Step in and do what? Occupy the country indefinitely? How many decades will it take for Afghanistan to stop being Afghanistan?

I’m an American, so my taxes have footed the bill for Afghanistan’s security and liberty for the last twenty years. I don’t like that this is the cost (and I’m sympathetic to people who are frustrated at the expense), but seeing how quickly the Taliban have swept in, I would rather maintain a minimal force for another two decades, especially if the burden could be shared by the International community and perhaps specifically the regional community who have the most to gain from a free Afghanistan. It’s probably not reasonable to expect a country to effectively adopt democracy in just a few years’ time, so maybe we should anticipate longer time horizons.

Occupying Afghanistan is just throwing money and blood down a hole for what exactly? For people who don't want us there? Because we're too embarrassed to admit there are problems we can't solve with M16s and Coca-Cola? It's the graveyard of empires for a reason. Even if you snapped your fingers and right now political violence was forever ended in Afghanistan it still wouldn't have been worth the cost. A foreign occupying force isn't "fixing" Afghanistan any more than an orderly is fixing a violent mental patient by sitting on his chest.

Why not? Americans haven't been engaged in ground combat operations for years now outside of special forces. They were just providing the weapons, logistics, training, and air power to contain the Taliban.

That seems reasonably sustainable. Make it into South Korea with airstrikes.

Take a look at the territory controlled by the Taliban vs time while we were at this level. They were not contained. We just were keeping them out of a few urban areas.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57933979

I skimming your link, it seems the Taliban didn’t take significant territory until the US pulled out altogether. In the time during which the US was not actively fighting on the ground but was providing logistic support and air strikes and so on, the Taliban were effectively kept at bay.

You need to look a bit more carefully, and ideally at more than just at the one link. The US and gov controlled the country entirely at one point. By 2017 The large swaths of the country are contested.

61% by 2018. The writing was on the wall.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/08/world/asia/us...

> We just were keeping them out of a few urban areas.

How is that not containment if they can’t take major areas?

Afghanistan is about the same size as Texas, permanent occupation is technically manageable. However, it would bring hate upon the US. It’s also a proxy-war with Russia, who might be funding the opposite side, so the costs to colonization are not just occupation, but hedging the spendings of all other countries who don’t want USA to occupy the zone.

So, impossible if we don’t get others on board, among Arab countries in general, perhaps China or Russia too.

> It’s also a proxy-war with Russia

If that's the case, it's a recent development in the last several years. Possibly since the Ukraine incident. Russia and the Taliban have been enemies for decades before.

Many already (and will always) hate the US, and the US has the GDP to outlast declining Russia. If anything, this is a test bed for remote force projection.

If Afghans want US protection that doesn’t require boots on the ground, that seems reasonable considering capabilities already available. “Peace through superior firepower.”

Peace and allies through collateral damage.

Do nothing, do something, we lose in a way regardless.

> the US has the GDP to outlast declining Russia

I particularly look forward to Russia’s declining influence as the world transitions away from oil. As much as people like to criticize US leadership and government, the Kremlin is on a whole different level (and I’m glad that this isn’t such a controversial sentiment among liberals since 2016).

Counterpoint: Global warming can make most of Russian inhabitable, enable farming on vast regions, and the Northern Route of merchandise through the poles can make them a central actor in international commerce.

Meanwhile “every country has a reason to hate US”, hating the US is often the easy game to play in local politics, and maybe all of them are joining the tipping jar to pay those who can make us decline. Loss of trust towards media and institutions, judges ruling that monopolies can keep rolling or judges “not acting” when clearly facing criminal activity, loss of trust towards police, activism groups which I’d wonder how they remain out of prison, that requires funding and bribes; if I were the Talibans, China, Russia, or any country of the middle east really, I would fund them until the US collapses or loses its dominant position. It’s all hypothesis but it’s easy to implement.

It’s not a given that USA doesn’t decline in front of other, less hated superpowers.

where do new taliban come from? It's been 20 years since the original invasion and the Taliban from back then are probably either all dead or too old to fight.

So it must be a popular ideology for some.

