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Afghanistan Didn't Fall: It Never Existed

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Posted By: Judy W., 8/17/2021 2:49:00 PM

"Afghanistan's collapse: Did US intelligence get it wrong?" ABC News asks. "Afghanistan Is Your Fault," barks Tom Nichols at The Atlantic. “Why Afghan Forces So Quickly Laid Down Their Arms,” Politico ponders. The one thing that the Taliban's conquest of Afghanistan is good for is more media hot takes. Afghanistan didn't fall because it never existed. The Afghan army laid down its arms because it also never existed. And not just because many of the 300,000 soldiers were imaginary. Its Pashtun members surrendered to their fellow Taliban Pashtuns, or fled to Iran or Uzbekistan, depending on their tribal or religious affiliations which, unlike Afghanistan, are very real.

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We started out in Afghanistan to keep terrorist groups from breeding there. I think we did that pretty much, though it was obvious we would have to stay there to keep that up. The nation building was a side thing but it was probably a futile effort that distracted from the main goal. Nevertheless, we owe the people who joined our side at least some safety.

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Reply 1 - Posted by: Heil Liberals 8/17/2021 3:03:22 PM (No. 882715)
An excellent article. The entire Middle East was created out of the ashes of World War I. The Wilsonites, and the holier than thou European “victors” created a world in which people who hated one another were forced to exist together. Wilson’s idea that nation’s have a right to self-determination only extended to those of European nature. Everyone else would be forced into unnatural nation-states that violated that tenant. Progressives have still never learned.
5 people like this.

Reply 2 - Posted by: DVC 8/17/2021 3:19:48 PM (No. 882726)
Interesting. This tracks with a comment I made on another thread. This is an idea that has been germinating in my mind for some time. Trying to see root probems requires examining rood assumptions. The flawed assumption is "Afghanistan is a country".....the disaster flows from that huge error. FTA"Afghanistan isn’t a country. It’s a stone age Brigadoon of quarreling tribes, ethnic groups, Islamic denominations, and warlords manned by young men with old Russian and American rifles. Unlike the fiction of a democratic Afghanistan, that is something they will die for." This is the critical error that outsiders make. We imagine that this REGION is a country. It has never been a country, and the people have never had any fealty to the "country" of Afghanistan, but only to tribes, sects and family, which is a complex, unknowable fragment of that region that the outside world marks as "Afghanistan" on it's maps. It is a map making convenience, since showing 500 tiny "stink-doms" with irregular and fluid locations would be messy for cartographers. Blame it all on the cartographers. It is still a Muslim 3rd world stinkhole and it was not worth the American lives expended there. We should have nuked it 20 years ago and left it at that.
4 people like this.

Reply 3 - Posted by: DVC 8/17/2021 3:23:19 PM (No. 882733)
Actually, #1, there was an intentional effort to group the fragments of the Ottoman Empire into fractions, unmanagable 'countries' with the intent of keeping them squabbling internally to delay for as long as possible the reassembly of the Muslim Ottoman Empire which has threatened Europe for 1400 years when unified. The 'messy' countries was a specific plan by post WW1 diplomats. And it has worked, to an extent, if we'd just STOP trying to "improve things" and let them kill each other as efficiently as they can.
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Reply 4 - Posted by: Heil Liberals 8/17/2021 3:45:56 PM (No. 882754)
#3, that is interesting, and I'll leave it there with your deeper knowledge and understanding.
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Reply 5 - Posted by: DVC 8/17/2021 4:15:39 PM (No. 882781)
Search on Sykes-Picot Agreement for info on how the Ottoman Empire was divided up by Britian and France, with agreement from Russia after WW1.
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Reply 6 - Posted by: usawatcher 8/17/2021 4:40:22 PM (No. 882807)
Finally someone who gets it. You can't make a country out of 7 century thinking tribes. American are very naive when it comes to other country's and their peoples. I was fortunate in my younger days to have traveled the world and been to other country's including China. And while everybody luved our Levi's they were also products of their country's. By that I mean their religions, their politics, their history's. We are naive in the sense that we have thought we could overlay our form of government onto another country and it would work. The article's author articulates that concept much better than I ever could.
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Reply 7 - Posted by: bad-hair 8/17/2021 6:20:49 PM (No. 882945)
Any dam country whose name ends in stan isn't one, including Pakistan, Khazak**** and Uzbeki^^^*.
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Reply 8 - Posted by: Geoman 8/17/2021 7:12:44 PM (No. 883023)
Like the old Yugoslavia, Afghanistan was a western construct but without the nationalism of a people to make it so. That, unfortunately, is the model that progressives have in store for the U.S. They just want their progressive tribe to be the big dog and any other tribes with whom they might be forced to share power, eliminated or enslaved.
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Reply 9 - Posted by: NorthernDog 8/17/2021 7:53:30 PM (No. 883057)
I'm still trying to figure out how anyone can live there. Looks like its 90% bone-dry desert. I guess the poppy fields are in a fertile region but the media steadfastly avoids showing that area, or mentioning that Afghanistan is world's biggest supplier of heroin.
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