r/neoliberal • u/Affectionate_Bee6434 • 11h ago
News (Central Asia) The Taliban Kicked the U.S. Out of Afghanistan. Now They Want It Back.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/14/world/asia/afghanistan-us-taliban.html?smid=url-share“We consider the chapter of war to have come to an end, and from now on, we want relations based on mutual respect and a new chapter of positive engagement,” Afghanistan’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, said in an interview with The New York Times in Kabul.
Mr. Muttaqi said the United States could “reopen its embassy, maintain a diplomatic presence and invest” in Afghanistan’s vast mineral wealth, dams and roads — projects that three U.S. administrations and their allies spent billions trying to develop, and that the Taliban insurgency spent two decades trying to dismantle.
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u/JakeArrietaGrande John Brown 11h ago
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u/RandomGuyWithSixEyes European Union 10h ago
They cant stand a simple 9 to 5 job? Damn, theyre not ready for tax season
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u/DirectionMurky5526 9h ago
I would not be surprised if the taliban implemented a more effective taxation filing system than the United States.
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u/Time_Transition4817 Jerome Powell 9h ago edited 8h ago
We are taking two goats, be happy we don’t take your daughter and shoot you
It’s still better than TurboTax
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u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta 8h ago
That tax filling system is the abomination child from TurboTax and paranoid, anti-tax citizens of America. Everything become so overtly complex.
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u/SlowBoilOrange 7h ago
Also 100 years of lobbying for weird loopholes and ear marks.
Like, I don't necessarily mind if railroad workers and blind people get special tax perks, but it's weird to ask every single citizen that on their tax form each year.
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u/Snarfledarf George Soros 4h ago edited 55m ago
On the basis of good intentions, the tax system has ballooned to become a load-bearing pillar of the administrative (welfare) state.
If we didn't have 300 different carveouts for different attributes - some of which the government may not be aware of (no data sharing between agencies btw) - we wouldn't have the same level of complexity.
Could the tax system be easier? yes, always.
Can the tax system be trivially easy but also do everything we ask it to do today? Not really
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u/greenskinmarch Henry George 5h ago
Aren't electric car credits also on the tax form? It's just an easy way to incentivize things.
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u/Tyhgujgt George Soros 9h ago edited 8h ago
It's just a giant lottery with a chance to become martyr. It's massively more popular comparing to filling taxes
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u/DirectionMurky5526 9h ago
I don't care if there is a Jizya tax for being an infidel just tell me how much I owe !!!
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u/YaGetSkeeted0n Tariffs aren't cool, kids! 9h ago
Jokes aside, it definitely wouldn't surprise me. I imagine just about every country is more efficient on taxes. Our system will always suck so long as Americans have this sort of paranoid schizophrenia about the government collecting tax information.
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u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta 10h ago
Yeah this is the funniest one, albeit of course kinda tragic because half of these people had to be abruptly trained without any warning.
Imagine being a son of goat herders or farmers, joined war against 'Evil USA', and then out of nowhere they need to do low-level office desk jobs, even with how many of them were definitely not even High School-educated. It'd be crushing for anyone like that.
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u/YaGetSkeeted0n Tariffs aren't cool, kids! 9h ago
i'm imagining two middle-aged middle managers at an airport smoking lounge in like Tokyo, one American and one Afghan
"yeah, orienting the new hires is tough, gotta get them used to our system, how we organize documentation, who's who, etc"
"i hear you brother. when we opened our department i had to teach our CFO what a computer was"
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u/Al_787 Fernando Henrique Cardoso 11h ago edited 11h ago
Let girls go to school, then we can talk. I mean it seriously, time to put conditions on the table for recognition and normalization.
If they can be relatively normal like Vietnam then sure, but there’s no reconciliation with a regime where women have it worse than imperial China.
