Taliban is going to let them land and they are going to stand and watch and laugh, while some of them will take some propaganda photos, all while they surround the tarmac with riflemen. The US has payed the Taliban cash to be allowed to evacuate, Taliban controls the airfield, the US the tarmac. No reason to shoot at Americans at all, this is just to evacuate US personel and some lucky Afghans. The Taliban has won and then there is no point in shooting at US forces when those forces leave in just a very few days. Bullets will be saved for Afghans now, as victory against the Americans have already been achieved.
@Maria , are you able to translate in full all he said ?
i have nothing to say to contribute to this topic apart from to say my utter sympathy to the population of afghanistan and those affected.
there was always going to be a vacuum when the support finally left. horrible.
i want to step back from just accpeting the west has decimated afghanistan with its policies and is solely to blame…people can still treat other humans with respect and dignity…but yeah…this is heartbreaking.
1 Like
Yes and Bin Laden wasn’t found in Afghanistan at the end of it all. The true perpetrators of terrorism in the last two decades haven’t really been brought to justice.
1 Like
So basically, the army may have been told by ‘higher-ups’ not to fight back…and then apparently Ghani escapes with cars full of cash. Well this is the age of social media, and he’s sitting in Oman - not exactly North Korea, there’ll be a whole lot of questions for him till the end of his life.
It is already translated into English above.
He was General Hameed Gul in the Pk Army, he retired when he msde that interview,and was anti- American and pro-taliban.
If any of you good people could just sign this petition to help Educators of the British Council, I would be very grateful.
The Afghans are very angry with him and Dostum, the way they ran away.
I think this Taliban 2 are smarter this time, very media savvy. I noticed they all had mobile phones and very techy.
They want to be recognised as an legitimate govt around the world.
They are already in talks with China for the recontruction of infrastucture of the country and mining of precious metals and minerals.
2 Likes
Nobody denies that Bin Laden was in Afghanistan or that AQ were helped by the Taliban. Of course, the most logical step would have been an invasion of Saudi Arabia, but the perils of that are pretty clear.
It didn’t help that the cretinous Dubya was president at the time.
i think ‘we’ need to be careful with some of our assumptions.
An example is here with your ‘cars full of cash’ when for the moment ‘tail between his legs’ would possibly be more apt.
Then the ‘told by higher ups’ not to fight back without knowing who the higher ups were. It does seem the hotch potch government capitulated saying it was to prevent further bloodshed. Even American intelligence was saying they could hold on for 6 months and we know that the Taliban controlled 50% of the country (even if it was mainly rural areas).
This is an intelligencve disaster by the US. It also indicates that weapons and training don’t mean anything if the logistics don’t follow the US botched that as the Afghan army don’t seem to have had any logistical know how (many of the ‘security forces’ hadn’t been paid, were under fed … and this was known since well before Trumps stated he wanted to withdraw).
Some intelligence sources number the security forces at 95K (including ‘police’). If that is so why on paper where there 300K?
My take is that all Taliban had to offer to tribal leaders was their dignity back and they could walk to Kabul. Let’s face it much of the army was recruited from the old tribal and ethnic militias. As Maria says the Taliban have become highly organised and savvy (they did their homework).
Anyway here’s a piece that supports some of my thoughts.
It indicates that even the U.S didn’t have confidence in their own puppet government.
6 Likes
This is what’s wrong with Afghanistan.
The Soviets retreated. Masum, Hekmatyeer, all died. Taliban fell. USA retreated.
This bu***rd is still around.
Hekmityar is alive and is meeting with Karzai and Dr Abdallah in Doha.
1 Like
Oh dear, oh dear 
Maybe we never really understood Afghanistan and still don’t.
2 Likes
Do ‘we’ ever try to understand?
‘We’ seem to see the same imperialistic rince and repeat over and over. Arm a militia to fight who we don’t like. Celebrate when said militia wins. Then go in guns blazing against same militia (who are now the government in place) because we don’t like them any more. Win set up coalition puppet government that has no credibility and isn’t even a trusted partner. Pull out. Find another militia and start all over.
