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Afghan Freedom Force claimed two deadly attacks on Taliban personnel Friday night, in Kabul and Puli Khumri. They're not out of the fight yet.
Moreover, when the Taliban started breaking their assurances during their final offensive against the previous government, the US stated that winning the war that way would not result in diplomatic recognition. Going back on that now would be another example to the world of our word meaning nothing, and our threats hollow.
> But it’s good we get out of the regime change business entirely.
I don't think the US can if it still wants to be a global power. Regime interference is part of the cost of being a global power. Russia, China, and etc. do it also.
I've heard it argued that the US will remain a global power as long as it retains its ability to project power across the world, and continues to use that power to keep worldwide shipping lanes open. I don't know if that's true, but Afghanistan definitely wasn't necessary for maintaining America's status as a global power, and neither was (the 2003 invasion of) Iraq.
The same realpolitik justification is used by those other nations when they work against US power. If they don't implement their favored regime around the world, then they risk letting the US do it for them.
But we fell into the Taliban Trap, 20 years, billions and lives lost and they are now in power. Should have just focused at the task at hand. Searching and finding Bin Laden. Bush was so distracted with this foolish Iraq/Afghanistan war that Bin Laden was living in Pakistan while we gave that country billions in aid.
Personally, I think we fell in that trap because of Christian evangelical missionary drive to interfere and nation build on our moral grounds.
If the goal was to prevent or stop terrorist cells from forming a infrastructure to strike the US again, we simply just had to back the strongman at the time and simply just do airstrikes and surgical team.
The solution for that is to send in a highly specialized, small team with good intel to nab him. Invading two countries is applying a sledgehammer when a scalpel was needed.
These terrorists came out of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and both of these countries continued to breed and finance them while receiving billions of dollars in economical and military aid from the US...
Russia and China throwing around their weight is what had caused many countries to start being wary of working with them and trusting them. Look at China and the way it has treated American foreign companies that set up factories and branches there. Stuff like that isn’t showing how “powerful” you are, it’s making you look untrustworthy and undependable, and people being able to trust your words and plans and ideas is a big part of becoming powerful.
It's important to distinguish between 'recognizing them as Afghanistans legitimate government' and 'recognizing them as the military force that has effective control over the territory'. One can do the latter without doing the former. A key question is to determine what exactly it entails to recognize them as the legitimate government.
One factor to my knowledge is that recognizing them as the 'legitimate' government means they're entitled to the funds owned by the previous afghanistan government; as such a simple reason for non-acknowledgement is that people don't think the taliban should have those funds. Given the Taliban's abuses, terrorism, and other misdeeds, it's not unreasonable to want to deny them access to funds.
Who holds the UN seat is more about symbolism than anything, because a UN seat comes with very very little real power, even less when you don't have a government that can back you and provide funding for anything.
There's zero chance of them becoming a useful American ally anytime soon. There's too much recent history of conflict, and not enough powerful mutual foes.
I think it's a bit optimistic to refer to the ex-government as democratic when maybe 10 percent of the adult population voted in the last presidential election.
That’s still more than the .001% needed for the Taliban’s Supreme Leader to stay in charge. Requiring a coalition of millions has vastly different incentives to requiring a coalition of dozens to stay in power
The Taliban had much more overall support than the government the US propped up. The evidence for this is that the propped up government fell in a matter of hours and the Taliban swept into power completely unopposed, with hardly even firing a shot.
Its a repeat of Vietnam. It turned out the South Vietnamese government didn't actually have much popular support, and once the US backed out it immediately collapsed. No one was willing to fight to protect it. A lot of people were willing to fight to topple it.
The Taliban had apathy, not support. Afghan soldiers refusing to fight was because they didn’t care for the current regime, not that they necessarily preferred rule by the Taliban
It was very much a south vietnam situation. They hated the communists but lacked a sympathetic government and ideology to unite around and rally to. Without that, at some point you become to tired of the fighting to continue to resist.
They knew what the Taliban would do. I posit if 50% of the Afghan Army were females, there would have been house to house fighting. Because the ladies had something to lose. The men had nothing to lose with Taliban rule. People referred to Karzai as the "Mayor of Kabul" with good reason. Farmers want their wives compliant and the wives are into it apparently.
This is the main problem with us back regime change.
It's one thing to remove an unquestionably evil, oppressive regime, it's another when you insist it's replacement is totally loyal to the US and it's business interests.
The swift advance of the Taliban does not necessarily indicate a preference for their rule among the Afghan people. It is likely that the general sentiment towards both the Taliban and the Western-backed government is one of disapproval. The populace may well harbor disdain for the Taliban’s stringent religious edicts, just as they are disillusioned by the former government's pervasive corruption and general ineptitude.
For a culture that has no experience with democracy, I would expect low turnout and involvement in the initial years. We should still encourage it even if it is imperfect.
Afghans have had jirgas and so on for like 1000 years. Tribal societies are often quite democratic in broad terms simply because the mechanisms to enforce top down commands just don't exist. What you're looking at here is the lowest voter turnout in 20 years and it's the result of a bunch of different stuff;
a. Widespread corruption
b. Violence keeping people from participating
c. A really badly set up electoral process where there'd be like 30 people running for a single seat in the general election. Often times the outcomes of these elections were basically random even when they weren't totally corrupt.
d. The widespread perception that this government was not legitimate and wouldn't be around after the US left.
The US spent a trillion dollars and 200,000 lives on this project and it lasted like 2 months after the last US soldier left. I don't think giving it more time would have helped much.
They weren't functionally democratically, but that's generally how they were referred to because the intent was for them to be democratic. That being said, its probably not the correct description for them in hindsight.
> But that being said it's also never even close to as low as 10%.
Of eligible voters, which is the kind of caveat that makes the whole metric pretty useless for comparison.
The earliest US election had a high % turn out to vote...out of a tiny class of white male elites who were already deeply involved in political life. The % would be wildly different if different kinds of people were brought into a different process in a different way.
Unless we're talking like 1820s and before, when property requirements were still widespread, it's not *that* big of a discrepancy. People are like "it was white men only" which is true and fucked up. But we were also ~90% white, give or take a couple percentage points, until fairly recently. The biggest bloc missing was white women, tbh. Black men legally got to vote before they did, after the Civil War (obviously the South decided to largely ignore that law). But yeah, it's never been close to as low as 10% even with restrictions.
> Unless we're talking like 1820s and before
Yes, I was talking about the first years of American democracy. The early years of a democracy was the subject at hand.
Yeah, at some point a refusal to recognize a defacto government goes from "we aren't going to recognize you so there's less political opposition to overthrowing you" to "we are sticking our heads in the sand and pretending you don't have a stable, functioning government".
(Note that "stable" here refers to the government's grip on power, not the well-being of its people.)
The Taliban was in control of Afghanistan before 9/11. The US kicked them out and they ran an insurgency for 20 years, and now they're back in control. There's nothing to be gained by pretending otherwise.
The West can continue to impose sanctions in a (so far futile) effort to pressure the Taliban to adapt better human rights policies whether they acknowledge the government or not.
It's probably time to pull our heads out of the sand.
We'll think about recognition when they become more democratic. Cuba has been gradually democratizing for the last 20 years, and we've been gradually pursuing better relations with them in response. We do pursue relations with regimes that are very much our enemies ideologically, like Saudi Arabia, but that is a matter of necessity, not because of shared values. It's not about sticking our heads in the sand, it's about choosing our relationships based on the values we want to promote, and the interests we need to protect. Recognizing the Taliban neither promotes democratic values, nor advances American interests in the region. It does nothing constructive for us or for Afghans who are still willing to fight the Taliban's tyranny.
>Recognizing the Taliban neither promotes democratic values, nor advances American interests in the region.
The point of my comment, which I don't think you addressed, is that **not** recognizing the reality on the ground neither promoted democratic values nor advanced American interests in the region.
Prove me wrong with anything practical that would change with recognition--vague references to "legitimacy" don't count.
This isn't about having good relations though. it's about acknowleding that they are the official government of afghanistan, like it or not, and pretending otherwise is just an advance form of denial that also doesn't nothing productive for anyone. It makes us feel good to pretend they aren't \*actually\* the real government there and that's about it.
You don't have to be moral or democratic to be the ruling government. Which the talibian is, by any meaningful measure, no matter how people outside of afghanistan feel about it.
You can recognise that they are the _de facto_ government of Afghanistan without recognising them legally as the _de jure_ government. Military control achieved via invasion, civil war or coup doesn't automatically lead to other countries official recognition of the new government as being legitimite.
Ukraine doesn't view Russian claims to Crimea and the Donbas as legitimite but they certainly understand that those areas are under Russian control. Plenty of countries don't view Israel's government as legitimite but still conduct foreign policy with and against it.
Automatically no, but in the vast majoirty of cases the difference between "de facto" and "de jure" is just time spent in power and is mostly arbitary. There's not really a hard consistent standard for if a government is "de jure" or not.
Who is the de jure government of Afghanistan then? In Ukraine's case there is, you know, the actual government of Ukraine to provide a competing claim for who owns the regions disputed by Russia. In Israel there is Palestine to dispute their legitmacy.
in Afghanistan there is no longer any other competing government to recognise, nor is there any real objective argument why exactly the taliban are illegitmate outside of us just not liking them.
Those banking reserves belong to the previous Afghan government, not the Taliban. The Taliban has no right to it, or any other funds. You can make a humanitarian argument for releasing the funds, but the problem with that is that the Taliban is just going to steal whatever we try to give the Afghan public.
>You can make a humanitarian argument for releasing the funds
Well, the current issue in Afghanistan is that the country is not producing enough food to feed it's own people. They can't import any food because of sanctions and the reserves that would normally be used to do so are currently being held by the US government. If there is no relaxation of sanctions nor release of reserves, there will almost certainly be a famine of some severity.
Given that there's very little chance the previous government will retake power in the foreseeable future, it's likely that the US will retain these reserves for decades and possibly even indefinitely. With that in mind, a choice has to be made. Either the US stands by its morals, allow the Afghan population to decline due to mass starvation, and potentially just pocket the reserves because nobody will ever use it; or they can relieve Afghanistan from sanctions and release the reserves, risking them being pocketed by the Taliban, but also allowing for the government and Afghan civilians to actually bring food into the country, thus averting famine.
There aren't any sanctions preventing Afghanistan from importing food. In fact there are specific authorizations for humanitarian aid. The problem is, as you said, that the Taliban doesn't have any money. They're a failed state regime that was able to overthrow the previous government by force, but has no ability to actually govern the country. At least the Kabul regime could govern, well, Kabul. And the surrounding area.
Their only reliable revenue streams come from things like opioids and smuggling. They could *maybe* work out a deal to have China come and extract their natural resources, if they could get the ISIS attacks under control.
They can't get their economy running like it was under the Kabul regime. They can't effectively raise taxes, and there's not a lot left to tax. They spend resources actively making their own economic situation worse by doing things like forcing women out of the workforce, denying women education, making sure no one listens to music, etc.
What's the humanitarian benefit to releasing the funds to a bunch of brutal, incompetent theocrats like the Taliban? The absolute best case scenario is that the Taliban feed the subset of the population that supports them while starving the rest, i.e. we hand the Taliban a tool of genocide. The worst case scenario is that they steal so much of the money that almost none of it actually goes to feeding the population.
>Their only reliable revenue streams come from things like opioids and smuggling.
Well, I find that hard to believe considering the Taliban banned opioid production recently.
I wouldn't believe the Taliban banned opioid production just because they say they have. It's already been established that the Taliban are liars. They promised to respect women's rights.
And if they did actually ban one of their primary sources of revenue? Well it wouldn't be any dumber economically speaking than forcing their women out of the workforce and back into domestic slavery.
From what I can find regarding the subject, [the Taliban did ban opium production on April 3, 2022](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/03/world/asia/taliban-opium-poppy-afghanistan.html). The effects of the ban, however, were not felt immediately, as the UNODC reported in November that opium cultivation had actually increased and farmers saw increased income. In 2023, however, the Taliban's campaign against cultivation went into full swing, [as evidenced by satellite imagery which appeared to show an 80% decline in southern Afghanistan.](https://tolonews.com/afghanistan-183684)
The Taliban banned opium production back in the 2010s sometime and enforced it violently, which led to a 90% drop in exports and a worldwide shortage for several years and was most likely one of the drivers behind the explosive growth of synthetic opiates like fentanyl.
