Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Why Afghan Forces So Quickly Laid Down Their Arms — Anatol Lieven

The tribal way of war. "Arrangements."

Politico
Opinion | Why Afghan Forces So Quickly Laid Down Their Arms
Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of Pakistan: A Hard Country. From 1985 to 1998, he worked as a journalist in South Asia, the former Soviet Union and Easter

7 comments:

lastgreek said...

Once you made it clear you were packing up/no more military actions, that was it.

And once you physically start evacuating, panic will break out.

What’s interesting is that you’re not really going away. Well, not that far away — just a “few blocks down the street.”

Ahmed Fares said...

My own realization that we were over our heads in Afghanistan came when I interviewed farmers who pretended to set up Taliban camps that the US would then bomb. The farmers would collect the remnants of millions of dollars worth of bombs and sell them for $100 as scrap metal. —Nicholas Kristof

source: Nicholas Kristof on Twitter

Peter Pan said...

We just had a peaceful transfer of power in Nova Scotia. As in Afghanistan, it came as a complete surprise.

Peter Pan said...

Canadians are congratulating Nova Scotians... in hopes that what happened here will occur at the federal level.

lastgreek said...

The interesting thing about Canadian provincial politics (except maybe Quebec and for the obvious reasons) is that no one cares. And if it's possible, even more so for Atlantic Canada. Except for the premier of Ontario, I can't name another provincial premier if my life depended on it. Funny thing though, I can name governor of Texas.

Peter Pan said...

"Houston, there's a problem."

This is what the Premier of Nova Scotia will be hearing.

Peter Pan said...

There's an unspoken rule in Canadian politics: Don't call an election in the middle of summer.