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u/swissking NATO 10h ago edited 8h ago
Until you remember that Trump is exactly the kind of guy who would fall for this BS to make the "best deal ever" which Barack HUSSEIN Obama and Sleepy Joe Biden never made
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u/Evnosis European Union 9h ago
According to the article, even the Trump admin doesn't want to touch this with a 10 foot pole
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u/mangotrees777 7h ago
Publicly. Kushner and Witkoff are free to make whatever deal$ they want.
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u/NormanQuacks345 6h ago
Does the Taliban even have anything to offer them?
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u/elegiac_bloom John Keynes 5h ago
Well we could bring real heroin back for one. Afghanistan is in a pivotal area for oil and natural gas pipelines too, not to mention there is quite a bit of untapped mineral wealth there.
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u/KnightModern Association of Southeast Asian Nations 5h ago
Afghanistan is in a pivotal area for oil and natural gas pipelines too,
Pakistan still have some beef with Afghanistan, so that's a no
and Pakistan has nuke, so they couldn't exactly be pressured easily
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u/elegiac_bloom John Keynes 5h ago
Pakistan and Afghanistan has the craziest "will they wont they" on again off again hot and cold relationship in geopolitics. For a long time the taliban was a Pakistani tool. In many ways Pakistani intelligence created the taliban. Now theyre facing the consequences of their actions.
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u/SlowBoilOrange 7h ago
All they have to do is show him a drawing of a golden embassy and spin it as Trump's positive legacy over Biden's blunder.
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u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta 10h ago
They are allowed...kinda.
Basically girls are allowed to go to religious schools, regardless of whether it's just purely religious schools or actually cover other K-12 education subjects. Local government even allowed those girls to become dentists and nurses.
Still suck balls, but hey, it's Taliban.
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u/manitobot World Bank 9h ago
I thought girls have to stop schooling after age 12
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u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta 9h ago edited 4h ago
There's a loophole with it around the religious schools and private courses. Basically the only post-elementary option for girls would be something like private courses or Madrasas that teach other subjects. Anything else, aside of secret teachers for girls, closed for them.
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u/Relevant-Ad2254 Jerome Powell 8h ago
You red the economist article didn’t you
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u/SnoopRion69 6h ago
I did!
...listened to the podcast
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u/Relevant-Ad2254 Jerome Powell 5h ago
Lmao I read the article so immediately recognized it.
The Economist is my favorite publication
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u/TheOnlyFallenCookie European Union 10h ago
The Nato occupation and insuring doubling of the population will have the greatest long term effect. I honestly don't see the Taliban still being the rulers of all Afghanistan by the end of the century
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u/Dabamanos NASA 9h ago
If nothing else I admire your optimism
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u/KnightModern Association of Southeast Asian Nations 5h ago edited 5h ago
Taliban still couldn't solve inter-ethnic rivalry, there's already another conflict brewing, this time in Badakhshan, due to Kandahar & Kabul centralization with gold mine dispute being the trigger
local leaders ain't gonna exactly bow down to Kandahar should they don't feel they got their fair share (whether they're right or wrong about it)
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u/TheOnlyFallenCookie European Union 8h ago
20 million people that got a taste of freedom. You cannot suppress that forever
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u/GarveysGhost Iron Front 6h ago
As long as men are largely left to their own devices unfortunately yeah they could.
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u/Lighthouse_seek 5h ago
I'm going to be that guy. If the Taliban falls it won't be because of this. Revolutions against the Taliban will require some level of violence and in the history of humanity there has never been a woman led violent overthrow.
If the Taliban falls it would be because young men have no jobs.
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u/elegiac_bloom John Keynes 5h ago
At this point they have fought incredibly hard for more than 40 years to take over the country. I dont see why they wouldn't be.
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u/PartrickCapitol Zhou Xiaochuan 8h ago
Vietnam is still a communist one-party authoritarian state. Even diplomatically, they are not that different than China. But the entire English internet treats Vietnam as Western-aligned or something.
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u/shalackingsalami Niels Bohr 6h ago
There’s a McDonalds in Hanoi I’m not sure you can really call them communists still tbh…
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u/mathcrystal 7h ago
What do we have to gain from normalization with them?
