Imagine thinking world events happen because of whoever is on TV
The Taliban governs Afghanistan because Americans overthrew the previous secular left-wing Republic of Afghanistan government because the Republic made extracting surplus value from the region difficult.
The Taliban is in power because white Americans are so bloodthirsty and unhinged that Afghanis prefer a far-right evangelical government to a permanent fascist colonial occupation with liberal aesthetics.
They will remain in power because Americans funneled so many weapons to right wing paramilitary death squads like the Mujahideen and others (which consolidated into the Taliban) that the country will never be stable enough to return to secular and left-wing governance.
This is why China is pouring money into Afghanistan, if the country becomes stable enough, Afghanistan becomes a reliable partner nation and connects China to the Europe, right wing thought and nationalism is eroded by education into solidarity and internationalism, and the conditions for left wing organizing can eventually return.
Which means oil is processed in the county, and the surplus value produced by those high-value form petroleum products remain in the hands of the people that live and work there, instead of the surplus value being siphoned of out of the country by the American corporations that Americans like to pretend are separate from the American government. Which is why Americans intervened to begin with.
They will remain in power because Americans funneled so many weapons to right wing paramilitary death squads like the Mujahideen and others (which consolidated into the Taliban) that the country will never be stable enough to return to secular and left-wing governance.
girl power
Afghans don’t prefer the Taliban. They have no choice in the matter. The religious zealots rule.
They have no choice because Americans gave the Mujahideen (and affiliates which later consolidated into the Taliban) guns and Stinger missiles to overthrow the democratically elected socialist Republic of Afghanistan in 1992.
The American government gave rural right-wing evangelists the weapons necessary to overthrow the socialist government elected by a huge majority in the secular left-wing cities. Does that sound familiar?
The US gave weapons and trained with NATO the Afghanistan military to safeguard an elected government. The military surrendered in days. That is why Afghans have no choice.
the US sponsored and financed those religious zealot networks in the 1970s to block a socialist movement in afghanistan that had begun in the 1920s. the farm laborers and workers of the country were sick of the feudal system of massive landowners and were tired of the british soldiers propping it up. they wanted universal secular education, an end to the honor killings of women, and a transition to a democratic republican form of governance uninterested in being occupied by western powers.
the US merely continued the project of the british occupiers: financing, training and arming religious psychos (literally men who threw acid in the faces of women who were literate) and opium gangsters, because these are the kinds of assholes that can be relied upon to kill socialist reforms without compunction. the kind of people that will murder children, burn books, and firebomb schools/hospitals. the US wound this minority of killers up and set them lose on the soviet border to lure the US’ rival into an intractable war.
it worked and then the disease got a mind of its own, containment failed (several of US-backed strongmen who functioned as cutouts in supplying war materiel in the gulf were overthrown), and the violence turned towards outwards, and specifically towards the west. the taliban and ISIS are offshoots of networks the US and the UK established and, at best “lost control” of. but, more cynically, they still play a vital role in goosing the military industrial complex and making americans angry at central asians/arabs, sparking their will to export money and violence at the border of our geopolitical rivals.
