This isn't really accurate. The Northern Alliance entered into an agreement with the US to secure the country. An insurgency sprang up and we fought it for 20 years before giving up. Since this is now after the fact, we can safely say the Taliban ran the insurgency the whole time.

The Taliban are a military and political group compromised of an ethnic minority in Afghanistan. It's not even that the US lost to "goat herders with guns". We failed to secure a small country against a well organized, armed minority.

▲

LorenPechtel 22 days ago | parent [-]

No. Pakistan supported an insurgency group for 20 years.

No insurgency like that can exist without foreign support in some form, usually from governments but it can be from resource export.

And the reality is nobody has ever defeated a foreign sponsored insurgency. Some have ended because the sponsor quit sponsoring them, but that is not the same thing as defeated.

▲

sidewndr46 22 days ago | parent [-]

I don't really think it's news that the Taliban are sponsored by Pakistan. We've known that longer than I've been alive.

▲

LorenPechtel 20 days ago | parent [-]

The point is we were actually fighting Pakistan.

Nobody has ever defeated a foreign-funded insurgency, other than by the funding going away. It's no surprise we didn't accomplish what nobody else has, either.

	▲	sidewndr46 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		This is akin to arguing that the USSR fought the US in Afghanistan. It's known that we armed and helped the various groups active there at the time. It's also pretty well established we had only a handful of people on the ground there at any point in time. Had the USSR actually fought the US at this point in time, the resulting combat would have been the most significant combat engagements of the 20th century. Everyone knows Pakistan funded the insurgency. Pakistan has no interest in actually running Afghanistan. It's a buffer state for them. The US has no real interest in trying to get Pakistan to stop this. It's a failure of domestic politics that we didn't drop pack up a few weeks after it became obvious Bin Laden was not there.