A very long road has brought us to this - as far back as Kipling's day and "the Great Game." England failed, Russia failed, and Afghan suffered. The US supported the Mujahidin which eventually became the Taliban. Diplomacy only works when all sides want it to work. That has not been the case in the past 20 years in Afghanistan where the warlords started this war in our name after 911. Bad choices were made for decades.
I may not be the sharpest knife in the kitchen but it seems to me that the taliban couldn’t have overtaken the country so fast had it not been embedded throughout already. And I think turnip and poppy bragged about their great successful negotiations over there to start the exit? To prevent the taliban from using Afghanistan as their launch pad? I do not like where my thoughts are going on this. The whole thing was lost before it started 20 years ago, and they should have expected it to end badly. It still makes me feel ill, especially today. Maybe we should consider it lucky if we got all of our people out of there. Period.
The resurgence of the Taliban and the fall of Afghanistan are the direct result of the decision by George Bush, Jr., Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld to make Afghanistan a very low priority immediately (even before actually) the Taliban was defeated in 2001, so they could focus resources and attention on the removal of Saddam Hussein. There was enormous good will and hope on the part of the Afghan people immediately after the removal of the Taliban, and strong support among the NATO nations and the larger international community for an effort to reconstruct Afghanistan and establish it as a center of stability in a very instable region. It would have required a lot of work, but the experience in Bosnia and other countries that had made up Yugoslavia showed that it could have been done. It would have required removing or reining in the warlords we had allied ourselves with, and demanding that Pakistan surrender the Taliban leadership who fled there. Bush and his cabal squandered the opportunity.
A very long road has brought us to this - as far back as Kipling's day and "the Great Game." England failed, Russia failed, and Afghan suffered. The US supported the Mujahidin which eventually became the Taliban. Diplomacy only works when all sides want it to work. That has not been the case in the past 20 years in Afghanistan where the warlords started this war in our name after 911. Bad choices were made for decades.
I may not be the sharpest knife in the kitchen but it seems to me that the taliban couldn’t have overtaken the country so fast had it not been embedded throughout already. And I think turnip and poppy bragged about their great successful negotiations over there to start the exit? To prevent the taliban from using Afghanistan as their launch pad? I do not like where my thoughts are going on this. The whole thing was lost before it started 20 years ago, and they should have expected it to end badly. It still makes me feel ill, especially today. Maybe we should consider it lucky if we got all of our people out of there. Period.
The resurgence of the Taliban and the fall of Afghanistan are the direct result of the decision by George Bush, Jr., Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld to make Afghanistan a very low priority immediately (even before actually) the Taliban was defeated in 2001, so they could focus resources and attention on the removal of Saddam Hussein. There was enormous good will and hope on the part of the Afghan people immediately after the removal of the Taliban, and strong support among the NATO nations and the larger international community for an effort to reconstruct Afghanistan and establish it as a center of stability in a very instable region. It would have required a lot of work, but the experience in Bosnia and other countries that had made up Yugoslavia showed that it could have been done. It would have required removing or reining in the warlords we had allied ourselves with, and demanding that Pakistan surrender the Taliban leadership who fled there. Bush and his cabal squandered the opportunity.