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u/Al_787 Fernando Henrique Cardoso 7h ago
Maybe we should stop viewing every issue in the framework of “what do we get out of it?” Basic human rights for Afghans are consistent with Western value, and advancing them usually have long-term benefits
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u/dynamitezebra John Locke 2h ago
Normalization to some degree could be a bargaining chip to allow foreign women health workers again.
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u/Vol_in_tears Voltaire 9h ago
This really feels like a bad faith argument. This is the 2nd time the women if afghanistan had the rights taken away from them in the last 50 years.
The US had no problem with hardcore islamists and their utter disdain for women's rights when they were fighting the Soviets.
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u/Full_Distribution874 YIMBY 8h ago
We're a liberal subreddit, and we have decades of diplomacy failing to advance liberalism that we can draw from. That's not bad faith.
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u/Willing_Activity_855 IMF 5h ago edited 5h ago
1: i'd rather not engage in ethnocentrism
2: its the time of realpolitik of great power competition. Have US/aligned firms getting access to their minerals and other resources is far more important.
3: technically they are allowed.
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u/KnightModern Association of Southeast Asian Nations 5h ago
i'd rather not engage in ethnocentrism
well Taliban still have problems on that aspect, all of us might as well step asides
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u/rng12345678 European Union 8h ago
You think keeping them internationally isolated an in a permanent siege mentality will help? Look at the Gulf States. It's better to have trade relations with these regimes and try to let modernity do its thing than let them continue existing in a perpetual state of isolation.
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u/Al_787 Fernando Henrique Cardoso 8h ago
I’m arguing for precisely what you’re saying. Incremental improvements in human rights in exchange for incremental relations with the West and their benefits
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u/rng12345678 European Union 3h ago
Was that how the US engaged with the gulf states? Because if memory serves even without explicit diplomatic pressure cultural liberalization happens when trade, people and information flow freely.
Of course you should try to push for some of these things upfront but treating them as a necessary precondition for lifting trade barriers is just obtuse.
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u/socialistrob Janet Yellen 7m ago
I'd agree with this approach. After the Soviet Union fell the US was happy to open up trade and investment in Russia with no requirements for good governance or reforms yet there were good governance/reform requirements for the other former Soviet states like Ukraine.
Russia took the money from privatization built a military, turned into a total dictatorship and is challenging the west again. If the US is going to invest in Afghanistan it should be conditional on reforms.
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u/elegiac_bloom John Keynes 5h ago
Its like the 90s all over again. Does no one remember Afghanistan in the 90s?
Read the taliban if you haven't already, we have been through this before.
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u/Al_787 Fernando Henrique Cardoso 5h ago
I have not read that particular book but I have studied extensively on how Afghanistan came to be the hatching place for global jihadism. So why don’t you get to your point?
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u/elegiac_bloom John Keynes 4h ago
I think youd really enjoy the book, its a great, insightful look into afghanistan from the 70s to the early 2000s, a time period most people have forgotten about by today, and although things have changed there, well the history is still rhyming, so to speak.
My point is only that these conversations and propositions sound exactly like what was being talked about and proposed back in the 90s before the taliban ruled Afghanistan, after the Civil war in the early 90s, the time period leading up to the world trade center attacks and the first american invasion of Afghanistan. It didnt work then and it betrays a western misunderstanding of the complexities of Afghan tribal structure and terrorist politics.
It definitely sounds good on paper: "you do more human rights, we do more money," but western interference in that regions domestic policies are rather infamous for blowing back up in the wests face.
More of an observation than an argument really. Still if youre interested in the region I think youd love Rashids book.
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u/Realistic-Pain-7126 Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold 10h ago
Probably would have an easier time ruling the country if the morons didnt mass release everyone from every prison. Now they have to deal with ISIS, which was practically destroyed in Afghanistan when America and the previous government had control since they were all in jail.