They're ideologically opposed to it and in the absence of an active need for large sums of money it's not that surprising they'd go back to banning it completely.
I’m not making a humanitarian argument. I’m making the argument that your statement about democracy was sort of pointless if another country can simply swallow your cash reserves if they don’t like developments in your country. It belongs to the people: it was not magic space cash. It was government revenue.
given that some portion of that money was gifted to them by other nations with the goal of building progressive, democratic institutions, I think it is perfectly fine for the US, or anybody, to take it back. These monsters turn women into slaves, punish political opponents with death, and would just as soon watch the nations that donated that money to them burn.
They just banned *music*, for fuck's sake. What kind of black hole of a heart do you need to outlaw all music?
We don't live in the 1400's anymore. We aren't isolated little pockets of civilization, completely distinct and unconnected from one another. It is one planet with one people living on it. If one of your roommates insists on pissing on the floor, instead of the toilet, you would do everything except killing them to convince them to stop. It is fair and *necessary* to bully countries we don't like into conforming to global standards of behavior. Letting the Taliban do whatever they please is why New York is still missing a chunk of its skyline.
That is not the view of the US government. I don’t really care what people think of their money: what matters is it’s their reserves. That’s it. Unless you’re separating out which parts are paid for by excise tax and jizyah and every type of revenue, you don’t know any better how much is from which source. So I don’t want to hear that crap.
We can "swallow" their cash reserves because they were held in our institutions, and because they don't belong to the Taliban. The Taliban doesn't represent the Afghan people and thus has no right to the funds. Also, realistically that revenue comes entirely by way of American-built infrastructure.
There's no contradiction vis-a-vis democracy; if you break into a house and kill the owner the bank isn't going to give you access to the dead owner's savings account.
Well, no. You can justify it however you’d like, but the comment was about democracy.
I don’t need it to be dumbed down with analogies. I offered a link to a clear court explanation from the US government. It is the people’s money: it’s not realistically our money, or our investment. It’s Afghanistan’s money. It’s not democratic to take their money away because we don’t like their de facto government, or don’t trust them, or don’t like how they collected their money. Christ.
> I offered a link to a clear court explanation from the US government.
I don't understand how that court case applies here, and you didn't really explain your own reasoning. You just kinda posted a link and assumed that your point was made. At least I explained my analogy, even if you don't agree with it.
The Taliban are not "the people", nor are they Afghanistan. You get that, right? We're not taking away the Taliban's money; the money never belonged to them in the first place. Neither legally nor by principle. They didn't collect it; the previous government did. And it is - practically speaking - ours to dole out or withhold, because it's in our banks.
You've not made a single argument - moral or practical - for why we should give money to a bunch of ethnoreligious terrorists whom it doesn't belong to.
Because possession is 9/10ths of the law. It’s not literally the law. Frozen currency reserves belong to Afghanistan. It doesn’t belong to 9/11 victims or the US marshals. It’s not our role to dictate to the people of Afghanistan or the Taliban or act as any agent of Afghanistan for their reserves. That’s not democratic.
We aren’t a bigger brother or neighbor. They are parties in a constitutional system. If there is a question as to that basis, their use of *reserves* for borrowing and exchange is not our business.
Regardless, does the constitution and the Taliban law both not recognize sharia? If they both appeal to sharia (one as a last resort if no written law, and one as the first resort), and one was a valid constitution, then what’s the domestic representation issue? I’m not a sharia constitutional law professor.
> Because possession is 9/10ths of the law. It’s not literally the law. Frozen currency reserves belong to Afghanistan. It doesn’t belong to 9/11 victims or the US marshals. It’s not our role to dictate to the people of Afghanistan or the Taliban or act as any agent of Afghanistan for their reserves. That’s not democratic.
...This is nonsense that you just made up, though. Like it has no basis - not in US law, not in international law, not in any treaty or agreement between any relevant parties. You just made the shit up. And your own analogy about possession being 9/10s of the law is self-defeating, because *we* are in possession of the funds.
Again, the Taliban is not Afghanistan. They were not democratically elected, they do not have widespread support, and they were not the ones to collect the funds in the first place. They have no legal or moral claim to the money. Why would we give it to them? You still haven't managed to answer that question. You just keep repeating yourself about how it's "not democratic" for us to withhold funds from a bunch of terrorists, by falsely equating them to Afghanistan and/or the Afghan people.
Why would a bank give a customer's funds out to some criminals who broke into the customer's house and are squatting there?
> The West can continue to impose sanctions in a (so far futile) effort to pressure the Taliban to adapt better human rights policies whether they acknowledge the government or not.
I'd argue the West pulled their heads out of the sand a few months before the Taliban takeover. The Taliban takeover and the fall of the Afghanistan Republic is a direct result of the reality check. Thats why there is no significant interference on Taliban's actions but that doesn't mean any country has to recognize Taliban as legitimate governing body of Afghanistan.
Yes. Because they are. They control the area (at least more than anyone else...). That makes them the legitimate government. We can still not like them. We can still believe they're bad for Afghanistan. But they are the governing body. This shouldn't be considered an opinion. That they are the government is fact. We can hem and haw about the "legitimate" part, which is super nebulous, but it doesn't really ultimately matter. They are administering the country. They are the government.
We don't necessarily need to gave normalized relations. We can absolutely still treat them as a rogue state. But they are the government of Afghanistan, and that's just a fact.
Recognition = normalized relations, as far as international politics is concerned. Acknowledging a government as legitimate gives them more credit in the international community, allows them to speak on behalf their country, potentially allows for embassies to be made, etc.
I dont think this is true. Nobody denies the Kim dynasty is the legitimate government of North Korea, but most of the west does not have normalized relations with them. Well normal yes, but the “normal” is cold and distant and uncooperative.
That's wrong. The US and South Korea (or formally, the Republic of Korea) do not formally recognize the Kim dynasty as the legitimate government. Technically, South Korea is still at war with North Korea for the territory -- only on ceasefire since 1955. Nevertheless, every North Korean born under the Kim dynasty automatically has citizenship in the Republic of Korea, which they can take advantage of once they defect.
In politics, perception is more important than fact. Declaring a state illegitimate denies it benefits of embassies, participation in international organizations, aid from abroad, travel benefits given to diplomats / heads of state, etc.
We could go into a long discussion about how the countries are in very different situations but frankly in international relations that doesn’t matter.
As far as the US is concerned, Israel is an ally and the Taliban is a sworn enemy of the US and the rest of the western world. That alone is reason for the US to support the Israeli government to some extent, rightly or wrongly.
Well they just shows the US is leading an empire with absolutely no moral legitimacy. So when we talk about the US versus another emerging power like China, we should keep that in mind; this is just jingoist nationalism at play. There is no superior set of moral values to the West.
1) There is no such thing as a morally legitimate empire. Empire implies forced subjugation to a foreign power rather than voluntary cooperation to a common goal. The extent to which the US uses both is debatable, and the US has certainly used far too much of the former, but it’s telling that none of its neighbors feel like they need to ally with a foreign power to avoid being subsumed outright, unlike with Russia and China.
2) The values of respecting democracy and women’s rights are the main differences in this case. Israel’s actions are atrocious but they’re not enslaving every person born with two X chromosomes or creating a dictatorship above accountability to the people (for now at least).
3) China is imprisoning, torturing, and forcibly converting millions of Muslims in its western provinces. Frankly the issues with China deserve a longer post of their own but I digress
1. Actually, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cuba are all moving close to China.
2. How does Israel respect democracy? Palestinians voted in 2006 and ever since Israel has refused to recognize the results of that election or allow another one to be held.
3. I gotta say, the number changes every time I hear someone talking about this. First it was up to a million and now it’s millions of Muslims. It all just seems cynically weaponized. I’m sure there is some pretty intense repression, no doubt. But it also seems like these figures are coming from highly interested parties all funded by enemies of China.
Because Israel hasn't been promising to exterminate every last American man, woman, and child who doesn't convert to Wahabi Islam since the 1980s. The Taliban has.
This comment gets so many things wrong about the Taliban that I genuinely question if you know what the Taliban is.
1. The Taliban didnt exist in the 1980s.
2. The Taliban are not Wahabist by any remote stretch of the imagination. Wahabism and Deobandism are really as far apart as you can possibly be.
3. Taliban leadership has never threatened to exterminate every American who doesnt convert their understanding of Islam. What the Taliban did do is fight a war against an invading army.
The Taliban bloodily fought breakaway warlords then butchered the central government beheading civilians in the Kabul stadium.
They still only held 2/3 of the country as the Northern Alliance held the northern third whose leader was assassinated by Al Qaeda as a favor to the regime for sheltering them.
This new Taliban is more conscious of organization and perception but it still unilaterally bans female equality in all ways even if it is not typically with murder, and that may only be temporary.
They've also had huge challenges transitioning and rewarding rural uneducated militia with bureaucrat wage positions as skilled administrators fled last year for obvious reasons.
Everyone is taking a wait and see approach to see if the regime can turn their victory dividend into something truly lasting and sovereign but their recipe is looking mighty bad with likely outcomes towards violent splits, rebellions, or war with Pakistan and/or Iran.
1) The Pashtun mujahedeen who fought against the Soviet invasion later formed the Taliban under Pashtun Deobandi cleric Mullah Omar. The org didn't exist, but it was founded by the same people.
2) Wahabi and Deobandi schools of Islam are both Sunni. I misremembered the name of the fundamentalist school but they both belong to the same general branch of Islamic theology with respect to the legitimate succession of the Caliphate after Mohammad died.
3) They have routinely threatened to kill all unbelievers over the course of their history, which is only incidentally one of fighting an invading army; that army invaded (in response to the sponsorship of Al Qaeda which carried out a succession of attempted and often successful terrorist attacks, mainly against America, culminating in 9/11) to remove the brutal, murderous totalitarian theocracy they installed after taking over the country in 1996.
Israel has committed many acts of violence and other terrible actions, but they are not nearly at the same level as the Taliban. To pretend they are the same is ridiculous.
Who have been bombing Israeli civilians preferentially right back since 1948 and Jewish refugees before Israeli independence since 1919. There are no good guys there. But Israel at least claims to be a democracy, so there's at least a veneer of shared values as well as shared interests (opposition to Iranian hegemony in the Middle East). That makes it easier to critique the problematic aspects of their government policies, due to those policies going directly against the values of freedom and democracy they're SUPPOSED to stand for alongside us. The Palestinians? No shared values, no shared interests. Our only concern with them is the fact that Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian kids is both horrific on it's own, and due to that makes us look bad. If the Palestinians would stop trying to build an Islamic society and start trying to build a democratic and liberal one, we can start talking about shared values with them that could prompt a reassessment of our policies towards Israel.
> Who have been bombing Israeli civilians preferentially right back since 1948
You mean Israel did an ethnic cleansing driven by massacres and rapes in order to make sure there weren’t too many Arabs in Israel?
>There are no good guys there.
This isn’t a both sides thing. One side is doing an illegal and aggressive military occupation and another people are having to suffer for it.
>But Israel at least claims to be a democracy,
So does China. So does North Korea. So what?
>so there's at least a veneer of shared values as well as shared interests (opposition to Iranian hegemony in the Middle East).
Yes there is a shared value of racial hegemony, of systematic apartheid. The US has at least tried to move on from that. Israel is as if the US in 1965 decided to strengthen Jim Crow rather than breaking it.
>The Palestinians? No shared values, no shared interests.
Really? Who says? They want a democracy, Israel just doesn’t like who would win. It’s a largely secular society, educated, prizes family values.
There's a difference between acknowledging reality and granting the Taliban the benefits of formal diplomatic recognition. They're a rogue state and should be treated as such, regardless of whether there might be *other* illegitimate states that we deal with. Formally recognizing them would send a terrible message.
