Liberal Librarian: The result of fighting a land war in Asia
March 20, 2003. Mark that date. Why? Because that was the date we lost Afghanistan.
When the George W. Bush administration decided to remake the Middle East, and left a gaping hole in Central Asia, the scenes we witnessed yesterday as the Taliban swept into Kabul—with Afghanistan's feckless "president" hightailing it to Tajikistan—were inevitable.
In the twenty years of our misadventure in Asia, we built a 300,000-man army which was supposed to fight the Taliban and keep it out of power. Instead, as this Washington Post article details, this corrupt army and its corrupt leadership had been making deals with the Taliban for years. A modern army with modern equipment and training simply faded in the face of a medieval death cult because it simply didn't believe in what it was supposedly fighting for.
Read the whole thing here:
https://establishmentbar.blogspot.com/2021/08/monday-open-thread-result-of-fighting.html