Jump to content

International Events VII- Afghan Catastrophe


DireWolfSpirit

Recommended Posts

7 minutes ago, Ran said:

It should continue its planned withdrawal. The longer they stay, the greater the chance of a repetition.

Pentagon presser just started and that's exactly what they're going to do. The mission remains unchanged as of now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 minutes ago, Arakan said:

According to Reuters at least 10 US Soldiers among the killed…

12 service members were killed and 15 more were wounded per the Pentagon. They haven't yet said the total number of causalities. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 minutes ago, Ran said:

It should continue its planned withdrawal. The longer they stay, the greater the chance of a repetition.

That may be reasonable if they know of IS locations. Given that they had some sort of intelligence warning of this, they may have leads. They may also press the Taliban to do as they've promised and not allow IS to operate.

If the Taliban fulfill agreements to prevent terrorist groups in Afghanistan (as well as other aspects of said agreements), the US should consider supporting their recieving IMF funds and international aid.

I doubt the Taliban has the capacity to prevent ISIS-K from operating in Afghanistan, but they certainly aren't friends. The two organizations have been fighting each other for years in southern Afghanistan. It is possible the US and Taliban might work together via US drone strikes using Taliban intel, though I imagine both sides would try to keep it a secret.

I'm not sure what else the US could do at this point though. It's not like ISIS-K holds territory or hard targets that could be easily targeted. The last time estimate I saw was that there's only around 2,000 ISIS-K fighters in the country; but they are spread out in tiny operating cells that are hard to track.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Per General McKenzie, the US has been sharing some of their intelligence with the Taliban and believes the Taliban have thwarted some attacks against the airport already. So that's a positive. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 minutes ago, Ran said:

Per General McKenzie, the US has been sharing some of their intelligence with the Taliban and believes the Taliban have thwarted some attacks against the airport already. So that's a positive. 

I think he also said that the Taliban were responsible for screening people before they arrived at the US manned checkpoints at the airport, so I think it's very possible that there are ISIS supporters within the Taliban.  Not one, but two suicide bombers got through the Taliban screening.  Is that the result of poor screening methods, or were they allowed in by a supporter?  The fact that the Taliban freed all the ISIS fighters, bomb makers, planners, etc. that were locked up in prisons suggests that the Taliban isn't really that against ISIS, or at a minimum, that some factions within the Taliban aren't against ISIS.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Mudguard said:

I think he also said that the Taliban were responsible for screening people before they arrived at the US manned checkpoints at the airport, so I think it's very possible that there are ISIS supporters within the Taliban.  Not one, but two suicide bombers got through the Taliban screening.  Is that the result of poor screening methods, or were they allowed in by a supporter?  The fact that the Taliban freed all the ISIS fighters, bomb makers, planners, etc. that were locked up in prisons suggests that the Taliban isn't really that against ISIS, or at a minimum, that some factions within the Taliban aren't against ISIS.

The Taliban have fundamental and philosophical disagreements with ISIS-K, which appears to have been (at least in part) founded by a disillusioned former Taliban commander, Abdul Rauf Aliza. The organisation is self-motivated and has no formal ties with the OG ISIS (who have disavowed official connections with ISIS-K), and Pakistani intelligence seems to regard it more as a breakaway Taliban faction. Aliza was killed by a drone strike a few years ago, ISIS-K effectively has carried on in his name, with him serving as a convenient martyr.

The Taliban seem to regard ISIS-K as fucking nutjobs (even by their standards) for their indiscriminate suicide bombings of civilian targets which don't seem to have much of an actual military or political objective to them. Something the Taliban are really concerned about is all the foreign troops pulling out and ISIS-K decided to carry on their suicide bombing campaign, which the Taliban are not really well-equipped to respond to or deal with.

Is it possible some ISIS-K members infiltrated the Taliban and were carried along with them to victory? Sure. After ISIS-K's highwater point of support in Afghanistan a few years ago (before the organisation effectively collapsed in Iraq and Syria), it lost a lot of members and I have little doubt some of them may have ended up in the Taliban. But again it's very hard to say the degree to which they retained their allegiances or if they were just opportunist fighters selling their services to whichever group could feed and arm them.

For this attack, it looks like the Taliban had decided not to search people arriving at the airport because they didn't have enough manpower (the Taliban are seriously overstretched at the moment and they badly need things to calm down so they can consolidate). From statements tonight it sounds like they want to wash their hands of security and leave it to the Americans and British.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

29 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Well, the one thing we do know is that pretty soon the cities here will be awash in heroin, since that is what the Taliban do.

These are the kind of generalizations which are, to put it nice, not good. Opium Production reached record levels under the watch of NATO and the US. 90% of worldwide opium production comes from Afghanistan, under the watch of NATO and the US. Unfortunately one cannot add pics here…

Afghan Opium Production (page 5)

Maybe the Taliban will continue the opium production because money talks, or maybe not because it’s haram, I don’t know. But one cannot deny that they almost eradicated the opium growth in 2001 whereas under the watchful eyes of the CIA it grew and grew. 

