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Afghanistan – This Is The End …
This was fast. The Taliban have as of now 18 of 34 province capitals (province) under there control.
- August 6 – Zaranji (Nimruz)
- August 7 – Sheberghan (Jowzjan)
- August 8 – Kunduz (Kunduz)
- August 8 – Sar-e Pol (Sar-e Pol)
- August 8 – Talquan (Takhar)
- August 9 – Aybak (Samangan)
- August 10 – Farah (Farah)
- August 10 – Pul-i Khumri (Baghlan)
- August 11 – Faizabad (Badakhshan)
- August 12 – Ghazni (Ghazni)
- August 12 – Kandahar (Kandahar)
- August 12 – Herat (Herat)
- August 12 – Qala-e-Naw (Badghis)
- August 13 – Lashkar Gah (Helmand)
- August 13 – Tirin kot (Uruzgan)
- August 13 – Chaghcharan (Ghor)
- August 13 – Pul-e Alim (Logar)
- August 13 – Qalat (Zabul)
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Only three of the bigger cities, Kabul, Jalalabad and Mazar-i-Sharif, are not yet in Taliban hands.
Jalalabad and the eastern provinces near the border to Pakistan are Taliban heartland. They will fall automatically. Mazar-i-Sharif, home of the brutal warlord 'General' Dostum, may decide to fight to the end. The fate of Kabul is still open.
The other still yellow provinces will likely change hands with little or no fighting.
Paktﻯawal @Paktyaw4l – 9:06 UTC · Aug 13, 2021
My province has just announced they are surrendering to the Taliban without a fight, Gardez city will be spared from fighting. Scholars and tribal elders are telling government forces that the government is no more, no more fighting.
The U.S. is sending 3,000 soldiers to Kabul to secure the evacuation of its embassy. 650 soldiers are already there. A reserve of 5,000 is kept on bases near the Persian Gulf. Britain will send 600 soldiers. The U.S. will have to evacuate at least 4,000 'embassy' staff of which 1,400 are 'diplomats'.
The AP summarizes the situation:
The onslaught represents a stunning collapse of Afghan forces after the United States spent nearly two decades and $830 billion trying to establish a functioning state after toppling the Taliban in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The advancing Taliban ride on American-made Humvees and carry M-16s pilfered from Afghan forces.
Afghan security forces and the government have not responded to repeated questions from journalists, instead issuing video communiques that downplay the Taliban advance.
Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the Afghan army has rotted from within due to corruption and mismanagement, leaving troops in the field poorly equipped and with little motivation to fight. The Taliban, meanwhile, have spent a decade taking control of large swaths of the countryside, positioning themselves to rapidly seize key infrastructure and urban areas once President Joe Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal.
The difficulty of moving troops out to the provinces means the government is likely to focus all its efforts on defending the capital.
There is fear of a battle for Kabul but I find it unlikely that the Afghan army will take a stand. Who or what are the Afghan soldiers supposed to fight for? Its units are likely to negotiate a peaceful change of command as they have done elsewhere. They will then be told to go home. There may be some bodyguards of this or that warlord or politician who will try to protect their compounds. If they fight they will have little chance to survive.
President Ashraf Ghani and other politicians will soon retreat to their villas in Dubai. In a week or two the whole of Afghanistan may well be, for the first time ever, under total control of the Islamic Emirate.
Our politicians have lied to us over 'bringing democracy' to Afghanistan. Corruption, from Washington DC through Kabul down into the smallest army units in Afghanistan, had long destroyed all hope for better results.
The incompetent military leaders have disregarded their duty when they declared again and again that they have turned the corner of the fight. The intelligence people have never understood Afghanistan. How else could they have misjudged the speed of the current outcome?
All this was well known to anyone who read the reports by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. But lots of weapons were sold and lots of contractors made abstruse profits for projects that were never done. The war was a self licking ice cream cone.
It is good that this scam is now finally ending. The Afghan people will be mostly happy about it. Corruption will end. No more bribes will have to be paid.
The country will continue to be poor but much safer.
It’s funny to see some of the comments, at this obviously late stage in the game, suggesting [some perhaps hoping] the US will somehow pull a rabbit out of the hat, lol!
I suggest the folks read the headline of this article: Afghanistan—This is the End
Bernhard is exactly right. He has been analyzing the Afghanistan situation correctly for many weeks now—even though the rapid events have still caught a lot of us by surprise.
