Taliban controls Afghanistan

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And you want me to do ... what, exactly?

A cake for me.

Just a thought: what's the fundamental difference between American forces persence in Afghanistan and American forces presence in South Korea?
I mean, the latter never in my memory caused such controversy.

those poor afghan people ... they have suffered far too long.

Magz: It's a strategic/geopolitical thing. It goes back to the Korean War. The United States does not want the Communist North Koreans to take over the whole of the Korean Peninsula. They feel, if this should happen, that all East Asia will be threatened by the Communists (China and Korea combined).

I understand this part - but how about Afghanistan? Is it Central Asia, brutally speaking, less important than East Asia? Or is there some other important difference?

I believe that the US feels that it is not strategically expedient, over all, to invest in Afghanistan like they do in South Korea.

They believe the costs and risks outweigh the strategic benefit in investing in Afghanistan. That's my impression.

It would probably be a different story in an oil-rich nation.

If there was Russian influence (and conquest) like there was in the 1980s and 1990s, the US would probably have stayed in Afghanistan.

Ever heard of a place called ....Vietnam?

Vietnam (very different from Korea) is better analogy than Korea.

Maybe its a generational thing. But its seems self evident to me that Afghanistan was "another Vietnam". The Taliban were the Vietcong/North Vietnames. And once the US was forced to leave (due to the war weariness of the American voter) the Vietcong/Taliban would take over. The Taliban are a worse regime than the Vietnamese Communist IMHO (worse to their own people, and they never used their country as a base for terror attacks on the US homeland). But I digress.

In Korea we fought a short, but intense bloody war. Then it was over in three years. And the continued US presence in the South Korea is more like the US presence in West Germany- a strategic necessity. And there is no open ended guerilla war of attrition against US forces there. No drain on the American public the way the "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan (or Vietnam) were.

The US left Vietnam, and South Vietnam collapsed a few years later. And predictably the Taliban are taking over even faster. The US presence was like a boat, and the Taliban are like the water. They just close in at the stern as the boat passes.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 09 Jul 2021, 4:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The cake is a lie.

Here, women are faced with:

1. Making less pay than men
2. "Fetal heartbeat" abortion bans, banning abortion after 6 weeks, no exceptions for rape or incest. Conservatives basically tell them they "shoulda kept their legs closed"
3. If raped, the first thing the prosecutor asks the victim is "what were you wearing?". If she is dressed like anything other than a 90-year-old Amish spinster, she was "asking for it".

LGBT are faced with:

1. Bullying/cyberbullying to the point of suicide. It usually starts with a deeply religious person they know telling them they're going to hell, or that their "lifestyle" is a sin.
2. Trans students not being allowed to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with, and not being able to participate in sports with the gender they identify with.
3. Trans students being called by their birth gender.
4. Being disowned by their families.
5. Being seen as "potential pedophiles" by conservatives.

Non-Christians are faced with:

1. Jews are accused of "killing Jesus" or subject to a laundry list of conspiracy theories.
2. Muslims are all vilified as terrorists.

I suggest you learn what the same or analogous groups faced in Taliban-ruled Afganistan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban_t ... t_of_women
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#C ... _practices
And death penalty for homosexual acts.

I also thought it was strange to compare the Taliban to the VietCong. For one thing the Taliban are formed from ex-mujahadeen - a creation of the United States, they were armed/funded by the CIA to fight the Russians.

Once upon the time the leader of the Taliban was Osama Bin Laden and he was an operative for the CIA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegatio ... _bin_Laden

They were both guerilla war insurregent groups.

My point was that the US presence in Afganistan is not comparable to that of the US presence in either West Germany, or in South Korea. And that the obvious issue between the lines when ever Americans discussed Afghanistan was that it was "another Vietnam".

Comparing the two is like saying "water is wet". Vietnam is the obvious unspoken disaster that US policymakers were trying to avoid- but ended up recreating in Afghanistan.

The politics the VC and the Taliban were fighting for were different, but the tactical situation for the US fighting them was very similar. And the outcome looks like its going to be identical. The Fall of Saigon, and refugees fleeing.

The fact that the future Taliban were originally our allies doesnt change that fact. In fact it underscores the fact.

Afghanistan was originally "Russia's Vietnam". The US helped the Mujahadeen to fight the Soviets during the last decade of the Cold War on purpose to pull the Soviets into a Vietnam type quagmire of guerilla war. And it worked.

Then After 9-11 Afghanistan became our own ...second Vietnam type quagmire. Not as bloody for the US as either Vietnam or as bloody as it was for the Russians in Afganistan. But it was twenty years long. Along with the "forever war" in Iraq it stressed out the American voter. And helped to drive the american voter into the arms of extreme populists like Bernie and like Donald, and enough to force the current middle of the road POTUS to pull out against the advice of his military -just to placate the voter.

Although we'll never know, I suspect Biden is glad for the opportunity to do this and actually get away with it. Everybody knows what the outcome will be but nobody is getting publicly angry about it. Even Biden's enemies can't get too angry because everybody also knows that is exactly what Trump was planning to do.

We pulled out because vital US interests aren’t involved….and the situation in Afghanistan is seen as being as potentially a quagmire worse than Vietnam. The US doesn’t have a total grasp of the complexity of the situation there.

Don't know if it'll matter much, but I saw on the news how Afghan civilians are taking up arms to fight the Taliban. I'm not saying they stand to win, but at least there are people there who yearn to live in a free society.