Thread by @Semiogogue

This is my best guess on what's going down in Afghanistan

[THREAD]

Biden's a dipshit. They know he's a dipshit. USA has long played the revolving dialectical game of Republicans make war, Democrats make peace. Of course it's a lie. But bear in mind they run things in cycles.

So Biden's perfect to oversee the phase of mock humiliation. The narrative is globally fixed that Afghanistan was a blunder. That the US are inept. That valiant goat herders with matchlock jezails destroyed the world greatest superpower blah, blah, blah.

And you've all seen that this narrative has taken root. Helped along by Tony Blair's remarks about 'imbecility', mind you.

So "The US is floundering." "Afghanistan was lost." "Biden is manifestly incompetent & oversaw this" etc. etc.

But what ACTUALLY just happened?

Two important things:

1. We're not longer officially responsible for what happens there. This whole theater of the Taliban taking control in humiliating fashion is exactly the narrative of "The US is no longer in control".

2. We just armed a region in a way we could never have openly done right on the border of Iran, Pakistan AND China. But now it doesn't seem we armed them on purpose. It was an accident! We never intended these people to have these weapons! etc.

What happens next? Who's stupid enough to imagine tribal Afghans (with tribal rivalries baked into even the Taliban, mind you) are going to operate as a unified group?

Where might those weapons end up?

Can we be so sure where that whole army's worth of equipment will go? Planes and helicopters, night vision equipment, MRAPs, radios and drones – can we be so sure where that will go?

Again: think about what countries surround Afghanistan.

I don't see how everyone imagines that we got 'run out' of Afghanistan. It's all theater. YES, we couldn't have stayed a lot longer, YES, it's been economic destruction for us, YES public support for it has dwindled to almost nothing (not that it was ever great).

But one thing we did not do is leave Afghanistan because it's so unified and all the tribes came together to defeat us.

That's bullshit. The Taliban retook control because we didn't fight back and we're leaving based on an agreement.

And for those w/ eyes to see, my remarks above outline my best guess as to *why* we've done so & why in this particular way.

We just dumped a literal army's worth of arms into a very specific place while portraying ourselves as unable to make things happen there.

Do the math.

Last time this happened was when we left Iraq. We left enormous amounts of equipment behind. Not as much as in Afghanistan, as far as I can tell, but lots of gear. And we'd been arming Sunnis against Shiites for a while.

A short time thereafter, what happened in Syria?

Duh.