this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
765 points (88.8% liked)
Political Memes
8917 readers
2730 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What the fuck? I'm pretty sure I implied that the process of "forging their own path forward" would imply getting rid of the Taliban, and that American interference was bad because it strengthened the Taliban. If that's Taliban apologia, then I'm Barack Obama. To repeat, fuck the Taliban and fuck the war on terror for helping the Taliban consolidate power. This isn't rocket science. Now that Uncle Sam is gone, Afghans have a real shot at getting rid of the Taliban and putting half-decent leadership in charge.
"The Taliban had to win for the Afghan people to be truly free because of Anti-Imperialism" is campist dogshit of the same fucking variety as apologia for the theocracy of Iran, or, from another ideological standpoint, the 'Vanguard State' of the USSR and PRC. Unless what you're arguing for is some variety of accelerationism, wherein the Taliban taking control of the major levers of power in the country will Invigorate The Heroic Resistance(tm), in which case it's slightly less vile, considerably more idiotic, and no less campist in regarding the actual occupation government of the Taliban as preferable to the Dogs Of The Great Satan. It doesn't fucking matter that you believe that in the long run the Taliban should be cast off if you think its appropriate in the 'short-term' of fucking decades of throwing acid on little girls' faces for receiving an education and banning women's voices from being heard in public by a totalitarian theocracy puppet state of a foreign intelligence agency without the slightest hint of democratic pretensions and an extensive history of extrajudicial murder in excess of the already-quite-violent situation in pre-2021 Afghanistan.
Would you like to fucking remind me what the position of the Taliban was like before 'American interference'.
I'll give you a little fucking hint - not fucking pretty.
Would you like to remind me what the position of the Taliban is now?
The primary difference is that the NRF doesn't have a figure like the Northern Alliance had in Ahmad Shah Massoud, a figure who could unite disparate personalities (and it is a matter in large part of personalities in coalition building in a country without a strong sense of nationhood (and if you say that Afghanistan does have a strong sense of nationhood, I will unfortunately not be surprised) or broader ideological unity) in resistance to the Taliban. And Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated before the American intervention in the country.
The whole fucking idea that the Taliban came into power because of 'anti-imperialist' credentials is a fucking armchair leftist take with no understanding of the history or society of Afghanistan at present, nor, for that matter, of social movements in general or of the practical position of the Taliban itself. The Taliban remained deeply unpopular in most of Afghanistan, and are a continuing contributor to the deep and declining dissatisfaction in Afghanistan today.
The deeper issue is that this is all in-line with your previous positions. This isn't some fucking fluke, just an especially stark display of how far you're willing to take your campism. The idea of the Afghan government, which constantly clashed with US interests, as an 'occupation' government is especially fucking absurd, but hey, whoever you need to play apologist for in the name of 'anti-imperialism' (here, of course, meaning campism, not being against governments which are puppeted by foreign powers or which sell off the natural resources of the nation to imperialist countries with no input from the citizenry of Afghanistan).
This is no different than simping for North Korea under the position that South Korea is an Amerikkkan puppet. "Sure North Korea is bad, but we need to kick out the foreigners, and THEN the People will Rise Up Against Oppression, like they have in the DPRK (they have risen up against oppression, right?)"
Thank you for affirming, with that edit, everything I saw implied by your previous statements.
So I reiterate - fuck your Taliban apologia, Mr. Obama.
Okay I'm about as interested in continuing this conversation as you are, given that you're obviously more interesting in unilateral condemnation than understanding, but like you do realize we're now living in the timeline where Obama didn't leave Afghanistan right? I mean dude, the US-installed government fell within four months of the US withdrawal. Four months from start to end. The so-called Afghan government was a corrupt mess only propped up by NATO pumping billions of dollars in money, supplies and troops, and as soon as NATO left it started falling apart. We're talking ghost battalions, preposterous amounts of bribery, billions of dollars in embezzled money. No matter how much you hate the Taliban (which, yeah, we all do), the Islamic Republic simply never provided a credible alternative. I mean what the heck is this? In the immortal words of Joe Biden:
And they fucking lost anyway. I mean I fucking hate that the group to succeed them had to be the Taliban, but when your government can't survive three months without support from the most powerful country in the world, well that is a fucking problem. This is even worse than I thought; there was simply no way to keep that house of cards standing, and who was the only group capable of filling the void? That's right, the Taliban, no thanks to Uncle Sam. And now that you don't have America giving the Taliban legitimacy with every bombing, drone strike or even their very existence, the people of Afghanistan are organically taking up arms against the Taliban. Wonder how that works.
PS: Not everyone who disagrees with you on topics you're strongly opinionated about is the devil (or a Taliban apologist, but those are basically the same thing).
PSS: More seriously, you show a serious lack of understanding regarding the attitudes of indigenous peoples towards foreign invaders. A foreign enemy is enough to turn anyone into a hero and anyone (or anything) into a villain.
Welp, guess I gotta go war crimin'.
