The issue is two-fold. It's unclear to what extent the promises are genuine, they are unlikely to stem from a unified Taliban and it is extremely questionable if they are even possible.

We have a tendency to view groups like Taliban like an single entity. It isn't. It is a network of factions, organized under a number of councils that loosely cooperate under somewhat joint theocratic ideal. Right now there is probably some momentum going that can overshadow internal division, but that time will end.

Like most political groups, they also have their own political discord. We saw under the rule of Mullah Mansour how divided the Taliban can be, he was unpopular in large parts of the ranks. The current leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, is theocratic hardliner, but not much of a politician or military leader, making leadership contingent on support from other factions. He has already been subjected to two documented assassination attempts.

The ideologies of the factions also differ. You have extremist hardliners and more "moderate" (understand that the term is used in a relative manner here, it's not moderate in the sense we would normally think about it) factions that might favor some diplomatic solution to ensure a functioning state.

Cue in the conflicts with other actors that also operate in Afghanistan and fight against the Taliban, the most well known being ISIS. ISIS is well known to recruit defectors from the Taliban. It doesn't take a political genius to see what can happen here if the hardliners within the Taliban don't get their political will pushed through, the room to keep "moderate" promises is likely extremely narrow. Already now it is assessed that risks from ISIS terrorist attacks against Taliban-controlled Kabul is high.

Add to this a country so lacking in infrastructure that making it a cohesive political entity even in peacetime would be gargantuan task, an ethnically and linguistically divided populace, plenty of foreign actors with interest in the region and an economy that was already in shambles and will now in all likelihood become far worse, and an information network and educational system so lacking that there is pretty much no way to reach the entire country with messaging.

Great post, but Akhundzada has been incapacitated from severe Covid for months. Since this offensive started it’s been Yabub (Mullah Omar’s son) and Sirajudin Haqqani sharing power. How they share no one knows, but the competing power centers are Yacub and the Haqqani network, then somehow Baradar factors in as he’ll be president.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/01...mic-akhunzada/

It’s pretty clear to me with the prominence of several haqqanis in how the endgame is playing out that the Haqqanis run the Taliban. A haqqani was first to meet with Karzai. He was the first Taliban leader to enter Kabul. He controls security for Kabul. A haqqani is governor of khost.

Thanks for the information, I didn't know how absent he had been. I even see some speculate that he might be dead, which in itself is probably a good indicator of how difficult it is to gain insight into the workings of Taliban leadership.

The power squabbles your article describes is also an indicator how fraught things will likely become. Betting on stability seems like a poor bet at this point, and stability is the necessary component of any policy, regardless if it is hardliner theocracy or some sort of compromise.

You’d think the guy would at least release an audio tape claiming victory right? I mean he won his war. While haqqanis are giving speeches at Friday prayers all over Kabul.

It seems they’ve closed the gates to the airport and the only way to get in is to arrange to be snatched out of the crowd.

Bingo. Say no to the central bank and then,

"We came, we saw, he died. Ha ha ha." - Hillary

Of course it's not terrorism when the world police do it.

"I know this Arab leader was a rapist because I read it in a Jewish newspaper".

Canada leaves citizens behind . One day after calling the Taliban our brothers

Justin Trudeau only promised to get 21,000 out. Sadly he got 3500.



https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canad...?ocid=msedgntp

Look out for UH-60 Black Hawk Helicopters to show up on craigslist near Kabul. The Taliban can't figure out how to get them off the ground, but they're having a grand ol' time driving them around in circles on the tarmac.

Part of me knows that the billions of dollars of US military tech now in Taliban control wasn't strictly the fault of the US government, since they had provided it to the Afghan military in hopes that they'd be able to handle themselves for more than 48 hours in the event of an uprising, but I can certainly appreciate the optics of it all. Biden isn't going escape this for a while.

We've just funded the next three decades of jihad.

fyp

... okay?

"**** it, I've been a raging drunk for the past 5 decades, what's another 3?"

All those kids of parents that worked with the Allied forces that die will be future Afghan Taliban terrorists.

I am not sure Trump could have fxxded this up this bad

Tends to happen when the alcoholic doesn't think their drinking is the problem.

Advocating for the US to continue its military interventionism in the middle east is like telling an alcoholic that his problem isn't the drinking, it's that he didn't drink enough.

Two suicide bombs explode in crowds outside the airport

Looking at Twitter a lot of people were killed

Biden ****ed this up so badly because he wanted a legacy "win" by pulling out of Afghanistan before the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

I highly doubt that was the motivation. Even if this had gone according to plan, it was never going to look like a win.

this. the bulk of the blame falls on the Trump administration and their capitulation to the Taliban in the Doha Agreement, while simultaneously kneecapping the Afghan gov't.

this tragedy and these images lie at the feet of the failed Trump adminstration and his SoS Pompeo.

Having 3000 troops at the airport while being surrounded by terrorists doing suicide bombing and Taliban holding the roads to the airport was such a great execution by Biden.


All of Biden's generals told Biden not to do a hard pull out. Biden and his foreign policy 2nd in command Jake Sullivan overruled them.


Biden ****ed the chicken on the pullout badly. There's no way to spin it.

It didn't even take 24 hours for this comment to age badly.

W deserves most of the blame for this generational cluster****.

Would have been very easy politically for Biden to kick the can down the road like every post-W president and let the next guy worry about how we get out of there.

My point wasn't to defend the execution or to allocate blame among, W, Trump and Biden. My point was that your speculation about Biden's motives is nonsensical for exactly the reason I said. Withdrawal was never going to look like a win, even if it had gone as well as possible. Thus, I find it hard to believe that the timing was motivated by a desire to book a win.

I disagree with this.


Bush deserves all the blame for Iraq.


But we aren't talking about Iraq. Which president is not going to war in Bush's shoes after 9/11? It was near unanimous in senate / congress. Canada went to war with USA in Afghanistan. Nato went in there too. Everybody joined USA to invade Afghanistan. Obama opened up a warfront in Libya and Syria under less extenuating circumstances vs 9/11. Obama is 100% going into Afghanistan.

Based off reporting, the only person that was for a hard pullout was Biden and Jake Sullivan.

Nobody else recommended Biden to withdraw this quickly while so many Americans and translators were still in Afghanistan.

Taliban were still sitting in caves in the mountains waiting it out. Not 1 American soldier had died in last 18 months.

It only leads to one explanation for such a quick pullout. So Biden can hold a parade in 3 weeks.

If Biden did not pull out, you think the Taliban still would have just waited around and not attacked?

I'd caution against being so black and white, saying there's just "one explanation," when we clearly don't have all the facts.

Anyone with half a brain should have seen that it was going to be a perpetual cluster**** and W was a moron who had no clue what he was doing. Sorry, if you thought this nation-building exercise in Afghanistan was a smart idea you have no business complaining about the inevitably chaotic pullout. It was always going to end like this, the only question was which president would have the stones to rip off the bandaid.