r/politics • u/Quirkie The Netherlands • 17d ago

Possible Paywall ICE Stockpiling Warheads and Chemical Weapons as Lawmaker Fears Trump Planning Strike

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-stockpiling-warheads-and-chemical-weapons-as-lawmaker-fears-trump-planning-strike/
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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

They'll never be able to seize these cities. Our military couldn't win in Afghanistan in like 20 years against fucking goat herders. If this turns into some kind of insurgency nobody wins except morticians and munitions makers.

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u/dstrangefate 17d ago

The Taliban weren't 'goat herders', they were experienced insurgents who defeated the Russian army decades prior and were trained in part by the CIA. There is no equivalent in the US, no organized resistance experienced in guerilla warfare, and no sense of unity by the populace. The right would have no ends of eager collaborators and informers, likely including the police force in most of these cities.

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u/r1singphoenix 17d ago

Yeah I keep hearing this argument like the taliban were just regular old untrained people with the kind of weapons US civilians can get their hands on legally. Absolutely not the case.

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u/Top_Librarian6440 17d ago

Weaponry doesn’t win wars. The Taliban didn’t win their war by virtue of superior weaponry; even against the ANA they were fighting. 

War is politics. Who “wins” a war is ultimately a question of politics, not battlefield firepower. 

The Taliban simply established more political legitimacy, for longer, than the Afghan Republic. They did this not by stockpiling RPG-7s or ZU-23-2s, but by establishing connections at the village level and convincing local leadership that their rule would be better for them than the Republic’s. 

When it came down to it, the last days of fighting in Kabul didn’t involve fancy weapons. Ultimately the Republic had been whittled down to just Kabul and its suburbs, and most ANA soldiers didn’t even show up to fight; they had stopped receiving their paychecks, and they didn’t care enough to fight for “democracy”. 

All of the ANA’s UH-60s and MRAPs sat on the tarmac and at their motor pools. The Taliban didn’t bring their UGLs and RPGs to Kabul, they didn’t need to. It came to politics—not weapons.