The US could take out the Taliban - it would require a 300,000 to 500,000 occupying force and total cultural change to what Afghanistan is, which would require brutal, horrific crimes against humanity, to strip Afghanistan of many of its current beliefs and culture.
Kabul in the 1970s was a groovy, swinging place with women in miniskirts and men wearing tie-dye (as was Tehran). It's the Taliban who imposed the present culture after ejecting the Soviets (with US help). Western strategy should have been to revert it to that, but instead it was to somehow replace the Taliban with a regime that was equally religiously hardline but just happened to be US friendly, and that was obviously never going to work...
While I certainly agree the ideal would be to revert Afghanistan to the pre Soviet-invasion culture, that's a task impossible for any foreign power to accomplish. It would have to come from within, be organic, to be sustainable. No outside power can afford the cost necessary to give Afghanistan a long-term umbrella required to develop relatively quickly. The US couldn't afford to do it, nobody else is going to be able or willing to try. The reason the US is willing to side with less than ideal groups is because there are no practical alternatives, you need a large pillar to put in place or it'll all just fold that much faster when confronted by the Taliban. There are few large pillars in Afghanistan in terms of power structures. The moment the US is gone, the Taliban will immediately press and crush the central government (regardless of which group is in power at the time), any agreements the Taliban sign will be ignored just as North Vietnam ignored everything they agreed to and immediately resumed their conquest.
The Northern Alliance was able to very rapidly smash the Taliban with the help of the US (the Taliban can't easily hold Afghanistan as a military force, so chaos and civil war is guaranteed in the near future). The challenge now and in the future is how to make any positive progress stick. The various powerful groups there, and their perma foreign sponsors (eg Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, etc), are not going to stop trying to topple eachother. The only thing giving Iraq a shot at being an independent, functional nation is their oil resource providing considerable funding to support a central government; Afghanistan of course lacks anything comparable. I don't know where the economy is going to come from to fund a potent central government in Afghanistan (while the Taliban operates on the cheap in comparison). It obviously takes a very long time to build up an economy from scratch in a location like Afghanistan.
The moment the US is gone, the Taliban will immediately press and crush the central government (regardless of which group is in power at the time), any agreements the Taliban sign will be ignored just as North Vietnam ignored everything they agreed to and immediately resumed their conquest.
The Afghans have a saying, "you have watches, but we have time". No American or Western electorate was or is willing to commit to a permanent presence. So here we are!
Democracy means giving some level of choice to folks, and in countries with lots of non-urban non-groovy folks that means the rural parts get what they want. See voting in modern Iran, Egypt (the Muslim Brotherhood was elected), etc.
Afghanistan is only about 25% urban. The Cold War era led to a couple of decades of countries trying to figure out their alignment and less internal strife, but by the 70s the internal rumblings were becoming clear.
We could keep Cairo, Tehran and Kabul groovy as long as we're comfy keeping the boot on the majorities necks.
> Kabul in the 1970s was a groovy, swinging place with women in miniskirts and men wearing tie-dye (as was Tehran).
Imagine thinking you have a coherent picture of what the culture in Afghanistan and Iran was like in the 1970s just because you saw those half-dozen photos people post over and over on reddit.
Imagine thinking you have a coherent picture of what the culture in Afghanistan and Iran was like in the 1970s just because you saw those half-dozen photos people post over and over on reddit.
Imagine thinking you have something to contribute to this discussion, if you’re not going to enlighten us...?
I'm pointing out your lack of knowledge on the issue, which is an order of magnitude more of a contribution than you spewing your Dunning-Kruger level take on the history of the conflict in Afghanistan.
You seem to think that a small number of photographs showing young people in popular western attire from a largely rural country's capitol in 1970s implies that the country at large had something approaching a liberal western mindset on culture and religion at the time. You also seem to be incorrectly conflating the Afghan Mujahideen, the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance.
I'm not going to write a dissertation on the topic on HN, but I'll just say that it's very clear that you don't know as much about it as you think you do, and I implore you and anyone reading the thread to go and read on this 40-year conflict in some detail if they want to gain a meaningful understanding of it.
Kabul in the 1970s was a groovy, swinging place with women in miniskirts and men wearing tie-dye (as was Tehran). It's the Taliban who imposed the present culture after ejecting the Soviets (with US help). Western strategy should have been to revert it to that, but instead it was to somehow replace the Taliban with a regime that was equally religiously hardline but just happened to be US friendly, and that was obviously never going to work...