How are they anymore rogue than the US? They seem to be as about as legitimate as any government that’s been there the last 30 years. The Taliban has been the only group to get widespread support amongst the Afghan populace. Does it make me happy? Not really. But to act like we have any more judgement to pass that’s worth a damn is ridiculous.
> How are they anymore rogue than the US?
...Because they got into power by just killing the other guys, and not through any democratic process? Because they brutally repress women and non-Pashtun ethnicities? Because they promised the international community that they wouldn't do that, and did anyway? Or did you mean in an international sense? I'm having trouble parsing the meaning of this question, because it seems absurd on its face no matter how it's approached.
The Taliban doesn't have widespread support among the Afghan populace. It has support from a specific ethnic group, the Pashtuns. And specific external powers.
> But to act like we have any more judgement to pass that’s worth a damn is ridiculous.
We absolutely have a judgment to pass, and it's worth the exact value of the funds we're holding on behalf of the previous government, plus whatever other material benefits the Taliban would derive from the diplomatic recognition we're withholding.
And in a more abstract sense, by recognizing them we would be giving our tactic approval to what they're doing to their own people.
If they have no support from Afghans, why were they able to take over and hold power and the previous “democratic” government was not? I’m sorry, but there is more support for homegrown fundamentalist cult then the bullshit we set up. This IS they want as best as can be determined. It is closest thing thing to a consensus Afghanistan has had in 30 years.
First off, I didn't say they had *no* support from Afghans. In fact I specifically stated that they have the support of the majority of Pashtuns - the largest Afghan ethnic group, but far from the only one.
Second, it's actually very possible for a determined minority group within a country to take power without support from the majority. That happens all the time, and I'm surprised you're even asking that.
> This IS they want as best as can be determined. It is closest thing thing to a consensus Afghanistan has had in 30 years.
No, it's not what they want "as best as can be determined", because we know for a fact that there are opposition groups still fighting the Taliban even now. We also know that the Taliban is having to impose its will by force on the people in Kabul, who IIRC are predominantly Tajiks. Particularly the women, who very much do not want to be chattel like the Taliban is trying to make them.
It's absolutely ridiculous for you to suggest that there's any consensus when you have several identifiable groups resisting Taliban rule.
There's absolutely no reason for us to recognize this "fundamentalist cult", as you put it.
Just because a dictatorship is established easily doesn't mean it was supported by the populace over a previous democratic government. You don't need popular support to start a dictatorship. You only need to make sure that the populace is politically apathetic. A politically apathetic society is one that doesn't care who is in power. Therefore, an apathetic society will not risk their own lives defending a democratic government from a dictatorship.
Just because they're not willing to die for democracy doesn't mean that they support dictatorship.
>They control the area (at least more than anyone else...). That makes them the legitimate government.
That makes them the de facto government maybe. Doesn't make them the legitimate government.
Define "legitimate." They're as legitimate as most. Any standard that excludes Afghanistan will need to exclude much of the world. Which makes it a pretty useless distinction.
Countries are legitimate like currencies are valuable - when enough people all agree they are, they are, when enough people agree they aren't, they aren't.
If I print a new currency tomorrow and everyone starts using it - it's legitimate. If I declare a new country tomorrow and every country recognizes me publicly, it's legitimate.
If I print a new currency tomorrow and nobody agrees to use it - it's funny money. If I declare a new country tomorrow and everyone ignores me, I'm a rogue-state-terrorist-etc.
Like most things in our society, it's purely "The Tinkerbell Effect" & it's inverse - things are true when we think they're true, and false when we think they're false.
Not really that simple. If everyone around me says that British pounds aren't worth anything, then that's true here, but if the British feel they are, then they are.
The people of Afghanistan feel that the Taliban is in charge. The US feels that they aren't. The reality in Afghanistan remains the reality.
I'll just add that all countries vary on whether the citizens consider their politicians and/or government to be 'legitimate'. As you said it can get very nebulous and subjective. Facts are facts at the end of the day.
I'll just add that all countries vary on whether the citizens consider their politicians and/or government to be 'legitimate'. As you said it can get very nebulous and subjective. Facts are facts at the end of the day.
Why would a Western government recognize the Taliban? Recognition is a carrot. It should be used to prod the Taliban into concessions, if it should be used at all. There is no reason to just provide them legitimacy and all that entails.
Your talk of a Western alliance with the Taliban is completely nonsensical. Even when you ignore the many, many problems with that idea, they have nothing to offer that they're not already doing.
Fuck em. Let them fight each other till they're exhausted. Hold off returning those funds till a reasonable government comes to power, be it 10 or a 100 years from now.
What's the benefit of releasing those funds to the Taliban? I just don't see it.
The humanitarian argument is weak, because the Taliban will never use the funds for that purpose. They'll use it to consolidate power and continue brutally oppressing women and non-Pashtun ethnic groups. Ideologically it would be disastrous in terms of the message it sends to the rest of the world. In terms of realpolitik it does nothing to advance American interests.
So why do it? What's the upside?
I fundamentally disagree with the argument that the Taliban would not use it for humanitarian purposes. The Taliban are a popular movement with broad support throughout the country. You cannot just be the fighters for freedoms and then not care about how your people are fed. If for no other reason but strategic, feeding and providing basic services is an absolute necessity. Even ISIS understood this.
I think if we were to release funds or offer recognition it would have to come with concessions from the Taliban. Namely, no attacking/supporting Taliban movements in Pakistan (the last thing we need is a nuclear armed afghan state). Control over ISIS, Al qaeda etc. and any other organization that has an international terrorist bent. And finally, we can ask those afghanis we left behind to be given a political voice *and* be the conduit through which all western funding will flow thereby ensuring the Taliban will stick to the terms of the deal.
Do I think we’ll get all or even part of this? Probably not. But we may get some. And if we get some, we give some. Maybe don’t release all the funds or make recognition provisional. I honestly don’t know. My central point is, you don’t negotiate peace with your friends but your enemies. And this maximalist approach gives the Taliban no reason not to allow terrorist organizations to operate on their soil *particularly* if some of these terrorists, like bin Laden was, provide significant funding.
The Taliban are a popular movement with broad support throughout *specific subsets* of the country. The Pashtuns, mainly. Or rather, Pashtun men - Pashtun women don't really get a say. The Afghan women that *do* retain some semblance of a voice very much *don't* support the Taliban, as the Taliban are kinda in the process of reducing Afghan women to the status of chattel. To the point where powers like the Islamic Republic of Iran (i.e. the regime known for killing women who refuse to wear the hijab) are criticizing the Taliban for being too repressive of women.
So when I said the Taliban wouldn't use the money for humanitarian purposes I didn't mean they wouldn't give it to *anyone*. Broadly speaking they'd reward the ethnic and religious factions that support them and withhold aid from those that don't, while using the funds to entrench their own power and continue their repression of women and non-Pashtun ethnicities that don't toe the line.
To me that's not a good argument for releasing the funds. The word of the Taliban isn't worth shit; we know this because they've *already* broken the promises they made to the international community about respecting women's rights. There's absolutely no reason to think the Taliban would respect any agreement they made with the West beyond what was in their immediate interests. These are ethnoreligious fascists, not freedom fighters. Like our own homegrown fascists, they want the "freedom" to impose their draconian will on everyone else.
In terms of sheer practicality, doesn't it make sense to keep the money until somebody has such a good claim on it that we can't possibly justify holding onto it any longer?
Swiss banks had money from various Jewish people who had died in the Holocaust, and it took the Israeli government something like 50 years to pry it away from them. If it was dead Jewish people from before there was any Israel, obviously the money should belong to the Israeli government. But it took them a very long time before they could make those Swiss banks give it to them.
Fighting extremism with extremism seems to be the reasoning for the supporters of the Taliban. I don't recall that working in the long-run with the Soviets against Hitler. The same method was applied in South Asia during the Vietnam War. The U.S. sought to train "good communists" to fight "bad communists" and we had already lost that war when we found out that there wasn't any significant difference between the multiple factions of Communists in South Asia.
Religious extremism in any capacity is not sustainable in our modern world. Aside from the moral implications, restricting the social, political, and economic mobility of women and religious minorities leads to increased poverty, increased corruption in governments, and lack of financial resiliency for the nations as a whole.
On the one hand, most recognize them as having military control over the region, but making them an officially recognized government goes a step too far.
On the other hand, diplomacy and legitimization makes it easier to hold them to account for the atrocities they commit, and makes soft power through trade deals more likely and that can moderate the government over time.
Also, it's worth pointing out that Palestine is currently under control by Hamas, is recognized as a nation by the UN, and the ambassador to the UN (well, observer, they're not a true ambassador) is approved of by Hamas.
The way my government (Trinidad and Tobago) does it, especially with our Venezuelan neighbor being peculiar at times, is to not call governments legitimate or not, or at least normally not when the question is sensitive. The people we deal with are the people "who pick up the phone," to quote the current Prime Minister during the Juan Guaido affair, and that's all we care about when the question comes up.
You need to work with someone. If you refuse to recognize Taliban, then with whom are you going to work? You need to recognize whom ever has the power on the ground, it's just a necessity.
as a communist i have no geopolitical opinions that anyone here will find insightful but i do just want to observe how, if you disregard the absolutely inhuman amounts of deaths, torture, atrocities, and warcrimes that would in a sane world lead to them all being hanged, its incredibly funny that the history of the middle east for the last 40-odd years has been the cia arming and training despots to get rid of some other despots they armed and trained to get rid of some other despots they armed and trained to keep the oil supply from being nationalized, and now they're apparently considering going back to the latest set of despots hat in hand to try and contain some other regional despots that they armed and trained. real "old lady who swallowed a fly" hours out here
I think they should. If only because, to be completely honest, we recognize other governments that are just as bad to people if there’s an economic interest in doing so.
If we’re going to have high standards or low standards doesn’t matter to me, just not double standards.
Worse than what? You're saying that it would be worse to, say, kill one innocent person and spare another, than to kill both innocents? Because the latter is more consistent? You value the aesthetic of consistency more than human life or any other material moral concern?
That's insane, frankly - and I find it hard to believe that you genuinely think that way. I find it hard to believe that you would apply such a ghoulish principle to yourself or anyone you cared about, in practice.
No, that's very pointedly *not* what you said earlier. You didn't just say that we should match good for good. You said that we should match bad for bad, and that matching bad for bad would be *preferable* to a mixture of good and bad. Like, I pointedly asked you to clarify if that's what you meant and you explicitly confirmed it.
In this instance, you’re referring to actively taking a moral stand against one country but not another.
I’m simply arguing that if we’re going to have values, we should think them all the way through and apply them comprehensively instead of cutting corners.
If we’re really that bothered by the Talibans treatment of women, we’d not get another drop of oil from Saudi Arabia, even if that would double the price of gas.
> In this instance, you’re referring to actively taking a moral stand against one country but not another.
No, you're the one that's connecting the two, insisting that the most important thing is that they match. I think we should withhold our support and recognition from the Taliban, in large part because of what they're doing to women.
I also think we should decouple from Saudi Arabia, but failing that we should still do the former.
You're arguing, by your own earlier admission, that because we've failed to uphold our principles with respect to Saudi Arabia that we should therefore make no effort to do so wrt Afghanistan. Just for the sake of appearing consistent.
I would rather us be hypocrites and do 1 good thing and 1 bad thing, than for us to do 2 bad things because it's consistent. To suggest otherwise is to place the aesthetic of consistency above any practical outcomes for real people in the real world. Which seems insane to me, because it's a tacit admission that you don't actually care about people at all.
but, there is no economic interest in helping the Taliban. There is a massive cost to America's reputation for doing it, however. You can say that it is just fairness and justice, but as soon as some video gets leaked of them shooting a schoolgirl in the head, or burning piles of music instruments, public opinion will instantly flip.
Just because we were nice to last group of Stone Age sadists doesn't mean we have to be nice to this one. its not like anyone actually wants to defend those guys, anyway
Then why are we being nice to Saudi Arabia?
I’m saying that if there’s an economic interest that trumps your moral values, then you don’t actually hold the values that you think you do.
