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Afghanistan: Mission Accomplished

TopCat said:
Do you think the Ghani led government had more legitimacy? If so, why?
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The premise of the Ghani government was that it was a coalition of warlords and elders. A bulwark of powerful interests against the Taliban. Part of the reason why the Taliban have been able to sweep through the country with such ease was the instability of the US backed government, which was built on a fundamental misunderstanding of the country, the balance of forces and the interests and motivations of those that made up the newly constructed administration.

The American strategy: to install ‘liberal democracy’ was the wrong strategy, at the wrong time, in the wrong place and with alliances with the wrong people.
 
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Smokeandsteam said:
The premise of the Ghani government was that it was a coalition of warlords and elders. A bulwark of powerful interests against the Taliban. Part of the reason why the Taliban have been able to sweep through the country with such ease was the instability of the US backed government, which was built on a fundamental misunderstanding of the country, the balance of forces and the interests and motivations of those that made up the newly constructed administration.

The American strategy: to install ‘liberal democracy’ was the wrong strategy, at the wrong time, in the wrong place and with alliances with the wrong people.
Click to expand...
But the question I asked?
 
Dogsauce said:
Despite the history of these cunts, going door to door looking for collaborators/villains after taking control of a country isn’t (in general) anything particularly unexpected or necessarily massively sinister is it? Any army would do that for their own security.
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Oh come off it. Sinister is exactly the word. These door knockers include freed criminal prisoners looking for the procecuter and his family.
 
Smokeandsteam said:
If only it was containable to Urban. In fact it's broadly representative of liberal/left thought as Varoufakis' (someone I previously had some time for) 'hang in their sisters' tweet so nauseatingly demonstrated. Our side is fucked by these types again and again.
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I don't think people are objecting to calling the Taliban medieval for that reason though.

I object to calling them "medieval" and, yes, "othering" them for probably the opposite reasons to what you're imagining.

Aside from the points raised by others about Taliban ideology being a relatively modern phenomenon, the failure of liberal democratic institutions is not caused by "medievalism" and it is not something alien or unrelated to the contemporary political situation of western countries either.

I don't think the failure of state building in Afghanistan should be looked at independently from the failure of the Arab Spring.

Nor should it be looked at as unrelated to the global decay of liberal democratic institutions. This includes the emergence of China as a mature fascist superpower and their attempts to export their tools of repression to developing countries, and the transformation of Hong Kong into a repressive totalitarian police state; the return of military dictatorship in Myanmar; revanchist Russian gangster capitalism and Eurasianism; erosion of democratic norms by religious and nationalist Conservatives in Hungary and Poland; and in the Anglosphere, we also have a general loss of privacy and the rise of surveillance capitalism and unaccountable power of tech companies to shape and regulate public discourse; a brazen yet failed attempt by a President of the United States to overturn the results of a democratic election, backed by populist nationalist supporters willing to use violence, and an openly corrupt British government continually undermining rule of law and separation of powers, stacking public institutions, broadcasters and regulators with their supporters, and legislating against the right to protest.

The problem with "othering" the Taliban as mediaeval is twofold. First, a tendency to see non-western regimes as fundamentally alien is also what western tankie types who support anything if its perceived to be against the west do. Syria, China, Russia or wherever are not real places to these people, but kind of imaginary foils to the west, which allows them to support reactionary regimes in other countries which they would never dream of supporting in a western country. I'm sure we are on the same page here in disliking these people.

The second problem which comes from othering these regimes is a failure to see them as local expressions of a modern systematic failure of liberal democracy to deliver.

I think this ultimately stems from the loss of sovereignty and declining power of labour caused by globalisation, as well as a kind of global transformation from 20th Century capitalism into a kind of rentier, neo-feudal economy, with inflation of real estate being a key part of the global financial system. Both of these things have already made liberal democratic institutions wholly inadequate for delivering a society in which democracy is more than a formality.

I think the only way out of this is to double down on internationalism, but not in a western-centric way which kneejerk supports any perceived enemy of the west. Instead, it means recognising that the interests of people protesting against corruption in Russia are not dissimilar to the interests of people protesting against anti-protest legislation in the UK, and that the British establishment is in fact heavily intertwined with Russian gangster capitalists investing in UK property and football clubs; recognising the complicity of western corporations, universities and financial institutions in Chinese fascism and making common cause with Uyghur, Hong Kong or Tibetan groups on this basis; and recognising the similarities between the Taliban and right wing terrorism in the US - from incels to white supremacists - and making common cause on this basis.

