Very good point.
Does anyone not know what’s going to happen next in Afghanistan?
Maybe the same thing that happened in Vietnam? The US pulled out, and S. Vietnam was conquered. Lots of refugees, and lots of dead people.
It's going to be handed back to the Taliban... one way or the other.
They’ll slide back into the comfort of the 11th century. Or whatever primitive time they’re comfortable with.
The Northern Alliance held out against the Taliban from 1996 until 2001, when Uncle Sam came to the rescue. The Tajiks, Uzbeks and the Hazara will probably return to their respective ethnic redoubts, if it comes to that. There's a lot of predictable liberal hand wringing over how every civil war is Vietnam, with the side we back losing, but I suspect we've weakened the Taliban to the extent that the Afghan government has the ability to slowly grind it down over decades, the way such wars are usually decided. For instance, the Colombian government spent 50 years fighting the FARC, to the point that the FARC is still around, but a shadow of its former self. The West backed all of Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) against Communist insurgencies trained, supplied and financed by China and the Soviet Union, and only three of the countries fell to the communists.
The ghosts of Alexander the Great, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union say we lose.