Stanley McChrystal: belief

Transcript context

…Not right now, but how much medium-term optimism do you have for Afghanistan? It’s great you worded it that way, Tyler. Medium-term, I think things are going to move forward. I don’t think Afghanistan is anything like it was in 2001. There’s been too much progress socially, too much education. I think the Taliban are going to find that they caught something they really aren’t prepared for. They’re going to try to reimplement what they had in the 1990s, and it’s going to be very uncomfortable. I expect in the near term, there will be a lot of friction, and then one of two things is going to happen. The Taliban will just find they’ve got to mature and accommodate and evolve themselves into a different kind of government, or they won’t be able to maintain control. I think that the former is more likely, that the Taliban are forced to change who they are, but I’m not sure which of those two options is going to play out. What did we learn from the Armenia-Azerbaijan war? Is it all just about drones now? Or is that an outlier?…

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