Soon you will be rooting FOR the Taliban.

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The US has already quietly cooperated with them and has fed them intelligence because ...it's possible to be even worse than they are.


https://youtu.be/j8dwDYXXqVQ

not good

I'll never root for them but sure, the US probably believes that compared to them ISIS is the greater threat, and they are. Still, the Taliban are not your allies, not in the long term.

Isn't there also a third faction though? I know that the Taliban defeated the Panjshir rebels but I think they're still and if ISIS-K get's defeated they would much more likely to be long term allies of the west than the Taliban.

Islamists always end up killing each other, the smart thing to do is to let them be.

Thats true.

Further...if ISIS gains power in Afghanistan it may use the place as a base.

One of the reasons they hate the Taliban and think the Taliban has gone soft...is that the Taliban kisses China's ass to get economic aid and investment from China. And as a result the Taliban looks the other way about China's oppression of the Uighurs who happened to be Muslim.

Maybe if we are lucky the Taliban's ISIS enemy will use Afghanistan as a base to do terrorism against China in a 9-11 or Oct 4 type attack in he name the Uighur cause. This will provoke China to retaliate, and to invade and to occupy Afghanistan. Causing China to get sucked into the same "graveyard of empires" quagmire that the US, and the USSR, and the Victorian Brits, got sucked into!

Ignoring that, how many times do we need to get bitten by these sorts of groups that we fund, train and then they turn on us? The fact that they'll likely wind up turning on each other on their own just makes it that much dumber.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to remember in the Bill Clinton era, the Russians were trying to get rid of the Taliban but didn't have the support to do it.

I forget if it was the Taliban or if that was just Al Qaeda during the '80s that was being funded by the US to fight the Russians. But, if you're off, it's not by much.

Pretty sure you're right. Always thought it was a shame we never convinced Russia under Yeltsin to join NATO back in the 1990s

Actually it was the mujahideen. They eventually lost the Afghan civil war to the Taliban in the mid-1990s and allowed benefactor Osama Bin Laden and his al Qaeda group to take refuge there.

Gosh.
I keep wrongly assuming that folks know the basics.

It was before Clinton, during the the George Herbert Walker Bush administration (daddy bush, not W.) that the US made its last move in the Cold War.

Funding the Mujahadeen ...the native afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The occupiers were trying to prop up a Soviet puppet government in Kabul. We gave them stinger missiles. We did it to stick it to the USSR and to pin them down into a quagmire (do Vietnam in reverse on them).

It worked. The Mujahadeen drove the Soviets out. It weaken the USSR. Became one of the thousand cuts that caused the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. Which ended around 1990.

By the time Clinton took over the cold war and the Soviet Union were both history.

The Taliban became the dominant faction of the Mujahadeen and took over. And their allies, the international Islamist force of Al Queda was allowed sanctuary in Afghanistan with Ben Laden as Al Queda's leader.

Then in 2001...Al Queda sent members to the US to fly planes into skyscrapers etc.

Thats why above I said that both Russia and the US had successive quagmires in Afghanistan. And why I ...fantasize about ISIS doing a 9-11 on China...so China can have the fun of occupying Afghanistan too!

Last edited by naturalplastic on 05 Dec 2023, 3:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The US were so invested in the Mujahadeen back in the 1980s that they even made guest appearance in Stallone's iconic "Rambo" movie, It was propaganda of course, but the "brave" mujahadeen helped Stallone defeat the "evil" Russians It would have been plausible to even cast Osama Bin Laden in a Rambo movie, he was at that time training the mujahadeen on behalf of the US taxpayer and on the payroll of the CIA.

Back then of course, Saddam Hussein and Muamar Gaddafi were also getting money from the US.

Yes.
Life was simpler when...Saddam Hussein was in power.

Iraq was a bulwark against Iran. So the Saudies didnt feel so threatened. And it was harder for Iran to extend its influence westward to the shore of the Mediterranean ...to support Hezbollah and HAMAS.

Bush really destabilized both Iraq and the whole region when he invaded.

The only consolation is that if we hadnt invaded Iraq Iraq probably would have destabilized itself by now.

Saddam would have died of old age by now. Then his depraved sons would have fought each other for the throne, and the whole jury rigged nation that is Iraq would have come unraveled anyway. Ethnic groups fighting. A pro Iran Shiite regime taking over. ISIS invading. And Iran extending its influence westward anyway.

The Taliban were a faction of mujahideen.

Bin Laden was paid by the CIA to train the Mujahadeen
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1670089.stm

He also created Al Qaeda who would go on to cause havoc across the middle east.

They all need to smoke more hashish , switch to Sufism and chill out.
Whirling instead of fighting.