Comments by "Kalimdor199" (@Kalimdor199Menegroth) on "How Afghanistan became a failed state" video.

  1. Iceland relies on NATO army in place of its own national army. So yes, it still applies to them as well.
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  2. The nation state, while being a Western creation, is not the only kind of state-building model. There are plenty of multinational states in the West as well. There is more than just one model. Democracy and human rights are indeed western creations. The Taliban uprising did not evolve in an organic manner. It was a consequence of 20 years of constant wars and atrocities. They were there to fill the void after the soviets left and the mujahidin started fighting against one-another. To label the Taliban movement as an organic evolution, that means it existed at least in the fringes of Afghanistan prior to the soviet takeover. It did not. While there were radical islamic movements, none of them were as extreme and brutal as the Taliban. The Taliban movement is an outside influence as well. It originated from Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and later adopted elements from the Deobandi religious movement. Neither the first, nor the second were native in Afghanistan. Is the country at peace? We don't know and we can't say for sure. The population that got a taste of Western freedoms will not take lightly the idea of having their country turned into a militant Islamic theocracy. Afghanistan is a failed state as it is now essentially a terrorist-captured state. And it will remain as such as long as there will be no form of moderation within it. The people of Afghanistan did not vote the Taliban into power, last time I checked. So saying that they chose the Taliban to rule them is a bit of a stretch. From experience, war at all cost is not less bad or good than peace at all costs. Having peace at all costs under a brutal repressive regime is bad. No matter how you try to sugarcoat it. At the same time spiraling into perpetual war is bad as well. There is no guarantee that the Taliban would bring stability to the country. They will only intensify repression and enforcement of religious zealotry. The Taliban are strictly a militaristic religious movement. They are not equipped to rule a state. And they are also composed of various factions that have broken apart and unified every now and then. There is a possibility that if they keep to themselves, maybe no one will bother them. But if they decide to do what they did in the 90s, exporting terrorism on a global scale and even threaten regional security, then you can be certain that it won't be long until someone will start another war there. Not necessary a foreign military invasion. For a country like Afghanistan, you only need a divide and conquer tactic. Exploit their ethnic, religious and political differences and make them clash. Chaos will again ensue.
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  3. They did. And he mentions it towards the end, how they financed and armed the mujahidin.
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  4. The mistake was not that they sent students abroad. It was that they sent students abroad into 2 state entities that were hostile to one another. It doesn't take a genius to realize that if you train your technocrats in one country, and your soldiers and officers in another, things will eventually spiral into self-destruction. If they decided to send both students and military personnel to train abroad but in a single country, things might've been different. At the very least there wouldn't have been a conflict of visions and values between the state bureaucracy and the military. When my country was in the process of unifying and building a modern state, we sent students abroad too. They then came back and modernized the state. But we sent them to France, to UK, to Austria, to Germany. States that had roughly similar values, Western values. We did not send them to Russia or the Ottoman Empire. That would've made no sense. This was the mistake the Afghan government made. My country also tried, during communist period to play with both the US and with the Soviet Union. And the result was a violent transition from communism to capitalist democracy rather than a peaceful one as it happened in almost all other former communist states in Europe. This is a very dangerous tactic that most failed at and very, very few got it right.
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  5. To be honest, Afghanistan is also partly to blame, specifically the people that were in power between 1950 and 1975. American and Soviet influences did not come into Afghanistan by themselves. The Afghan state willingly attracted both, training bureaucrats in the US and military officers in the USSR. A mind-boggling decision considering the context of the Cold War.
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  6. As many as possible. The people of Afghanistan wanted a better future. Those in power back in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s thought that their development strategy was good. And it was temporarily. The way they chose to achieve it came to bite them in the end. Afghanistan should be a lesson to countries who think they can play superpowers and reap only benefits. It is a recipe for disaster to craft a state by educating technocrats and military officers into 2 antagonistic cultures and ideologies.
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