[wita]

“Back in 2004, when Afghan and American generals were laying the foundations for the post-Taliban Afghan army and security forces the number one question in the minds of everybody around the table was “who will pay for it?””

Looks to me like no one had a clue what the real question should have been. Can it be accomplished knowing the fourth century attitude and the existing tribalism?

[maddogtiger]

It has never been a country. Desolve the central government let tribal leaders take over.

[Zhang Fei]

[Looks to me like no one had a clue what the real question should have been. Can it be accomplished knowing the fourth century attitude and the existing tribalism?]

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The Taliban had no problem coming up with an army. It’s not a question of attitude. It’s keeping the government standing until it can survive on its own. This Afghan government is a brand new entity. It’s fragile because of its novelty. After independence from European rule, a number of Third World governments collapsed to foreign-funded (mainly China* and the Soviet Union) Communist insurgencies because they lacked the solidity that only time can bring.

Just past WWII, the Greek monarchy fought a Communist insurgency for 4 years in a conflict that killed 150K people. That’s 2% of the Greek population of 7.5m people, and this was a country where the pre-WWII government simply went back to work after the Nazis were evicted. Whereas the Afghan government is brand new.

* North Vietnam was taking in enormous amounts of Chinese equipment gratis in addition to the billions of dollars of gear they bought from the Soviets right up to the fall of Saigon in 1975. In 1975, the year of the fall of Saigon, it received almost 5,000 artillery pieces and 1m artillery shells from the Chinese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_in_the_Vietnam_War#Confronting_U.S._escalation