World Politics Thread

It's a curious position given their hideous "re-education camps" and efforts to sterilise Uyghurs. 

Its not a massive distance from Afghanistan to China and I believe they share a very narrow border. The Taliban may be trying to rebrand but at the end of the day they're fanatical religious terrorists, the very thing China is trying to exterminate. 

It's a very combustible partnership. Two tyrannical forces neither will ( or can) back down least it undermines their ideology.   

Alright HairyArse

You've got it partially wrong. China doesn't give two shits about fanatical religious terrorists as long as it's outside their borders. China has nothing to back down from. They're very clear that they don't meddle in other countries internal affairs, just like they don't want other countries to meddle with theirs. Al they want is oil, gas and minerals.

Question is if the taliban are ok with doing business with China.

It's a crazy world when you get live tweets from world leaders and terrorists. The timelines on some of these are mad.

twitter.com/AmrullahSaleh2

twitter.com/ashrafghani

That some higgy-esque people are revelling in this on social media is pretty gross. Lots of us thought the war on terror was being done wrong but it shouldn’t make the suffering of it failing or the soldiers killed/injured targets for a certain kind of owns over empathy activist

Current world politics is a literal Onion article.

Well, by all accounts, the army took money from the Talibans to surrender (and given that they hadn't been paid in months, it was an easy deal for them).

And the public probably doesn't like being shot upon on the streets. It's one thing to protest against Trump, after all you know that you can do so in relative safety, but I wouldn't want to try my hand protesting against an extremist guerrilla army.

also for years the ANA (the national army) didn't give a fuck and was unmotivated - rather smoke drugs. I posted a video on EG forum from when Obama was in power and it showed the problems the trainers had like the instructor was telling them they are not ready as one didn't have his rifle and the other didn't have his helmet!

The taliban have said "they have changed" but they have not at all, stopping women from going to their jobs and beating women and children who are still trying to leave

There were protests on the streets yesterday. People got shot and beaten. So, there is some resolve, but not enough.

I just don't think the "let's go to another country far away and remake them in our image" strategy works. The west were invaders plain and simple. Not very inspiring. Maybe where the Kurds were fighting to get a land of their own it could have been possible if west behaved like allies. 

They should have used the money to build infrastructure, schools, and hospitals. Trained doctors, nurses, and teachers.

Afghanistan is just in a really crappy place. The Western forces should never have gone there in the first place, and broadly speaking I'd be in favour of extracting ourselves from the whole thing.

But the manner in which it's been done does not seem like the best method of leaving. Easy to say as an armchair pundit with no experience, I admit

I meant infrastructure in ALL of Afghanistan. Roads conencting cities, railways, powerstations etc etc.

I also think that if they managed to build the country up to a point where they could have a McD's on every corner that would have been $722Bn better spent than what they've been doing over the last two decades.

In short, I think it's been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that you can't just send military forces across half the globe and turn a foreign country into your own image by force. IT just doesn't work.

At the same time I do not like what Afghanistan is turning into, so a new strategy would be nice. No idea what that would look like, but "A McD's on every corner" sounds like a good idea.

Imagine everything that's needed to sustain that. (Looks at the current state of the US. Reconsiders)

Our development aid wasn't nothing, but it did peter out a lot over Obama and Trump's terms. The immediate collapse of the army and government isn't completely on us, but it's at least partly on us.

But on the other hand, nation building is hard. Probably even harder when you're trying to build one from what's essentially a tribal society. At least Germany and Japan had already-existing systems to scaffold over. Afghanistan was starting from scratch, and building something stable out of it would probably have taken at least another couple of decades.

The fact is that the US didn't have a strategy. They had no idea what they were trying to achieve so as the oldest book on the subject says, it was nothing but the noise before defeat. Two decades of randomly killing citizens in a foreign country and they didn't even know if they were trying to stop global terrorism, re-build Afghanistan into a democracy, getting revenge for 9/11, or anything else.

Trying to put the blame on the afghanis for the wests fuck up is dishonest.