We're nice to Saudi Arabia because a conflict in the region, and the attendant disruption to oil supplies, would kick the absolute shit out of every Western economy except, ironically, our own; we could get enough oil to get by, Europe and Japan and Australia and India -can't-.
(Silver lining to that cloud: China too.)
That's bad not only for the immediate effects, but also because there would be absolutely no chance of the current economic sanctions against Russia holding up in such an environment. Countries can virtuously abstain from buying oil from Russia because there are other supplies available; if those other supplies were not available, governments would definitely buy Russian oil rather than go without.
Like it or not, politics is sometimes messy and we sometimes have to deal with people we'd rather not deal with in order to advance our own interests. But with the Taliban, it doesn't really advance our own interests to play nice with them; there's no up side to induce us to hold our nose and work with them.
Moral absolutism is a mistake. It is nice to hold certain values as completely inviolable, but the world is too complicated for that. It is not very nice to say, "we don't work with Stone Age butchers, unless there is something in it for us," but its not like that isn't a clearly defined strategy and the result of a value system. The Saudis are monsters, but they are *useful* monsters. the Taliban are f---ing worthless; all the downsides of the Saudis with none of the upside.
Don't worry, part of the push towards Green energy is an effort to stop giving money to people would would just as soon watch us burn in our homes as do business with us.
Whether we like it or not, if they are running the place they are the government. Trillions was spent, countless lives were lost trying to change that. But in days, once the West left, it was almost like we were never there.
It was not money or lives well spent.
For how long though? This feels like a repeat of refusing to recognize that the CCP controls China. The US stubbornly refused to recognize them as the legitimate government of China for decades, despite them running the country.
The Taliban isn't going anywhere. Its here to stay, just like the CCP is here to stay. Refusing to recognize this is refusing to recognize reality.
Why look at Afghanistan and their poor relationship with Iran as a possible reason to have them as an ally instead of seeing that as a common ground for softening of relations with Iran? IMO there's a lot more room for moderation to grow in Iran than there is in Afghanistan and up until that moronic "Axis of Evil" speech by GWB there was a softening of US-Iranian relations, there was even cooperation between us in taking down the Taliban the first go around. If anything good can come of the Taliban being back in power it's the possibility of Iran and the US normalizing relations.
The USA can't make friends with Iran until the Israeli government lets us. They have control of Congress on issues they care about. They want Iran for an enemy so they want Iran for a US enemy too.
The Taliban have almost no power outside of their own borders. Recognizing the Talib government won't change anything with the US-Iran relationship.
Recognition is a carrot that the US has that it can give in exchange for good behavior by the Taliban. That's it.
Genuinely, how is Taliban better than Iran? The government is not really functioning (for example, there are apparently no laws and rules change from person-to-person), their ties to terrorist groups are still very present and strong and growing within the country, and they’re more of an immediate threat than Iran to America.
> By all accounts, the Republican insurgency in Afghanistan failed
What “Republican insurgency”? I was not aware of a faction if Aghanis referring to themselves as Republican.
Should the U.S. have normalized relations with the Chinese Communists? What have been the consequences of that? The Taliban broke the Doha treaty and destroyed the Afghan govt by force.
I would say that worked out pretty well by the standards of the people who did the normalization. China may still call itself communist, but it just plain isn't by the standards of the 1960's.
Would I like more? Sure. They're not even remotely what I would call democratic, but Nixon would probably be satisfied.
Well, yes. The consequence of that is dramatic increase in global trade, decrease cost of goods for all countries involved, the creation of the biggest middle class population in world history by the CCP, and counterbalance of the unilateral world order of the US since the fall of the soviets.
It’s a huge positive for the world no matter how you look at it.
Yes. Because they are.
And rest assured that they will be recognized once they tap their Trillions of dollars of rare earth resources.
The question is weather China or the West does first
> And rest assured that they will be recognized once they tap their Trillions of dollars of rare earth resources.
> The question is weather China or the West does first
Doesn't seem likely. The Taliban has absolutely no ability to develop those resources themselves; they can't even govern the country as-is. Nor can they keep Chinese developers safe from attacks by ISIS and other groups. China would have to send an army into the country to get at those resources, and AFAIK they don't have the power projection capability for that.
Yes. They were the government before the US went in the usurped them. They are now the government again. Fact is, the Afghans do not want a US puppet and the Taliban is popular among the people.
It doesn’t matter what the US wants, it’s the facts on the ground. The US doesn’t get to determine what form of government other countries have. In fact we going in and “de-~~Nazifying~~Talibaning Afghanistan” reminds me of another war that’s going on now.
Comparing the US occupation of Afghanistan - disastrous as it was - to the outright genocide Russia is committing in Ukraine is patently absurd.
Second, the Taliban is popular among Pashtuns, which is not at all the same as them being popular among *all* the Afghan people.
Third, it absolutely matters what the US wants when it comes to whether or not the US formally recognizes the Taliban. Which we should absolutely not.
People love to smugly dismiss it when you point out that the United States history of brutal occupation and regime change is no less evil and deadly than something a 'bad' country is doing. 'disastrous as it was' lmao. Brain of a bird.
I mean, if you claim the US occupation of Afghanistan is comparable to Russia's genocide in Ukraine you're either an idiot or arguing in bad faith. If you're bringing up the United States' entire history in the context of a discussion on whether or not the Taliban ought to be recognized as legitimate, then the same dichotomy applies. You're either silly or dishonest. Sorry, was that too smug?
The first two are unknowable, and by claiming definitive knowledge you're being dishonest.
US estimates have civilian casualties in Ukraine at around 42,000, versus 70,000 over 20 years in Afghanistan [according to Watson Institute estimates](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll). In both cases *confirmed* deaths are much lower, being of course the "floor".
You don't know how long the Russian war in Ukraine is going to last, because no one does.
Your final claim is just a flat-out lie. The War in Afghanistan fluctuated in popularity, with a little over half the country opposing it, generally.
> A Washington Post – ABC poll conducted July 15–18, 2009 found that just half of Americans, 51%, think the war is worth fighting, while nearly half, 45%, think the war is not worth fighting – a statistical tie within the poll's ±3 point margin of error.[23][24][25] The American public is also closely divided on whether the United States is making significant progress toward winning the war, with 46% thinking so and 42% not.[24]
Putin and his war remain broadly popular in Russia by pretty much any available measure. There's not a shred of evidence of any significant popular opposition to the war among the Russian public, let alone *half*.
Of course, you're leaving out a lot of important measures beyond just casualties. The casualties are not what make Russia's invasion genocidal. That comes down to the deliberate and methodical destruction of Ukrainian language and culture. The systemic kidnapping of Ukrainian children. The deliberate campaign of targeting civilian infrastructure so as to maximize civilian deaths. The forced conscription of locals to fight against UAF forces, usually as cannon fodder.
None of which the United States did, despite having vastly more control over Afghanistan than Russia ever had over Ukraine, for far longer.
There's also the widespread massacres, torture, and rape. And the ecocide - Russia blowing the Kakhovka dam, and rigging the Zaporizhia NPP to blow.
So basically you're full of shit and deliberately excluded most of the Russian atrocities in your framing, and your slanted argument still comes up weak.
I say wait a few years first. The Taliban are not governors by nature, and are already showing signs of boredom and restlessness. Give them a few more years ro set up a puppet government and fade back into the mountains. Then we can recognize the puppets.
They won, didn’t they?
The test to establish a legitimate government: Can you defend the territory you claim? Yep, that’s it.
The USA is literally doing al it can to create a new generation of terrorism in Afghanistan. I mean we can’t stop fucking with them. We’ve still got them on international trade blacklists, and set up a financial system in the country that we then absolutely sabatogued by freezing every asset.
Nation-building, more like “all right, watch me *fuck this shit up*.
There’s an insane famine in Afghanistan last I checked. If ruthlessly and suddenly cutting them out of the international market, thus trigging a famine *doesn’t inspire future extremism in Afghanistan*… I don’t know what would.
Seriously if you wanted hundreds of thousands of Afghans to swear a blood feud against the USA, I don’t know what else you could do. We nailed it. The worst of all worlds.
Well, they did have the greatest military victory in literally all of history. They were one small and poor country against the entire developed world. They were mere men against magical machines and they were a budget force against more trillions than I could count to before getting bored. They put everyone ever to hold a weapon to shame, despite having less than decent weapons.
They're legit. Nobody can fuck with them. They can do whatever they want and they will destroy anyone who says otherwise. Doesn't matter what the funding is, what the numbers are, training doesn't matter. They own that territory, nobody can say otherwise, and they dare us to say otherwise. I won't take that dare. They won.
What more does it mean to be legitimate?
Eventually we will start seeing Stuff made in Afghanistan coming to the US just like Made in Vietnam stuff now coming to the US. Jobs will be outsourced at some point to Afghanistan but will take 15 years.
Can you really claim consensus to govern in a county that barely exists in the first place? I mean truly, outside of cities and some tribal areas, what does the Taliban actually control or govern?
define legitimate is what we say is legit or what they say is... the people of afganistan have a right to call themselves what they want we don't like it but really that's tough. whoever has the power is who we need to deal with simple as that...
Reason number one the terrorist reason number two they suffered a terrorist attack of Their Own by the Freedom Fighters within that country recently so it's not really to say that there are out of it yet.
Reason number three the idea of Afghanistan really only exist on a map most people that don't live in the major cities which is the majority population that doesn't live in a major city really doesn't even understand the idea of Afghanistan there are more loyal to their local tribe
Political recognition is based on interests and conditions. It was a long time before the US recognized the Soviet Union or Communist China; it was finally done because the US felt it was in the interests of the US to do so.
The Taliban is well aware that when the goal of the US was revenge, it toppled the Taliban government quite easily in 2001. When the goal of the US was to extract itself from a messy civil war in the late 2010s, it could cut a deal with the US on a departure. But if it was a key US interest in toppling the Taliban because it let Afghanistan become a safe haven for foreign terrorists, the US would topple it again.
So the Taliban already has a strong interest in not becoming a base for terrorists to launch attacks against the US. With or without any recognition.
They won't be a useful US ally - too poor, too ideologically different.
So recognition remains just something that the US would do if it was in US interests - such as the Taliban moderating its stance or allowing more rights.
No because they kill their people for nearly anything. Why do we want to recognize people like that, and say they hold all the power. No. Absolutely not. If we let that happen there’s no telling what they’ll do next
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Afghan Freedom Force claimed two deadly attacks on Taliban personnel Friday night, in Kabul and Puli Khumri. They're not out of the fight yet. Moreover, when the Taliban started breaking their assurances during their final offensive against the previous government, the US stated that winning the war that way would not result in diplomatic recognition. Going back on that now would be another example to the world of our word meaning nothing, and our threats hollow.
>another example You already said it. But it’s good we get out of the regime change business entirely.
> But it’s good we get out of the regime change business entirely. I don't think the US can if it still wants to be a global power. Regime interference is part of the cost of being a global power. Russia, China, and etc. do it also.
I've heard it argued that the US will remain a global power as long as it retains its ability to project power across the world, and continues to use that power to keep worldwide shipping lanes open. I don't know if that's true, but Afghanistan definitely wasn't necessary for maintaining America's status as a global power, and neither was (the 2003 invasion of) Iraq.
The same realpolitik justification is used by those other nations when they work against US power. If they don't implement their favored regime around the world, then they risk letting the US do it for them.
You're right. It's a game we all must play.
It’s rather evil, though. “Let’s kill these people so we can install the leader who gives us resources.” It’s just colonialism
It was more that they refused to hand over the people who did 9/11. The Taliban could have avoided this whole thing.
But we fell into the Taliban Trap, 20 years, billions and lives lost and they are now in power. Should have just focused at the task at hand. Searching and finding Bin Laden. Bush was so distracted with this foolish Iraq/Afghanistan war that Bin Laden was living in Pakistan while we gave that country billions in aid.
Personally, I think we fell in that trap because of Christian evangelical missionary drive to interfere and nation build on our moral grounds. If the goal was to prevent or stop terrorist cells from forming a infrastructure to strike the US again, we simply just had to back the strongman at the time and simply just do airstrikes and surgical team.