Remember a few weeks ago, everybody was talking about the US PMC mercenaries that were going to be ‘left behind’? What happened to that?
Just another soap bubble. Now we have a few more soap bubbles being carried in the breeze here at the discussion zone. Some are pure fantasyland—like the Taliban is ‘secretly’ working for the CIA and such nonsense. These folks are obviously COPING very very hard, lol!
Others wonder about the sending in of troops to secure the safe exit of the nearly five thousand US ‘diplomats’ and such. They wonder if this means those soldiers will actually fight against the Taliban?
No. It is far far too late for such a thing.
Those soldiers are coming because the US didn’t expect that they would have to pull out their spooks and ‘shit stirrers’ [thousands of them it turns out], as J Swift astutely pointed out in 121.
Those troublemakers were never meant to leave. At least not for a couple of years, similar to the Vietnam scenario, where the south puppet government held on for a couple of years after US pulled out. That was the plan, anyway.
Obviously even that is now burnt toast, lol!
Besides the 5,000 or so US nationals that somehow have to ESCAPE with their big fat exceptional butts intact, there are also many thousands of collaborators, ‘interpreters’ etc. Some say up to 100,000. Canada I think said they will be taking 20,000.
Aside from the stupidity of bringing in such dangerous riffraff to live among your own people [remember the ‘white helmets’ that were welcomed to ‘resettle’ in various western countries a year or two ago, as that US-built bastion of terrorism collapsed in Syria, under heavy Russian-backed house-cleaning?], getting that many people out under the current circumstances is a huge LOGISTICAL nightmare on its own.
Another commenter astutely pointed to the 1975 evac flights from Da Nang to Saigon, on US commercial airliners. Here’s the network news footage of that chaos from 1975.
Look at those cockroaches, all of them armed, some of the shooting at the plane and throwing hand grenades, all of the SOuth Vietnam soldiers—scrambling aboard to save their asses, while leaving the women and children behind. Which was supposed to be the purpose of those mercy flights. A total of five women on that plane!
This is what we could well see in Kabul in a matter of days, or at most weeks. This is why those soldiers are being brought in. So the US nationals can be safe from their own desperate Frankenstein creations, who now want to get out at any cost too. some of whom are going to use force to get on those evac planes.
There will be many cockroaches left behind. They will all be dealt with most appropriately by the Talib, lol! [Uncle T earlier suggested a nicotine patch-like ‘solution’ for some of the scumbags, only involving a C4 ‘patch’ to the forehead, lol!]
Kabul is a huge rat’s nest right now. The Talib have taken most of cities with very little, or almost no fighting at all. Mostly the cockroaches, including governors, Afghan troops etc, were allowed to leave—but leaving the military hardware behind.
There are now only one or two cities, aside from Kabul itself that are not in the hands of the Talib. This is indeed the end!
And yes, we have all been surprised by many things as this astonishing ‘new Taliban’ in a matter of mere hours really, simply took control with almost no resistance.
As I mentioned in my comment 32 upthread: How on earth did this happen? What must have happened behind the scenes with the major players in the Region, Russia, China and Pakistan?
Obviously there has been major coordination between these players and the Taliban.
Translation: Behind the New Taliban stand world powers Russia and China, plus Pakistan. [Plus the SCO, the ‘stans etc].
Bhadrakumar yesterday picked a curious quote from Russian defense minister Shoigu:
What’s important to us is that the border with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan is also taken under the control of the Taliban.
Really? So now Russia is good with a ‘terrorist’ organization that is still officially banned in the country, having taken control of the frontier territories with its Central Asian ally states?
How very interesting.
Bhadrakumar adds his own:
As for Russia and China, Taliban’s consolidation in the North is a factor of stability and security.
So here is the big takeaway: What we are seeing in Afghanistan is not just the victory of the Taliban, but also the victory of the Russia-China ‘double helix’ against the Ponzi Empire!
That’s what Afghanistan was all about from the beginning. US setting up shop in the post-Soviet space. Big Fail!
We will find out more about this incredible backstory in due time.
But in the meantime, we can look forward to more such faceplants in the coming months—in Iraq, in Syria, etc.
Posted by: Gordog | Aug 14 2021 15:47 utc | 182
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