Comments by "Mortablunt" (@Mortablunt) on "Task & Purpose"
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@Mike Hunt
@Mandrake92
Way to not understand the situation at all! The underlined reality was the American occupation government was ineffective, corrupt, and gave nobody anything to fight for. You should actually read the investigations into it as well as interviews with former Afghan soldiers.
A very common theme is abuse of the military, oftentimes soldiers didn’t get paid at all for a weeks or even months. The American backed regime also liked to play tribal and cultural favorites; although passions are just 40% of the Afghan population the represented almost all of the posts of any imports in the government, and they not only disenfranchised the other 60% of the people, they also abused them. Ministers used influence to enrich themselves and pull favors for their particular tribe while abusing the government to punish and oppress rivals. People we were counting on as civil servants to run the countries operated more like gang leaders.
The government failed to deliver on any kind of public good. Roads didn’t get worked, on water, didn’t get supplied electricity didn’t come, criminals didn’t get prosecuted, Schools didn’t get run, and so on. The two parts in particular about schools and law were most important. The Afghan official courts were extremely corrupt and also had all kinds of loopholes actually enforced by American occupation forces. The Taliban for all their faults actually provided a sort of education, some types of social services, and even brought some law and order to an otherwise a completely anarchic countryside.
Between the abuse, the disenfranchisement, and not getting paid for their work, there was a reason the Afghan occupation regime folded.
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Well, he completely misses the political aspect of the situation. This whole writeup is incredibly self-serving and spins like the rings of Saturn, so I’ll be succinct.
War is classically politics, by other means. Due to the strong varied resentments against the president of Syria at the start of the last decade, there was a strong coalition opposed to his rule. This included democracy advocates, who wanted more liberal government. This included Theo Kratts, who wanted a more religious government. This included social conservatives, who did not like him following European style modernization, and it also included Arabists, who dislike the fact that he of the ruling class were made of a non Muslim minority called the Alawi. Most of these groups have a little in common with each other, other than not liking the president.
At first, when hostilities began, they need to work together to prevent assured destruction by the central authority, and its military overcame many other concerns, but overtime as it seemed like the government forces were surely going to lose they had to start thinking about the realities of who is going to rule Syria next, and what the new Syria was going to look like, and how it would function. Just came at the same time as an opening power vacuum as much of the state was no longer under the control of the government.
So the groups started fighting each other, and the various ideologies started pushing for dominance. One of the very few things that united a plurality of groups was that they share the same religion, Sunni Islam. So the political Islam factions had a leg up on securing control, and the ones that became ISIS were ruthless in killing or subordinating absolutely all other Islamist factions.
Emergence of Isis politically was a response to a socialunrest, autocratic rule that opposed many values held by the Syrian people, and what they felt to be their culture. With the importance of religion in Syrian society, being led by a warrior clerk, massively helped Isis with receiving social and political legitimization from factions outside of government control. The sinful evil secular authority was gone, and in came a supposedly righteous religious authority that would rule with enlightenment. Supposedly.
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