Is there some reason this person would have a special insight into the Afghan situation? Did he spend time over there in the military or state department? Has he worked as a staffer in the Congress? And how did he get accepted into the UC system with a 2.2 GPA?<p>As a friend and godfather to people that have served in the area while working for the DoD or the State Dept, and as someone that lost two friends in SE Asia, I have been trying to get my head around this mess.<p>My ideal political or social news commentator -> brutally and fearlessly honest, STEM background, a stint in public service overseas, and very familiar with inside the beltway but not an insider. Does such a person exist?
The Taliban rolled in within what... hours?<p>Governments that fall that quickly are so corrupt, so incompetent, and so bankrupt (morally, etc) that they are ghosts.<p>It strangley is like the failed startup I saw once that had a big angel investor. (Yes I'm aware of the white privilege / valley-centric self-absorption that sentence is lathered in, this is kind of a joke comparison): No real products or ability to sustain ourselves long term, even with consulting. The C-suite was basically bullshitting projected sales and products to the angle investor corporation.<p>Eventually the corp pulled the plug because of course the C-suite "marketing campaign to the corp overlord" fell apart.<p>The Karzais haven't been running a government, they've been running a marketing campaign for a government-like product to sell to the US Military so they can get rich as the C-suite salaries.<p>I guess that story is lacking the utter corruption of the C-suite running a cocaine/prostitution/bitcoin mining farm for self-enrichment on the side on the company dime which would actually be what the Karzais were doing. Well, and a poor populace of users we had been carpet bombing their weddings.<p>But once the funding is gone, poof the startup is gone the next day. The Afghan government absolutely seemed like that.<p>So the weird thing is all the puff stories trying to give sympathy to all these government people. Come on, they, like I, knew the whole thing was a bankrupt exercise in monetary extraction well before it died. They knew what was coming, and arguably, like I, was complicit in the uh, "monetary extraction".