, and how nothing could stop them. They told me that even if they died, they were confident that these goals would be achieved by their brothers in arms. And I’m sure they would have kept doing this forever.


They told me how they planned to keep killing Americans. They told me the details of these plans: what weapons they would use, where they would do it, how many they hoped to murder. Often, they told me these things while doing the killing. They told me that, God willing, the world would be made in their image. And they told me what so many others refused to hear, but what I finally understood: Afghanistan is ours.

Ian Fritz served in the U.S. Air Force from 2008-2013.

[JustJohn or JJ]

Kaima,

   Will we ever learn???

Read: What we got wrong in Afghanistan

Ten years after my last deployment, and after 20 years of combat with the world’s richest, most advanced military, the Taliban has reclaimed Afghanistan. Whatever delusions existed about whether this would happen or how long it might take have been dispatched as efficiently as the Afghan security forces were by the Taliban over a single week. What little gains have been achieved in women’s rights, education, and poverty will be systematically eradicated. Any semblance of democracy will be lost. And while there might be “peace,” it will come only after any remaining forces of opposition are overwhelmed or dead. The Taliban told us this. Or at least they told me.

They told me about their plans, their hopes and dreams. They told me exactly how they would accomplish these goals, and how nothing could stop them. They told me that even if they died, they were confident that these goals would be achieved by their brothers in arms. And I’m sure they would have kept doing this forever.


They told me how they planned to keep killing Americans. They told me the details of these plans: what weapons they would use, where they would do it, how many they hoped to murder. Often, they told me these things while doing the killing. They told me that, God willing, the world would be made in their image. And they told me what so many others refused to hear, but what I finally understood: Afghanistan is ours.

Ian Fritz served in the U.S. Air Force from 2008-2013.

[Jaga]

Pieter, it is usually true that the neighbors of the neighbors are our biggest friends - just like Poland and Hungary, or Russia versus Germany who still like and respect each other despite the wars.
Still there are paschtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan and they do have a common culture and common ground.

Aug 15, 2021 6:09:02 GMT -7 pieter said:

What I know from Afghan Sunni Muslim people who fled Afghanistan due to the terror of the Taliban is that they hate Pakistan. According to them Pakistan causes trouble in Afghanistan. The Afghan people I know are Pro India and anti-Pakistan. In the Indian-Pakistan conflict these Afghans support India.

[karl]

Pieter

Meaning not to be the odd man out with this subject, but of course it is a mess at the present, hopefully once the invaders have left, it will settle down. But, my self do not believe so, for then the power struggles usually will raise its nasty head.
For the present, the Taliban people are acting like a bunch of wild indians with their blattering about and accomplishing nothing. In due time, will come the Chinese with their own agenda and behind them, it appears the Russians are sharpening their swords to reenter the country once the Chinese have cleared the way.

For not only the raw earth materials are at stake, so as the new crop of opium to be made ready for the world market. Things will eventually settle but in which direction is only a guess at this time.

www.dw.com/en/why-is-russia-so-interested-in-afghanistan-all-of-a-sudden/a-36989680

An American publication:

www.newsweek.com/afghanistans-fall-china-russias-chance-asia-iran-wants-join-1620873

Karl

[pieter]

Aug 21, 2021 12:02:17 GMT -7 Jaga said:

Pieter, it is usually true that the neighbors of the neighbors are our biggest friends - just like Poland and Hungary, or Russia versus Germany who still like and respect each other despite the wars.
Still there are paschtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan and they do have a common culture and common ground.

Aug 15, 2021 6:09:02 GMT -7 pieter said:

What I know from Afghan Sunni Muslim people who fled Afghanistan due to the terror of the Taliban is that they hate Pakistan. According to them Pakistan causes trouble in Afghanistan. The Afghan people I know are Pro India and anti-Pakistan. In the Indian-Pakistan conflict these Afghans support India.

