🇦🇫 THREAD:

The people arguing for abandoning Afghanistan forget that we tried this thirty years ago...

...with disastrous consequences - both for Afghanistan and the rest of the world.

9/11 was just one of the results of pretending Afghanistan didn't exist in the 1990s.

1/🧵





2001 was not the first time in modern history that the US + allies got involved militarily in Afghanistan.

Albeit at arm's length, the West and others heavily backed the Mujahideen guerillas fighting the Afghan communist government and their Soviet allies in the 1980s.

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🇦🇫 THREAD:
Afghanistan was not destroyed by post-9/11 war, or even (first and foremost) by civil war in the 1990s.

Afghanistan was destroyed by the Soviet intervention of the 1980s.

More Afghans died *every year* from 1979-89 than in all the 20 years after 2001 *combined.*

1/4 In 1979 Afghanistan's population was about 14 million people. By 1989:

- ca. 1.5 million had died
- ca. 1.5 million had become invalid
- ca. 5 million people had become refugees.

In total, that's 50% of Afghanistan's pre-war population.

2/4

One of the most tragic aspects of the West's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is how "well-meaning" Western progressives thought our disengagement would be the solution to all of Afghanistan's problems.

Instead, it handed Afghanistan to the Taliban.

1/8 By peddling narcissistic arguments that all of Afghanistan's problems had to do with Western involvement, the "anti-war" lobby gave credence to the most ethically and strategically irresponsible policy possible:

Legitimizing the Taliban and betraying our allies.

2/8

🇦🇫 THREAD:
I keep hearing nonsense about the Afghan forces not being willing to fight.

It's a disgusting lie.

We took out almost all our troops in 2014 - since then the Afghans fought like hell.

But in 2021, we left them without ammunition, food, water, and air support.

1/🧵 People keep forgetting that the West pulled out almost all of its troops in 2013-14. NOT in 2021.

And after that, the Afghans did almost all the fighting.

The remaining Western presence was mainly advisors, logistics, and air support.

2/🧵

THREAD:

#OTD Exactly 50 years ago, Mohammed Daoud ousted his cousin King Zahir Shah, took power in Afghanistan, and declared it a Republic - first opening the door to more than 40 years of violence and war in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, his legacy remains a complex one.

1/🧵 To be clear, the War in Afghanistan did not start with Daoud's reign as president - but with the end of it.

He was killed in 1978 with his whole family when Soviet-backed Afghan communists mounted a coup of their own.

But the seeds for that too were sown by Daoud himself.

2/🧵

🇦🇫 THREAD:
One of the most baffling decisions of the whole War in Afghanistan is the 🇺🇸US refusal to provide air support to Afghan Forces during the Taliban offensive of 2021.

Despite all the other mistakes made, this alone could have changed the outcome of the war.

1/🧵 The summer of 2021 was the decisive moment of the war since 2001, and a point when the Afghan forces (for a number of reasons I've discussed elsewhere) were at the breaking point.

But also a point when the Taliban -out in the open- was at its most vulnerable to air strikes

2/🧵

🇦🇫THREAD:

There was no reason why the Taliban should have won in 2021.

Much has been said about the chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan in 2021, and how it might have been done differently.

The far more important point is how we could have avoided an evacuation at all.

1/🧵 The idea that a Taliban victory was unavoidable and just a matter of time is total nonsense.

The Afghan Republic faced many challenges, especially corruption and disunity. And many big mistakes had been made over 20 years.

But none of that made defeat inevitable.

2/🧵

Once you scratch the surface of the Taliban's propaganda, there is nothing at all "traditional" or "national" about their movement.

The Taliban is an utterly modern movement, mostly based on 20th-century political ideas and foreign religious teachings.

1/11 The political idea that a group of mullahs should control government has no traditional precedent in Afghanistan - or anywhere in the Islamic world.

It is a riff on radical Islamism. a 20th-century *political* ideology brought to Afghanistan by academics in the 1960s.

2/11

🇦🇫 THREAD:
Every single Afghan frontline soldier or officer I have spoken to has told me they were desperately short of ammunition, fuel, water, food, and other supplies during the decisive fighting in 2021.
Why? Was choking off the Afghan forces also part of the Doha deal?
1/🧵 At the point when the Afghan Republican defence forces started collapse in July-Aug 2021, many units had been fighting for weeks or months without meaningful resupply.
They were not just short of ammunition, but forces to eat expired field rations and drink unsanitary water.
2/🧵

THREAD:
No conflict has mattered more for world history at the turn of millennium than the war in Afghanistan.
Almost invisibly, but in plain sight, the 43-year War in Afghanistan has been the pivot around which the most critical events of recent history have turned.
1/🧵 Western cynics say "Why does this faraway country Afghanistan matter to us at all?"
The truth is, it's almost impossible to explain, but whatever has happened in Afghanistan since it's war broke out in 1978 has had seismic consequences for the rest of the world. 2/🧵