The problem is breaking out of a kind of binary thinking left over as a Cold War remnant, recognising that we already essentially live in one world, and trying to create a political vocabulary and language which allows for a genuinely global democratic movement and authentic solidarity with progressive parts of Afghan society. Dismissing the Taliban as medieval is a problem not because we need to be touchy feely and nice to the Taliban or something, but because it underestimates how ominous their takeover of Afghanistan is for democratic ideals everywhere, not just for the region.
 
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Rimbaud said:
I don't think people are objecting to calling the Taliban medieval for that reason though.

I object to calling them "medieval" and, yes, "othering" them for probably the opposite reasons to what you're imagining.

Aside from the points raised by others about Taliban ideology being a relatively modern phenomenon, the failure of liberal democratic institutions is not caused by "medievalism" and it is not something alien or unrelated to the contemporary political situation of western countries either.

I don't think the failure of state building in Afghanistan should be looked at independently from the failure of the Arab Spring.

Nor should it be looked at as unrelated to the global decay of liberal democratic institutions. This includes the emergence of China as a mature fascist superpower and their attempts to export their tools of repression to developing countries, and the transformation of Hong Kong into a repressive totalitarian police state; the return of military dictatorship in Myanmar; revanchist Russian gangster capitalism and Eurasianism; erosion of democratic norms by religious and nationalist Conservatives in Hungary and Poland; and in the Anglosphere, we also have a general loss of privacy and the rise of surveillance capitalism and unaccountable power of tech companies to shape and regulate public discourse; a brazen yet failed attempt by a President of the United States to overturn the results of a democratic election, backed by populist nationalist supporters willing to use violence, and an openly corrupt British government continually undermining rule of law and separation of powers, stacking public institutions, broadcasters and regulators with their supporters, and legislating against the right to protest.

The problem with "othering" the Taliban as mediaeval is twofold. First, a tendency to see non-western regimes as fundamentally alien is also what western tankie types who support anything if its perceived to be against the west do. Syria, China, Russia or wherever are not real places to these people, but kind of imaginary foils to the west, which allows them to support reactionary regimes in other countries which they would never dream of supporting in a western country. I'm sure we are on the same page here in disliking these people.

The second problem which comes from othering these regimes is a failure to see them as local expressions of a modern systematic failure of liberal democracy to deliver.

I think this ultimately stems from the loss of sovereignty and declining power of labour caused by globalisation, as well as a kind of global transformation from 20th Century capitalism into a kind of rentier, neo-feudal economy, with inflation of real estate being a key part of the global financial system. Both of these things have already made liberal democratic institutions wholly inadequate for delivering a society in which democracy is more than a formality.

I think the only way out of this is to double down on internationalism, but not in a western-centric way which kneejerk supports any perceived enemy of the west. Instead, it means recognising that the interests of people protesting against corruption in Russia are not dissimilar to the interests of people protesting against anti-protest legislation in the UK, and that the British establishment is in fact heavily intertwined with Russian gangster capitalists investing in UK property and football clubs; recognising the complicity of western corporations, universities and financial institutions in Chinese fascism and making common cause with Uyghur, Hong Kong or Tibetan groups on this basis; and recognising the similarities between the Taliban and right wing terrorism in the US - from incels to white supremacists - and making common cause on this basis.

The problem is breaking out of a kind of binary thinking left over as a Cold War remnant, recognising that we already essentially live in one world, and trying to create a political vocabulary and language which allows for a genuinely global democratic movement and authentic solidarity with progressive parts of Afghan society. Dismissing the Taliban as medieval is a problem not because we need to be touchy feely and nice to the Taliban or something, but because it underestimates how ominous their takeover of Afghanistan is for democratic ideals everywhere, not just for the region.
Click to expand...

Good post.
 
Rimbaud said:
I don't think people are objecting to calling the Taliban medieval for that reason though.

I object to calling them "medieval" and, yes, "othering" them for probably the opposite reasons to what you're imagining.

Aside from the points raised by others about Taliban ideology being a relatively modern phenomenon, the failure of liberal democratic institutions is not caused by "medievalism" and it is not something alien or unrelated to the contemporary political situation of western countries either.

I don't think the failure of state building in Afghanistan should be looked at independently from the failure of the Arab Spring.

