How did the United States cause the Taliban control of Afghanistan?
The Taliban were in control before the US invasion following the 9/11 attacks. Although the US failed in training the Afghan military, it seems like the Taliban would be in control regardless. The alternative to occupation would be a more complete destruction of the country.
I don't think the parent comment is describing the humanitarian crisis going this far back, but the US is at least partially responsible for the pre-9/11 Taliban going back to the support of the Afghan mujahideen in the Cold War.
I tried to untangle all this stuff, but it looked really complicated. Apparently the US encouraged radical Islam as a way of opposing Soviet occupation - resisting state-sponsored atheism and culture and all. But there were a bunch of mujahideen groups, spanning multiple ethnic groups and ideologies.
After the occupation ended, a bunch of the groups signed onto the Peshawar Accord to create a government, but a few of the groups (notably Gulbuddin, who later razed Kabul) didn't, and sparked a civil war. Pakistani intelligence (ISI) backed Gulbuddin, and amidst the bloodshed the Taliban emerged as a force countering all the warlords tearing the place apart. Sensing the winds change, ISI backed the Taliban, who cleaned up the civil war and seized control. I'm not sure what radicalized the Taliban, other than seeing the bloodshed as products of moral failing and not heeding the Qur'an.
From Wikipedia, the early Taliban actually participated in peaceful interfaith debates with Christians and Hindus while it was in Pakistan. I'd like to know how it got so extreme.
“The alternative to occupation would be a more complete destruction of the country.”
You seem to be conflating a theocratic regime being in charge with the bloodshed of war, or as you call it, occupation. A great many people died and were horribly injured throughout the 20 year war. But you think the wrong regime would have been a “more complete destruction?”
So the way I see it, there no way we can tolerate the Taliban facilitating attacks on US soil.
So after the initial invasion and defeat of Taliban forces, what is the correct move? Occupation didn’t work, but leaving after overthrowing the theocracy just allows the theocracy to reform.
It seems to me that a more thorough elimination of the remaining Taliban is the only other option here. I am legitimately asking what the other options are.
I've spent the better part of a decade thinking about this question, and I've settled on one answer: if the objective was to erase the theocracy and install a western-style or western-aligned government, we should've treated Afghanistan like an Imperial colony. Fully erase all traces of how Afghans managed themselves, force them to pay taxes to the US government for providing security and administering their government, and hand off administration of that government in pieces over the course of a generation as the civil infrastructure matures.
I think this is a stupid objective, however. It would be astronomically expensive, it would've cost untold amounts of blood, and "doing Colonialism" in the 21st century is frowned upon for good reason. What would we gain? What would the Afghans gain? Money from mineral extraction? In the end, we did psuedo-colonialism anyway, and it got us nothing but dead Americans and dead Afghans.
I had one idea. Invest $60-80 billion dollars a year in infrastructure and humanitarian projects inside Afghanistan from 2002-2020. That's about triple their total GDP and similar to the cost of war. That investment gradually leads to deradicalization, both because people become better educated and happier, but also because they start to see the US as a legitimate friend.
There were lots of infrastructure and state building projects. Not only by US, many European countries funded development projects too. It was hard due to the ongoing violence, sometimes a project was funded and outcome couldn't even be inspected in situ, but only from satellite images.
I was quite specific in my idea. $60-80 billion worth, without ousting the Taliban. That's different to the current state of affairs, which is a much smaller number than that, and which involved military intervention.
I'm genuinely surprised that people still think "do more NGO investment" would've worked. What do you think we did for 20 years there? I walked I don't know how many patrols where we went to hand out money to Afghan "contractors" for building a road, and they'd just disappear after they got paid.
>That investment gradually leads to deradicalization, both because people become better educated and happier, but also because they start to see the US as a legitimate friend.
There have been plenty of indications in the news, if you've been paying attention. It is in China's security interest that its neighbor does not fall into chaos. The CCP have already met with a delegation of Taliban leaders.
China will reportedly offer infrastructural investment in exchange for a modicum of peace. There are also many natural resources which China is eyeing.
The US didn't. The anti-US propagandists will lie and claim the US created the Taliban in the process of supporting the Mujahideen against the Soviets, which is a stretched fiction. Back in reality, there were and are many powerful regional factions in Afghanistan, many disparate groups of Mujahideen. The Taliban came into existence long after the Soviets left Afghanistan.
The circumstances which lead to the rise of these forces, is informed by the history, including both Russian and American investment in a 'war by proxy'
I also used to repeat the simplistic trope the US made the taliban de-facto since the US made the Muhahideen to defeat the russian backed puppet government. I think it has elements of truth, but there's obviously a lot more to it.
It's not "there's nothing here" simple either. The Taliban might not have taken root if the whole war-by-proxy hadn't happened. Some stuff I read suggests modern Afghanistan is like Kurdistan: unfathomably hard to make work, against the political realities of the neighbours and the different pressures inside the country.
How did the United States cause the Taliban control of Afghanistan?
The Taliban were in control before the US invasion following the 9/11 attacks. Although the US failed in training the Afghan military, it seems like the Taliban would be in control regardless. The alternative to occupation would be a more complete destruction of the country.