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That's an interesting thought, that the media is under the control of one part of the deep state but not another part.

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SIGNY: That's an interesting thought, that the media is under the control of one part of the deep state but not another part.

KIKI: When I think about it, the MIC/ spook agency arm of the Deep State is running the US military, covert ops, and foreign policy. Neither the President nor the Congress is in control of those. But that Deep State arm isn't running the US economy (not directly, even though the collective bloated budget does swing the US economy indirectly).

How much the 'think tank' arm of the Deep State is running the MIC/ spook agency arm I have no guess. But clearly the MIC/ spook agency arm has a self-serving (self-funded) agenda of its own, which it pursues, no matter what the President might order (as, say, commander-in-chief) or the Congress might say (per the budget).

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Since the USA does't have much of a production economy, what we have is financialists and financialism. Our financial system is based on the petrodollar, which banks are anxious to protect in direct relation to how many petrodllars/treasuries they old in reserve. The banks of course want their share of the drug money too.

So overall I think the BIGGEST split is actually between the CIA and Pentagon.

I'll give it some more thought.

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SEONDRATE*: Signym, you sound exactly like someone raised on Marxism, always predicting the impending collapse of America. Are you sure you are not a Russian troll?

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/VAPGDPMA

*If you can stoop AGAIN to libelling me as a Russian troll, I can once again call you SECONDRATE

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Signy - just a comment. Do you see where Obama made things better for US manufacturing?


Yeah, neither do I.

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KIKI: Signy - just a comment. Do you see where Obama made things better for US manufacturing? Yeah, neither do I.

SECONDRATE: Snicker all you want, but laughing shows you never will understand that there has never been a factory built anywhere in the world to create employment,

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:

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KIKI: Signy - just a comment. Do you see where Obama made things better for US manufacturing? Yeah, neither do I.

SECONDRATE: Snicker all you want, but laughing shows you never will understand that there has never been a factory built anywhere in the world to create employment,

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Well, actually not true.

I know, from someone who went to China every few years, that when an American company built a factory in China, the Chinese government would ask the manager "How many people will it take to tun this factory?" and if the answer was "100" the Chinese government would say "Then you will hire 300". . . .

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, SECOND, it sounds like you're conceding both of your points

a) That USA manufacturing is robust and
b) That the ONLY driver of manufacturing policy is cutting costs by reducing labor

Anyway, this is far off-topic.

Back to our regularly scheduled discussion.

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the NY Times, using numbers from the Association of Wartime Allies, claims that there were more than 300,000 Afghans who assisted us during our 20-year war and deserve our help in being evacuated. Of these, about 250,000 remain and still need to be airlifted out.

Maybe so, but I'd take this with a grain of salt. The AWA has been pushing this number for months, but as near as I can tell they're the only ones. As you can imagine, it's a very difficult number to estimate, which means that it's easy to produce nearly any figure you want. The AWA may be right, but other estimates I've seen seem to hover around 80-100,000, of which we've already evacuated about 60,000 or so. If that estimate is correct, it means we have 20-40,000 Afghans left to evacuate.

Obviously I don't have any independent way to estimate these numbers myself. I just want to point out that the AWA has been alone in its estimate for months, and the fact that the Times has finally decided to write a story about them doesn't make their estimate any more (or less) credible than it's ever been.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
That's an interesting thought, that the media is under the control of one part of the deep state but not another part.

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So, what is (are) the OTHER part(s) of the deep state?

Just noodling about which parts I've observed working together and which parts work separately or (potentially) at cross-purposes...

The two agencies that I think work together most closely are the CIA and State Department. Embassies in foreign countries are natural covers for gathering foreign intelligence. No need to set up fake companies and fake identities (journalists, import/export, telecom etc) I have been told -and it makes sense- that many embassy staff are dual employees of both State and CIA. So the driver is CIA and the secretary is CIA etc. AFA the ambassadors themselves, most of them are appointed as political favors and have no clue about what's going on around them. But in sensitive embassies ... such as Ukraine, Libya, Iran, Georgia etc ... the ambassadors are fully "read into" CIA ops, whether it's gun running or regime change or what-have-you, and actively participate.