Nor should it be looked at as unrelated to the global decay of liberal democratic institutions. This includes the emergence of China as a mature fascist superpower and their attempts to export their tools of repression to developing countries, and the transformation of Hong Kong into a repressive totalitarian police state; the return of military dictatorship in Myanmar; revanchist Russian gangster capitalism and Eurasianism; erosion of democratic norms by religious and nationalist Conservatives in Hungary and Poland; and in the Anglosphere, we also have a general loss of privacy and the rise of surveillance capitalism and unaccountable power of tech companies to shape and regulate public discourse; a brazen yet failed attempt by a President of the United States to overturn the results of a democratic election, backed by populist nationalist supporters willing to use violence, and an openly corrupt British government continually undermining rule of law and separation of powers, stacking public institutions, broadcasters and regulators with their supporters, and legislating against the right to protest.

The problem with "othering" the Taliban as mediaeval is twofold. First, a tendency to see non-western regimes as fundamentally alien is also what western tankie types who support anything if its perceived to be against the west do. Syria, China, Russia or wherever are not real places to these people, but kind of imaginary foils to the west, which allows them to support reactionary regimes in other countries which they would never dream of supporting in a western country. I'm sure we are on the same page here in disliking these people.

The second problem which comes from othering these regimes is a failure to see them as local expressions of a modern systematic failure of liberal democracy to deliver.

I think this ultimately stems from the loss of sovereignty and declining power of labour caused by globalisation, as well as a kind of global transformation from 20th Century capitalism into a kind of rentier, neo-feudal economy, with inflation of real estate being a key part of the global financial system. Both of these things have already made liberal democratic institutions wholly inadequate for delivering a society in which democracy is more than a formality.

I think the only way out of this is to double down on internationalism, but not in a western-centric way which kneejerk supports any perceived enemy of the west. Instead, it means recognising that the interests of people protesting against corruption in Russia are not dissimilar to the interests of people protesting against anti-protest legislation in the UK, and that the British establishment is in fact heavily intertwined with Russian gangster capitalists investing in UK property and football clubs; recognising the complicity of western corporations, universities and financial institutions in Chinese fascism and making common cause with Uyghur, Hong Kong or Tibetan groups on this basis; and recognising the similarities between the Taliban and right wing terrorism in the US - from incels to white supremacists - and making common cause on this basis.

The problem is breaking out of a kind of binary thinking left over as a Cold War remnant, recognising that we already essentially live in one world, and trying to create a political vocabulary and language which allows for a genuinely global democratic movement and authentic solidarity with progressive parts of Afghan society. Dismissing the Taliban as medieval is a problem not because we need to be touchy feely and nice to the Taliban or something, but because it underestimates how ominous their takeover of Afghanistan is for democratic ideals everywhere, not just for the region.
Click to expand...
I have been finding it a little strange how little attention what's happening in Hong Kong is getting. I'd thought maybe this is just Covid hogging the headlines and preoccupations but the amount of attention the situation in Afghanistan has recieved suggests otherwise.
 
Rimbaud said:
I don't think people are objecting to calling the Taliban medieval for that reason though.

I object to calling them "medieval" and, yes, "othering" them for probably the opposite reasons to what you're imagining.

Aside from the points raised by others about Taliban ideology being a relatively modern phenomenon, the failure of liberal democratic institutions is not caused by "medievalism" and it is not something alien or unrelated to the contemporary political situation of western countries either.

I don't think the failure of state building in Afghanistan should be looked at independently from the failure of the Arab Spring.

Nor should it be looked at as unrelated to the global decay of liberal democratic institutions. This includes the emergence of China as a mature fascist superpower and their attempts to export their tools of repression to developing countries, and the transformation of Hong Kong into a repressive totalitarian police state; the return of military dictatorship in Myanmar; revanchist Russian gangster capitalism and Eurasianism; erosion of democratic norms by religious and nationalist Conservatives in Hungary and Poland; and in the Anglosphere, we also have a general loss of privacy and the rise of surveillance capitalism and unaccountable power of tech companies to shape and regulate public discourse; a brazen yet failed attempt by a President of the United States to overturn the results of a democratic election, backed by populist nationalist supporters willing to use violence, and an openly corrupt British government continually undermining rule of law and separation of powers, stacking public institutions, broadcasters and regulators with their supporters, and legislating against the right to protest.