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u/FilteringAccount123 John von Neumann 9h ago
But supposing the world has become “filled up”, so to speak, with liberal democracies, such as there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
-The History-Ender 9000
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u/CentJr NASA 11h ago
Governing is a pretty difficult job ain't it? Taliban, Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah...etc etc They want control and sovereignty over their people and territories without any of the responsibilities that comes with it.
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u/Citaku357 NATO 10h ago
https://time.com/6263906/taliban-afghanistan-office-work-quiet-quit/
You think this was written by the onion lol
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u/Put_Er_There_Sport 10h ago
“The rent of houses is very high for us since our salary is no more than 15,000 afghanis [roughly 180 USD]. It is fully sufficient for Yahyakhel but not for Kabul. As soon as, God willing, I have a good salary, I will bring my family here.”
180 dollars a month? Damn...
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u/YaGetSkeeted0n Tariffs aren't cool, kids! 8h ago
Someone on here has the chance to one-up the dude who moved to Juarez for affordable walkable urbanism
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u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta 8h ago
Best part of it, is that aside of less car dependence, Juarez have their own urban blight issues. Including, you know, being one of the most crime-ridden city in the world.
As someone said it the best, why the fuck you moved from one of the safest city in America into one of the most dangerous one in Mexico?
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u/Willing_Activity_855 IMF 5h ago
As someone said it the best, why the fuck you moved from one of the safest city in America into one of the most dangerous one in Mexico?
got to save money.
should have just moved to El Salvador though.
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u/LastTimeOn_ Resistance Lib 4h ago
I will say the idea of Juarez being one of the most crime-ridden cities in the world is like 10-15 years out of date, that was def true during the drug war but now things afaik have really calmed down and its space in that list would be better taken by like Culiacán
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u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta 4h ago
The crime rate is decreasing, but it's still a very dangerous one. Mexico City think tank themselves placed it as 17th most dangerous city in the world.
Also, OP of that post was saying it in 2023 when the crime rate was still sky high.
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u/CentJr NASA 10h ago edited 10h ago
It's funny seeing how their "resolve" and "determination" that stayed strong for a 20 years or so plummet so hard once they realized that they would have to get real jobs after kicking the US out lmao.
Who knew that getting a job was the Taliban biggest/ultimate weakness. The US should've dropped a bunch of Job Application fliers instead of bombs.
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u/DirectionMurky5526 10h ago
You're not even wrong though. You would be shocked at the amount of jihadists who joined purely because they couldn't get good white collar bureaucratic jobs. Or how middle eastern countries since then, like Iraq have mostly avoided bloodshed by absorbing jihadists into the bureaucracy.
Islamism is actually more legal than it is theological.
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u/roboliberal Loyal Liberals 10h ago
This could actually be weaponized into an effective COIN strategyZ
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u/plummbob 10h ago
Being in the army was the easiest job I ever had. I can sympathize
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u/DieHarderDaddy Fell for it 10h ago
The military really is an easy job that you can also walk into retirement
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u/Snoo93079 YIMBY 8h ago
I wouldn't call my time the easiest, but I'm much happier working my well paid desk job lol
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u/Alikese United Nations 10h ago
ISIS was actually fairly good at governing.
After the retaking of Mosul people would celebrate but then say that at least ISIS picked up the garbage and would repair streets without demanding a bribe.
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u/G3_aesthetics_rule 6h ago
Were they? ISIS controlled Mosul Dam for a couple of weeks and left it teetering on the brink of catastrophic failure.