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The CIA gets some of its harebrained ideas from abroad (PNAC, written largely by Israel; Iraq/WMD and Trump/Russia from MI6) which overlaps with "thinktankistan".

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Another cooperative arrangement is between the CIA and FBI/DOJ. We could see that in the flow of "Trump/Russia" from Hillary to the UK operatives back to the CIA, FBI/DOJ which launched a politically-motivated persecution of Trump. So while the CIA does "ops" abroad, the FBI does "ops" here. And the "leaks" (fabricated allegation) came mostly thru State Dept and FBI employees.

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A less-comfortable fit is the formal military v the CIA. At the beginning of our regime change effort in Syria, Obama put the military and CIA into something of a horse race: The military was to train "moderate rebels" in Jordan while the CIA (and Saudi Arabia) were to fund jihadists covertly. The training mission was a debacle (much like Afghanistan but on a smaller scale); the trainees took their training and weaponry over to the jihadist side, leaving a tiny group of USA loyalists. It was widely criticized in the paper: four million dollars to train one soldier! (or words to that effect) and quietly shelved.

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But in Afghanistan, the CIA needed the military to protect its blacksites and convert Afghanistan into a narco-state. The only way I can imagine that happening is direct payoffs to the involved ranking military. Also, the CIA eventually shared its secret drone program with the Pentagon, altho the Pentagon was also committed to secrecy. Also, the DIA has its own mission: to collect intelligence for the successful prosecution of a war. So altho the military has been jammed together with the CIA for some operation, I think the fit isn't a comfortable one.

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The NSA does sigint. In the RUSSIADIDIT! statement about the "hacking"of the DNC server, the NSA demurred, allowing only "moderate" confidence.

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ANOTHER tail that wags the dog are large financial interests. Since the USA doesn't have much of a production economy, what we have is financialists and financialism. Our financial system is based on the petrodollar, which banks are anxious to protect in direct relation to how many petrodollars/ treasuries they old in reserve. The banks of course want their share of the drug money too.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Signy - just a comment. Do you see where Obama made things better for US manufacturing?


Yeah, neither do I.

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Originally posted by second:
Snicker all you want, but laughing shows you never will understand that there has never been a factory built anywhere in the world to create employment, no more than there has ever been a factory built to create water and air pollution. Employment and pollution and fuel and material and all other costs have always and everywhere been things to be minimized or even eliminated. Yes, you and politicians can talk about "employment opportunities" at factories as much as you please, but that is not what a factory is for, because if it was then every factory-owner would be striving to make work more labor intensive rather than less. You will never see (in the real world) that intention to make more man-hours of work by making the factory less efficient.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Well, then you agree with me ...

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Why believe anything you hear about it now?

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1KIKI: Well, then you agree with me ...

SECOND: I have NO IDEA what is going on inside your head that you bizarrely think I agree with.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Signy - just a comment. Do you see where Obama made things better for US manufacturing? Yeah, neither do I.

SECOND: Snicker all you want, but laughing shows you never will understand that there has never been a factory built anywhere in the world to create employment

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SIGNYM:
So, SECOND, it sounds like you're conceding both of your points
a) That USA manufacturing is robust and
b) That the ONLY driver of manufacturing policy is cutting costs by reducing labor

SECOND: Except in countries...

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Why believe anything you hear about it now?

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My grandmother believed the moon landings were fake and professional wrestling was real. She got pretty mixed-up about what to believe and what to disbelieve, but she was from Nebraska and voted for Republicans who confuse the difference between reality and unreality.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:

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SIGNYM:
So, SECOND, it sounds like you're conceding both of your points
a) That USA manufacturing is robust and
b) That the ONLY driver of manufacturing policy is cutting costs by reducing labor

SECOND: Except in countries...

