No.386070[Reply]
>Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai (born 19 May 1949) is an Afghan politician, academic, and economist who is serving as President of Afghanistan. He was first elected on 20 September 2014 and was re-elected in the 28 September 2019 presidential election. He was announced the winner after a protracted process in February 2020 and was sworn in for a second term on 9 March 2020. An anthropologist by education, he previously served as Minister of Finance and the Chancellor of Kabul University.
>Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002, Ghani was a professor of anthropology at numerous institutions (mostly Johns Hopkins University), and later started working with the World Bank. As the Finance Minister of Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004, he led Afghanistan's attempted economic recovery after the collapse of the Taliban government.
>He is the co-founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness, an organization set up in 2005 to improve the ability of states to serve their citizens. In 2005 he gave a TED talk, in which he discussed how to rebuild a broken state such as Afghanistan.[2] He is a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, an independent initiative hosted by the United Nations Development Programme. In 2013 he was ranked 50th in an online poll to name the world's top 100 intellectuals conducted by Foreign Policy magazine and second in a similar poll run by Prospect magazine.[3]
>An independent politician, Ghani came in fourth in the 2009 presidential election, behind Hamid Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, and Ramazan Bashardost. In the first round of the 2014 presidential election, Ghani secured 35% of the vote, second to Abdullah who secured 45% of the votes cast. However, in the second round Ghani secured around 55.3% of the votes while Abdullah secured around 44.7% of the votes cast. As a result, chaos ensued and the United States intervened to form a unity government.[4]
>Ghani was re-elected when the final results of the 2019 presidential elections were announced after a long delay on 18 February 2020.[5][6] He was sworn in as president for a second five-year term on 9 March 2020.[7]
22 posts and 5 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.>>
No.387132
Is this generation of the Taliban actually the same that was in power in the 90s? For some reason I get the vibe that these nuTaliban are much more reasonable and charitable than their original iteration.
>>
No.387140
>>387106Dude having open pedophiles in your army isn't a good look, having pedophiles who literally offer little boys to solders as a reward is also fucked up
>>
No.387147
>>387098In the Vice docs about Afghanistan, from 10 years ago or more (when they weren't such sellouts) they even tackle that.
>>
No.387214
>>387110> but the US removed the Soviet's tech advantage which would have inevitably won the war, by supplying advanced anti-air equipment to the rebels.Extremely overmemed. The effect of supplying the muj with anti-air weapons was/is grossly overstated in all popular sources. It was more effective as a propaganda tool than as a tactical tool, to put it into perspective.
> https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/afghanistan/2002-01-01/stinging-rebukes<Archival evidence now shows that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev decided to withdraw from Afghanistan a year before the mujahideen fired their first Stinger in September 1986. The Stingers, moreover, had no lasting military impact in Afghanistan and thus could not possibly have chased the Red Army out. The missiles did make an impact in their initial few months – shooting down dozens of Soviet and Afghan aircraft and compelling others to abandon their missions or to fly so high as to be ineffective. Soon, however, Soviet technical and tactical countermeasures largely nullified the effects. Soviet aircraft were retrofitted with flares, beacons, and exhaust baÛes to disorient the missiles, and Soviet pilots operated at night or employed terrain-hugging tactics to prevent the rebels from getting a clear shot. The best evidence that the Stingers were rendered ineffective is that the mujahideen had all but stopped firing them by 1988, despite continued receipt of hundreds more from the CIA. Instead, the rebels sold the missiles in international arms markets or squirreled them away for future use.The Soviet effort in Afghanistan disintegrated largely because the Soviets weren't willing to commit more forces to it, and that's largely because there wasn't a clear military goal. At the height of the conflict, the USSR only had 100k troops there, deployed in a very conventional fashion.
Contrast that in Vietnam, a similar war, peak US troop deployment was over 500k, and thats without counting the troops deployed by the other nations assisting the US, such as Australia, Thailand and South Korea.
>>
No.387220
>>387214>Visiting Scholar, Center for International Studies, University of Southern CaliforniaMilton Bearden responds:
>Alan J. Kuperman's proposition, based on archival evidence, that Gorbachev was ready to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1986 is simply not supported by the historical fact of a vigorous and brutal Soviet prosecution of the war until 1988. And Kuperman's characterization of the Soviets' having developed successful countermeasures to the Stinger – flares, beacons, and exhaust baÛes – is contradicted by overwhelming evidence from U.S., Soviet, and Afghan sources. >The only reliable Soviet countermeasures employed in Afghanistan were flying above 12,000 feet or at night. Either measure negated the tactical value of Soviet air forces and gave the mujahideen freedom of movement on the ground, which is why the United States introduced the Stinger in the first place. >In short, the Stinger did its job. The Afghan resistance was bolstered, the Soviets quit Afghanistan, and their empire collapsed a couple of years later. >It is noteworthy that, although Kuperman has written extensively on this topic, he has not chosen to discuss his theories with former CIA officers directly involved with the deployment of the Stinger.I mean thanks for including the rebuttal I guess.