Perhaps we’ve also forgotten the importance Afghanistan once had being a buffer zone between ‘us’ and russia as well as many other things.
There’s also the creation of ‘artificial’ countries based on administrations zones and/or geography rather than people (something Russia does as well).
4 Likes
Thank you.
I know who he was (he is dead) and what he was, so that wasn’t what I was asking. I was asking if he said something that the translation didn’t touch upon. Sorry if I was unclear.
He was director of ISI until 1989 and later a defense analyst. Just because he was retired years ago, doesn’t make it uninteresting (it is not as if a former ISI director loses his contacts and touch with the organisation just because he is retired). ISI plays geopolitics for decades with long term plans, not just a few years.
The links between the Taliban and Al Qaida were and are intimate (their leaders have shared blood as an example). The Casus Belli the US had after 9/11 2001 were against Al Qaida. This led to the Taliban since Al Qaida had training camps there and Osama Bin Laden lived there. The Taliban refused to give them up (of course). And the US lasered in on what they viewed to be the main base of Al Qaida operations (but of course there are and were others) , ignoring a lot else. They then invoked article 5 of the NATO pact, designed against inter-state wars (chiefly the Warzaw Pact of course) against what was and is a guerilla terrorist organisation. This was always dubious, the Article 5 was not designed for this. But after the shock and aftermath of 9/11 US allies felt they had to give in to the Americans because of history (Marshall Aid, Second World War, the fact that the US was the military leader of NATO, fear of NATO collapsing if they denied the Americans; and so much more reasons for going along with the US). This was viewed as a terrible mistake by many but when the US said A) NATO had to say B) for reasons in my parentheses above. There was not much choice. The view was however, and this view has been reigning, that if we go in, at least we must finish the job and not end up like the British Empire and the USSR.
But yes, issues like Pakistan and their formidable shadowy intelligence organisation, were never ever tackled. Just mild pressure for a short time. Saudi Arabia also an obvious problem, as were and are the Wahabi states like Qatar. But that is super complicated because the US has bases there, and Saudi Arabia is the United States favorite heinous regime in their own personal Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with that kingdom; so pressure on KSA was never going to happen.
Basically, the US chose the easiest target politically (but one of the hardest to win with Hard Power), a target with known bases for Al Qaida and an alliance with them. That Osama Bin Laden and many of his lieutenants also lived there made it an obvious political target for the US.
As for terror in general, it is hard to know what you mean since there are several other groups and militias (including even states, although these don’t truly fit the definition of a terror group) that use terror. But Al Qaida is course the most prominent group in the Muslim World, the group to which other like-minded groups pay fealty to (then we can write a lot about ISIS, but they started out as an Al Qaida sub-group and only broke with them in a bloody civil war later down the line when there was a stark disagreement with methods used against Muslims and the fact that Al Qaida didn’t recognice their Caliphate and thought it a major strategic mistake).
But it is all incredibly complicated that is for sure.
Really agree with what you write about these Afghan officials. They change their stories every second day now after the fall of Kabul, so hard to know what is completely true, but we can at least see a definite pattern. And it is known definitely that Ghani escaped with a lot of money indeed. This is corroborated from several sources, Afghan journalists , Russian intelligence and others.
1 Like
These stories are (a lot of the Afghan social media accounts I have sometimes visited are now deleted for reasons that should be obvious, as a guillotine hangs over people’s heads now, so now one must unfortunately turn to secondary sources or sources inside Afghanistan that one knows must be extremely careful with what they say) just a couple of embassy evacuation stories:
it’s all just scary to watch unfold. but I feel like we’ve seen this story before somewhere.
scary that there’s now going to be another Emirate in the world…as the other examples of how this type of autocratic society actually works (the rich and the disposable poor) has not filled the world with joy.
1 Like
Just for the very interested. It is a good listen for those though:
2 Likes
Thought this video was very good
A more balanced perspective of the issues. Made two months ago which just shows how inevitable the outcome last week was.
5 Likes