“A Muslim Yugoslavia” and More Afghanistan 2050 Roundtable Posts
First, an excerpt of my contribution to the Afghanistan 2050 Roundtable, then from the RT in it’s entirety, so far:
“We snatched anarchy from the jaws of defeat”
– Henry Kissinger
Historians tracing the origins of the short but terrible Indo-Punjabistani nuclear exchange of 2024 over the issue of Kashmiri independence generally look to the rapid disintegration of Pakistan into secession, civil war and democide a decade earlier during the conclusion of the “American war” in Afghanistan.
Pakistan had officially been touted as a steadfast ally of the United States during nine years of an American-led campaign against the Taliban insurgency and its al Qaida partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal territories, with successive administrations overlooking strong evidence of Pakistani collusion with Taliban leaders. This changed in 2012 when mounting war-weariness at home and an impending presidential election forced President Barack Obama to take more aggressive action to bring the war in Afghanistan to something resembling a “victory”. On September 1st, US forces in Afghanistan under General David Petraeus launched “Operation Iron Emir”, a devastating combined arms “raid” into Pakistan’s tribal territories that routed the Taliban rear areas, effectively annihilated the Haqqani Network, incuding its commander, Sirajuddin Haqqani, along with Hizb-i-Islami, and its notoriously cruel leader, Gulbuddin Hekmetyar, pictures of whose head, decapitated in a 500 lb bomb blast, were splashed across the front page of The New York Times….
Now for the rest:
seydlitz89 – Afghanistan 2050: A Political Watershed
. . . Thus ends our discussion of the military aspects of the Afghan campaign. The political roots of the campaign and how they developed – everyone obviously has their own individual story as to how their own family was affected by the momentous events this war helped to set in motion – are not so easily discernible today. President Bush’s decision to invade the country and overthrow the Taliban government in 2001 seemed a logical response to the events of 11 September, but was in reality predetermined by decades of ideological and political confusion which only came to its inevitable end with the withdrawal of Successor States forces in 2018. In effect American policy makers fancied themselves metaphysicians capable of driving human historical events/the development of political cultures through the use of military power. While the tendency among Bush Studies academics is to argue that Bush represents a unique model followed by his three successors, this puts too much influence on the man and not the times, nor the history which made those times what they were…
selil – Afghanistan 2050: A distributed solution to the distributed problem
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