Yes, it is a fucking problem that a government cannot survive without foreign support against a military with foreign support. That does not, however, equate to the idea that the military with foreign support winning is the only fucking way forward.
And how's that gone? And which people are taking up arms?
Oh, what's that? The same groups of people who defended the republic against the Taliban offensive?
Golly gee, it's almost like what happened isn't some new development of a base of support or the energizing of a new, previously passive group to take up arms, but a continuation of the same fucking fight but with vastly reduced resources. Luckily, as we all know, continuing a fight with the same base of support but vastly reduced resources results in the Underdog Bonus(tm) coming into play, and definitely isn't a delusion of accelerationist dipshittery that a worse position is a better one, actually.
And what about people who say, explicitly, that the Taliban taking power is the only way to free Afghanistan of Imperialist Chains(tm)? You know, like you explicitly said?
"It's not apologia because I don't like them, I'm just making apologies for why their rise to power was good and necessary!"
No, that's still apologia, sorry to burst your bubble. You can own up to it or you can lie to yourself, but don't expect other people to play asspat games with someone who plays apologist for a regime busy banning little girls from learning how to read and mutilating the ones who get too uppity.
'Indigenous peoples' jesus fucking Christ, this is exactly the kind of narrow pseudoacademic bullshit that gets passed around leftist circles as a universal truth that I was removed about. Who are the indigenous peoples and who are the foreign invaders, here? Do you know anything about Afghan ethnic groups, or how they regard one another? Do you understand the base of recruitment of the Taliban?
If I showed you data regarding the opinions of Afghans before 2021 on the Taliban and the US, would you change your mind, or would you find a convenient excuse to continue licking the Taliban's boots as some expression of 'anti-imperialist' sentiment (by being a representative of Pakistani imperialism, which is somehow immune to this notion you're peddling)?
Apparently, what you really mean is "Bad Camp is always the foreign invader, which means other foreign invaders are suddenly Expressions Of The Indigenous Will"
Did you read the article I linked? Pakistani support was only one item on a very long list of factors. I mean the Taliban expanded their reach massively by being like "we're gonna win anyway, wanna surrender now?" I'm also very much not convinced that foreign support for the Taliban was more than what the Republic was getting. The much more serious problem was that the Republic was unable to maintain the illusion of legitimacy necessary for a state to survive. If you want to condemn me as a Taliban apologist, you first have to confront the very real and ultimately fatal problems confronting the Republic even after 20 years of American money and airstrikes. Here's a hint:
On the other hand, the Taliban were united by a militant Islamist ideology.
And a bunch of independent militias and Taliban defectors, with more speculated to be on the way if those guys can hold on against the Taliban. So no, it is not in fact the same groups of people who defended the republic against the Taliban offensive.
I never said anything about Imperialist Chains™; my point was and is that Afghanistan was going remain stuck in political limbo as long as the US-backed government was in charge. Obviously they were running a much more tolerable operation than the Taliban program, but it wasn't and was never going to be stable enough to survive without being propped up by America and NATO. It was a band aid that did nothing to address, and was mutually exclusive to addressing, the wound festering under it. At some point Afghanistan was going to have to sink or swim; an eternal status quo was simply not tenable. To repeat, the Taliban takeover wasn't good, it wasn't desirable for a Better Future™; it was the unavoidable result of the inevitable US withdrawal, in which case delaying the inevitable hurt many and helped no one. Some band aids simply need to be ripped off, no matter how painful it is to do so. Here's one example: This failure to rip off the band aid early enough has now left Afghanistan woefully underequipped to deal with its climate change problems; Kabul's water resources (I think I got that right) will dry out by 2030 and in this critical period it's the fucking Taliban in charge. Rather than 10 years of war, X years of Taliban rule and 20-X of peacetime non-Taliban rule Afghanistan got 20 years of war and likely (though hopefully not) 10 years of Taliban rule before catastrophe hits, because the Republican government was too busy failing to stop America from dropping bombs on Afghan to be anything but an unstable rump with no legitimacy whatsoever. Also, may I remind you that we're living in the future where America stayed in Afghanistan? While I acknowledge that I might have some of the causes wrong, this is the reality Afghanistan is living. What we're now seeing is
Americans and everyone else, kind of and kind of, respectively.
I wouldn't characterize the fatal lack of legitimacy of the Republic as an anti-imperialist reaction if the data says what you're implying, and that would mean my bit about indigenous peoples was wrong, but that would do nothing to counter the fact that the Republic still fatally lacked legitimacy. You seem to know enough about Afghan ethnic groups that you should know that loyalty to a central administration that asserts its right to rule via a democratic mandate is not how Afghans do things. The short of it is that, no matter the reason, the Taliban had political legitimacy in the eyes of Afghans and the Republican government didn't. That's not a reality you can argue your way around. Edit: And to be clear, I don't mean the moral kind of political legitimacy; I mean political legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghans who are supposed to compose it and whom it's supposed to serve.