Afghan government collapse.

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Could the Taliban take Kabul, a city of over 4 million people, with the forces they have?

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Vietnam 2, electric boogaloo.

Not exactly; the North Vietnamese had tanks and aircraft.

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To be honest, a siege of Kabul looks pretty likely now. Not sure the Taliban would want to do a direct assault.

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At the end of the day, if the Taliban can keep the streets safe, the shops stocked and the lights on, many will tolerate the other stuff.

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At the end of the day, if the Taliban can keep the streets safe, the shops stocked and the lights on, many will tolerate the other stuff.

They did precisely none of that in their previous rule of the country. I don't know why people pretend that Taliban governance is unknowable, we know they don't get the trains to run on time. Their governance was farcical and one of the most incompetent in the world.

There's a reason that the us was able to initaly take over the country with about special forces, local allies and air support. They didn't exactly have a solid hold of the country.

Now they've learned from their mistakes and their long years of hiding and fighting has taught them some very sharp lessons. I'd doubt those lessons will carry into peacetime governance.

Afghanistan doesn't actually have any passenger trains to run on time.

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British Parliament is being recalled next week over all this.

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By the time they figure it out, you tend to end up with a lot of dead people.

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If the USA is smart they should move quickly to form a relationship with the new Taliban regime as there is no alternative to the Taliban in the medium term.   Their goal should be try to lock out as much PRC-Russia influence over the Taliban as possible.

To think that there is someone unironically advocating this from the American perspective. Such a move would establish, once and for all and in the eyes of the world, that American foreign policy is about submission to American interests, period. All of the sanctimonious propaganda about "freedom", "democracy", and "human rights" is permanently revealed to be a complete sham.

But it was a sham the whole time and were used as talking points for domestic support for necessary foreign policies to uphold USA national interests.   Anything else would be a amateurish policy for a Great Power.  I do not see why the USA should not ideally try to get Taliban regime to be a second Saudi Arabia. 

Nations should be left to decide their own political and social systems.  If they are wrong they will figure it out on their own.  Any attempt by an outside power to impose such systems will merely delegitimatize those very ideas as a foreign imposed import.

I think at some point the Taliban need to find - if not allies - at least some kind of stable relationships once aid from the USA and our allies are cut off. You can't run a country into complete economic misery and maintain support among enough people.

The North Koreans are trying.

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Ghani's tweet suggests to me that he's going to set up some form of government in exile.

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The Taliban didn't exist during the Soviet-Afghan War.

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The next step now is to make that what evil happens in Afghanistan stays in Afghanistan, basically.

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Amrullah Saleh (now based in Panjshir) proclaimed himself President, arguing that Ghani had vacated the presidency by fleeing. That means there are 3 people who claim to be in charge of Afghanistan, although I don't see many people taking Ghani very seriously at this point.

Saleh can wait. The Taliban, if they're not careful, is going to end up being the Central Asian equivalent of Theresa May. Trying to please everyone, not committing firmly in one direction or the other, then getting ousted by someone more decisive with a worse hairdo. I dread to think what the Taliban equivalent of BoJo is like.

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Anyone else find the Taliban media conference with commentary about the treatment of women super-cringeworthy.

They were out of their depth on the PR front.

To quote Commander Fred from The Handmaid's Tale:

"We only wanted to make the world better. Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse for some."

I'm half wondering who's the Taliban's Serena Joy...

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

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If it's a choice between killing nine people as "collateral damage" in a drone strike and letting that vehicle kill possibly ninety people in a suicide bombing, then you would go for the former. Although of course, you wouldn't sleep very well at night afterwards.

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Problem is that both sides have an incentive to lie and control of a bunch of mountains is ultimately illusory if you're not actually standing on them.

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We'll see how long that lasts though.

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And in this cases, the resistance have Tajikistan.

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That will probably be "it" for the rest of the year now for fighting. Winter is now going to be the real problem for the people of Afghanistan.

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The Afghanistan government would’ve collapsed had we pulled out any other time. 10 years in the past, or 10 years in the future, the outcome remains the same. We had to end the endless war, but still conduct drone strikes on ISIS-K and such in the Middle East.

The US really needs to review its counter-insurgency strategies, because "Vietnamisation" has failed two times out of the four it has been attempted.

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Women protest again in Kabul against new all-male government:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58490819

Even Donald Trump had a more diverse government, by miles, than this lot.

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The Taliban surrender was on condition of immunity from prosecution, wasn't it?

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I still want to remove Pakistan’s “major non-NATO ally” status though.

I strongly suspect, that if that were to happen, Pakistan would move far more into the Chinese camp. That doesn't make it a bad idea, but it's something that has to be borne in mind.

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The Afghans born after 2001 make up close to half the population too.

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Think is, the "hardline" approach used in 1996-2001 is maybe the only way of bringing the country fully under their control in the short term - but it has a longer term price. As was once famously said by Boris Yeltsin "you can build a throne of bayonets, but you cannot sit on it for long".

The Iron Throne in the books was pretty easy to cut yourself on as well.