Posted on 08/20/2021 3:06:33 AM PDT by Kaslin
When politicians and journalists talk about Afghanistan, most of them do not know what it really is. That is to say, they are distracted by the fact that it has had a flag, a territory, and a name, and until recently, its official representatives participated in a variety of international forums, such as the United Nations.
Until last week, it even had a (semi-) democratic, elected, but remarkably corrupt government, which as a governing class supervised an equally corrupt police, judiciary, and army. All that is gone now. Why? Because the Taliban are better anthropologists than President Biden, the CIA, the American and NATO military, and their intelligence (or not very intelligent) branches, as well as all the leaders of Canada, Britain, and the European Union combined.
How did a bunch of semi-literate tribal leaders without B.A.s, M.A.s, and Ph.D.s outsmart the over-educated leaders and experts in the West? That is to say "us"? Here is a concise answer.
Afghanistan as an idea is a political entity only about one hundred eighty years old, with a complex political history that has included the total defeat and massacre of one of Queen Victoria's armies from India in 1842, often written about as the "retreat from Kabul." But in reality, Afghanistan is simply a territory of mountains and deserts filled with competing Muslim tribes of different ethnicities, many of them nomadic or semi-nomadic. These include but are not limited to the Aimaq, Baloch, Hazara, Kyrgyz, Nuristani, Pashtun, Sadat, Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbek. Most are Sunni Muslims, but many are Shia. The largest and most dominant ethnic group are the Pashtun, who speak an Indo-European language but have been Muslims for centuries.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Pournelle used to refer to the president of Afghanistan as “the mayor of Kabul”. Apparently he understood the country better that our military and foreign policy elites.
Little by little, the world will be introduced to a thoroughly screwed up, but "they're gettin' there" nation of animals. >
>>(semi-) democratic, elected, but remarkably corrupt government, which as a governing class supervised an equally corrupt police, judiciary, and army. <<
For a minute there, I thought he was talking about Washington.
One of the guys on talk radio a few years ago was explaining how Europe ‘occupied’ territories in the Middle East hundreds of years ago, which is no different than the way we ‘occupied’ Iraq and Afghanistan. They’d basically be clustered together in a dozen forts and would only go outside of these forts for short periods (highly armed), or when traveling between these forts, no different than us in Afghanistan. Compare that to how we occupied Japan and Europe after WW2, and to this day, where our soldiers can safely go anywhere in the those countries when they want.
There was a term for that type of ‘occupation’ in the Middle East, but I don’t remember it.
Actually, the way Islam took over the ME in the first place set the pattern. Mohammed was a tribal warlord from a primitive, migratory tribe who wreaked havoc on the collapsing and weakened cities that had never recovered from the fall of the Roman Empire. Even if they had not been part of it formally, they were within its sphere of influence and benefitted from the stability it brought.
Mohammed’s savage military conquests were one thing, but his true stroke of genius was the invention of Islam, a syncretist “religion” that was part Arab tribal nationalism, part pagan moon-worship, part ritual law based on a sort of parody of Jewish law, and a faux history again based on a distortion of Jewish history, with a few Christian figures thrown in to placate the Christian population of the ME at that time.
When he took over a city, he imposed this bizarre religion on them - by the sword, of course - and the religion of Islam became their new identity. So this imposed unity under a non-tribal identity, even though his tribe actually kept the upper hand. To this day, certain levels of Islamic authority are limited to descendants of Mohammed, who had no sons and thus relied on the family line through his daughter Fatima, and the identification of the descendants is one of the conflicts between Shia and Sunni.
So that’s what the Taliban is doing here in Afghanistan.
I wonder what’s going to happen when the Chinese start bossing the Taliban around. After all, the Chicoms are all atheists while the Taliban are hyper-religious.
Hey Taliban remember, “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”
That is a good question.
Who is Pournelle?
The Chinese, at the very least, will do what they did to the Tibetans and what they are doing to the Uyghurs if they need to. No ROE, no rules at all to get what they want and no one will hear about how they got it.
“I thought he was talking about Washington”.
District of Corruption”.
Many talibanimals are Anthropithecus.
Jerry Pournelle. A really interesting man, passed a few years ago. Was a cold warrior who did strategic game theory stuff, was an assistant mayor to Sam Yorty in Los Angeles (I believe the last Republican mayor), was a noted computer columnist in Byte magazine back in the early days of PCs, and a very successful science fiction writer. Probably best described as a paleocon politically. Was very against the war in Iraq and the nation building part of Afghanistan. Thought we should have built space power satellites for energy independence from the Middle East instead of going to war there.
His kids still keep his web page up. He hated the word blog, but he arguably had the first blog. It was daily reading for me, along with Free Republic. Oh, and his first word processing computer is in the Smithsonian.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/
The following statement is meant to sound very intelligent but is actually silly and explains nothing:
“Afghanistan as an idea is a political entity only about one hundred eighty years old”
The idea of the unified German state is only about 150 years old. Does that make that idea illegitimate to the German people?
Actually, the modern democratic nation state, the world over, is not much more than 200 years old. Is ancient history around the world more legitimate to people everywhere, than the ideas they have today about their land?
The Taliban are not different than the now deposed government of Afghanistan in wanting to unify the land, contrary to its fractured history.
The Taliban are NOT trying to preserve or respect that “anthropological” history of very distinct
peoples in the land. They want to trash the history of Afghanistan and subdue everything and everyone under Pashtun dominant, radical theocratic dominant religious tyranny. Even in past Muslim periods of Afghanistan there was less religious tyranny than with the Taliban.
If we bought all the authors arguments, the U.S. should definitely totally break up today. The idea of it being one nation is too young and does not recognize the differences among us.
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