The problem with "othering" the Taliban as mediaeval is twofold. First, a tendency to see non-western regimes as fundamentally alien is also what western tankie types who support anything if its perceived to be against the west do. Syria, China, Russia or wherever are not real places to these people, but kind of imaginary foils to the west, which allows them to support reactionary regimes in other countries which they would never dream of supporting in a western country. I'm sure we are on the same page here in disliking these people.

The second problem which comes from othering these regimes is a failure to see them as local expressions of a modern systematic failure of liberal democracy to deliver.

I think this ultimately stems from the loss of sovereignty and declining power of labour caused by globalisation, as well as a kind of global transformation from 20th Century capitalism into a kind of rentier, neo-feudal economy, with inflation of real estate being a key part of the global financial system. Both of these things have already made liberal democratic institutions wholly inadequate for delivering a society in which democracy is more than a formality.

I think the only way out of this is to double down on internationalism, but not in a western-centric way which kneejerk supports any perceived enemy of the west. Instead, it means recognising that the interests of people protesting against corruption in Russia are not dissimilar to the interests of people protesting against anti-protest legislation in the UK, and that the British establishment is in fact heavily intertwined with Russian gangster capitalists investing in UK property and football clubs; recognising the complicity of western corporations, universities and financial institutions in Chinese fascism and making common cause with Uyghur, Hong Kong or Tibetan groups on this basis; and recognising the similarities between the Taliban and right wing terrorism in the US - from incels to white supremacists - and making common cause on this basis.

The problem is breaking out of a kind of binary thinking left over as a Cold War remnant, recognising that we already essentially live in one world, and trying to create a political vocabulary and language which allows for a genuinely global democratic movement and authentic solidarity with progressive parts of Afghan society. Dismissing the Taliban as medieval is a problem not because we need to be touchy feely and nice to the Taliban or something, but because it underestimates how ominous their takeover of Afghanistan is for democratic ideals everywhere, not just for the region.
Click to expand...
You're still talking about liberal democracy and democratic ideals as the thing to be wished for and strived for globally, that all these bad things that are happening are bad mostly because they are the enemies of that ideal. And I haven't got a better idea.
But what's just happened might be seen as showing the hubris of this conviction that a liberal democracy is an unequivocal good thing, that it's what every right thinking person in the world should want. What if instead it has just been a flash in the pan, a couple of hundred years of this idea, in the west, is being mistaken for some sort of natural order. idk.
 
bimble said:
You're still talking about liberal democracy and democratic ideals as the thing to be wished for and strived for globally, that all these bad things that are happening are bad mostly because they are the enemies of that ideal. And I haven't got a better idea.
But what's just happened might be seen as showing the hubris of this conviction that a liberal democracy is an unequivocal good thing, that it's what every right thinking person in the world should want. What if instead it has just been a flash in the pan, a couple of hundred years of this idea, in the west, is being mistaken for some sort of natural order. idk.
Click to expand...

To be clear, I'm saying liberal democracy in its current form is failing to deliver more general and broader democratic aspirations, i.e. a government which genuinely represents its people and governs in their interests. I think democracy in general terms is inherently worth pursuing; but the specific incarnation of liberal democracy is increasingly looking outmoded and inadequate.

I don't really know what the answer is exactly, but I think a progressive political movement today in the west should focus more on representation and political reform; we know democracy as it stands is failing to deliver and has been hijacked by elite interests, but there seems to be precious little focus on how we can put forward some form of democratic renewal.

I think a movement for democratic renewal and the creation of new modern institutions should be a priority for progressive movements in the west. A movement focusing on political and democratic reform in the west creates the conditions for a broader international movement, as you can make common cause with movements in the growing number of countries which are outright authoritarian, and it sidesteps the problem of democracy being cast as a tool of western imperialism if it is also part of a movement against the western political establishment.

What I would like to see is the western left making common cause with "Milk Tea Alliance" transnational East Asian democratic movements, democracy protests in Belarus, and anti-corruption campaigns in Russia etc as part of a global movement for genuine democracy and social justice.

But first we need to reimagine what a 21st Century democracy should look like and come to some consensus on it. That's the difficult first step.
 
teuchter said:
I have been finding it a little strange how little attention what's happening in Hong Kong is getting. I'd thought maybe this is just Covid hogging the headlines and preoccupations but the amount of attention the situation in Afghanistan has recieved suggests otherwise.
Click to expand...

