this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Yes, it is a fucking problem that a government cannot survive without foreign support against a military with foreign support. That does not, however, equate to the idea that the military with foreign support winning is the only fucking way forward.
And how's that gone? And which people are taking up arms?
Oh, what's that? The same groups of people who defended the republic against the Taliban offensive?
Golly gee, it's almost like what happened isn't some new development of a base of support or the energizing of a new, previously passive group to take up arms, but a continuation of the same fucking fight but with vastly reduced resources. Luckily, as we all know, continuing a fight with the same base of support but vastly reduced resources results in the Underdog Bonus(tm) coming into play, and definitely isn't a delusion of accelerationist dipshittery that a worse position is a better one, actually.
And what about people who say, explicitly, that the Taliban taking power is the only way to free Afghanistan of Imperialist Chains(tm)? You know, like you explicitly said?
"It's not apologia because I don't like them, I'm just making apologies for why their rise to power was good and necessary!"
No, that's still apologia, sorry to burst your bubble. You can own up to it or you can lie to yourself, but don't expect other people to play asspat games with someone who plays apologist for a regime busy banning little girls from learning how to read and mutilating the ones who get too uppity.
'Indigenous peoples' jesus fucking Christ, this is exactly the kind of narrow pseudoacademic bullshit that gets passed around leftist circles as a universal truth that I was bitching about. Who are the indigenous peoples and who are the foreign invaders, here? Do you know anything about Afghan ethnic groups, or how they regard one another? Do you understand the base of recruitment of the Taliban?
If I showed you data regarding the opinions of Afghans before 2021 on the Taliban and the US, would you change your mind, or would you find a convenient excuse to continue licking the Taliban's boots as some expression of 'anti-imperialist' sentiment (by being a representative of Pakistani imperialism, which is somehow immune to this notion you're peddling)?
Apparently, what you really mean is "Bad Camp is always the foreign invader, which means other foreign invaders are suddenly Expressions Of The Indigenous Will"
Did you read the article I linked? Pakistani support was only one item on a very long list of factors. I mean the Taliban expanded their reach massively by being like "we're gonna win anyway, wanna surrender now?" I'm also very much not convinced that foreign support for the Taliban was more than what the Republic was getting. The much more serious problem was that the Republic was unable to maintain the illusion of legitimacy necessary for a state to survive. If you want to condemn me as a Taliban apologist, you first have to confront the very real and ultimately fatal problems confronting the Republic even after 20 years of American money and airstrikes. Here's a hint:
On the other hand, the Taliban were united by a militant Islamist ideology.
And a bunch of independent militias and Taliban defectors, with more speculated to be on the way if those guys can hold on against the Taliban. So no, it is not in fact the same groups of people who defended the republic against the Taliban offensive.
I never said anything about Imperialist Chains™; my point was and is that Afghanistan was going remain stuck in political limbo as long as the US-backed government was in charge. Obviously they were running a much more tolerable operation than the Taliban program, but it wasn't and was never going to be stable enough to survive without being propped up by America and NATO. It was a band aid that did nothing to address, and was mutually exclusive to addressing, the wound festering under it. At some point Afghanistan was going to have to sink or swim; an eternal status quo was simply not tenable. To repeat, the Taliban takeover wasn't good, it wasn't desirable for a Better Future™; it was the unavoidable result of the inevitable US withdrawal, in which case delaying the inevitable hurt many and helped no one. Some band aids simply need to be ripped off, no matter how painful it is to do so. Here's one example: This failure to rip off the band aid early enough has now left Afghanistan woefully underequipped to deal with its climate change problems; Kabul's water resources (I think I got that right) will dry out by 2030 and in this critical period it's the fucking Taliban in charge. Rather than 10 years of war, X years of Taliban rule and 20-X of peacetime non-Taliban rule Afghanistan got 20 years of war and likely (though hopefully not) 10 years of Taliban rule before catastrophe hits, because the Republican government was too busy failing to stop America from dropping bombs on Afghan to be anything but an unstable rump with no legitimacy whatsoever. Also, may I remind you that we're living in the future where America stayed in Afghanistan? While I acknowledge that I might have some of the causes wrong, this is the reality Afghanistan is living. What we're now seeing is
Americans and everyone else, kind of and kind of, respectively.
I wouldn't characterize the fatal lack of legitimacy of the Republic as an anti-imperialist reaction if the data says what you're implying, and that would mean my bit about indigenous peoples was wrong, but that would do nothing to counter the fact that the Republic still fatally lacked legitimacy. You seem to know enough about Afghan ethnic groups that you should know that loyalty to a central administration that asserts its right to rule via a democratic mandate is not how Afghans do things. The short of it is that, no matter the reason, the Taliban had political legitimacy in the eyes of Afghans and the Republican government didn't. That's not a reality you can argue your way around. Edit: And to be clear, I don't mean the moral kind of political legitimacy; I mean political legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghans who are supposed to compose it and whom it's supposed to serve.