Afghan government collapse.

[The Mikado]

Vietnam 2, electric boogaloo.

Not exactly; the North Vietnamese had tanks and aircraft.

Also "Not exactly," the South Vietnamese held out for about a year and a half after American withdrawal. Afghanistan will be 100% Taliban held by year end, and they never held 100% of Afghanistan in the 90s.

[The Mikado]

I suspect that most of this shift is generational.

The war actually did kill a lot of senior officials of the Taliban from the period when they ran Afghanistan. Muhammad Omar dying in 2013 is a good example, even if it was of natural causes: if he had still been Emir of Afghanistan in 2013 rather than a guerilla leader on the run he probably wouldn't have died of natural causes at 53. He'd probably still be running Afghanistan at 61 today.

There's a chance Al is literally right here and that the next Taliban government is mostly made up of people in their 30s and 40s who were basically kids/young adults when the Taliban last ruled Afghanistan just because the people who actually ruled Afghanistan back then are all dead.

[The Mikado]

Vietnam 2, electric boogaloo.

Not exactly; the North Vietnamese had tanks and aircraft.

Also "Not exactly," the South Vietnamese held out for about a year and a half after American withdrawal. Afghanistan will be 100% Taliban held by year end, and they never held 100% of Afghanistan in the 90s.

Well that remains to be seen, I can certainly see some groups in the country not submitting willingly.

Is this still "remains to be seen?" The areas of Afghanistan most hostile or dubious to the Taliban in the 90s are already under their control.

[The Mikado]

I assume one of the first acts of the new Taliban regime is to rename Hamid Karzai International Airport with ex-Prez Hamid Karzai being a old bitter enemy of the Taliban.

What are we thinking, Mullah Omar International Airport?

Maybe make it more generic. Emir Al-Mu'minin International Airport. Commander of the Faithful is a title that COULD refer to Mullah Muhammad Omar, or it could refer to the present leader of the Taliban, or it could refer to Emir Dost Muhammad, the 19th century leader who drove out the Brits in the First Anglo-Afghan War whom Omar took his title in commemoration of.

It keeps things nice and ambiguous, like naming something "Royal" or "Presidential."

[The Mikado]

What a disaster.

https://twitter.com/bsarwary/status/1427002551858311173

There had to have been some way to stall the Taliban’s advance long enough to get these people out, even with a fixed withdrawal date. Failure to do that has got to be one of the single biggest US strategic blunders in decades.

Honestly, I don't think there's a single national American politician in either party who was brave enough to call for mass resettlement of tens/hundred of thousands of Afghans (or Iraqis, earlier) in the US due to domestic political concerns. I certainly remember this exact same argument about the people helping us in Iraq and Afghanistan being accepted as refugees into the US dating back to the George W Bush years, continuing through Obama and Trump, and now into Biden. None of those four presidents actually wanted the political issues of resettling six digits worth of Afghans in the United States.

This is obviously a black mark on Biden's career, but if we'd been steadily taking ten thousand Afghans a year since 2007 or so, we wouldn't need to be in this situation now.

[The Mikado]

I can't remember much from 2001 but i'm curious if it would have been possible to try to root out Bin Laden without doing much to the established order in Kabul?

The Taliban did reject Bush's initial ultimatum to give bin Laden and Al Qaeda over, but honestly even if the Taliban had been interested in cooperating, American bloodlust was so high it's impossible to explain. America wasn't going without a war here even if the Taliban had bent over backwards to cooperate.

What MIGHT have worked is if the US actually had gotten bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and the rest at Tora Bora in December 2001. If Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were captured or killed just three months after 9/11, it's quite possible the US public opinion would be so happy we'd be more open to declaring victory and calling it quits rather than staying another two decades. It's more or less the failure of the punitive aspect of the Afghanistan war that forced us into the nation building aspect to look for SOMETHING to be a win.

[The Mikado]

I don't think there's any reason yet to take Saleh and lil' Massoud (what are we going to call the son of the Lion of Panjshir? The Cub of Panjshir?) all that seriously, let alone as a new Northern Alliance.

Let's see if they survive a few weeks first before we announce that the Northern Alliance has risen from its grave once again.

[The Mikado]

Whatever... meanwhile we some reports that the Taliban are conducting house-to-house searches in Kabul to round up ISKP members.

If you want nightmares, look up the details of how the Taliban executed Najibullah back in 1996. A lot of members of IS Khorasan might find themselves wishing they had the instantaneous end of an American drone strike by the end of this.

Honestly, if the Taliban wants to be on good terms with the US as they apparently do, gruesome public executions of IS fighters would be, depressingly enough, an absolute PR goldmine among Americans wanting something more visceral than a drone strike.

[The Mikado]

Vietnam 2, electric boogaloo.

Not exactly; the North Vietnamese had tanks and aircraft.

Also "Not exactly," the South Vietnamese held out for about a year and a half after American withdrawal. Afghanistan will be 100% Taliban held by year end, and they never held 100% of Afghanistan in the 90s.

Well that remains to be seen, I can certainly see some groups in the country not submitting willingly.

Is this still "remains to be seen?" The areas of Afghanistan most hostile or dubious to the Taliban in the 90s are already under their control.

Feeling really, really good about this call back in August.

Not as good for the people of Afghanistan, of course.