“Not content with depriving girls and women of education, employment, and free movement, the Taliban also want to take from them parks and sport and now even nature, as we see from this latest ban on women visiting Band-e-Amir,” Human Rights Watch’s Associate Women’s Rights Director Heather Barr says.
I’m referring more to the fact that the west spent two decades there trying to train Afghan soldiers to defend against the Taliban, we equipped them with weapons tools, spent billions on infrastructure. And after all that literally only a handful of people even bothered to resist when the Taliban came in. There is no underground resistance, no sabotage of the Taliban’s rule etc. There are no real signs of any will to resistance, so what else are we to make of that besides this is the way the majority wants it?
If the US were taken over by the far right, and then that fascist government dislodged by a European coalition it is very likely that there would be a strong effort by a lot of Americans to seize on that disruption because right-wing fascism is not a popular ideology here despite their outsized influence.
There are many victims of the Taliban, I’m not denying that, it’s more that if the majority of people do nothing how can it be said that Afghan’s care about those victims? And if Afghan’s can’t bring themselves to care enough to fight, and outsiders already spent twenty years there trying to do something different, what can the west do besides help people escape?
Okay, but the US didn’t do a great job of preparing Afghanistan for resisting the Taliban when they left. The US basically packed everything up and left overnight. Have you seen John Oliver’s very good segment on the topic? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2hw_ghPcQs&ab_channel=LastWeekTonight
This is true, it was far from perfect and the western coalition has done their fair share of damage, but this eventual exit could be anticipated for years even if it were rushed at the end. The US has been trying to help Afghans to take the lead for a very long time and train a professional army. The Taliban has also been suffering and starving as much as anyone else there, the Afghan government had the backing of the wealthiest, most militarily advanced nations on the planet. If anyone had a chance it should’ve been that government.
A similar thing to what we see the Ukrainians doing; using the weapons the US gave them. The country is not unarmed, they threw down their arms when the Taliban approached.
I’m really not trying to be argumentative, but it’s hard to believe that after 20 years the Afghan people needed more to prepare for a US exit.
Not to mention that a lot of the times the Afgan Army went on patrols with US forces, The ANA we’re fucked out of their minds on opiates and just fucked around.
Yes, when I think of the ANA I always think back to this short doc segement from the war, and the absurdity of ever expecting that it would become an actual motivated fighting force that would stand against the Taliban.
The whole ANA wasn’t like this, there were more specially trained groups and those who are ideologically “present”, but I think we got a grim reminder of just how few in number they were when the US pulled out. The motivation to prevent the Taliban taking over simply isn’t there in the population. The people might even suffer under the Taliban rule, but there’s just kind of this complete apathy from huge swaths of the population.
I feel most bad for the girls who grew up in the brief time where they actually had access to education during the occupation, only to have it taken away and be left with this knowledge of how fucked things are for them now, how they’ve been dropped on their ass by their own people.
I agree with your general point, but isn’t there resistance in the northern parts of Afghanistan? Also there’s the part where the US gave the Taliban some of the best PR out there. Fighting against a foreign invader tends to make you pretty popular irrespective of your stance on other things.
There’s something to be said for “aleast they’re Afghan” sure, but the Taliban weren’t a new faction, they’d been ruling Afghanistan brutally for a long time fore the invasion. They’re not an unknown quantity to the Afghan people.