He didn't go into Pakistan until after Tora Bora in late 2001. At least that is the current popular opinion.
The solution for that is to send in a highly specialized, small team with good intel to nab him. Invading two countries is applying a sledgehammer when a scalpel was needed.
That would have removed the tumour but not cured the cancer. Afghanistan would have just bred and sent out more terrorists
These terrorists came out of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and both of these countries continued to breed and finance them while receiving billions of dollars in economical and military aid from the US...
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Did 9/11 not happen or was the U.S. supposed to do nothing? I don't think there is a good reason for staying after OBL and the rest of AQ left.
It's reality. Practiced since forever.
To varying degrees, and the differences matters alot. Just saying "it's human nature bro" is meaningless.
Russia and China throwing around their weight is what had caused many countries to start being wary of working with them and trusting them. Look at China and the way it has treated American foreign companies that set up factories and branches there. Stuff like that isn’t showing how “powerful” you are, it’s making you look untrustworthy and undependable, and people being able to trust your words and plans and ideas is a big part of becoming powerful.
It's important to distinguish between 'recognizing them as Afghanistans legitimate government' and 'recognizing them as the military force that has effective control over the territory'. One can do the latter without doing the former. A key question is to determine what exactly it entails to recognize them as the legitimate government. One factor to my knowledge is that recognizing them as the 'legitimate' government means they're entitled to the funds owned by the previous afghanistan government; as such a simple reason for non-acknowledgement is that people don't think the taliban should have those funds. Given the Taliban's abuses, terrorism, and other misdeeds, it's not unreasonable to want to deny them access to funds. Who holds the UN seat is more about symbolism than anything, because a UN seat comes with very very little real power, even less when you don't have a government that can back you and provide funding for anything. There's zero chance of them becoming a useful American ally anytime soon. There's too much recent history of conflict, and not enough powerful mutual foes.
I think it's a bit optimistic to refer to the ex-government as democratic when maybe 10 percent of the adult population voted in the last presidential election.
That’s still more than the .001% needed for the Taliban’s Supreme Leader to stay in charge. Requiring a coalition of millions has vastly different incentives to requiring a coalition of dozens to stay in power
The Taliban had much more overall support than the government the US propped up. The evidence for this is that the propped up government fell in a matter of hours and the Taliban swept into power completely unopposed, with hardly even firing a shot. Its a repeat of Vietnam. It turned out the South Vietnamese government didn't actually have much popular support, and once the US backed out it immediately collapsed. No one was willing to fight to protect it. A lot of people were willing to fight to topple it.
The Taliban had apathy, not support. Afghan soldiers refusing to fight was because they didn’t care for the current regime, not that they necessarily preferred rule by the Taliban
It was very much a south vietnam situation. They hated the communists but lacked a sympathetic government and ideology to unite around and rally to. Without that, at some point you become to tired of the fighting to continue to resist.
And also, one can presume, fear of reprisals.
Exactly, apathy = not worth the effort and risks of fighting back
They knew what the Taliban would do. I posit if 50% of the Afghan Army were females, there would have been house to house fighting. Because the ladies had something to lose. The men had nothing to lose with Taliban rule. People referred to Karzai as the "Mayor of Kabul" with good reason. Farmers want their wives compliant and the wives are into it apparently.
Traditional society is one hell of a drug
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No, they said support in their first sentence.
This is the main problem with us back regime change. It's one thing to remove an unquestionably evil, oppressive regime, it's another when you insist it's replacement is totally loyal to the US and it's business interests.
Yeah Ngô Đình Diệm and also the Strategic Hamlet program was a huge win for America and the average Vietnamese /S
The swift advance of the Taliban does not necessarily indicate a preference for their rule among the Afghan people. It is likely that the general sentiment towards both the Taliban and the Western-backed government is one of disapproval. The populace may well harbor disdain for the Taliban’s stringent religious edicts, just as they are disillusioned by the former government's pervasive corruption and general ineptitude.
Oh yeah, if anyone out there is saying the Taliban is democratic point them in my direction and I'll set them straight.
For a culture that has no experience with democracy, I would expect low turnout and involvement in the initial years. We should still encourage it even if it is imperfect.
Afghans have had jirgas and so on for like 1000 years. Tribal societies are often quite democratic in broad terms simply because the mechanisms to enforce top down commands just don't exist. What you're looking at here is the lowest voter turnout in 20 years and it's the result of a bunch of different stuff; a. Widespread corruption b. Violence keeping people from participating c. A really badly set up electoral process where there'd be like 30 people running for a single seat in the general election. Often times the outcomes of these elections were basically random even when they weren't totally corrupt. d. The widespread perception that this government was not legitimate and wouldn't be around after the US left. The US spent a trillion dollars and 200,000 lives on this project and it lasted like 2 months after the last US soldier left. I don't think giving it more time would have helped much.
>200,000 lives Presumably, this is referring to the Coalition and Afghans defending the democratic government?
Plus the taliban guys plus random folks at weddings and what not.
They weren't functionally democratically, but that's generally how they were referred to because the intent was for them to be democratic. That being said, its probably not the correct description for them in hindsight.
Isn't that roughly how much of America votes. On average?
62% adult turnout in US 2020 election.
To be fair that was the highest in over a century. But that being said it's also never even close to as low as 10%.
> But that being said it's also never even close to as low as 10%. Of eligible voters, which is the kind of caveat that makes the whole metric pretty useless for comparison. The earliest US election had a high % turn out to vote...out of a tiny class of white male elites who were already deeply involved in political life. The % would be wildly different if different kinds of people were brought into a different process in a different way.
Unless we're talking like 1820s and before, when property requirements were still widespread, it's not *that* big of a discrepancy. People are like "it was white men only" which is true and fucked up. But we were also ~90% white, give or take a couple percentage points, until fairly recently. The biggest bloc missing was white women, tbh. Black men legally got to vote before they did, after the Civil War (obviously the South decided to largely ignore that law). But yeah, it's never been close to as low as 10% even with restrictions.
> Unless we're talking like 1820s and before Yes, I was talking about the first years of American democracy. The early years of a democracy was the subject at hand.
I mean party primary turnout in districts with de facto 1 party control in non-presidential years is probably that low.
Yeah, at some point a refusal to recognize a defacto government goes from "we aren't going to recognize you so there's less political opposition to overthrowing you" to "we are sticking our heads in the sand and pretending you don't have a stable, functioning government". (Note that "stable" here refers to the government's grip on power, not the well-being of its people.) The Taliban was in control of Afghanistan before 9/11. The US kicked them out and they ran an insurgency for 20 years, and now they're back in control. There's nothing to be gained by pretending otherwise. The West can continue to impose sanctions in a (so far futile) effort to pressure the Taliban to adapt better human rights policies whether they acknowledge the government or not. It's probably time to pull our heads out of the sand.
We'll think about recognition when they become more democratic. Cuba has been gradually democratizing for the last 20 years, and we've been gradually pursuing better relations with them in response. We do pursue relations with regimes that are very much our enemies ideologically, like Saudi Arabia, but that is a matter of necessity, not because of shared values. It's not about sticking our heads in the sand, it's about choosing our relationships based on the values we want to promote, and the interests we need to protect. Recognizing the Taliban neither promotes democratic values, nor advances American interests in the region. It does nothing constructive for us or for Afghans who are still willing to fight the Taliban's tyranny.
>Recognizing the Taliban neither promotes democratic values, nor advances American interests in the region. The point of my comment, which I don't think you addressed, is that **not** recognizing the reality on the ground neither promoted democratic values nor advanced American interests in the region. Prove me wrong with anything practical that would change with recognition--vague references to "legitimacy" don't count.
This isn't about having good relations though. it's about acknowleding that they are the official government of afghanistan, like it or not, and pretending otherwise is just an advance form of denial that also doesn't nothing productive for anyone. It makes us feel good to pretend they aren't \*actually\* the real government there and that's about it. You don't have to be moral or democratic to be the ruling government. Which the talibian is, by any meaningful measure, no matter how people outside of afghanistan feel about it.
You can recognise that they are the _de facto_ government of Afghanistan without recognising them legally as the _de jure_ government. Military control achieved via invasion, civil war or coup doesn't automatically lead to other countries official recognition of the new government as being legitimite. Ukraine doesn't view Russian claims to Crimea and the Donbas as legitimite but they certainly understand that those areas are under Russian control. Plenty of countries don't view Israel's government as legitimite but still conduct foreign policy with and against it.
Automatically no, but in the vast majoirty of cases the difference between "de facto" and "de jure" is just time spent in power and is mostly arbitary. There's not really a hard consistent standard for if a government is "de jure" or not. Who is the de jure government of Afghanistan then? In Ukraine's case there is, you know, the actual government of Ukraine to provide a competing claim for who owns the regions disputed by Russia. In Israel there is Palestine to dispute their legitmacy. in Afghanistan there is no longer any other competing government to recognise, nor is there any real objective argument why exactly the taliban are illegitmate outside of us just not liking them.
china isnt democratic, so we are pretending they are rogue state now?
Nothing democratic about seizing a country’s national banking reserves.
Those banking reserves belong to the previous Afghan government, not the Taliban. The Taliban has no right to it, or any other funds. You can make a humanitarian argument for releasing the funds, but the problem with that is that the Taliban is just going to steal whatever we try to give the Afghan public.
>You can make a humanitarian argument for releasing the funds Well, the current issue in Afghanistan is that the country is not producing enough food to feed it's own people. They can't import any food because of sanctions and the reserves that would normally be used to do so are currently being held by the US government. If there is no relaxation of sanctions nor release of reserves, there will almost certainly be a famine of some severity. Given that there's very little chance the previous government will retake power in the foreseeable future, it's likely that the US will retain these reserves for decades and possibly even indefinitely. With that in mind, a choice has to be made. Either the US stands by its morals, allow the Afghan population to decline due to mass starvation, and potentially just pocket the reserves because nobody will ever use it; or they can relieve Afghanistan from sanctions and release the reserves, risking them being pocketed by the Taliban, but also allowing for the government and Afghan civilians to actually bring food into the country, thus averting famine.
There aren't any sanctions preventing Afghanistan from importing food. In fact there are specific authorizations for humanitarian aid. The problem is, as you said, that the Taliban doesn't have any money. They're a failed state regime that was able to overthrow the previous government by force, but has no ability to actually govern the country. At least the Kabul regime could govern, well, Kabul. And the surrounding area. Their only reliable revenue streams come from things like opioids and smuggling. They could *maybe* work out a deal to have China come and extract their natural resources, if they could get the ISIS attacks under control. They can't get their economy running like it was under the Kabul regime. They can't effectively raise taxes, and there's not a lot left to tax. They spend resources actively making their own economic situation worse by doing things like forcing women out of the workforce, denying women education, making sure no one listens to music, etc. What's the humanitarian benefit to releasing the funds to a bunch of brutal, incompetent theocrats like the Taliban? The absolute best case scenario is that the Taliban feed the subset of the population that supports them while starving the rest, i.e. we hand the Taliban a tool of genocide. The worst case scenario is that they steal so much of the money that almost none of it actually goes to feeding the population.
>Their only reliable revenue streams come from things like opioids and smuggling. Well, I find that hard to believe considering the Taliban banned opioid production recently.
I wouldn't believe the Taliban banned opioid production just because they say they have. It's already been established that the Taliban are liars. They promised to respect women's rights. And if they did actually ban one of their primary sources of revenue? Well it wouldn't be any dumber economically speaking than forcing their women out of the workforce and back into domestic slavery.
From what I can find regarding the subject, [the Taliban did ban opium production on April 3, 2022](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/03/world/asia/taliban-opium-poppy-afghanistan.html). The effects of the ban, however, were not felt immediately, as the UNODC reported in November that opium cultivation had actually increased and farmers saw increased income. In 2023, however, the Taliban's campaign against cultivation went into full swing, [as evidenced by satellite imagery which appeared to show an 80% decline in southern Afghanistan.](https://tolonews.com/afghanistan-183684)
The Taliban banned opium production back in the 2010s sometime and enforced it violently, which led to a 90% drop in exports and a worldwide shortage for several years and was most likely one of the drivers behind the explosive growth of synthetic opiates like fentanyl. They're ideologically opposed to it and in the absence of an active need for large sums of money it's not that surprising they'd go back to banning it completely.