Jaga,

The Afghan colleague I had is an Afghan Pashtun and he disliked Pakistani Pashtuns and the Pashtun Taliban people. He is an Afghan patriot and dislikes all people that destroy his country. Wether they are Pakistani or Afghan. He is a honest, sincere and good willing guy. He wants the best for his country and isn't prejudiced against other Afghan people of different ethnic background. He said; "We are all Afghans whether we are Pashtun, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, Hazara, Baloch, Pashai, Nuristani, Aimaq, Gujjar, Brahui, Qizilbash, Pamiri, Kyrgyz, Sadat or from other ethnic Afghan groups.

My Pashtun Afghan colleague said he dislikes and hates corrupt leaders, whether they are Pashtun, Uzbek, Tajik, Baloch or Nuristani. He also disliked the Afghan mujahideen war lords that destroyed Kabul before the Taliban came. War lords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani.

After the Soviet withdrawal, most of the Afghan mujahideen continued its fight against the government of Mohammad Najibullah, which continued to receive funding from Moscow, while similarly the Mujahideen was also still receiving funding from Washington and Islamabad. After Najibullah's government collapsed, the Mujahideen factions (apart from Hezb-i Islami Gulbuddin) signed a power sharing agreement (the Peshawar Accord) and captured Kabul on April 28, 1992, celebrating their "Victory Day". However, the divisions between the various factions were still there and it was a catalyst that led to another civil war between the new government and Mujahideen factions that rebelled against it. This meant that after 1992, various Mujahideen factions including the Shi'ite Hezb-i Wahdat continued to exist as militias rather than merely political parties, with many fighters being loyal to specific leaders.


Mohammad Najibullah Ahmadzai (Pashto/Dari: محمد نجیب‌الله احمدزی‎; 6 August 1947 – 27 September 1996), commonly known as Najibullah or Dr. Najib, was an Afghan Communist politician who served as the General Secretary of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the leader of one-party ruling Democratic Republic of Afghanistan from 1986 to 1992 and as well as the President of Afghanistan from 1987 until his resignation in April 1992, shortly after which the mujahideen took over Kabul. After a failed attempt to flee to India, Najibullah remained in Kabul. He lived in the United Nations headquarters until his death at the hands of the Taliban after their capture of the city. After Najibullah's death, the brutal civil war between mujahideen factions, the Taliban regime, continued fighting, and enduring problems with corruption and poverty, his image among the Afghan people dramatically improved, and Najibullah came to be seen as a strong and patriotic leader. Since the 2010s, posters and pictures of him have become a common sight in many Afghan cities.


Taliban in Afghanistan: In 2021, Taliban has occupied Afghanistan. But this is not the first time the Taliban has done this. Earlier in 1996, the Taliban had occupied Afghanistan. Along with this, the Taliban brutally killed the then President of Afghanistan Mohammad Najibullah and hanged him from the pole of the traffic light.


The maimed corps of Mohammad Najibullah in Afghanistan

On 25 April 1992, a civil war had ignited between three, later five or six, mujahideen armies, when Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and supported by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) refused to form a coalition government with other mujahideen groups and tried to conquer Kabul for themselves. After four months, already half a million residents of Kabul had fled the heavily bombarded city.


Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (Pashto: ګلبدين حكمتيار‎; born 1 August 1949) is an Afghan politician and former mujahideen leader. He is the founder and current leader of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin political party, so called after Mohammad Yunus Khalis split from Hezbi Islami in 1979 to found Hezb-i Islami Khalis. He has twice served as prime minister during the 1990s.


Burhānuddīn Rabbānī (Persian: برهان‌الدین ربانی; 20 September 1940 – 20 September 2011) was an Afghan politician and teacher who served as President of Afghanistan from 1992 to 2001 (in exile from 1996 to 2001).

The following years, several times some of those militant groups formed coalitions, and often broke them again. By mid 1994, Kabul's original population of two million had dropped to 500,000. In 1995–96, the new militia, the Taliban, supported by Pakistan and ISI, had grown to be the strongest force. By late 1994, the Taliban had captured Kandahar, in 1995 they took Herat, in early September 1996 they took Jalalabad, and eventually in late September 1996 they captured Kabul. Fighting would continue the following years, often between the now dominant Taliban and other groups (see Afghan Civil War (1996–2001)).

