There really is a man with a gun over there

Saw this piece on Strategy Page, which is pretty good IMHO, and it makes several points to which I've alluded as how what we're told by Fake News and Fake Government is not the situation on the ground at all. The piece itself is a somewhat long read which I urge anyone interested to read completely, but another point of view if the smoke and mirrors we see doesn't ring true

Despite a growing number of inaccurate claims of victory against the resistance, the opposition is often public, with daily cell phone videos of anti-Taliban and anti-Pakistan demonstrations still taking place in major cities. If this was mentioned anywhere but Gateway, I missed it. There was a large women's protest Sunday with many of the participants held in a parking garage (just the way Pelosi Galore treats the soldiers who came to put down the "insurrection"). This is that doing things against their best interests that FICUS said they wouldn't do.

There's also a civil war within the Taliban (anybody hear about that from Lester Holt?). By 2017 it was obvious to the Pakistanis that about half the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan were anti-Pakistan and most of them acted on their hatred of Pakistani efforts to manipulate and control Afghanistan. The fighting lasted a few years and ended in a ceasefire, not a reconciliation.

Pakistan installed trusted Afghans (mainly from the Haqqani Network) to run the Taliban with some neutral Taliban clerics as replacements for Mullah Omar. Now Pakistan is being reminded that many, if not most, Afghan based Taliban leaders oppose Pakistan loyalists being part of the new Taliban government. The Taliban do still need Pakistan and China, which exerts enormous economic and political power in Pakistan. China is offering the same arrangement to the Taliban government and most Taliban oppose being in the pay of the Chinese. Up until now China had accepted Pakistani assurances that Pakistan would continue to control the Taliban leadership when the Taliban had defeated the elected government.

We tend to think of the country as it was in the days of Alexander. And that's very inaccurate. Another factor is that Afghanistan is a much different place than it was in 2001. There are now 32.9 million Afghans, an increase of 57 percent. One of the more obvious examples of this is the national capital; Kabul. In 2001 it had a population of half a million but twenty years later that has increased ten times to five million. Despite the population growth, over two-thirds of the population still lives in the countryside.

GDP has grown continuously since 2001 with average family income increasing noticeably each year until 2020 when GDP declined 5 percent because of covid19

So there is a base for resistance more than before, which brings up another point.

In 2001, when the Americans intervened, they did so to assist the NA (Northern Alliance), which was largely Afghan Tajiks and Uzbeks and still holding out in the north on September 11, 2001. While Pushtuns, mainly in the south, are 40 percent of the population, Tajiks are 24 percent, Hazara ten percent, Uzbek 9 percent and various other non-Pushtun minorities in the north comprise a majority of Afghans.. So we have a ball game much unlike the last time. 

Some may not like Lindsey Graham's statement that we may go back there if terrorism rears its ugly head again, but leaving so precipitously has left a bad taste not only in most Americans' mouths, but the worlds. Another 9/11 or something worse the likes of Team America's 9/11 times 10,000 might not be avoidable.

What a field day for the heat

A thousand people in the street 

Singing songs and they carrying signs

Mostly say, "Hooray for our side"

Stay safe