Like in Vietnam, the US continued a bloody war well past the time at which losing was inevitable. And, now it’s over. There’s going to be some people put up against walls and shot, in Afghanistan, which is a return to normal of sorts.

A lot of pundits are asking “how did the US lose?” The answer to that is simple: the US has lost every insurgency it has gotten involved in, except for the ones where it was able to respond genocidally. That’s probably a general rule for insurgencies, but I’m not sure so I won’t make that claim. The problem is, when insurgents have a border that they can cross, or places to hide, they will simply melt away into the landscape until they can return and strike at a time, place, and manner of their choosing. The vast military apparatus of the US doesn’t help against that – in fact, the larger the military’s “footprint” the bigger a target it is, too. I’ve described this dynamic elsewhere in terms of “force protection” – the more troops and infrastructure you have involved in an insurgency, your rear lines become a bigger target, so you need to bring more troops in to protect the rear zones, which means more troops to protect the troops, etc. Eventually, the opposition realizes that they can do a Tet Offensive-type maneuver and menace the rear zones, at which point the invaer has no option but to pack up and go home.

The Taliban did not adopt a particularly aggressive posture – they just waited for the US to get tired and go home, which they would, eventually. They did some attacks in the form of “blue on blue” in which an agent joined the security forces, got inside the wire, and then threw a grenade or shot some Americans. The American response was typical and necessary – they isolated themselves from the local population, creating walled forts. When that wasn’t enough, they made the forts “Americans Only” which drives a nail right through the heart of any kind of “hearts and minds” counter-insurgency.

Meanwhile, the US’ “hearts and minds” counter-insurgency tactics have never worked. They are based on techniques developed by the French in Algeria, so you can tell how well they worked for the French. [Yes, David Petraeus wrote a book on counter-insurgency in which he plagiarized the main point from David Galula]. There’s a lot of digression about counter-insurgency in this fascinating piece by Adam Curtis: [bbc] One of the aspects of “hearts and minds” that Curtis dissects neatly is that the counter-insurgency brings out lots of extremely sketchy sociopathic characters who are there to make money or have fun killing people. That plays directly against the “hearts and minds” mission. And, that’s why the US failed in Afghanistan: as usual we built a puppet government and put someone in place whose plan was to steal as much as possible and then flee the country to someplace where they could live in comfort forever after. Kharzai may not have been a pit of corruption but he surrounded himself with people who were, because those were the only kind of people who step forward to take a job in the government of Afghanistan. [Hamid Kharzai, BTW, has apparently decided to stay in Kabul after the flight of his successor; he’s old and he may be attempting to be the “good cop” who can come back to run the country as a figurehead.] But the problem remains: it’s hard to win “hearts and minds” in a poor country when you’re hunkered in air-conditioned forts with imported Pizza Hut and Burger King, not interacting with anyone except to send out “search and destroy” missions that occasionally kill everyone at a wedding.

The reason the US loses these wars is because we pick unwinnable wars. It’s that simple.

What pisses me off is that it was Bush and co that picked this unwinnable war, yet the Party of George W Bush is complaining that Biden lost the war. No, Bush lost the war – Biden just ended it.

The US spent billions trying to build the Afghan army into a practical force that could maintain stability, by looking at its own insanely expensive military (which loses insurgencies) and deciding to build a “mini me” version of that. What kind of military works for Afghanistan? It looks a whole lot like the Taliban. Instead of very expensive, highly trained soldiers with an air force, etc., the US should have recruited a huge force of irregular troops, given them uniforms and vehicles and ammunition and let them go police the country. By the way, that’s how the US conquered Afghanistan in the first place – tons of CIA money backing the “Northern Alliance” which looked indistinguishable from the Taliban because, it was.

So, the US built an army that depended on air-conditioned barracks with Burger King and Pizza Hut, predator drones, live intelligence feeds, satellite tracking, and NSA phone intercepts. The US would get notice from NSA that so-and-so was calling someone suspicious (probably inviting them to a wedding) and satellite surveillance indicated that there was a meeting – so saddle up the kill team. If you look at that chain, the part that the US controls was the entire first part, surrounding the targeting, i.e.: the most important part of mission planning. When the US left, they took that. I’m not saying that the US’ mission planning was any good – in fact it appears to have been terrible – but it’s what they had. I’m not suggesting this, for real, but if the US had created a military that ran its own missions it would have devolved into a rag-bag of revenge killings, corruption, and judicial murder, just like what the Taliban are going to impose. I suppose I am grudgingly glad that the US was too stupid to create its own Taliban and control Afghanistan that way, but it might have worked. As it stands, we have proof positive that the Taliban-style “government” can run Afghanistan. You need a lot of boots on the ground and to be willing to kill a lot of people. Which, the US is – but we’ve trained ourselves to need our B-52s and knife missiles when, as you can see, the only part of the US contribution to militarism in Afghanistan is the humvees that the Taliban have gleefully traded their Toyota Hiluxes for. If the US had built a military that was disorganized and organic, 10 times the size (at the same cost) and given them humvees with machine-guns, that might have worked.