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Sounds like you agree with me here, too. First you make a universal statement, and then when you get called on it you start clawing back rather significant exceptions.

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SIGNYM:
So, SECOND, it sounds like you're conceding both of your points
a) That USA manufacturing is robust and
b) That the ONLY driver of manufacturing policy is cutting costs by reducing labor

SECOND: Except in countries...

SIGNY: Sounds like you agree with me here, too. First you make a universal statement, and then when you get called on it you start clawing back rather significant exceptions.

SECOND: Ex-President Herbert Hoover was flat out calling FDR a Commie during all those years.

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SECOND: Here is another Universal Statement: Riches go to the quick.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The other thing I find puzzling is his constant refrain about "struggling to remain in the middle class" like some sort of mantra.

Who is that aimed at?
And what is he trying to do?
It doesn't rattle MY cage, and I doubt it rattles yours, or anyone else's here.

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Now, coming back to our topic, in 2021 the US truly inspires nobody. Absolutely nobody. That is a sad, but undeniable fact. And that is the main reason why Kabul fell so fast: the “defenses” of Kabul were like the fists of a man with advanced osteoporosis – they lacked a crucial element: faith. No matter how good, effective or otherwise powerful those “fists” really were, or thought/pretended to be, it made no difference: one crucial element was missing and that decided it all.- The Saker

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
In other words, the military became just another corrupt bureaucracy.

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The Times of London reports that the US simply abandoned a truly astounding arsenal of military equipment and weapons.

This reportedly includes up to

22,174 Humvee vehicles,
nearly 1,000 armored vehicles,
64,363 machine guns, and
42,000 pick-up trucks and SUVs.
358,530 assault rifles,
126,295 pistols,
nearly 200 artillery units
state-of-the-art military helicopters
warplanes,
other aircraft

...

night vision goggles,
body armor

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“The Taliban now has more Black Hawk helicopters than 85% of the countries in the world,” Congressman Jim Banks, a veteran, lamented.

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Pepe Escobar posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times

The announcement by Taliban spokesman Zahibullah Mujahid in Kabul of the acting cabinet ministers in the new caretaker government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan already produced a big bang: it managed to enrage both woke NATOstan and the US Deep State.

This is an all-male, overwhelmingly Pashtun (there’s one Uzbek and one Tajik) cabinet essentially rewarding the Taliban old guard. All 33 appointees are Taliban members.

Acting PM
Mohammad Hasan Akhund – the head of the Taliban Rehbari Shura, or leadership council, for 20 years – will be the Acting Prime Minister. For all practical purposes, Akhund is branded a terrorist by the UN and the EU, and under sanctions by the UN Security Council. It’s no secret Washington brands some Taliban factions as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and sanctions the whole of the Taliban as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organization.

SPIRITUAL LEADER
It’s crucial to stress Himatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban Supreme Leader since 2016, is Amir al-Momineen (“Commander of the Faithful”). He can’t be a Prime Minister; his role is that of a supreme spiritual leader, setting the guidelines for the Islamic Emirate and mediating disputes – politics included.

Akhunzada has released a statement, noting that the new government “will work hard towards upholding Islamic rules and sharia law in the country” and will ensure “lasting peace, prosperity and development”. He added, “people should not try to leave the country”.

Spokesman Mujahid took pains to stress this new cabinet is just an “acting” government. This implies one of the next big steps will be to set up a new constitution. The Taliban will “try to take people from other parts of the country” – implying positions for women and Shi’ites may still be open, but not at top level.

DEPUTY PM
Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar, who so far had been very busy diplomatically as the head of the political office in Doha, will be deputy Prime Minister. He was a Taliban co-founder in 1994 and close friend of Mullah Omar, who called him “Baradar” (“brother”) in the first place.