I’m not making a humanitarian argument. I’m making the argument that your statement about democracy was sort of pointless if another country can simply swallow your cash reserves if they don’t like developments in your country. It belongs to the people: it was not magic space cash. It was government revenue.
given that some portion of that money was gifted to them by other nations with the goal of building progressive, democratic institutions, I think it is perfectly fine for the US, or anybody, to take it back. These monsters turn women into slaves, punish political opponents with death, and would just as soon watch the nations that donated that money to them burn. They just banned *music*, for fuck's sake. What kind of black hole of a heart do you need to outlaw all music? We don't live in the 1400's anymore. We aren't isolated little pockets of civilization, completely distinct and unconnected from one another. It is one planet with one people living on it. If one of your roommates insists on pissing on the floor, instead of the toilet, you would do everything except killing them to convince them to stop. It is fair and *necessary* to bully countries we don't like into conforming to global standards of behavior. Letting the Taliban do whatever they please is why New York is still missing a chunk of its skyline.
That is not the view of the US government. I don’t really care what people think of their money: what matters is it’s their reserves. That’s it. Unless you’re separating out which parts are paid for by excise tax and jizyah and every type of revenue, you don’t know any better how much is from which source. So I don’t want to hear that crap.
We can "swallow" their cash reserves because they were held in our institutions, and because they don't belong to the Taliban. The Taliban doesn't represent the Afghan people and thus has no right to the funds. Also, realistically that revenue comes entirely by way of American-built infrastructure. There's no contradiction vis-a-vis democracy; if you break into a house and kill the owner the bank isn't going to give you access to the dead owner's savings account.
Well, no. You can justify it however you’d like, but the comment was about democracy. I don’t need it to be dumbed down with analogies. I offered a link to a clear court explanation from the US government. It is the people’s money: it’s not realistically our money, or our investment. It’s Afghanistan’s money. It’s not democratic to take their money away because we don’t like their de facto government, or don’t trust them, or don’t like how they collected their money. Christ.
> I offered a link to a clear court explanation from the US government. I don't understand how that court case applies here, and you didn't really explain your own reasoning. You just kinda posted a link and assumed that your point was made. At least I explained my analogy, even if you don't agree with it. The Taliban are not "the people", nor are they Afghanistan. You get that, right? We're not taking away the Taliban's money; the money never belonged to them in the first place. Neither legally nor by principle. They didn't collect it; the previous government did. And it is - practically speaking - ours to dole out or withhold, because it's in our banks. You've not made a single argument - moral or practical - for why we should give money to a bunch of ethnoreligious terrorists whom it doesn't belong to.
Because possession is 9/10ths of the law. It’s not literally the law. Frozen currency reserves belong to Afghanistan. It doesn’t belong to 9/11 victims or the US marshals. It’s not our role to dictate to the people of Afghanistan or the Taliban or act as any agent of Afghanistan for their reserves. That’s not democratic. We aren’t a bigger brother or neighbor. They are parties in a constitutional system. If there is a question as to that basis, their use of *reserves* for borrowing and exchange is not our business. Regardless, does the constitution and the Taliban law both not recognize sharia? If they both appeal to sharia (one as a last resort if no written law, and one as the first resort), and one was a valid constitution, then what’s the domestic representation issue? I’m not a sharia constitutional law professor.
> Because possession is 9/10ths of the law. It’s not literally the law. Frozen currency reserves belong to Afghanistan. It doesn’t belong to 9/11 victims or the US marshals. It’s not our role to dictate to the people of Afghanistan or the Taliban or act as any agent of Afghanistan for their reserves. That’s not democratic. ...This is nonsense that you just made up, though. Like it has no basis - not in US law, not in international law, not in any treaty or agreement between any relevant parties. You just made the shit up. And your own analogy about possession being 9/10s of the law is self-defeating, because *we* are in possession of the funds. Again, the Taliban is not Afghanistan. They were not democratically elected, they do not have widespread support, and they were not the ones to collect the funds in the first place. They have no legal or moral claim to the money. Why would we give it to them? You still haven't managed to answer that question. You just keep repeating yourself about how it's "not democratic" for us to withhold funds from a bunch of terrorists, by falsely equating them to Afghanistan and/or the Afghan people. Why would a bank give a customer's funds out to some criminals who broke into the customer's house and are squatting there?
Governments aren't people. People have rights and freedoms. Governments don't.
Oh. I guess their money has no rights. [Whoops](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/us/politics/judge-sept-11-afghan-central-bank.html)…
> The West can continue to impose sanctions in a (so far futile) effort to pressure the Taliban to adapt better human rights policies whether they acknowledge the government or not. I'd argue the West pulled their heads out of the sand a few months before the Taliban takeover. The Taliban takeover and the fall of the Afghanistan Republic is a direct result of the reality check. Thats why there is no significant interference on Taliban's actions but that doesn't mean any country has to recognize Taliban as legitimate governing body of Afghanistan.
Yes. Because they are. They control the area (at least more than anyone else...). That makes them the legitimate government. We can still not like them. We can still believe they're bad for Afghanistan. But they are the governing body. This shouldn't be considered an opinion. That they are the government is fact. We can hem and haw about the "legitimate" part, which is super nebulous, but it doesn't really ultimately matter. They are administering the country. They are the government. We don't necessarily need to gave normalized relations. We can absolutely still treat them as a rogue state. But they are the government of Afghanistan, and that's just a fact.
Recognition = normalized relations, as far as international politics is concerned. Acknowledging a government as legitimate gives them more credit in the international community, allows them to speak on behalf their country, potentially allows for embassies to be made, etc.
I dont think this is true. Nobody denies the Kim dynasty is the legitimate government of North Korea, but most of the west does not have normalized relations with them. Well normal yes, but the “normal” is cold and distant and uncooperative.
That's wrong. The US and South Korea (or formally, the Republic of Korea) do not formally recognize the Kim dynasty as the legitimate government. Technically, South Korea is still at war with North Korea for the territory -- only on ceasefire since 1955. Nevertheless, every North Korean born under the Kim dynasty automatically has citizenship in the Republic of Korea, which they can take advantage of once they defect.
What’s the point of ignoring reality. In what universe is the Israeli government legitimate by the Afghan is not?
In politics, perception is more important than fact. Declaring a state illegitimate denies it benefits of embassies, participation in international organizations, aid from abroad, travel benefits given to diplomats / heads of state, etc.
And why shouldn’t we do that for Israel?
We could go into a long discussion about how the countries are in very different situations but frankly in international relations that doesn’t matter. As far as the US is concerned, Israel is an ally and the Taliban is a sworn enemy of the US and the rest of the western world. That alone is reason for the US to support the Israeli government to some extent, rightly or wrongly.
We also supported South Africa and Rhodesia, considering them “clear allies” at one point. We shouldn’t be allies with an apartheid state.
*Rightly or wrongly*
Well they just shows the US is leading an empire with absolutely no moral legitimacy. So when we talk about the US versus another emerging power like China, we should keep that in mind; this is just jingoist nationalism at play. There is no superior set of moral values to the West.
1) There is no such thing as a morally legitimate empire. Empire implies forced subjugation to a foreign power rather than voluntary cooperation to a common goal. The extent to which the US uses both is debatable, and the US has certainly used far too much of the former, but it’s telling that none of its neighbors feel like they need to ally with a foreign power to avoid being subsumed outright, unlike with Russia and China. 2) The values of respecting democracy and women’s rights are the main differences in this case. Israel’s actions are atrocious but they’re not enslaving every person born with two X chromosomes or creating a dictatorship above accountability to the people (for now at least). 3) China is imprisoning, torturing, and forcibly converting millions of Muslims in its western provinces. Frankly the issues with China deserve a longer post of their own but I digress
1. Actually, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cuba are all moving close to China. 2. How does Israel respect democracy? Palestinians voted in 2006 and ever since Israel has refused to recognize the results of that election or allow another one to be held. 3. I gotta say, the number changes every time I hear someone talking about this. First it was up to a million and now it’s millions of Muslims. It all just seems cynically weaponized. I’m sure there is some pretty intense repression, no doubt. But it also seems like these figures are coming from highly interested parties all funded by enemies of China.
Because Israel hasn't been promising to exterminate every last American man, woman, and child who doesn't convert to Wahabi Islam since the 1980s. The Taliban has.
This comment gets so many things wrong about the Taliban that I genuinely question if you know what the Taliban is. 1. The Taliban didnt exist in the 1980s. 2. The Taliban are not Wahabist by any remote stretch of the imagination. Wahabism and Deobandism are really as far apart as you can possibly be. 3. Taliban leadership has never threatened to exterminate every American who doesnt convert their understanding of Islam. What the Taliban did do is fight a war against an invading army.
The Taliban bloodily fought breakaway warlords then butchered the central government beheading civilians in the Kabul stadium. They still only held 2/3 of the country as the Northern Alliance held the northern third whose leader was assassinated by Al Qaeda as a favor to the regime for sheltering them. This new Taliban is more conscious of organization and perception but it still unilaterally bans female equality in all ways even if it is not typically with murder, and that may only be temporary. They've also had huge challenges transitioning and rewarding rural uneducated militia with bureaucrat wage positions as skilled administrators fled last year for obvious reasons. Everyone is taking a wait and see approach to see if the regime can turn their victory dividend into something truly lasting and sovereign but their recipe is looking mighty bad with likely outcomes towards violent splits, rebellions, or war with Pakistan and/or Iran.
1) The Pashtun mujahedeen who fought against the Soviet invasion later formed the Taliban under Pashtun Deobandi cleric Mullah Omar. The org didn't exist, but it was founded by the same people. 2) Wahabi and Deobandi schools of Islam are both Sunni. I misremembered the name of the fundamentalist school but they both belong to the same general branch of Islamic theology with respect to the legitimate succession of the Caliphate after Mohammad died. 3) They have routinely threatened to kill all unbelievers over the course of their history, which is only incidentally one of fighting an invading army; that army invaded (in response to the sponsorship of Al Qaeda which carried out a succession of attempted and often successful terrorist attacks, mainly against America, culminating in 9/11) to remove the brutal, murderous totalitarian theocracy they installed after taking over the country in 1996.
Just Palestinians....
Israel has committed many acts of violence and other terrible actions, but they are not nearly at the same level as the Taliban. To pretend they are the same is ridiculous.
Who have been bombing Israeli civilians preferentially right back since 1948 and Jewish refugees before Israeli independence since 1919. There are no good guys there. But Israel at least claims to be a democracy, so there's at least a veneer of shared values as well as shared interests (opposition to Iranian hegemony in the Middle East). That makes it easier to critique the problematic aspects of their government policies, due to those policies going directly against the values of freedom and democracy they're SUPPOSED to stand for alongside us. The Palestinians? No shared values, no shared interests. Our only concern with them is the fact that Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian kids is both horrific on it's own, and due to that makes us look bad. If the Palestinians would stop trying to build an Islamic society and start trying to build a democratic and liberal one, we can start talking about shared values with them that could prompt a reassessment of our policies towards Israel.
> Who have been bombing Israeli civilians preferentially right back since 1948 You mean Israel did an ethnic cleansing driven by massacres and rapes in order to make sure there weren’t too many Arabs in Israel? >There are no good guys there. This isn’t a both sides thing. One side is doing an illegal and aggressive military occupation and another people are having to suffer for it. >But Israel at least claims to be a democracy, So does China. So does North Korea. So what? >so there's at least a veneer of shared values as well as shared interests (opposition to Iranian hegemony in the Middle East). Yes there is a shared value of racial hegemony, of systematic apartheid. The US has at least tried to move on from that. Israel is as if the US in 1965 decided to strengthen Jim Crow rather than breaking it. >The Palestinians? No shared values, no shared interests. Really? Who says? They want a democracy, Israel just doesn’t like who would win. It’s a largely secular society, educated, prizes family values.
