Speaking of north/south divisions... I once spoke with a young adult Afghan refugee who got naturalized in New Zealand - this was a couple years after the Taliban fell. I asked him how he felt about that. I certainly didn't expect the response.

He said that Taliban were dangerous religious fanatics, but at least they were predictable fanatics - they had a set of laws, some very harsh, that you had to follow, or else. On the other hand, the Northern Alliance forces, in his telling, were basically just looters - they didn't bring better laws so much so as no laws, just a free-for-all where the guy with the gun takes whatever he wants. So his solution to that dilemma was to emigrate, but he told me that if he couldn't do that, he'd prefer Taliban.

> The goal was never to "win". It was to build up an army (the afghan army) that could eventually stand by itself and defend the government in place.

And we've done just that.

We're just not willing to admit that at the 11th hour we threw up our hands, said fuck it and decided that army would be the Taliban.

We literally handed them a country and all the shit they need to not be somebody's puppet.

If we had accepted that we'd just be turning over the country to the same old bunch of hard line jerks 10yr ago we could have better prepped for this moment but leaving the place on unstable footing is simply the price of deluding ourselves. I hope for everyone's sake it doesn't turn into a war torn shithole again.

The problem is the real goals are not revealed to the public, so all the wishywashy stuff about unclear goals is just to fool onlookers while the real goals were accomplished. Anybody who bought into the whole "no such thing as the deep state" in the anti-Trump furor of the moment is foolishly naive in contrast with the reality behind both Afghaniatan but also Iraq and the GWOT generally.

In a land were so many self-appointed technocrats clamor for censorship, soon discussion of the real hefty topics at play will become badspeak and premptively banned, removed, silenced.

For example,have fun trying to say one thing about how Israel and Suadi Arabia both had more involvement in 9/11 than Afghanistan did without immediatedly being attacked.

Its easier to talk about 3-letter motivations like continued drug, gun money going into black book coffers so they dont have to account to congress only because its something more in the mainstream mind.

Another topic thats generally forbidden? Analysis of the media machine that pushed us into war(s) in the first place.

I could go on. The point is the real goals are not the presented goals. If you understand that you have a much better chance at real insight.

I disagree, in the beginning the Americans were hopeful they could impose a puppet state with permanent US military bases. Look at a map and you can see the allure. Nobody in the region was particularly enthusiastic with that idea.

Nobody was particularly enthusiastic about the Taliban, either. Except perhaps the Pakistanis, who wanted a relatively friendly, stable country on their border (IIRC, there was an oil/gas pipeline involved.)