ACTING INTERIOR MINISTER
A predictable torrent of hysteria greeted the appointment of Sirajuddin Haqqani as Acting Minister of Interior. After all the son of Haqqani founder Jalaluddin, one of three deputy emirs and the Taliban military commander, with a fierce reputation, has a $5 million FBI bounty on his head. His FBI “wanted” page is not exactly a prodigy of intel: they don’t know when he was born, and where, and that he speaks Pashto and Arabic.

This may be the new government’s top challenge: to prevent Sirajuddin and his wild boys from acting medieval in non-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, and most of all to make sure the Haqqanis cut off any connections with jihadi outfits. That’s a sine qua non condition established by the China-Russia strategic partnership for political, diplomatic and economic development support.

ACTING FOREIGN MINISTER
Foreign policy will be much more accommodating. Amir Khan Muttaqi, also a member of the political office in Doha, will be the Acting Foreign Minister, and his deputy will be Abas Stanikzai, who’s in favor of cordial relations with Washington and the rights of Afghan religious minorities.

ACTING DEFENSE MINISTER
Mohammad Yaqoob, the son of Mullah Omar, will be the Acting Defense Minister.

OTHER
So far, the only non-Pashtuns are Abdul Salam Hanafi, an Uzbek, appointed as second deputy to the Prime Minister, and Qari Muhammad Hanif, a Tajik, the acting Minister of Economic Affairs, a very important post.

****

The Tao of staying patient

The Taliban Revolution has already hit the Walls of Kabul – who are fast being painted white with Kufic letter inscriptions. One of these reads, “For an Islamic system and independence, you have to go through tests and stay patient.”

That’s quite a Taoist statement: striving for balance towards a real “Islamic system”. It offers a crucial glimpse of what the Taliban leadership may be after: as Islamic theory allows for evolution, the new Afghanistan system will be necessarily unique, quite different from Qatar’s or Iran’s, for instance.

In the Islamic legal tradition, followed directly or indirectly by rulers of Turko-Persian states for centuries, to rebel against a Muslim ruler is illegitimate because it creates fitna (sedition, conflict). That was already the rationale behind the crushing of the fake “resistance” in the Panjshir – led by former Vice-President and CIA asset Amrullah Saleh. even tried serious negotiations, sending a delegation of 40 Islamic scholars to the Panjshir.

But then Taliban intel established that Ahmad Masoud – son of the legendary Lion of the Panjshir, assassinated two days before 9/11 – was operating under orders of French and Israeli intel. And that sealed his fate: not only he was creating fitna, he was a foreign agent. His partner Saleh, the “resistance” de facto leader, fled by helicopter to Tajikistan.

It’s fascinating to note a parallel between Islamic legal tradition and Hobbes’s Leviathan, which justifies absolute rulers. The Hobbesian Taliban: here’s a hefty research topic for US Think Tankland.

The Taliban also follow the rule that a war victory – and nothing more spectacular than defeating combined NATO power – allows for undisputed political power, although that does not discard strategic alliances. We’ve already seen it in terms of how the moderate, Doha-based political Taliban are accommodating the Haqqanis – an extremely sensitive business.

Abdul Haqqani will be the Acting Minister for Higher Education; Najibullah Haqqani will be Minister of Communications; and Khalil Haqqani, so far ultra-active as interim head of security in Kabul, will be Minister for Refugees.

The next step will be much harder: to convince the urban, educated populations in the big cities – Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif – not only of their legitimacy, acquired in the frontlines, but that they will crush the corrupt urban elite that plundered the nation for the past 20 years. All that while engaging in a credible, national interest process of improving the lives of average Afghans under a new Islamic system. It will be crucial to watch what kind of practical and financial help the emir of Qatar will offer.

The new cabinet has elements of a Pashtun jirga (tribal assembly). I’ve been to a few, and it’s fascinating to see how it works. Everyone sits on a circle to avoid a hierarchy – even if symbolic. Everyone is entitled to express their opinion. This leads to alliances necessarily being forged.

The negotiations to form a government were being conducted in Kabul by former President Hamid Karzai – crucially, a Pashtun from a minor Durrani clan, the Popalzai – and Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik, and former head of the Council for National Reconciliation. The Taliban did listen to them, but in the end they de facto chose what their own jirga had decided.