After a while, the US was too busy trying to keep the machine-guns it was handing out, from being pointed back at them. Because the “hearts and minds” war had been lost back in the Bush administration.

The Taliban had even shown a willingness to negotiate, which is the ultimate “hearts and minds” strategy. A lot of people don’t know this, but the US did have the Taliban where it wanted them: over a barrel of oil. The price was not acceptable, and that’s where the whole thing went off the rails. [bbc]

A senior delegation from the Taleban movement in Afghanistan is in the United States for talks with an international energy company that wants to construct a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan.

A spokesman for the company, Unocal, said the Taleban were expected to spend several days at the company’s headquarters in Sugarland, Texas.

Unocal says it has agreements both with Turkmenistan to sell its gas and with Pakistan to buy it.

That was December, 1997. Not too long before the US invaded. I’m sure that’s just coincidence, right? Does anyone want to bet that within the next 50 years it comes out that the US invaded Afghanistan because of the pipeline, not 9/11? [wik]

The Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India (TAPI) Pipeline, also known as Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, is a natural gaspipeline being developed by the Galkynysh – TAPI Pipeline Company Limited with participation of the Asian Development Bank. The pipeline will transport natural gas from the Galkynysh Gas Field in Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into Pakistan and then to India. Construction on the project started in Turkmenistan on 13 December 2015, work on the Afghan section began in February 2018, and work on the Pakistani section was planned to commence in December 2018. The abbreviation TAPI comes from the first letters of those countries. Proponents of the project see it as a modern continuation of the Silk Road.

It’s easy to predict such things because they’re happening already. The Taliban aligned with the Chinese, and basically agreed that they could cut the pipeline any time if the US-backed puppet government was building it. “Hearts and minds” should be “Oil and gas.” [france24]

China is ready to deepen “friendly and cooperative” relations with Afghanistan, a government spokeswoman said Monday, after the Taliban seized control of the country.

Beijing has sought to maintain unofficial ties with the Taliban throughout the US’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, which spurred an advance by the Islamist hardliners across the country that saw them capture the capital Kabul on Sunday.

Suddenly the reasons the US lost the war in Afghanistan are crystal clear, shiny black and blood-spattered.

The reporting from Afghanistan is not surprising: women are being shoved aside, politically, and some people considered thieves/looters have had hands cut off. I’m sure that eventually they’ll put a bunch of people (former cops, no doubt) up against a wall and shoot them. It’s going to be horrible, but then everyone always knew it would – which is why I think Biden was, in fact, a fucking idiot not to do anything to evacuate the people who matter rich before now. That’s probably the thing we can blame Biden the most, for – but to be fair, Trump started those gears in motion and he didn’t do anything useful either. He was too busy trying to turn the US into a puppet government, to worry about Afghanistan’s puppet government. The Taliban’s rule is, indeed, despotic and violent, and I don’t like theocracies at all. They’re cutting people’s hands off – just like they do in Saudi Arabia and they’re going to probably imprison and torture atheists and gay people – remember Raif Badawi? We should never expect anything but “same shit, different day” from despotic governments.

Oh, and you can totally believe the US government when it says that it’s going to cut back on fossil fuel extraction. As usual, they’ll just move the action to Turkmenistan or wherever, and tell the gomers back home “we’re really trying but those darned people over there aren’t playing along, nudge nudge wink wink.”

I was a bit worried (but not very) that the Taliban might attempt a sort of Dien Bien Phu strategy against the US, at the last minute. They probably are not centrally organized enough to pull it off, and they probably don’t care enough. But, had they gotten some moderately heavy artillery and covered Baghram airport, they could have suddenly stranded a bunch of US soldiers with a few mortar rounds. Airplanes on runways are notoriously fragile and a good shooter with a .50 cal machine gun could deny the airport from a mile away, for a while. Imagine the freak-out. But the Taliban aren’t interested in killing a bunch of Americans and inviting disproportionate retaliation – they’ve already seen how the US lashes out like a blinded boxer when it’s scared.

For Ketil Tveiten: As far as the stuff the US left behind – a lot of it is crap. The humvees will stop running, eventually, and won’t be repaired. The fancy toys will break and the military comms gear would have been designed to get messages from the US command structure in North America (satellite intelligence, etc) – all that stuff is useless, now. For a brief while there would have been interesting VPN passwords and user-ids on some of the laptops but I believe the folks who are responsible for cleaning that stuff up are competent-ish. They did OK in Vietnam, not so well in Iran and Benghazi!, and very well in Iraq.

I met a traveller from the graveyard of empires,

Who said – “Giant heaps of concrete barriers

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a Pizza Hut sign lies, whose discount sale,

And meal bundles, and Starbucks next to it,

Tell that its architect well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is American Capitalism, the Real Deal;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and empty strip malls stretch far away.”