My Pashtun Afghan colleague said that he as a Pashtun Sunni Muslim Afghan once voted for a Hazara Shia Muslim leader/politician, because he was one of the few not corrupt and decent political leaders and politicians.

He said as a Pashtun Afghan person he dislikes and hates Pashtun Pakistani people who came to Afghanistan to spread chaos, civil war, discord, violence, chaos, anarchy, misery and terrorism to my country. He also dislikes the Pashtun Taliban. He fled to Europe to the Netherlands to give his daughters a future, because he wants his daughters to study. Next to 2 daughters he has a younger son. He was traumatized by the ongoing war and terror, bloodshed, unsafety and cruelty in his country. He suffers from Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), due to the things he experienced in Afghanistan.

Cheers,
Pieter

[pieter]

Aug 21, 2021 12:02:17 GMT -7 Jaga said:

Still there are paschtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan and they do have a common culture and common ground.

Aug 15, 2021 6:09:02 GMT -7 pieter said:

What I know from Afghan Sunni Muslim people who fled Afghanistan due to the terror of the Taliban is that they hate Pakistan. According to them Pakistan causes trouble in Afghanistan. The Afghan people I know are Pro India and anti-Pakistan. In the Indian-Pakistan conflict these Afghans support India.

Jaga,

It is like the Russians in Czarist Russia, the SovjetUnion and the Russian Federation. There are Russians in Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland, Georgia, Israel, the USA, the UK, the European Union (EU) and the Russian Federation and they do have a common culture and common ground as well. But they have different political views, point of views and affiliations.

Cheers,
Pieter

[pieter]

Jaga, Kaima, Karl, John, Jeanne,

The question is what kind of world we want and what the aim, purpose, challange, strive for, urge, strategic and tactical position of the West is. The West is the USA, Canada, the UK, the EU countries (Continental Free and Democratic Europe), Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Monaco, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, San Marino, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.

Afghanistan is part of the Orient and the Orient is different than the the Occident (the Western World). Afghanistan is a landlocked multiethnic country located in the heart of south-central Asia. Lying along important trade routes connecting southern and eastern Asia to Europe and the Middle East, Afghanistan has long been a prize sought by empire builders, and for millennia great armies have attempted to subdue it, leaving traces of their efforts in great monuments now fallen to ruin.

The country’s forbidding landscape of deserts and mountains has laid many imperial ambitions to rest, as has the tireless resistance of its fiercely independent peoples—so independent that the country has failed to coalesce into a nation but has instead long endured as a patchwork of contending ethnic factions and ever-shifting alliances.

The modern boundaries of Afghanistan were established in the late 19th century in the context of a rivalry between imperial Britain and tsarist Russia that Rudyard Kipling termed the “Great Game.” Modern Afghanistan became a pawn in struggles over political ideology and commercial influence. In the last quarter of the 20th century, Afghanistan suffered the ruinous effects of civil war greatly exacerbated by a military invasion and occupation by the Soviet Union (1979–89). In subsequent armed struggles, a surviving Afghan communist regime held out against Islamic insurgents (1989–92), and, following a brief rule by mujahideen groups, an austere movement of religious students—the Taliban—rose up against the country’s governing parties and warlords and established a theocratic regime (1996–2001) that soon fell under the influence of a group of well-funded Islamists led by an exiled Saudi Arabian, Osama bin Laden. The Taliban regime collapsed in December 2001 in the wake of a sustained U.S.-dominated military campaign aimed at the Taliban and fighters of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization. Soon thereafter, anti-Taliban forces agreed to a period of transitional leadership and an administration that would lead to a new constitution and the establishment of a democratically elected government.



People

Ethnic groups

No national census has been conducted in Afghanistan since a partial count in 1979, and years of war and population dislocation have made an accurate ethnic count impossible. Current population estimates are therefore rough approximations, which show that Pashtuns comprise about two-fifths of the population. The two largest Pashtun tribal groups are the Durrānī and Ghilzay. Tajiks are likely to account for some one-fourth of Afghans, while Ḥazāra and Uzbeks each constitute nearly one-tenth. Chahar Aimaks, Turkmen, and other ethnic groups each account for small portions of the population.



