US and Taliban sign deal to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan

[Rev. Rye]

The U.S signed a peace deal with Taliban:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/f...nistan-war

US and Taliban sign deal to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan

• US troops could leave Afghanistan within 14 months
  
• Taliban agree to peace talks with other Afghans
  

So the American war against the Muslims of Afghanistan started since 2001, almost 20 years of constant fighting did not break the will of the people there; I have a question: if this war was just from the American side; then how did warriors with flip-flops and mere AKs stand still until a deal is signed from the American side to withdraw?

Isn't that a defeat on all scales?

I'll leave you dear user to think about it.

Once you look a bit at military history, it becomes clear this isn't a question of "how can these Ay-Rabs with flip-flops and Kalashnikovs beat the biggest army on the planet" but "how did the US military ever seriously think this would work in their favour?"

All the military might in the world means absolutely nothing when you're fighting a guerrilla movement with a shitton of popular support. It's why America has lost almost all its wars since 1953: they made the mistake of fighting guerrilla forces that the populace would likely consider at the very least the lesser evil. And the sole exception was because Saddam Hussein had a proper army (with strategies going back to Hannibal.) This might seem counter-intuitive, but, bear in mind: in situations like these, the line between civilian and warrior is alarmingly thin. You can take out a prominent fighter, and it will mean very little, because two will take their place. In situations like these, things go one of two ways: The Sons of Hannibal with the standardised armies will either A) end up giving up in the face of constant assault by these scrappy fighters, or B) commit genocide against them. And between the fact that everything America has done in the Middle East has inflamed tempers, the cult of martyrdom ubiquitous in Islamist groups, and the fact that even Trump isn't so brazen as to openly embrace genocide, it's clear that A is the only viable option.

If you're at all interested in issues like this, I cannot recommend The Battle of Algiers highly enough. It's a docudrama approach to the earlier days of the Algerian War of Independence, the ideological/action-oriented grandparents of these Islamist terrorists we've been dealing with nonstop since September 2001. The French take out a major terrorist cell, and any victory ends up meaningless. The French with their tanks prove no match to these ululating Algerians. And, before you chalk this all up to the French being Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys, they're really not. Not even in this film. They're pretty brutal, and, as nihilistic as it may seem in the film, the reality was even worse ON BOTH SIDES.