What's worse is the billions in armored vehicles and weapons that can be used against those who resist them. If anything, the Taliban are now in a stronger military position than in 2001.
I'd go further and say that in 2001 "the war" wasn't even that well defined. It seemed to be more about the action of attacking rather than any coherent vision. Iraq was at least up for debate, whereas Afghanistan was like well of course we need to attack them "back" how could you think otherwise?
Yeah. But there were a significant number of people who grew up seeing the Russians get beaten in Afghanistan, thought it was a decent lesson to learn without being involved, and then lo and behold, your country gets into a land war in Asia and gets to learn it for themselves.
Most of the Afghan civilian population do not have the benefit of an air force but many of them will die from US-built (and now Taliban-operated) equipment all the same. Sure, the civilians are not "allied forces" but it's still a shit move to give their opponents more weapons.
I'm sure people said Cuba would run out of cars in the 60s.
They might be able to use all that gear per the manual and best practices, but they'll make use of it however they can. Humans do that.
I hope history will look back at that and see it as a "plowshares" dump, where native ingenuity took tons of scrap iron and reformed into the infrastructure of a better society. I figure it's about as likely as being canrally pleasured by a pink unicorn, but its a pleasant fantasy.
There is a stark difference between old cars and modern tech, especially when we take into consideration repairability and right to repair being pressing issues.
Presumably, if the customer doesn't have the right to repair then the manufacturer would be able to make parts that are exceptionally difficult to repair without specialized knowledge and tools. Or worse, enforce cryptographic locks on any software/firmware to prevent unauthorized changes.
I think right to repair is about ensuring that the customer can make reasonable repairs to the product, and the manufacturer not infringing on their rights when designing the product.
Ah, I see you don't know that companies can "prohibit" chip manufacturers from selling specific chips to third parties [1,2]. Moreover, schematics, repair guidelines, and all sorts of other tools are not available to independent repair shops, which render repairs very difficult, Louis Rossmann has had frequent rants about this on his channel on Youtube [2], and is one of the most prominent advocates of the right to repair.
It follows then that unless right to repair passes/exists, obtaining replacement parts for any devices is exceptionally difficult. There is therefore a stark contrast between 1960s cars and their very limited electronics and current tech that relies on often hundreds of chips and software to operate.
In most cases where the US has supplied this kind of equipment, the locals don’t have the skills to actually work on the vehicles. The maintenance work in these situations is usually contracted out to a company from the US (just another part of the $2T grift).
They can probably figure out how to fix the ground vehicles and keep them running, but aircraft without a proper maintenance schedule will break down very quickly.
Afghanistan is not yet on the list[1]. If the new government doesn’t uphold its obligations under Doha, there is a good chance it will be added to it in the future.
"Afghanistan" (the recently routed government) is not on the list. The Taliban is not a (yet) recognized nation-state in most Western countries. It'll take time for these lists to get updated with recent events.
Considering that the Taliban is/was a hostile party to an active US military operation, starting economic activities with them without explicit government approval is probably not a good idea.
The Taliban (in Afghanistan; the Pakistani Taliban is on both the Treasury and State lists), as well as a very large number of persons and organizations associated with the Taliban separately, is on the Treasury Department OFAC Sanctions list even though for diplomatic reasons the Taliban has not been included on the State Department list of international terrorist organizations.
Trump ended the economic sanctions on the Taliban as part of the peace deal (or at least committed to by Aug 20 2020). Maybe weapons sanctions are still in place though.
That should be obvious to everyone, but in 2001 it was unpatriotic and politically incorrect to ask whether the US was capable of winning the war.