Pashtuns are extremely fierce when it comes to defending their Islamic credentials. They believe their legendary founding ancestor, Qais Abdul Rasheed, converted to Islam in the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad, and then Pashtuns became the strongest defender of the faith anywhere.

Yet that’s not exactly how it played out in history. From the 7th century onwards, Islam was predominant only from Herat in the west to legendary Balkh in the north all the way to Central Asia, and south between Sistan and Kandahar. The mountains of the Hindu Kush and the corridor from Kabul to Peshawar resisted Islam for centuries. Kabul in fact was a Hindu kingdom as late as the 11th century. It took as many as five centuries for the core Pashtun lands to convert to Islam.

Islam with Afghan characteristics

To cut an immensely complex story short, the Taliban was born in 1994 across the – artificial – border of Afghanistan and Pakistani Balochistan as a movement by Pashtuns who studied in Deobandi madrassas in Pakistan.

All the Afghan Taliban leaders had very close connections with Pakistani religious parties. During the 1980s anti-USSR jihad, many of these Taliban (“students”) in several madrassas worked side by side with the mujahideen to defend Islam in Afghanistan against the infidel. The whole process was channeled through the Peshawar political establishment: -overseen by the Pakistani ISI, with enormous CIA input, and a tsunami of cash and would-be jihadis flowing from Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab world.

When they finally seized power in 1994 in Kandahar and 1996 in Kabul, the Taliban emerged as a motley crew of minor clerics and refugees invested in a sort of wacky Afghan reformation – religious and cultural – as they set up what they saw as a pure Salafist Islamic Emirate.

I saw how it worked on the spot, and as demented as it was, it amounted to a new political force in Afghanistan. The Taliban were very popular in the south because they promised security after the bloody 1992-1995 civil war. The totally radical Islamist ideology came later – with disastrous results, especially in the big cities. But not in the subsistence agriculture countryside, because the Taliban social outlook merely reflected rural Afghan practice.

The Taliban installed a 7th century-style Salafi Islam crisscrossed with the Pashtunwali code. A huge mistake was their aversion to Sufism and the veneration of shrines – something extremely popular in Islamic Afghanistan for centuries.

It’s too early to tell how Taliban 2.0 will play out in the dizzyingly complex, emerging Eurasian integration chessboard. But internally, a wiser, more traveled, social media-savvy Taliban seem aware they cannot allow themselves to repeat the dire 1996-2001 mistakes.

Deng Xiaoping set the framework for socialism with Chinese characteristics . One of the greatest geopolitical challenges ahead will be whether Taliban 2.0 are able to shape a sustainable development Islam with Afghan characteristics.

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Quote:

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Pepe Escobar posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times

The announcement by Taliban spokesman Zahibullah Mujahid in Kabul of the acting cabinet ministers in the new caretaker government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan already produced a big bang: it managed to enrage both woke NATOstan and the US Deep State.

This is an all-male, overwhelmingly Pashtun (there’s one Uzbek and one Tajik) cabinet essentially rewarding the Taliban old guard. All 33 appointees are Taliban members.

Acting PM
Mohammad Hasan Akhund – the head of the Taliban Rehbari Shura, or leadership council, for 20 years – will be the Acting Prime Minister. For all practical purposes, Akhund is branded a terrorist by the UN and the EU, and under sanctions by the UN Security Council. It’s no secret Washington brands some Taliban factions as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and sanctions the whole of the Taliban as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organization.

SPIRITUAL LEADER
It’s crucial to stress Himatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban Supreme Leader since 2016, is Amir al-Momineen (“Commander of the Faithful”). He can’t be a Prime Minister; his role is that of a supreme spiritual leader, setting the guidelines for the Islamic Emirate and mediating disputes – politics included.