ETA
Not to forget that Hamid Karzai himself was knee-deep involved in the drug trafficking, with his brother being the Narco lord of Afghanistan. 
 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Arakan said:

According to Reuters at least 10 US Soldiers among the killed…

Well, what happens now? The US cannot simply let that go. But who to target? It wasn’t the Taliban, but IS-K. What will the US reaction be? Drone attacks? Supporting the Taliban to fight against IS? What a clusterfeck. IS might be the most insane terror group ever. AFAIK they are end times worshippers. Explains a lot. 

Well, it is the end times. When my mother was a young radiographer she had a colleague who was Assembly of God. Her colleague's father had done a big wall chart of all the Bible prophecies related to the end times, and his calculation was that all prophecies had been fulfilled by the middle of the 19th century. The father had actually pinpointed the exact year of final fulfilment as 1844. Muslims, likewise, base a lot of their end times calculations on Biblical prophecy, and so there will be many who will have made the same calculations. They are after all also awaiting the return of Christ.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Spockydog said:

With help from the CIA. Allegedly.

Wasn't their illegal drug zone was Central America?  And their heyday the Days of Raygun? To buy weapons to use in Iran?  Of course that was a long time ago so maybe those crimes have gone down the media memory hole?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

The Taliban have fundamental and philosophical disagreements with ISIS-K, which appears to have been (at least in part) founded by a disillusioned former Taliban commander, Abdul Rauf Aliza. The organisation is self-motivated and has no formal ties with the OG ISIS (who have disavowed official connections with ISIS-K), and Pakistani intelligence seems to regard it more as a breakaway Taliban faction. Aliza was killed by a drone strike a few years ago, ISIS-K effectively has carried on in his name, with him serving as a convenient martyr.

The Taliban seem to regard ISIS-K as fucking nutjobs (even by their standards) for their indiscriminate suicide bombings of civilian targets which don't seem to have much of an actual military or political objective to them. Something the Taliban are really concerned about is all the foreign troops pulling out and ISIS-K decided to carry on their suicide bombing campaign, which the Taliban are not really well-equipped to respond to or deal with.

Is it possible some ISIS-K members infiltrated the Taliban and were carried along with them to victory? Sure. After ISIS-K's highwater point of support in Afghanistan a few years ago (before the organisation effectively collapsed in Iraq and Syria), it lost a lot of members and I have little doubt some of them may have ended up in the Taliban. But again it's very hard to say the degree to which they retained their allegiances or if they were just opportunist fighters selling their services to whichever group could feed and arm them.

For this attack, it looks like the Taliban had decided not to search people arriving at the airport because they didn't have enough manpower (the Taliban are seriously overstretched at the moment and they badly need things to calm down so they can consolidate). From statements tonight it sounds like they want to wash their hands of security and leave it to the Americans and British.

Sometimes it seems like most ISIS factions are hostile to nearly every other organisation on the planet including some other ISIS factions.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, Arakan said:

These are the kind of generalizations which are, to put it nice, not good. Opium Production reached record levels under the watch of NATO and the US. 90% of worldwide opium production comes from Afghanistan, under the watch of NATO and the US. Unfortunately one cannot add pics here…

Afghan Opium Production (page 5)

Maybe the Taliban will continue the opium production because money talks, or maybe not because it’s haram, I don’t know. But one cannot deny that they almost eradicated the opium growth in 2001 whereas under the watchful eyes of the CIA it grew and grew. 

ETA
Not to forget that Hamid Karzai himself was knee-deep involved in the drug trafficking, with his brother being the Narco lord of Afghanistan.

there have been constant complains from nearby countries calling NATO to control the crops. Russia in particular has been very vocal, even claiming that the drug is being used as a weapon against the country.

What the Taliban will do with that, will strongly depends on the access to cash to run the government. It's pretty clear they are trying to portray themselves in the best possible light for that reason, so international funds can be released giving them time to bring investments from China and elsewhere.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, Mudguard said:

I think he also said that the Taliban were responsible for screening people before they arrived at the US manned checkpoints at the airport, so I think it's very possible that there are ISIS supporters within the Taliban.  Not one, but two suicide bombers got through the Taliban screening.  Is that the result of poor screening methods, or were they allowed in by a supporter?  The fact that the Taliban freed all the ISIS fighters, bomb makers, planners, etc. that were locked up in prisons suggests that the Taliban isn't really that against ISIS, or at a minimum, that some factions within the Taliban aren't against ISIS.

Given the chaotic situation it's probably very hard to run a proper screening.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, rotting sea cow said:

Given the chaotic situation it's probably very hard to run a proper screening.

Also, I doubt most Taliban fighters are trained in how to do a proper screening in the first place.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, Zorral said:

Wasn't their illegal drug zone was Central America?  And their heyday the Days of Raygun? To buy weapons to use in Iran?  Of course that was a long time ago so maybe those crimes have gone down the media memory hole?

Yup, the amount of heroin supplied from Afghanistan to the USA was overall reasonably negligible. The bulk of Afghanistan's stock went (and still goes) to Europe.

Quote

Sometimes it seems like most ISIS factions are hostile to nearly every other organisation on the planet including some other ISIS factions.

Pretty much. The Taliban are - somewhat - better but given their generals, their political leaders, their religious advisors and the very young soldiers on the ground are all giving very mixed messaging on what sort of government they will form and how they will govern, that's only relatively. The likelihood of major schism within the Taliban cannot be ruled out, though I suspect they will hold together in the short to medium term..

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...