In the uncertainty of the near future of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, what are the odds that the Taliban can maintain their power by sheer force of arms? Can possibly be a realistic US role in the struggle between "normal" Afghanis and their extremist countrymen?

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I want peace in Afghanistan. We all do. But I must say that armed Afghan resistance to the Taliban is to be expected, and I can not disagree with it. Who can blame "normal" Afghans-- especially the women-- for fighting against radical misogyny!?

One figure I have read is that the Taliban has between 80 and 90 thousand fighters. How many Afghans there are, who are not armed but sympathetic to the Taliban's extremism, has never been estimated, to my knowledge.

However, the Taliban undoubtedly is severely outnumbered. The UN estimates the July 1, 2021 population of Afghanistan at 39,835,428. The Taliban may have got their hands on billions of dollars worth of arms supplied to the Afghan Army, but that doesn't mean that they are all well-trained to use them, or that the munitions needed to use them will not run out, with no source of resupply.

Although Russia or China could-- can-- supply the Taliban with AK-47 rounds, maybe with RPGs, could they do the same with munitions (or parts) to be used in American Black Hawk helicopters, drones, and other aerial weapons, or American-made artillery? Would they see it in their geostrategic interest to do so?

Would any other geopolitical adversary to the United States see it that way? Iran undoubtedly would not, if only because Iran is Shi'ite Muslim, and the religious-extremist Taliban hates Shi'ites as much as they hate the women who bore them.

Kim Jong-Un's North Korea has been teetering on the brink of collapse for months, or years, nearly starving to death, and could not credibly supply the Taliban with effective arms over a distance of 4,488 miles, almost completely over Chinese airspace (and they have no naval resources to do so by sea, and Afghanistan is a landlocked country anyway).

Nor could China explain their permitting NK to do so, nor could they say to their ally NK that supplying the Taliban with arms was a viable or useful way of opposing the US.

Has anyone seen, thus far, any other Sunni Muslim nations or individuals making the most perfunctory statements of support for the Taliban takeover? Saudi Arabia? Syria? Pakistan? Indonesia? Crickets.

It is by no means sure that the Taliban will hold onto power in any enduring way. And there is even less evidence that, without any capability of transoceanic military-power projection, the Taliban can conceivably constitute any legitimate threat to the American homeland.

The question of whether, with an Afghani popular overthrow of the Taliban, the US would attempt to revive its country-reshaping effort through a returned Ashraf Ghani, who left Afghanistan with "only the clothes he was wearing," or other individuals, is premature, and by no means any sure thing.

President Biden may, in such a prospective denouement, say, "See, our leaving Afghanistan after 20 years came out all right after all!"

However, he would utterly forfeit such an American-political (read, Democratic) and geostrategic opportunity if the CIA were to begin covertly supplying non-Taliban Afghani entities, especially the major warlords who betrayed us in 2001 by letting/helping the Taliban and Osama bin Laden disappear after the 9/11/01 attacks (even though it was not even Afghans who perpetrated those attacks).

For the US to continue the neoconservative tactics of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" in Afghanistan (or any other nation) would be disastrous. When will men and women of good will, in senior positions in the US government, stand up and purge the neocon cabal that has been calling the foreign-policy shots of the United States ever since Paul Wolfowitz et al. came out with the PNAC in 1996?

Authors Website: http://www.watermelonslim.com

Authors Bio:

My name is William Perkins Homans the third, but probably more people know me as the bluesman (and artist) Watermelon Slim.



I've been in the fight against war, fascism, injustice and inhumanity for 47 years. I was at MayDay, 1971, and at the moratorium March the week before. I was one of the leaders of the Great New Jersey Turnpike Stall on my birthday, April 25, 1971.



I bear the scar on my left shin from a neoNazi jackboot, when I was one of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War who bounced the NSWPP from Flamingo Park at the Republican National Convention of 1972. My father fought the Nazis in the North Atlantic and Anzio, and I met their spawn in Miami.



My formal education has been first-rate. I wouldn't trade my degrees for Harvard ones. I was raised in the finest private Catholic and Episcopal high schools.
I earned my BA in History and Journalism from the University of Oregon/Eugene. I was also captain of the U of O bowling team, 1984-1986. High game 299. Mentors: Dr. W. Gordon Rockett, Dr. Daniell Pope
1997-2000: Oklahoma State University. M.A., History, 2000, plus the school-teaching curriculum. Mentor: Dr. Ronald Petrin

I am a world survivalist. My politics transcends right and left, perforce. I watch for signs we may transcend in some yet-unknown fashion the vectors and indicators in my environmental and geopolitical analysis.
As Tiny Tim said, "God bless us, every one!"