Or it could be that the Taliban just pays fighters better [0] compared to the central government in Kabul. Their annual revenue from drug trafficking, extortion, and donations exceeds $1.5B USD [1]. Private citizens from Pakistan and Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar give hundreds of millions of dollars to the Taliban each year [2]. Taliban fighters are also funded and trained directly by the Pakistani government [3]. Little wonder that they're able to take whole towns and cities without fighting, especially when the central government's fighters are underpaid when they're paid at all [4].

[0] https://afghanistan.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/09/taliban-pay-vs-...

[1] https://theconversation.com/the-taliban-are-megarich-heres-w...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-46554097

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/10302946

[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-security-idUS...

Going off 2009 numbers, the US spent $5.8 billion in foreign aid on the Afghan Security Forces Fund, and about a billion more on various counternarcotics programs [0]. This funding went up to around $10 billion in 2011, and slowly declined to around $3.6 billion in 2019. This also doesn't include the air support, troop advisors, special forces, etc. that we provided to supplement Afghanistan's government, or the international aid provided by other coalition partners. So they clearly have a massive financial advantage over the Taliban, as this doesn't even include tax revenue and other standard military funding sources.

Also, your [4] link is specifically talking about the police being underpaid and undertrained, not the army. My guess is that it primarily comes down to a huge motivation gap. The Afghani soldiers and police are in it for a paycheck, not to get shot, while the Taliban are fighting for an ideological cause they perceive to be just.

[0] - https://foreignassistance.gov/cd/AFG?measure=Obligations&fis...

That funding must flow through the massively corrupt Afghan bureaucracy before soldiers or police ever see it. Much of it gets skimmed, wasted, and embezzled. Many nice houses in the D.C. area have been built with that money, not including the palatial mansions and homes of American defense contractors.

>The Afghani soldiers and police are in it for a paycheck

I think you meant, "Afghan soldiers and police." Afghani is (fittingly) the Afghan unit of currency.

>...while the Taliban are fighting for an ideological cause they perceive to be just.

It's not a matter of how many Afghans perceive a certain cause to be just. It's a matter of how many are willing to suffer and die for their cause to come out on top. Even if only a minority support the Taliban, as recent polling shows to be the case, they can impose their will on the majority if they're more willing to suffer and kill. Of course, suffering is easier to endure when you're getting paid.

> That funding must flow through the massively corrupt Afghan bureaucracy before soldiers or police ever see it. Much of it gets skimmed, wasted, and embezzled.

This isn't exactly a compelling argument for our continued support of Afghanistan's government... We've been funding them to the tune of $3-10 billion a year in defense funding, and the corruption is so extreme that they are failing against the Taliban, with estimated total funding of $300 million to $1.6 billion [0]? That's an obscene level of graft. If 20 years on we still haven't reduced corruption to a manageable level, is it realistically even achievable?

> It's not a matter of how many Afghans perceive a certain cause to be just. It's a matter of how many are willing to suffer and die for their cause to come out on top. Even if only a minority support the Taliban, as recent polling shows to be the case, they can impose their will on the majority if they're more willing to suffer and kill. Of course, suffering is easier to endure when you're getting paid.

I saw the 13.4% statistic that you cited elsewhere, but I'm inclined to think that's either a low estimate or there are an awful lot of people who are ambivalent as long as basic government services continue. If the Taliban were truly culturally incompatible with the average citizen, surely there would be more organized resistance? From the news reports I've seen, the Taliban typically move into a new area, the local government rolls over, basic services continue, and the average person shrugs and moves on with their life.

[0] - https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/taliban-afghanistan

Large external funding tends to build corrupt governments due to bad incentives. It's possible that the Afghan government was effectively built to simply appease American advisors and convince them to request more money rather than actually servicing the needs of Afghans.

You don't get a renewed 10 billion dollars in defense grants by showing well maintained equipment and a well disciplined army.

>This isn't exactly a compelling argument for our continued support of Afghanistan's government...

I haven't made such an argument. Just outlining the problems.

If wikipedia is to be believed, there are something like 60K Taliban. Out of a country of over 30 million. It's pretty easy to recruit that small of a force from that large of a population. What seems more noteworthy is that the Afghan military can't seem to defend effectively against them even with 3x the personnel.

Some new fighters might come from the families and friends of people the US and allies have killed.