Religion

Virtually all the people of Afghanistan are Muslims, of whom some fourth-fifths are Sunnis of the Ḥanafī branch. The others, particularly the Ḥazāra and Kizilbash, follow either Twelver or Ismāʿīlī Shiʿi Islam. Sufism has been historically influential in Afghanistan, though in the 21st century fewer than one-tenth of Afghans belong to a Sufi order. The Nuristani are descendants of a large ethnic group, the Kafir, who were forcibly converted to Islam in 1895; the name of their region was then changed from Kāfiristān (“Land of the Infidels”) to Nūrestān (“Land of Light”). There are also a few thousand Hindus and Sikhs.



Decades of war and its fallout have devastated the stability of the population. During the late 1980s some 6 million people—probably one-third of the Afghan population at the time—were refugees, especially due to the Afghan War. Some 3.5 million were living in Pakistan, and perhaps another 2 million were in Iran. Although many were repatriated during the 1990s, the numbers of those internally and externally displaced rose again after 2000 as a result of continued civil strife, economic hardship, an extended and severe drought, the Afghanistan War, and the security transition following the 2014 withdrawal of foreign troops. By 2016 there were more than 2.5 million refugees registered abroad, and more than 1 million people were internally displaced.

The Soviet legacy


Soviet Red Army soldiers march in downtown Kabul during a military parade in October 1986. DANIEL JANIN/AFP via Getty Images

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the subsequent civil war severely disrupted the country’s economic development. Agricultural production declined, food shortages were reported, and industrial output stagnated—with the exception of natural gas production and some other industries considered essential by the Soviet Union. The private sector during the Soviet period encompassed primarily agriculture and livestock breeding. There formerly had been a mixed pattern of small, medium, and large landholdings, but this system underwent drastic change, particularly after 1978. The bulk of the trade and transport as well as most manufacturing was in the hands of private entrepreneurs until the late 1970s, when these sectors of the economy were nationalized. Public enterprise was confined to foreign trade, mining, and some industries.



A balanced budget was achieved with revenue derived principally from the sale of natural gas and from foreign loans and grants. Expenditures were mainly for government ministries, the developmental budget, and interest on foreign debt. The socialist government was committed to developing a mixed, guided economy. In practice, however, the effectiveness of this policy was limited by a paucity of government resources, a cumbersome bureaucracy, and a shortage in technical personnel.



Government and society

Constitutional framework

Until the mid 20th century, Afghanistan was ruled by the absolute power of the king. Two constitutions were promulgated, in 1923 and 1931, both affirming the power of the monarchy. The constitution of 1964, however, provided for a constitutional monarchy based on the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial authorities. A military coup in 1973 overthrew the monarchy, abolished the constitution of 1964, and established the Republic of Afghanistan. The Grand Assembly (Loya Jirga) adopted a new constitution in February 1977, but it was abrogated in 1978 when another coup established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, governed by the Afghan Revolutionary Council. Political turmoil continued, marked by a third coup in September 1979, a massive invasion of troops from the Soviet Union, and the installation of a socialist government in December 1979. Another new constitution—promulgated in 1987 and revised in 1990—changed the name of the country back to the Republic of Afghanistan, reaffirmed its nonaligned status, strengthened the post of president, and permitted other parties to participate in government. The communist regime, which had managed to hold power after the Soviet forces departed early in 1989, fell in 1992, and a coalition of victorious mujahideen parties formed a government (recognized by the UN) and named the country the Islamic State of Afghanistan. The new government was driven from the capital in 1996 by a movement based in Kandahār and calling itself the Taliban. The Taliban leaders promptly changed the name of the country to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Espousing the supremacy of Islamic law, the Taliban did not promulgate a new constitution. In December 2001 the Taliban was toppled by a coalition of Afghan parties supported by the United States. In January 2004 a new constitution was ratified, providing for a directly elected president with two vice presidents. It also provides for a bicameral National Assembly with a directly elected lower house and an upper house comprising appointees from local and provincial councils as well as presidential appointees. The constitution establishes Islam as the state religion and prohibits laws that contradict the tenets of Islam. It also includes provisions guaranteeing gender equality and the rights of religious minorities.