Akhunzada has released a statement, noting that the new government “will work hard towards upholding Islamic rules and sharia law in the country” and will ensure “lasting peace, prosperity and development”. He added, “people should not try to leave the country”.

Spokesman Mujahid took pains to stress this new cabinet is just an “acting” government. This implies one of the next big steps will be to set up a new constitution. The Taliban will “try to take people from other parts of the country” – implying positions for women and Shi’ites may still be open, but not at top level.

DEPUTY PM
Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar, who so far had been very busy diplomatically as the head of the political office in Doha, will be deputy Prime Minister. He was a Taliban co-founder in 1994 and close friend of Mullah Omar, who called him “Baradar” (“brother”) in the first place.

ACTING INTERIOR MINISTER
A predictable torrent of hysteria greeted the appointment of Sirajuddin Haqqani as Acting Minister of Interior. After all the son of Haqqani founder Jalaluddin, one of three deputy emirs and the Taliban military commander, with a fierce reputation, has a $5 million FBI bounty on his head. His FBI “wanted” page is not exactly a prodigy of intel: they don’t know when he was born, and where, and that he speaks Pashto and Arabic.

This may be the new government’s top challenge: to prevent Sirajuddin and his wild boys from acting medieval in non-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, and most of all to make sure the Haqqanis cut off any connections with jihadi outfits. That’s a sine qua non condition established by the China-Russia strategic partnership for political, diplomatic and economic development support.

ACTING FOREIGN MINISTER
Foreign policy will be much more accommodating. Amir Khan Muttaqi, also a member of the political office in Doha, will be the Acting Foreign Minister, and his deputy will be Abas Stanikzai, who’s in favor of cordial relations with Washington and the rights of Afghan religious minorities.

ACTING DEFENSE MINISTER
Mohammad Yaqoob, the son of Mullah Omar, will be the Acting Defense Minister.

OTHER
So far, the only non-Pashtuns are Abdul Salam Hanafi, an Uzbek, appointed as second deputy to the Prime Minister, and Qari Muhammad Hanif, a Tajik, the acting Minister of Economic Affairs, a very important post.

****

The Tao of staying patient

The Taliban Revolution has already hit the Walls of Kabul – who are fast being painted white with Kufic letter inscriptions. One of these reads, “For an Islamic system and independence, you have to go through tests and stay patient.”

That’s quite a Taoist statement: striving for balance towards a real “Islamic system”. It offers a crucial glimpse of what the Taliban leadership may be after: as Islamic theory allows for evolution, the new Afghanistan system will be necessarily unique, quite different from Qatar’s or Iran’s, for instance.

In the Islamic legal tradition, followed directly or indirectly by rulers of Turko-Persian states for centuries, to rebel against a Muslim ruler is illegitimate because it creates fitna (sedition, conflict). That was already the rationale behind the crushing of the fake “resistance” in the Panjshir – led by former Vice-President and CIA asset Amrullah Saleh. even tried serious negotiations, sending a delegation of 40 Islamic scholars to the Panjshir.

But then Taliban intel established that Ahmad Masoud – son of the legendary Lion of the Panjshir, assassinated two days before 9/11 – was operating under orders of French and Israeli intel. And that sealed his fate: not only he was creating fitna, he was a foreign agent. His partner Saleh, the “resistance” de facto leader, fled by helicopter to Tajikistan.

It’s fascinating to note a parallel between Islamic legal tradition and Hobbes’s Leviathan, which justifies absolute rulers. The Hobbesian Taliban: here’s a hefty research topic for US Think Tankland.

The Taliban also follow the rule that a war victory – and nothing more spectacular than defeating combined NATO power – allows for undisputed political power, although that does not discard strategic alliances. We’ve already seen it in terms of how the moderate, Doha-based political Taliban are accommodating the Haqqanis – an extremely sensitive business.

Abdul Haqqani will be the Acting Minister for Higher Education; Najibullah Haqqani will be Minister of Communications; and Khalil Haqqani, so far ultra-active as interim head of security in Kabul, will be Minister for Refugees.

