Afghan government collapse.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This is a humanitarian tragedy, and while I understand the rationale for leaving, it should be obvious to anyone who isn't a hack that Biden has severely mismanaged the process. If this had been happening under his predecessor there would be no hesitation about laying the blame on him.

That is fair comment, but I would simply add that it *is* his predecessor's "process".

Of course that doesn't alter the fact that on this at least, Biden agreed with him.

Yes... as is so often the case with fiascoes, path dependency has been a huge factor here.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

As an historical point it isn't actually true to say, as people often do, that Soviet troops never took the valley. They did, and repeatedly. The valley isn't easy to get into, but there's no defensible landform on earth that can stop a larger and better armed force from breaking through eventually. The problem they found was that it was an absolute nightmare to hold, due to all the small valleys and hollows leading off the main valley and up into the mountains; ideal territory for a guerrilla campaign, particularly in an area where supplying a long-term occupation force is logistically and financially extremely difficult. This isn't meant as a prediction, incidentally, just as background. Whether that sort of thing is feasible depends to an extent on motivation: in the 1980s the defenders were led by a man who turned out to be a tactical genius and were fighting a holy war against opponents who had, after a certain point, openly genocidal intentions against them.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Sad news, though it may be possible that there will be further guerrilla activity in the more remote regions of Panjshir.

Note that there's no necessary contradiction between 'we are in control of the valley' and 'the struggle continues': from the Taliban's present perspective what matters is occupying the towns along the valley floor and being able to say that, having done so, that they 'control' every district. From the perspective of the valley's defenders it's a little different. It's easy to overlook, but the place is huge and the main valley is only a small proportion of the land area.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

On a historical note I believe this is the first time since the 1970's that the whole country is under one government, there are no competing factions left fighting, who could have thought 20 years after 9/11 that this is how it would end, a complete and absolute Taliban victory, not even a civil war or different factions fighting each other but one government in power, first time country has been unified in decades.

Wrong, as usual. For quite a while after the 2001 war, the Taliban controlled (at best) scraps of hillside here and the odd valley there and stayed alive largely due to their ability to regroup safely on the other side of the Durand Line.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What an extremely stupid thing to do.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There's something about this story - leaking to journalists to try to undermine your internal opponents - that reinforces this, awful, awful feeling that I've been having for a while, namely that Taliban II: Electric Boogaloo is likely to be an extremely dark parody of modern political life...