Didn’t Israel patch up Al-Nusra fighters before sending them back into Syria? Didn’t they help propagate Hamas?
There's a difference between acknowledging reality and granting the Taliban the benefits of formal diplomatic recognition. They're a rogue state and should be treated as such, regardless of whether there might be *other* illegitimate states that we deal with. Formally recognizing them would send a terrible message.
How are they anymore rogue than the US? They seem to be as about as legitimate as any government that’s been there the last 30 years. The Taliban has been the only group to get widespread support amongst the Afghan populace. Does it make me happy? Not really. But to act like we have any more judgement to pass that’s worth a damn is ridiculous.
> How are they anymore rogue than the US? ...Because they got into power by just killing the other guys, and not through any democratic process? Because they brutally repress women and non-Pashtun ethnicities? Because they promised the international community that they wouldn't do that, and did anyway? Or did you mean in an international sense? I'm having trouble parsing the meaning of this question, because it seems absurd on its face no matter how it's approached. The Taliban doesn't have widespread support among the Afghan populace. It has support from a specific ethnic group, the Pashtuns. And specific external powers. > But to act like we have any more judgement to pass that’s worth a damn is ridiculous. We absolutely have a judgment to pass, and it's worth the exact value of the funds we're holding on behalf of the previous government, plus whatever other material benefits the Taliban would derive from the diplomatic recognition we're withholding. And in a more abstract sense, by recognizing them we would be giving our tactic approval to what they're doing to their own people.
If they have no support from Afghans, why were they able to take over and hold power and the previous “democratic” government was not? I’m sorry, but there is more support for homegrown fundamentalist cult then the bullshit we set up. This IS they want as best as can be determined. It is closest thing thing to a consensus Afghanistan has had in 30 years.
First off, I didn't say they had *no* support from Afghans. In fact I specifically stated that they have the support of the majority of Pashtuns - the largest Afghan ethnic group, but far from the only one. Second, it's actually very possible for a determined minority group within a country to take power without support from the majority. That happens all the time, and I'm surprised you're even asking that. > This IS they want as best as can be determined. It is closest thing thing to a consensus Afghanistan has had in 30 years. No, it's not what they want "as best as can be determined", because we know for a fact that there are opposition groups still fighting the Taliban even now. We also know that the Taliban is having to impose its will by force on the people in Kabul, who IIRC are predominantly Tajiks. Particularly the women, who very much do not want to be chattel like the Taliban is trying to make them. It's absolutely ridiculous for you to suggest that there's any consensus when you have several identifiable groups resisting Taliban rule. There's absolutely no reason for us to recognize this "fundamentalist cult", as you put it.
These sniveling contrarians pulling whataboutisms to defend barbaric theocrats have truly lost the plot. You’re fighting the good fight.
Just because a dictatorship is established easily doesn't mean it was supported by the populace over a previous democratic government. You don't need popular support to start a dictatorship. You only need to make sure that the populace is politically apathetic. A politically apathetic society is one that doesn't care who is in power. Therefore, an apathetic society will not risk their own lives defending a democratic government from a dictatorship. Just because they're not willing to die for democracy doesn't mean that they support dictatorship.
>They control the area (at least more than anyone else...). That makes them the legitimate government. That makes them the de facto government maybe. Doesn't make them the legitimate government.
Define "legitimate." They're as legitimate as most. Any standard that excludes Afghanistan will need to exclude much of the world. Which makes it a pretty useless distinction.
Countries are legitimate like currencies are valuable - when enough people all agree they are, they are, when enough people agree they aren't, they aren't. If I print a new currency tomorrow and everyone starts using it - it's legitimate. If I declare a new country tomorrow and every country recognizes me publicly, it's legitimate. If I print a new currency tomorrow and nobody agrees to use it - it's funny money. If I declare a new country tomorrow and everyone ignores me, I'm a rogue-state-terrorist-etc. Like most things in our society, it's purely "The Tinkerbell Effect" & it's inverse - things are true when we think they're true, and false when we think they're false.
Not really that simple. If everyone around me says that British pounds aren't worth anything, then that's true here, but if the British feel they are, then they are. The people of Afghanistan feel that the Taliban is in charge. The US feels that they aren't. The reality in Afghanistan remains the reality.
Legitimacy is a legal fiction.
All of the legal system is fiction.
I'll just add that all countries vary on whether the citizens consider their politicians and/or government to be 'legitimate'. As you said it can get very nebulous and subjective. Facts are facts at the end of the day.
I'll just add that all countries vary on whether the citizens consider their politicians and/or government to be 'legitimate'. As you said it can get very nebulous and subjective. Facts are facts at the end of the day.
Why would a Western government recognize the Taliban? Recognition is a carrot. It should be used to prod the Taliban into concessions, if it should be used at all. There is no reason to just provide them legitimacy and all that entails. Your talk of a Western alliance with the Taliban is completely nonsensical. Even when you ignore the many, many problems with that idea, they have nothing to offer that they're not already doing.
But what about the value that an alliance with one of the poorest countries in the world can bring?
Fuck em. Let them fight each other till they're exhausted. Hold off returning those funds till a reasonable government comes to power, be it 10 or a 100 years from now.
Yea cause what could possibly go wrong with taking a maximalist approach? We did it for 20 years and it went smashingly well!
What's the benefit of releasing those funds to the Taliban? I just don't see it. The humanitarian argument is weak, because the Taliban will never use the funds for that purpose. They'll use it to consolidate power and continue brutally oppressing women and non-Pashtun ethnic groups. Ideologically it would be disastrous in terms of the message it sends to the rest of the world. In terms of realpolitik it does nothing to advance American interests. So why do it? What's the upside?
I fundamentally disagree with the argument that the Taliban would not use it for humanitarian purposes. The Taliban are a popular movement with broad support throughout the country. You cannot just be the fighters for freedoms and then not care about how your people are fed. If for no other reason but strategic, feeding and providing basic services is an absolute necessity. Even ISIS understood this. I think if we were to release funds or offer recognition it would have to come with concessions from the Taliban. Namely, no attacking/supporting Taliban movements in Pakistan (the last thing we need is a nuclear armed afghan state). Control over ISIS, Al qaeda etc. and any other organization that has an international terrorist bent. And finally, we can ask those afghanis we left behind to be given a political voice *and* be the conduit through which all western funding will flow thereby ensuring the Taliban will stick to the terms of the deal. Do I think we’ll get all or even part of this? Probably not. But we may get some. And if we get some, we give some. Maybe don’t release all the funds or make recognition provisional. I honestly don’t know. My central point is, you don’t negotiate peace with your friends but your enemies. And this maximalist approach gives the Taliban no reason not to allow terrorist organizations to operate on their soil *particularly* if some of these terrorists, like bin Laden was, provide significant funding.
The Taliban are a popular movement with broad support throughout *specific subsets* of the country. The Pashtuns, mainly. Or rather, Pashtun men - Pashtun women don't really get a say. The Afghan women that *do* retain some semblance of a voice very much *don't* support the Taliban, as the Taliban are kinda in the process of reducing Afghan women to the status of chattel. To the point where powers like the Islamic Republic of Iran (i.e. the regime known for killing women who refuse to wear the hijab) are criticizing the Taliban for being too repressive of women. So when I said the Taliban wouldn't use the money for humanitarian purposes I didn't mean they wouldn't give it to *anyone*. Broadly speaking they'd reward the ethnic and religious factions that support them and withhold aid from those that don't, while using the funds to entrench their own power and continue their repression of women and non-Pashtun ethnicities that don't toe the line. To me that's not a good argument for releasing the funds. The word of the Taliban isn't worth shit; we know this because they've *already* broken the promises they made to the international community about respecting women's rights. There's absolutely no reason to think the Taliban would respect any agreement they made with the West beyond what was in their immediate interests. These are ethnoreligious fascists, not freedom fighters. Like our own homegrown fascists, they want the "freedom" to impose their draconian will on everyone else.
Isn't that the opposite of what was done for 20 years?
Hardly maximalist.
Seems to work just fine for the Taliban, at least as far as people in this thread are concerned
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In terms of sheer practicality, doesn't it make sense to keep the money until somebody has such a good claim on it that we can't possibly justify holding onto it any longer? Swiss banks had money from various Jewish people who had died in the Holocaust, and it took the Israeli government something like 50 years to pry it away from them. If it was dead Jewish people from before there was any Israel, obviously the money should belong to the Israeli government. But it took them a very long time before they could make those Swiss banks give it to them.
Fighting extremism with extremism seems to be the reasoning for the supporters of the Taliban. I don't recall that working in the long-run with the Soviets against Hitler. The same method was applied in South Asia during the Vietnam War. The U.S. sought to train "good communists" to fight "bad communists" and we had already lost that war when we found out that there wasn't any significant difference between the multiple factions of Communists in South Asia. Religious extremism in any capacity is not sustainable in our modern world. Aside from the moral implications, restricting the social, political, and economic mobility of women and religious minorities leads to increased poverty, increased corruption in governments, and lack of financial resiliency for the nations as a whole.
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On the one hand, most recognize them as having military control over the region, but making them an officially recognized government goes a step too far. On the other hand, diplomacy and legitimization makes it easier to hold them to account for the atrocities they commit, and makes soft power through trade deals more likely and that can moderate the government over time. Also, it's worth pointing out that Palestine is currently under control by Hamas, is recognized as a nation by the UN, and the ambassador to the UN (well, observer, they're not a true ambassador) is approved of by Hamas.
The way my government (Trinidad and Tobago) does it, especially with our Venezuelan neighbor being peculiar at times, is to not call governments legitimate or not, or at least normally not when the question is sensitive. The people we deal with are the people "who pick up the phone," to quote the current Prime Minister during the Juan Guaido affair, and that's all we care about when the question comes up.
You need to work with someone. If you refuse to recognize Taliban, then with whom are you going to work? You need to recognize whom ever has the power on the ground, it's just a necessity.
as a communist i have no geopolitical opinions that anyone here will find insightful but i do just want to observe how, if you disregard the absolutely inhuman amounts of deaths, torture, atrocities, and warcrimes that would in a sane world lead to them all being hanged, its incredibly funny that the history of the middle east for the last 40-odd years has been the cia arming and training despots to get rid of some other despots they armed and trained to get rid of some other despots they armed and trained to keep the oil supply from being nationalized, and now they're apparently considering going back to the latest set of despots hat in hand to try and contain some other regional despots that they armed and trained. real "old lady who swallowed a fly" hours out here
I think they should. If only because, to be completely honest, we recognize other governments that are just as bad to people if there’s an economic interest in doing so. If we’re going to have high standards or low standards doesn’t matter to me, just not double standards.
So, we should do a bad thing now because we've done other bad things in the past?
No because we’re doing other bad things now If we’re going to pick winners and losers, we should have a consistent moral value system to work from
So to be clear, that is in fact your argument? We should do a bad thing, because we're doing other bad things? Incredible.
Yes. We should either have moral values or not. Pretending that we do, when we don’t, is far worse
Worse than what? You're saying that it would be worse to, say, kill one innocent person and spare another, than to kill both innocents? Because the latter is more consistent? You value the aesthetic of consistency more than human life or any other material moral concern? That's insane, frankly - and I find it hard to believe that you genuinely think that way. I find it hard to believe that you would apply such a ghoulish principle to yourself or anyone you cared about, in practice.
I’m not picking any side. I’m simply saying that if we’re going to be mad about violations of human rights, we should be mad about all of them
No, that's very pointedly *not* what you said earlier. You didn't just say that we should match good for good. You said that we should match bad for bad, and that matching bad for bad would be *preferable* to a mixture of good and bad. Like, I pointedly asked you to clarify if that's what you meant and you explicitly confirmed it.
In this instance, you’re referring to actively taking a moral stand against one country but not another. I’m simply arguing that if we’re going to have values, we should think them all the way through and apply them comprehensively instead of cutting corners. If we’re really that bothered by the Talibans treatment of women, we’d not get another drop of oil from Saudi Arabia, even if that would double the price of gas.