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Quote:

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The next step will be much harder: to convince the urban, educated populations in the big cities – Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif – not only of their legitimacy, acquired in the frontlines, but that they will crush the corrupt urban elite that plundered the nation for the past 20 years. All that while engaging in a credible, national interest process of improving the lives of average Afghans under a new Islamic system. It will be crucial to watch what kind of practical and financial help the emir of Qatar will offer.

The new cabinet has elements of a Pashtun jirga (tribal assembly). I’ve been to a few, and it’s fascinating to see how it works. Everyone sits on a circle to avoid a hierarchy – even if symbolic. Everyone is entitled to express their opinion. This leads to alliances necessarily being forged.

The negotiations to form a government were being conducted in Kabul by former President Hamid Karzai – crucially, a Pashtun from a minor Durrani clan, the Popalzai – and Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik, and former head of the Council for National Reconciliation. The Taliban did listen to them, but in the end they de facto chose what their own jirga had decided.

Pashtuns are extremely fierce when it comes to defending their Islamic credentials. They believe their legendary founding ancestor, Qais Abdul Rasheed, converted to Islam in the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad, and then Pashtuns became the strongest defender of the faith anywhere.

Yet that’s not exactly how it played out in history. From the 7th century onwards, Islam was predominant only from Herat in the west to legendary Balkh in the north all the way to Central Asia, and south between Sistan and Kandahar. The mountains of the Hindu Kush and the corridor from Kabul to Peshawar resisted Islam for centuries. Kabul in fact was a Hindu kingdom as late as the 11th century. It took as many as five centuries for the core Pashtun lands to convert to Islam.

Islam with Afghan characteristics

To cut an immensely complex story short, the Taliban was born in 1994 across the – artificial – border of Afghanistan and Pakistani Balochistan as a movement by Pashtuns who studied in Deobandi madrassas in Pakistan.

All the Afghan Taliban leaders had very close connections with Pakistani religious parties. During the 1980s anti-USSR jihad, many of these Taliban (“students”) in several madrassas worked side by side with the mujahideen to defend Islam in Afghanistan against the infidel. The whole process was channeled through the Peshawar political establishment: -overseen by the Pakistani ISI, with enormous CIA input, and a tsunami of cash and would-be jihadis flowing from Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab world.

When they finally seized power in 1994 in Kandahar and 1996 in Kabul, the Taliban emerged as a motley crew of minor clerics and refugees invested in a sort of wacky Afghan reformation – religious and cultural – as they set up what they saw as a pure Salafist Islamic Emirate.

I saw how it worked on the spot, and as demented as it was, it amounted to a new political force in Afghanistan. The Taliban were very popular in the south because they promised security after the bloody 1992-1995 civil war. The totally radical Islamist ideology came later – with disastrous results, especially in the big cities. But not in the subsistence agriculture countryside, because the Taliban social outlook merely reflected rural Afghan practice.

The Taliban installed a 7th century-style Salafi Islam crisscrossed with the Pashtunwali code. A huge mistake was their aversion to Sufism and the veneration of shrines – something extremely popular in Islamic Afghanistan for centuries.

It’s too early to tell how Taliban 2.0 will play out in the dizzyingly complex, emerging Eurasian integration chessboard. But internally, a wiser, more traveled, social media-savvy Taliban seem aware they cannot allow themselves to repeat the dire 1996-2001 mistakes.

Deng Xiaoping set the framework for socialism with Chinese characteristics . One of the greatest geopolitical challenges ahead will be whether Taliban 2.0 are able to shape a sustainable development Islam with Afghan characteristics.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

oh dear. Putting the Haqqanis in charge of everything interior is like putting the Ukrainian Nazis in charge of everything interior

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:

We also made the mistake of trying to prop up yet another puppet, Kharazi

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Originally posted by second:

U.S. has evacuated and facilitated the evacuation of approximately 111,900 people. Since the end of July, we have re-located approximately 117,500 people.

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