Many Afghans continue to believe that “the highest manifestation of the will of the people of Afghanistan” is vested in the institution of the Loya Jirga. As a specially convened national assembly, it has traditionally held the power to amend and interpret the constitution, declare war, and adopt decisions on the most critical national issues. Loya Jirgas have played an important role in Afghan politics since the fall of the Taliban, convening in 2002 to establish a transitional government and in 2003 to ratify a new constitution. Because the Loya Jirga is closely associated with the rule of monarchy, it is revered most by those Afghans, especially in the dominant Pashtun community, who seek a more ethnically representative government than was initially installed following the Taliban’s overthrow.

Political process

Those government institutions established during the reign of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (1880–1901) laid the groundwork for the modern Afghan state. They gave primacy to a strong military, centralized government control from Kabul, and signaled the primacy of the Pashtun as the country’s ruling group.

Local government

In practice, however, Afghan governments have never succeeded in extending their rule very deeply at the local level. This reality has meant that local influentials and power brokers would not challenge the state, and the state, in turn, would refrain from trying to interfere with them. Whatever the regime in power, a high degree of autonomy has allowed local areas to pursue economic activities and to follow tribal and localized law and customs. To administer the government’s few extractive and allocative powers, the country was divided administratively into provinces, each headed by a centrally appointed governor. The provinces were further subdivided into districts and subdistricts headed by appointed officials.

Informal institutions and justice

Governments have also worked through largely informal consultative bodies at the local level, such as community councils (shūrās) and tribal assemblies (jirgas), many of which have continued to function regardless of changes in national politics. In the absence of an effective central government, Afghan communities have their own social norms, but none so elaborate as Pashtun tribal law, known as Pashtunwali. With the advent of the Taliban, Islamic courts and an Islamic administration of justice through interpretation of the law by clergy (ʿulamāʾ) assumed greater prominence. These changes have widely replaced the authority once exercised by traditional local leaders, or khans.

Weak central government

Afghanistan has relied far more on foreign subsidies and export taxes than on internal taxes to finance its limited scope of activities. As in other rentier states, the authorities were better able to distribute resources than to collect them. It was unnecessary for national government institutions to be very effective, since there was little policy to implement. If called upon to enforce a more active government, the existing institutions were bound to invite challenge and be prone to collapse. The most far-reaching and ultimately disastrous attempt to expand the penetration of the Kabul government occurred during the early years of communist rule that began in 1978 and eventually led to civil war and chaos.

Security

Following the collapse of the communist regime in 1992, government security apparatuses quickly dissolved. Individual mujahideen factions—formerly funded by foreign interests wishing to overthrow the regime—maintained their own militias and skirmished over control of the capital city and the countryside. Central government control extended little farther than Kabul itself, and law and order broke down almost entirely. The Taliban’s emergence can be traced largely to the absence of security and to the exhaustion of the population from years of civil war. Under Taliban rule—which after 1998 covered all but a small area of the northeast—the roads were secure and personal safety improved for most Afghans. However, armed Taliban devotees also kept close watch for any signs of irreligion and executed harsh punishments on perceived offenders. In fighting that continued in the northeast—between the Taliban and a coalition of mujahideen factions known as the Northern Alliance—ethnic cleansing and war atrocities were perpetrated by both sides.

The security environment in the post-Taliban period has been threatened by many factors. Thousands of land mines and large quantities of unexploded ordnance continue to litter the countryside. The return of many warlords expelled by the Taliban and the emergence of new power brokers spawned by the civil war has fragmented authority across the country. Regional commanders have sizable militias that they can use to compete over territory and resources, and small groups of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters have remained capable of mounting guerrilla raids. The presence of international peacekeeping forces and other military units, although limited in their number and scope of operation, has precluded the most serious armed conflict and enhanced the authority of the central government.

Source: www.britannica.com/place/Afghanistan/Political-process

[Jaga]

Pieter,

the picture of killed Najibullah, in that time a leader of the country by Taliban give me more perspective about why the current government fled so quickly.
I understand your colleague perpsective - Paschtun may be divided into fractions depending where they come from. This all is sad