Facebook has banned positive posts about the Taliban, which is interesting because, as person who doesn’t know much about Afghanistan, I’m curious as to what positive things one might say about the Taliban. I guess I may never know, and this post won’t say anything positive about the Taliban. Probably.
What I do know is that the Soviet Union went to war against Afghanistan for nearly 10 years for the purpose of keeping the pro-Soviet government in power despite attacks from Afghan fighters supporting both an Islamic theocracy and, interestingly, Maoist communism. That little detail is pretty interesting, isn’t it? Anyway, the Soviets lost around 26,000 troops, the Soviet-backed Afghan government lost 18,000, and the Islamic/Maoist side lost about 96,000 people, making the conflict similar in a way to the Soviet fight against invading Nazis in that the Soviets technically won, but suffered much higher losses relative to the invaders. As many as 2 million civilians died in the Soviet-Afghan war, about 5 million left the country as refugees, and another 2 million lost their homes and had to relocate inside Afghanistan.
The US looked at this situation and said, “That’s nice, but can I have a turn?”
If we assume the US war in Afghanistan is about to end, then it lasted about 20 years, beating the Soviets by a whole decade! Good for the US, I guess. Let’s see what those casualties look like! The Americans have lost around 7,500 troops (I’m including their mercenaries in that statistic), the US-backed Afghan government lost over 65,000 (ouch!), and the Taliban side lost about 55,000 people. Only about 50,000 civilians are reported killed on the Wikipedia page, which I’m using to quantify both conflicts for the sake of fairness. In summary, though, a much longer conflict with far fewer deaths, it seems.
Both the Soviets and Americans ended up equipping their enemies throughout the course of their respective conflicts. The Taliban are now replacing their worn out Soviet weapons with newer spoils from the west.
The US fought a similarly ill-advised conflict in Vietnam, but lost over 58,000 people during a much shorter period of time (perhaps 11 years, depending on how you determine when the US got involved). Basically, the US government has learned that to continue a foreign war, they must keep the US military deaths per year relatively low. In terms of losses by the foreign invader, the Soviet-Afghan conflict was 2,600/year, the US-Afghan conflict was 375/year, and the US-Vietnam conflict was 5,273/year. When people say that Afghanistan was the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, well it was really about half a Vietnam.
Though the situation in Afghanistan looks quite bleak, and though I hate to agree with Joe Biden (and Donald Trump, who is the US President factually responsible for US troops leaving Afghanistan), leaving Afghanistan alone for a while — or even treating it nicely — does seem like a better course of action than propping up a pro-capitalist regime, or a pro-Soviet regime, or a pro-Chinese regime, and it is certainly better than continuing to throw away human lives for nothing. I can certainly see why the Afghan government just gave up when the US decided to pull out — they were getting slaughtered even with the US there! Though it does appear that the situation for women in Afghanistan will be very, very bad, I think we should all keep in mind that we really only know about the Taliban through the lens of western media, and that it is not a neutral source of information.
What’s clear, though, is that Taliban rule in Afghanistan does NOT present any kind of immediate danger to the US, despite what the hysteria of conservative commentators would imply. If you read carefully, they don’t really have any kind of concrete reason for believing that the US is somehow in danger. Some would point to September 11, 2001 as evidence of what the Taliban can do; however, the Taliban did not plan 9/11, it is not the same thing as Al-Queda, and the vectors of attack that Al-Queda used are no longer available. Afghanistan does not have any kind of intercontinental missile technology, and anyone who looks at a globe will readily see that Afghanistan is on the other side of the world. Britain is literally a greater threat to the US than Afghanistan at this point. American-born right-wing extremists continue to be the greatest danger to Americans living in the United States.
The real reason all these conservatives are freaking out is because the US retreat from Afghanistan makes the US look weak, and their concern is more about their own fragile masculinity than any kind of material threat. I hate to break it to you, but the Trump years did far more to make the US look weak and pathetic than this decision to withdraw from Afghanistan (though, again, that decision is the responsibility of the Trump administration — not Biden). We look like a country that is about to collapse into civil war, populated by crazed clowns.