🇦🇫THREAD:
Most people today take it for granted that the war in Afghanistan began in 2001.
But that's complete nonsense.
By 2001 the war in Afghanistan had already been raging for 23 years, and caused the country to be utterly transformed by violence.
1/🧵 Many commentators also un-troubledly assume that the Taliban were in complete control of Afghanistan in 2001.
By extension, they also assume that the Taliban had won Afghanistan's civil war in the 1990s and brought peace to the country.
Both assumptions are wrong.
2/🧵

🇦🇫THREAD:
The poisonous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan has been at the heart of the violence and conflict over the last 45 years, and before.
I'd go as far as to argue that without the "Durand Line", there would not have been a war in Afghanistan at all.
1/🧵

https://twitter.com/natiqmalikzada/status/1591789090391076864

The so-called "Durand Line", named after the British civil servant who led the survey mission, was drawn up in the late 1890s as the boundary between British India and Afghanistan.
2/🧵

THREAD:
During the first 75 years of the 20th century, 🇦🇫#Afghanistan experienced less war and political unrest than almost every country in the West, including eg. 🇳🇴Norway, 🇧🇪Belgium, and 🇫🇮Finland.
1/🧵 It's a common trope re. the War in #Afghanistan that "Afghanistan has always been that way."
Meaning: a place of war, violence, tyranny and chaos.
But that's total nonsense.
Afghanistan became "that way" recently. And it did so as a result of modern ideological conflicts.
2/🧵

🇦🇫THREAD:
Afghanistan implemented its first democratic constitution in 1964 - without any outside pressure or interference.
I still keep hearing nonsense about how democracy in Afghanistan was a "Western" project that began after 2001. This is utter nonsense.

1/🧵 For most of the 20th century, Afghanistan was a monarchy. In 1963, its king was Zahir Shah, who by that time had already reigned for 30 years, having risen to the throne at age 19 when his father was assassinated by the supporter of a political rival.

2/🧵

Hear hear! In Europe we have massively under-invested in defence since the end of the Cold War, essentially outsourcing security and geopolitical leadership to the US. There is no excuse for Europe not to take the lead on European security.

https://twitter.com/minna_alander/status/1579811760907116545

It is genuinely strange how we take it for granted that Europe is weak-ish militarily and cannot be taken seriously geopolitically w/o the US. There is nothing other than lack of initiative preventing Europe, collectively, from (once again) being a superpower in its own right.

Whatever his sins in other areas, King Abdur Rahman of Afghanistan is cannily prescient when writing about #Russia and the "schemes and plots of its advances" some 125 years ago:

1/🧵 "The Russian policy of aggression is slow and steady, but firm and unchangeable... It is not the case with them, as with some other countries, that every party that comes into power can undo the work by the party that has come before itself..."
2/🧵

Best summary I've seen of why many American liberals don't take seriously American Christian Conservatives' religious faith.
Also excellent evidence for @holland_tom's argument that many modern cultural and political divides really are "intra-Christian" theological debates. 1/9🧵

https://twitter.com/mmpadellan/status/1570822428422705153

For more on how lots of seemingly modern things are not-obviously but obviously "intra-Christian" theological debates following a 2000-year precedent, I cannot recommend strongly enough @holland_tom's book Dominion. May be the best modern non-fiction book I've ever read. 2/9 🧵

🇬🇧 It's 1am in London, and this is the beginning of the ca 6-mile long queue stretching to Southwark Park to see Queen Elizabeth II lying in state at at Westminster - roughly a nine-hour wait.
Very beautiful to see so many people coming out, even in the middle of the night. Shad Thames, London, 2am, ca. 4miles queue left to see the late Queen Elizabeth II lying in state.

THREAD:

In his limp-wristed attempt at cosplaying a geopolitical "realist," @HawleyMO fails to realize that Finland has the largest mobilizable ground army in Europe, significantly strengthening European deterrence at no expense to the US and reducing the risk of war.

1/🧵

https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1554103358276911104

As many other idiot ideologues living in a fantasy world where "based Russia" are chill but China are bad, @HawleyMO also fails to recognize that Russia and China already are de-facto allies, and that alliance will continue to grow closer regardless of Western appeasement. 2/5

Short thread:

It's a result of how remarkably peaceful the last 80 years have been that most people in the West now take peace for granted, and assume war must be the consequence of some exceptional geopolitical aberration.

The opposite is true.

1/4 Long-term peace is the historical exception, and it relies on a fragile, geopolitical world order - built with decades of pragmatic and wise statecraft underpinned by both hard and soft power, led by the United States.
It is far more fragile than we think it is.

2/4

"European security now depends more on decisions taken in Washington DC than on decisions taken in London, Paris, or Berlin... this degree of reliance on the US is both irresponsible and unethical."

My latest for @Quillette.
@clairlemon @snewman477

1/12

quillette.com/2022/07/15/if-… "Given Russia's failure to defeat Ukraine, one might be forgiven for not seeing a serious conventional military threat to the rest of Europe—especially given NATO’s increasing vigilance." 2/12