Edit: Also, I recall hearing that many fighters are foreign. I imagine there's a greater than zero amount of people willing to go to Afghanistan and fight the US.

> fight the US

To be clear, they aren’t fighting the US, they’re fighting the Afghani government.

Sorry I wasn't clear, I had heard this was the case in the past, before the latest withdraw.

> where do new taliban come from?

You can say this about any abhorrent, oppressive belief system. This is insufficient grounds to subject the whole population to said oppression.

> So it must be a popular ideology for some.

hHow do you get from there to “thus it should be the law of the land for every Afghan”? If it’s so popular, why can’t it win in free elections?

Maybe they should try putting up a fight, then.

Who should?

The Afghan people who by and large do not want Taliban rule.

Motivation alone is insufficient for ordinary citizens to assemble into an effective fighting force. You need competent leadership, training, and experience. The Taliban has those qualities and by all appearances the Afghan military does not.

85% of Afghans have “no sympathy for the Taliban”, never mind support them. Not really a strong mandate, democratic or otherwise: https://asiafoundation.org/publication/afghanistan-in-2019-a...

On the other hand, from the same report:

> Overall, confidence in governmental and nongovernmental organizations has increased, with the exception of the Independent Election Commission, which has seen confidence drop from 43.3% in 2018 to 42.3% in 2019. As in previous years, Afghans have the most confidence in religious leaders (71.2%). Compared to 2018, confidence in MPs has gone up by 10.2 percentage points, from 42.3% in 2018 to 52.6% in 2019, the highest level so far. Confidence in the following organizations has improved since last year: government ministers (up 6.1 percentage points, to 44.4%), national NGOs (up 4.0 percentage points, to 53.3%), provincial councils (up 4.7 percentage points, to 55.6%) and international NGOs (up 4.9 percentage points, to 47.3%)

So religious leaders (presumably non-Taliban) have much stronger support than the government or NGOs.

Yes, very possibly. The Afghan government is definitely a US-installed chimera. There very likely is a better representation of Afghan people, it just it doesn’t seem to be the Taliban.

Ah, The Asia Foundation, a very reliable source of authentic Afghan opinions.

"The Asia Foundation (TAF), a Central Intelligence Agency proprietary, was established in 1954 to undertake cultural and educational activities on behalf of the United States Government in ways not open to official U.S. agencies."[17]

The Asia Foundation is an outgrowth of the Committee for a Free Asia, which was founded by the U.S. government in 1951.[18] CIA funding and support of the Committee for a Free Asia and the Asia Foundation were assigned the CIA code name "Project DTPILLAR".[19]

In 1954, the Committee for a Free Asia was renamed the Asia Foundation (TAF) and incorporated in California[20] as a private, nominally non-governmental organization devoted to promoting democracy, rule of law, and market-based development in post-war Asia.

In the 1950s, the Asia Foundation “clandestinely supported anti-Communist motion picture industry personnel, ranging from producers, directors, and technicians to critics, writers, and general intellectuals in many parts of Asia.”[21]

Among the original founding officers of the board, there were several presidents/chairmen of large companies including T.S. Peterson, CEO of Standard Oil of California (now Chevron), Brayton Wilbur, president of Wilbur-Ellis Co., and J.D. Zellerbach, chairman of the Crown Zellerbach Corporation; four university presidents including Grayson Kirk from Columbia, J.E. Wallace Sterling of Stanford, and Raymond Allen from UCLA; prominent attorneys including Turner McBaine and A. Crawford Greene; Pulitzer Prize-winning writer James Michener; Paul Hoffman, the first administrator of the Marshall Plan in Europe; and several major figures in foreign affairs.

In 1966, Ramparts revealed that the CIA was covertly funding a number of organizations, including the Asia Foundation.[17] A commission authorized by President Johnson and led by Secretary of State Rusk determined that the Asia Foundation should be preserved and overtly funded by the US government. Following this change, The Asia Foundation was classified as a private, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization under the section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.[22] The Foundation began to restructure its programming, shifting away from its earlier goals of "building democratic institutions and encouraging the development of democratic leadership" toward an emphasis on Asian development as a whole (CRS 1983).”

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asia_Foundation

No, he doesn't realize that. And no, the international community should not step in. They already did. This administration gave up on that friendship. Many will die because of that.