Afghan government collapse.

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For the US, was this result like a new Vietnam?

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US didn’t even know what it was doing there anyway, other than having a reason to invest in military weapons.

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Statement by the President.

That’s a great statement for Biden. Surprising how good he is being in comparison with Obama.

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My dad told me a lot about how his dad fought for the Nationalists against the Communists during the Chinese Civil War, and how the Nationalist army was vastly superior in numbers, and were supplied with weapons and food from the US. The Nationalists then proved to be so cartoonishly corrupt that the US gave up on them, and then they fell within less than two years. Entire divisions simply surrendered to the Communists without a shot fired. To me, it's watching the exact same thing at 10X speed.

To me this either looks more like US Vietnam II OR the US version of the Afghan-Soviet conflict  (Which was already known as the Soviets version of “Vietnam” lol).

Funny thing is that during the Afghan-Soviet conflict, Soviets were facing similar challenges US did. They wanted to keep Socialist influence in Afghanistan and biggest enemies were the religious fundamentalists who were against it because they saw it as a religious war (Atheists and Christians locally were with Socialist government).

And then since it was Cold War, you had US, western powers and even China giving military supplies to the religious fundamentalists to fight against the Soviets and the Afghan government, because they didn’t want expansion of Soviet influence. Soviet Union could take control of most places but couldn’t destroy them, which made them leave Afghanistan in 1989. Some say this war accelerated the fall of the Soviet Union. The geography of Afghanistan makes it easier for the fundamentalists to hide between the big mountains.

The funny thing is that US occupied the USSR position in the last years with similar accomplishments and failures. Funny enough, after 9/11 they became against the religious fundamentalists they supported and armed against USSR during Cold War and this time decided to side with Afghan government since Cold War had already ended. Afghanistan is uncontrollable country victim of foreign countries who don’t care about it treating it as a path for their own interests and at the same time the nightmare of these same powerful countries.

After all, USSR fall happened just after they took their troops out of Afghanistan and US had to face terrorist attacks after financing religious fundamentalists in the region, also entering similar unsolvable conflict in Afghanistan just to lose, exactly like USSR.

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Here is a key point that no one is making: if Biden had actually stuck to the terms of the Doha Agreement signed by the Trump admin and the Taliban, this massive humiliation for Washington would not have happened. According to the terms of the agreement, the US/NATO were supposed to be totally out of Afghanistan by May 1st of this year. But Biden wanted to stick around a little longer, probably to score some cheap domestic political points with the Neocons that backed his election campaign.

Yes, the Taliban would have still launched this year’s spring offensive that eventually took the entire country in dramatic style. But the US would have already been out if Biden had honored the agreement and left by May. The Taliban warned that there would be big consequences for this, but pretty much no one in the West took them seriously. Oops! Now we got to see Saigon 2.0, for real.

Also, one last important point to be made. This massive defeat for the Neocons has totally discredited them and their crazy ideology for all time. History did not end in the early 1990s and the US was clearly not destined to rule the entire world. The demented “Unipolar Moment” is now but a distant memory. For anyone that has been living under a Neocon rock for the last ten years: we are now living in a fully multi-polar world with multiple different power centers (most notably: the US, China, Russia and India).

Superpowers tend to fall when they get too arrogant and entitled about their power because that makes them lazier on the long term. It’s always the same story over and over again across history but all of them convince that this time it won’t happen to them because they’re all supposed to be “different”. Roman Empire lasted four centuries, these people calling the “end of history” in early 90s were just telling the narrative they WANTED to believe in. It was never realistic on any sense.

US rised in the XX century a lot in thanks to the creativity, optimism and also the idealistic spirit and ideas they convinced people of. Elites from mid-XX century weren’t saints but they were much more confident and competent than the soulless technocrats leading today. Who gets inspired by them?

In the past people were literally reaching to the moon. Nowadays all you hear from US is that they cannot do anything good to their people, like universal healthcare, while still actively working and investing a fortune to make other distant places worse.

USSR fall ended up being a curse in the long term to USA precisely because it gave them these false certainties. Will be fun seeing the development and reaction of the opportunistic international submissive rats spread in multiple countries along the coming decades though.

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https://twitter.com/samhusseini/status/1427068129839042564
This.....is.....brutal.

I didn’t fully understand it until I read the author’s name. Wow. Just wow.

He celebrated the same situation that ended up backfiring on his face years later. How does someone like that gets to sleep at night, knowing he sold out his own people and country? This is heavy stuff.

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While it's clear US forces and the Biden Admin were ill prepared for this, it's too easy to shift the blame only on ourselves and our allies. This situation is equally - if not more - a catastrophic failure of a corrupt Afghan govt that never managed to win enough public support, an incompetent military leadership and outright quitting members of the Afghan forces, who technically are superior to the Taliban militarily.

Another major NATO mistake was clearly not to take roles of other regional players into account, Pakistan in particular. Taliban would have never gotten that strong without political, military and logistical support from outside. Unfortunately, we never went forcefully enough after their supporters. To extinguish a fire, you first need to cut off the oxygen.

You’re overthinking it. US never really cared about ending terrorism in the region so why would they do that? lol

There was a specific group of people who benefited from the extension of this unnecessary war. What’s the point of producing war guns, planes and equipments if you’re not involved in a war?

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What on earth is ISIS-K's justification for that?

Uhhh putting way more fire into the sh**tstorm that is going on between two declared enemies of ISIS (US and Taliban)?

It humiliates US more in the eyes of domestic audiences and the world + Undermines Taliban plans of getting international recognition they want if a conflict is stimulated. Plus it sends the message ISIS is still relevant, by participating on something that is getting tons of media worldwide.