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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27085 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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The British successfully invaded Afghanistan multiple times, but never held it for prolonged periods. Which is probably what the US should have done.

There's this book, No Good Men Among the Living, which argues that the US successfully destroyed the Taliban in the invasion, but then stupid governance and our taking sides in the vast web of tribal politics brought it back.

So in every district Jan Muhammad appointed a Popalzai governor and police chief, or figures from closely related tribes. The trouble was, many of these communities had already chosen their own leaders during the waning days of the Taliban. In Khas Uruzgan, elders had elected as district governor an anti-Taliban personage from the mujahedeen era, a former school janitor named Tawildar Yunis (“Groundskeeper Yunis”). He was working out of the governor’s house, along with a locally elected police chief and other officials, collecting weapons from surrendering Talibs. But they were not Popalzais and, even worse, maintained political links to one of Jan Muhammad’s rivals from the civil war years. So Muhammad appointed a local Popalzai elder and friend of the Karzais, Abdul Qudus, as his governor. But Yunis refused to budge, the imprimatur of Khas Uruzgan elders lending his claims an undeniable air of legitimacy. Unswayed, Abdul Qudus then requisitioned the local school for himself and his coterie of followers, declaring that it was now the rightful governor’s residence and that it was his job to collect Taliban weapons. In response, Yunis appealed to everyone from Gul Agha Sherzai to President Karzai himself, but none were willing to wade into the growing mess. Tensions rose by the day. Jan Muhammad’s side began openly questioning Yunis’s anti-Taliban bona fides, throwing him into fits of rage. He returned the favor by declaring Jan Muhammad’s men soft on the Taliban.

The actual Taliban were perplexed. During the standoff, a trio of senior Taliban officials made their way to Khas Uruzgan to surrender to the new government: Tayeb Agha, an erudite, well-spoken twentysomething who had served as Mullah Omar’s personal secretary and adviser; former finance minister Agha Jan Mutassim, who had publicly rejected calls from Pakistani clerics to wage jihad against the Americans; and Health Minister Mullah Abbas, the official who had been responsible for recruiting Heela and other women to study as nurses and midwives. All three had been members of the Taliban since the movement’s inception. Their surrender should have been a political coup for the young Karzai government. But surrender to whom? Who was actually in charge?

And then the Americans, acting on bad information, stormed both 'government' offices in a nighttime raid, killing Abdul Qudus and his fellow officials (Yunis managed to escape and was never seen again). The three former Taliban guys decided that surrendering didn't seem like such a good idea and went back to Pakistan where they helped lead the new Taliban insurgency.

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