Indeed, there is a long thread on Hong Kong that is basically down to one poster now. They are basically reporting from there but there's not much dialogue. Maybe, like this self, people are overwhelmed by the situation when it's so personal. Maybe not sure how to reply apart from showing solidarity/sorrow.

Apologies for derail.
 
IC3D said:
They are the ones that continued to produce heroin with CIA backing. Basiclly narcos. Not surprising they are flexing now.
www.nytimes.com

A NATION CHALLENGED: DRUGS; Most Afghan Opium Grown In Rebel-Controlled Areas (Published 2001)

United Nations study indicates that most opium grown in Afghanistan this year was in areas controlled by rebel group Northern Alliance; opium harvests in Taliban-controlled areas plummeted after ban by Taliban, however, both factions appear to be heavily involved in, and financed by, drug trade (M)
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
Click to expand...

I just came across a video by Roberto Saviano claiming that heroin production is supported and taxed by the Taliban and the resources that this gives them is what has enabled them to succeed in occupying the country so rapidly, which would seem to contradict what that, sadly paywalled, NYT claims. Equally unhelpfully, for most, it is in Italian.



I don't know how reliable Saviano is considered on this topic, or indeed on anything beyond the workings of the Camorra.
 
Rimbaud said:
I don't think the failure of state building in Afghanistan should be looked at independently from the failure of the Arab Spring.
Click to expand...
Why did the Arab Spring fail?
I'd say because behind every dictatorship or authoritarian is another one ready to take its place.
And why is that?
Id say its because dictatorships of different stripes have been hard imbedded into layers of political establishments in Arab states as both a response to imperialism/colonialism and as products of it, as in where the imperial powers prop up their favourite hardman / do a regime change / proxy politics etc.
This also applies to Taliban -a product of their centuries long political environment. Take away the history of Western imposition and intervention, or even shock-horror imagine a world where the West engaged constructively rather than exploitatively, and the political landscape of the Arab/Muslim world would likely be radically different (as much as it is possible to do alternate histories)
 
tim said:
I don't know how reliable Saviano is considered on this topic, or indeed on anything beyond the workings of the Camorra.
Click to expand...
Just watched the video. He basically just says the defining characteristic of the Taliban is that they are narcotraffickers, that they always have been, and that their returns from the sale of heroin were greater than what the US invested in the ANA, thus potentially a richer army (not sure about that tbh). He also says that Iran will be enemy of the new Taliban regime because they are particularly afflicted by a heroin epidemic they'd like to stop and which they see the Taliban as responsible for. He says 90% of the world's heroin comes via the Taliban and that even legal opiates we find in hospitals often come from Afghan heroin at the source, but are sort of laundered through different countries before being sold to Western pharma companies.

Not sure how trustworthy he is on much of this stuff, not many sources given, but he certainly is the most respected intellectual voice on the drug trade within Italy.
 
Rimbaud said:
To be clear, I'm saying liberal democracy in its current form is failing to deliver more general and broader democratic aspirations, i.e. a government which genuinely represents its people and governs in their interests. I think democracy in general terms is inherently worth pursuing; but the specific incarnation of liberal democracy is increasingly looking outmoded and inadequate.

I don't really know what the answer is exactly, but I think a progressive political movement today in the west should focus more on representation and political reform; we know democracy as it stands is failing to deliver and has been hijacked by elite interests, but there seems to be precious little focus on how we can put forward some form of democratic renewal.

I think a movement for democratic renewal and the creation of new modern institutions should be a priority for progressive movements in the west. A movement focusing on political and democratic reform in the west creates the conditions for a broader international movement, as you can make common cause with movements in the growing number of countries which are outright authoritarian, and it sidesteps the problem of democracy being cast as a tool of western imperialism if it is also part of a movement against the western political establishment.

What I would like to see is the western left making common cause with "Milk Tea Alliance" transnational East Asian democratic movements, democracy protests in Belarus, and anti-corruption campaigns in Russia etc as part of a global movement for genuine democracy and social justice.

But first we need to reimagine what a 21st Century democracy should look like and come to some consensus on it. That's the difficult first step.
Click to expand...
Well bollocks to that.

Democracy and reformism is part of the problem, always has been - always will be.

Democracy and reformism mean a continuation of the status quo - capitalism, the state, parliamentary parasites, the wage system, the class sytem - all things that need to go.

Revolutionary anarchism is what is required.
 
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