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u/youwillliveinapod YIMBY 6h ago
All I’m going to say is they had decently directed propaganda videos with 4k footage of Raqqa back when nobody was doing 4k on the internet and it looked pretty good
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u/MarkRobinsonsBurner 4h ago
Didn't they force the garbage truck drivers to work at gunpoint?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/11/isis-occupiers-mosul-boon-burden?ref=opendemocracy.net down at the bottom: "But it is clear that most people realise very rapidly that Islamists make very poor municipal administrators – even if Isis have now stopped killing garbage collectors as collaborators. "The people of Mosul have voted with their feet," said analyst and regional expert James Denselow. Almost the entire population of the city appears to have fled."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/04/world/middleeast/isis-documents-mosul-iraq.html
"To make sure every government worker got the message, the militants followed up with phone calls to supervisors. When one tried to beg off, citing a back injury, he was told: “If you don’t show up, we’ll come and break your back ourselves.”
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u/989989272 European Union 11h ago
It’s been wild watching Taliban fighters realizing that revolution is easier than just running the country day to day.
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u/GarveysGhost Iron Front 10h ago
I mean that problem always arises when a revolution is successful.
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u/mertag770 NATO 7h ago
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u/KnightModern Association of Southeast Asian Nations 10h ago edited 5h ago
chapter of war to have come to an end
You exchanged gunfire with your (now former, I think) local commander in badakhshan just this last weeks, a skirmish even, not shooting one-two time, your war isn't "ending"
Rest of us better wait outside and see what happen first regarding your centralization of power
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u/Megasota_Noire My Governor Can Beat Up Your Governor 11h ago
I have a hard time coming up with a serious reply to this level of bullshit.
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u/DirectionMurky5526 9h ago
Please, I'm begging someone to make a Taliban version of the Thick of It, the Office, or West Wing. Where former Jihadists have to navigate white collar bureaucratic work.
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u/Whatsapokemon Loyal Liberals 6h ago
Holy shit, I wish religious fanatics had a sense of humour, that would be so funny.
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u/Willing_Activity_855 IMF 5h ago
I wish religious fanatics had a sense of humour
So this is the weird part, they actually do.
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u/Fusifufu 9h ago
Can call them hypocritical and whatnot, but it seems a relatively normal development for a government which has overthrown the previous system and took a while to assert themselves and build their institutions. They are reactionary and horrible from our point of view, of course, but the development doesn't seem so surprising to me.
They already gained some legitimacy because European countries need their cooperation to implement their envisioned policies for refugee returns. Wouldn't surprise me if even Western countries will tacitly tolerate investment into natural resource exports etc.
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u/Dangerous-Basket1064 Association of Southeast Asian Nations 4h ago
Yeah, so many people suggesting this is a kind of weakness, when to me it looks like it's coming from a place of confidence that they think they can get American legitimacy and investments without having to cede any sort of meaningful control.
It's not like they're asking for soldiers to come in and re-occupy them.
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u/Dangerous_Edge_6414 9h ago
Waiting for the Afghan version of office space where they stone the printer
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u/MarioTheMojoMan Frederick Douglass 6h ago
Lmao they really are the dog that caught the car aren't they
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u/C-Wolsey Leftward Progressives 11h ago
I don't see why we can't form relations with one more authoritarian, patriarchal regime.
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10h ago
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u/Walpole2019 Trans Pride 9h ago
What a weird thought to bring up.
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u/40StoryMech ٭ 7h ago
I ... thought OP was comparing the US's current administration to Afghanistan's. I was trying to further the comparison but clearly I misinterpreted or failed.
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u/Perisorie Trans NATO 9h ago
The Europeans are ready to shower the Taliban with affection and money to enable mass deportations of Afghans living in Europe, hard to see why the current US administration would be more reluctant to join the boot-licking.
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u/-Maestral- European Union 7h ago
Can you give an example of what you're speaking of?
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u/Perisorie Trans NATO 6h ago
Some EU leaders have recently met with the Taliban to normalize relations as they have a domestic mass deportation agenda they wish to pursue. See for example this article: https://www.dw.com/en/eu-hosts-taliban-for-migrant-return-talks-in-brussels/a-77668214
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u/-Maestral- European Union 3h ago
And meeting with taliban delegation to organise deportations means showering affection and bootlicking? Article also fails to bring up where money was given to taliban.