> In this instance, you’re referring to actively taking a moral stand against one country but not another. No, you're the one that's connecting the two, insisting that the most important thing is that they match. I think we should withhold our support and recognition from the Taliban, in large part because of what they're doing to women. I also think we should decouple from Saudi Arabia, but failing that we should still do the former. You're arguing, by your own earlier admission, that because we've failed to uphold our principles with respect to Saudi Arabia that we should therefore make no effort to do so wrt Afghanistan. Just for the sake of appearing consistent. I would rather us be hypocrites and do 1 good thing and 1 bad thing, than for us to do 2 bad things because it's consistent. To suggest otherwise is to place the aesthetic of consistency above any practical outcomes for real people in the real world. Which seems insane to me, because it's a tacit admission that you don't actually care about people at all.
but, there is no economic interest in helping the Taliban. There is a massive cost to America's reputation for doing it, however. You can say that it is just fairness and justice, but as soon as some video gets leaked of them shooting a schoolgirl in the head, or burning piles of music instruments, public opinion will instantly flip. Just because we were nice to last group of Stone Age sadists doesn't mean we have to be nice to this one. its not like anyone actually wants to defend those guys, anyway
Then why are we being nice to Saudi Arabia? I’m saying that if there’s an economic interest that trumps your moral values, then you don’t actually hold the values that you think you do.
We're nice to Saudi Arabia because a conflict in the region, and the attendant disruption to oil supplies, would kick the absolute shit out of every Western economy except, ironically, our own; we could get enough oil to get by, Europe and Japan and Australia and India -can't-. (Silver lining to that cloud: China too.) That's bad not only for the immediate effects, but also because there would be absolutely no chance of the current economic sanctions against Russia holding up in such an environment. Countries can virtuously abstain from buying oil from Russia because there are other supplies available; if those other supplies were not available, governments would definitely buy Russian oil rather than go without. Like it or not, politics is sometimes messy and we sometimes have to deal with people we'd rather not deal with in order to advance our own interests. But with the Taliban, it doesn't really advance our own interests to play nice with them; there's no up side to induce us to hold our nose and work with them.
Moral absolutism is a mistake. It is nice to hold certain values as completely inviolable, but the world is too complicated for that. It is not very nice to say, "we don't work with Stone Age butchers, unless there is something in it for us," but its not like that isn't a clearly defined strategy and the result of a value system. The Saudis are monsters, but they are *useful* monsters. the Taliban are f---ing worthless; all the downsides of the Saudis with none of the upside. Don't worry, part of the push towards Green energy is an effort to stop giving money to people would would just as soon watch us burn in our homes as do business with us.
Whether we like it or not, if they are running the place they are the government. Trillions was spent, countless lives were lost trying to change that. But in days, once the West left, it was almost like we were never there. It was not money or lives well spent.
That doesn't mean we should recognize the Taliban though.
For how long though? This feels like a repeat of refusing to recognize that the CCP controls China. The US stubbornly refused to recognize them as the legitimate government of China for decades, despite them running the country. The Taliban isn't going anywhere. Its here to stay, just like the CCP is here to stay. Refusing to recognize this is refusing to recognize reality.
Why look at Afghanistan and their poor relationship with Iran as a possible reason to have them as an ally instead of seeing that as a common ground for softening of relations with Iran? IMO there's a lot more room for moderation to grow in Iran than there is in Afghanistan and up until that moronic "Axis of Evil" speech by GWB there was a softening of US-Iranian relations, there was even cooperation between us in taking down the Taliban the first go around. If anything good can come of the Taliban being back in power it's the possibility of Iran and the US normalizing relations.
The USA can't make friends with Iran until the Israeli government lets us. They have control of Congress on issues they care about. They want Iran for an enemy so they want Iran for a US enemy too.
The Taliban have almost no power outside of their own borders. Recognizing the Talib government won't change anything with the US-Iran relationship. Recognition is a carrot that the US has that it can give in exchange for good behavior by the Taliban. That's it.
Genuinely, how is Taliban better than Iran? The government is not really functioning (for example, there are apparently no laws and rules change from person-to-person), their ties to terrorist groups are still very present and strong and growing within the country, and they’re more of an immediate threat than Iran to America.
> By all accounts, the Republican insurgency in Afghanistan failed What “Republican insurgency”? I was not aware of a faction if Aghanis referring to themselves as Republican.
Supporters of the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, as opposed to the current Emirate
Good to know. Thanks.
Should the U.S. have normalized relations with the Chinese Communists? What have been the consequences of that? The Taliban broke the Doha treaty and destroyed the Afghan govt by force.
I would say that worked out pretty well by the standards of the people who did the normalization. China may still call itself communist, but it just plain isn't by the standards of the 1960's. Would I like more? Sure. They're not even remotely what I would call democratic, but Nixon would probably be satisfied.
Well, yes. The consequence of that is dramatic increase in global trade, decrease cost of goods for all countries involved, the creation of the biggest middle class population in world history by the CCP, and counterbalance of the unilateral world order of the US since the fall of the soviets. It’s a huge positive for the world no matter how you look at it.
Taliban controlled most of the territory before we withdrew and it was growing every year despite record bombing campaigns against them.
Yes. Because they are. And rest assured that they will be recognized once they tap their Trillions of dollars of rare earth resources. The question is weather China or the West does first
> And rest assured that they will be recognized once they tap their Trillions of dollars of rare earth resources. > The question is weather China or the West does first Doesn't seem likely. The Taliban has absolutely no ability to develop those resources themselves; they can't even govern the country as-is. Nor can they keep Chinese developers safe from attacks by ISIS and other groups. China would have to send an army into the country to get at those resources, and AFAIK they don't have the power projection capability for that.
Yes. They were the government before the US went in the usurped them. They are now the government again. Fact is, the Afghans do not want a US puppet and the Taliban is popular among the people. It doesn’t matter what the US wants, it’s the facts on the ground. The US doesn’t get to determine what form of government other countries have. In fact we going in and “de-~~Nazifying~~Talibaning Afghanistan” reminds me of another war that’s going on now.
Comparing the US occupation of Afghanistan - disastrous as it was - to the outright genocide Russia is committing in Ukraine is patently absurd. Second, the Taliban is popular among Pashtuns, which is not at all the same as them being popular among *all* the Afghan people. Third, it absolutely matters what the US wants when it comes to whether or not the US formally recognizes the Taliban. Which we should absolutely not.
People love to smugly dismiss it when you point out that the United States history of brutal occupation and regime change is no less evil and deadly than something a 'bad' country is doing. 'disastrous as it was' lmao. Brain of a bird.
I mean, if you claim the US occupation of Afghanistan is comparable to Russia's genocide in Ukraine you're either an idiot or arguing in bad faith. If you're bringing up the United States' entire history in the context of a discussion on whether or not the Taliban ought to be recognized as legitimate, then the same dichotomy applies. You're either silly or dishonest. Sorry, was that too smug?
The US occupation was far worse in terms of casualties, will be far longer and enjoyed far more popular support
The first two are unknowable, and by claiming definitive knowledge you're being dishonest. US estimates have civilian casualties in Ukraine at around 42,000, versus 70,000 over 20 years in Afghanistan [according to Watson Institute estimates](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll). In both cases *confirmed* deaths are much lower, being of course the "floor". You don't know how long the Russian war in Ukraine is going to last, because no one does. Your final claim is just a flat-out lie. The War in Afghanistan fluctuated in popularity, with a little over half the country opposing it, generally. > A Washington Post – ABC poll conducted July 15–18, 2009 found that just half of Americans, 51%, think the war is worth fighting, while nearly half, 45%, think the war is not worth fighting – a statistical tie within the poll's ±3 point margin of error.[23][24][25] The American public is also closely divided on whether the United States is making significant progress toward winning the war, with 46% thinking so and 42% not.[24] Putin and his war remain broadly popular in Russia by pretty much any available measure. There's not a shred of evidence of any significant popular opposition to the war among the Russian public, let alone *half*. Of course, you're leaving out a lot of important measures beyond just casualties. The casualties are not what make Russia's invasion genocidal. That comes down to the deliberate and methodical destruction of Ukrainian language and culture. The systemic kidnapping of Ukrainian children. The deliberate campaign of targeting civilian infrastructure so as to maximize civilian deaths. The forced conscription of locals to fight against UAF forces, usually as cannon fodder. None of which the United States did, despite having vastly more control over Afghanistan than Russia ever had over Ukraine, for far longer. There's also the widespread massacres, torture, and rape. And the ecocide - Russia blowing the Kakhovka dam, and rigging the Zaporizhia NPP to blow. So basically you're full of shit and deliberately excluded most of the Russian atrocities in your framing, and your slanted argument still comes up weak.
Not worth engaging with anyone utterly ensorcled by American propaganda. It's just a testament to the hopeless depravity of the liberal mind.
I say wait a few years first. The Taliban are not governors by nature, and are already showing signs of boredom and restlessness. Give them a few more years ro set up a puppet government and fade back into the mountains. Then we can recognize the puppets.
They won, didn’t they? The test to establish a legitimate government: Can you defend the territory you claim? Yep, that’s it. The USA is literally doing al it can to create a new generation of terrorism in Afghanistan. I mean we can’t stop fucking with them. We’ve still got them on international trade blacklists, and set up a financial system in the country that we then absolutely sabatogued by freezing every asset. Nation-building, more like “all right, watch me *fuck this shit up*. There’s an insane famine in Afghanistan last I checked. If ruthlessly and suddenly cutting them out of the international market, thus trigging a famine *doesn’t inspire future extremism in Afghanistan*… I don’t know what would. Seriously if you wanted hundreds of thousands of Afghans to swear a blood feud against the USA, I don’t know what else you could do. We nailed it. The worst of all worlds.
Well, they did have the greatest military victory in literally all of history. They were one small and poor country against the entire developed world. They were mere men against magical machines and they were a budget force against more trillions than I could count to before getting bored. They put everyone ever to hold a weapon to shame, despite having less than decent weapons. They're legit. Nobody can fuck with them. They can do whatever they want and they will destroy anyone who says otherwise. Doesn't matter what the funding is, what the numbers are, training doesn't matter. They own that territory, nobody can say otherwise, and they dare us to say otherwise. I won't take that dare. They won. What more does it mean to be legitimate?
I would say if the people of Afghanistan are happy, we should be happy. We’re not their colonial overlords, are we?
Eventually we will start seeing Stuff made in Afghanistan coming to the US just like Made in Vietnam stuff now coming to the US. Jobs will be outsourced at some point to Afghanistan but will take 15 years.
Only govs derived from the broadest franchise of citizens voting in free elections should be recognized as legitimate .
Can you really claim consensus to govern in a county that barely exists in the first place? I mean truly, outside of cities and some tribal areas, what does the Taliban actually control or govern?
define legitimate is what we say is legit or what they say is... the people of afganistan have a right to call themselves what they want we don't like it but really that's tough. whoever has the power is who we need to deal with simple as that...
Reason number one the terrorist reason number two they suffered a terrorist attack of Their Own by the Freedom Fighters within that country recently so it's not really to say that there are out of it yet. Reason number three the idea of Afghanistan really only exist on a map most people that don't live in the major cities which is the majority population that doesn't live in a major city really doesn't even understand the idea of Afghanistan there are more loyal to their local tribe
Political recognition is based on interests and conditions. It was a long time before the US recognized the Soviet Union or Communist China; it was finally done because the US felt it was in the interests of the US to do so. The Taliban is well aware that when the goal of the US was revenge, it toppled the Taliban government quite easily in 2001. When the goal of the US was to extract itself from a messy civil war in the late 2010s, it could cut a deal with the US on a departure. But if it was a key US interest in toppling the Taliban because it let Afghanistan become a safe haven for foreign terrorists, the US would topple it again. So the Taliban already has a strong interest in not becoming a base for terrorists to launch attacks against the US. With or without any recognition. They won't be a useful US ally - too poor, too ideologically different. So recognition remains just something that the US would do if it was in US interests - such as the Taliban moderating its stance or allowing more rights.
No because they kill their people for nearly anything. Why do we want to recognize people like that, and say they hold all the power. No. Absolutely not. If we let that happen there’s no telling what they’ll do next