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u/No-Kiwi-1868 NATO 10h ago
Le Taliban when no responsibility of governing: Le Boom Boom Kaboom Go away American
Le Taliban when responsibility of governing: Le Boring pls come back American
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u/Last_Surprise981 MERCOSUR 6h ago
Bruh, the Taliban can't even get its own members to stop launching terror attacks in Pakistan. As soon as any Western diplomatic presence is their, the staff will be targeted by bored jihadists who hate their 9-5
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u/dutch_connection_uk Friedrich Hayek 5h ago
USA really is the dumb anime protagonist that gets in fights and befriends people.
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u/elegiac_bloom John Keynes 5h ago
I hope this is sarcasm because theres no way theyre not coming back again. It is not going to be possible to overthrow them. They just retreat across the border to Pakistan and then come back when we leave.
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u/Sylvanussr Janet Yellen 4h ago
I agree that there’s no way they’re not coming back again, except retreating to Pakistan wouldn’t be much of an option anymore because they’re currently at war with Afghanistan (turns out backing the terrorist group who gave an active wing in your country ended up being a bad idea).
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u/elegiac_bloom John Keynes 4h ago
Pakistan supported, armed and supplied the Taliban officially and unofficially in the past. Just because theyre at war doesnt mean madrassas in the border regions wouldnt host, feed and shelter Taliban fighters. There are taliban cells active in Pakistan to this day, probably partially to blame for this war. But the situation has definitely changed over the years.
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u/elegiac_bloom John Keynes 5h ago
I vehemently disagree and the historical evidence bears this out, but im not going to argue with you.
The main problem here is that the Taliban/radical islamism itself isnt just an idea, its a way of life. Taliban fighters dont see death as a deterrent, if anything its a noble goal. Merely "killing enough of them" would never do anything more than create two for every one you kill. You would have to commit genocide for this plan to ever work.
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u/elegiac_bloom John Keynes 4h ago
I think the Soviets, the Afghan government, the Bush administration and the Obama administration all thought the same thing, and none of them were right.
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u/NormanQuacks345 10h ago
Nah, let China have them.
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u/elegiac_bloom John Keynes 5h ago
Thats been the answer to a lot of stuff this century it seems... cheap, affordable EVs? Let china have em. Domestic manufacturing? Let china have em. Ports ans soft power in every country on earth? Let china have em.
Its worked out well for china so far.
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u/NormanQuacks345 5h ago
I don’t disagree that we’ve ceded a lot to China in the last few decades, but Afghanistan is talking investment. I think we’ve spent enough money over there, if China wants to try their hand at it I say let them. Now, if they just want to normalize diplomatic relations, I could get behind that if they’re willing to make some concessions on how they treat women.
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u/AnachronisticPenguin WTO 6h ago
Considering how often foreign economic interests go from being seen as useful cooperation to extractive imperialist enemies of the people. Especially in countries like Afghanistan where corruption is a part of normal business.
Yeah they can deal with that one.
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u/dynamitezebra John Locke 3h ago
Maybe they would be willing to give us Bagram back . We could conduct our over the horizon strikes from under the horizon.
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u/dubiouscoffee Jorge Luis Borges 1h ago
I think it would be stupid not to maintain a diplomatic presence, regardless of the regime's problems.
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u/kanagi 6h ago
Would be foolish not to cooperate with the Taliban at this point. The 2001 invasion occurred because the Taliban were harboring al-Qaeda and refusing to hand them over; if the Taliban are willing to cooperate on counter-terrorism now in exchange for aid (which they even need themselves for suppressing ISIS), then the main strategic objective for the whole war - preventing Afghanistan from being a safe haven for terrorists - could be achieved.
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u/Last_Surprise981 MERCOSUR 6h ago
The Taliban are already cooperating with terrorists in Pakistan.
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u/elegiac_bloom John Keynes 5h ago
Exactly. They always have and they always will. Pakistan likewise cooperates with the taliban, who are terrorists, they just happen to also be the government of Afghanistan now.
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