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Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

If you're doing infrastructure for the old regime and you're not particularly attached to the old regime and a new regime shows up it's completely normal to send some reps to figure out if the project is to be continued and the details thereof.

Obviously there are situational judgement calls that can't be captured by slinging stupid internet rules of thumb around but this is Ericson we're talking about. They're providing basic infrastructure stuff that anyone seeking to run a state needs. That's a pretty neutral thing to be involved in. It's not like they are a defense contractor who were supplying the people shooting at the new regime a week ago. And in this case it was a local contractor so that adds a potential layer of baggage.

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> but this is Ericson we're talking about. They're providing basic infrastructure stuff that anyone seeking to run a state needs. That's a pretty neutral thing to be involved in.

I totally disagree that Ericsson could be considered a neutral party as a foreign corporation doing business in Iraq. There is nothing neutral about doing business with a hostile foreign government. That's just not normal in any way. It's not like they had never heard of ISIS and were oblivious to all the Sharia law and violence going on in Iraq.

> The contractor was kept under house arrest, and claimed that the Ericsson manager then stopped answering his calls. "He abandoned me, he turned off the phone and disappeared."

In some organizations it's also typical to throw the contractor and underlings under the bus when the project turns to sh*t.

That was the perception of the employee. Clearly the whole thing is way out of normal, but what do you expect from the manager when they are informed that one of their employees are taken hostage? Become a trained hostage negotiator and one-man-army?

Later the article says:

> But the report says that one of the company's partners "made arrangements" with IS to secure his release and let the company continue its work in Mosul.

So no, the person wasn't abandoned.

There is a lot of questions about the manager's conduct before the kidnapping. How the heck did things end up there? But first thing I would expect from the manager after the kidnapping is to find a professional to handle the situation. And the professional very well might advice the manager to cut communications.

What do I expect from the manager?

Not to become a hostage negotiator darmy, but to hand the phone and the matter off to a proper hostage negotiator and army.

Not to just forking ghost the guy.

> There is a lot of questions about the manager's conduct before the kidnapping. How the heck did things end up there?

Ali's brother runs with the crew and will keep an eye out, something like that I imagine.

ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban are not "regimes" and I'd like to caution you away from normalizing terrorist groups as political entities. It has been known to vendors that operate in those areas who terrorists are and what tactics they employ. There is no "neutrality" to these groups. This is all common intel that vendors would have and obviously intel someone in their legal department bothered to read.

>ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban are not "regimes" and I'd like to caution you away from normalizing terrorist groups as political entities. It has been known to vendors that operate in those areas who terrorists are and what tactics they employ. There is no "neutrality" to these groups

Oh piss off with the rhetoric. The Taliban did and does run Afghanistan. For a brief moment Isis was running parts of Iraq and Syria. Both are trying to perform typical state administrative functions (courts and rule of law, taxes, defense, controlling borders, etc). One way just way more violent and way less successful than the other. Neutrality is not a foriegn concept in the middle east. They just have way different concepts of "non-neutrality by association, group membership and history" than most of the west does.

Edit: What constitutes a state or government of a state doesn't change because we don't like the specific policy decisions of said state or government or because said government maintains power through a level of violence we consider unacceptable.

This is an odd take. I was in Afghanistan for a total of a year. The Taliban courts that you're talking about executed a woman for having two forced relationships between two rival men, they would extract young men from their homes and make them into forced fighters, they enslaved local populaces for poppy season, just to name a few. Kidnapping and ransom is like a side business to them.

> they would extract young men from their homes and make them into forced fighters

Yesterday a senior German politician floated the idea of reintroducing (or, more accurately, "reactivating") compulsory military service. It previously ran from 1956 until 2011.[0]

As someone else has already pointed out, pretty much all of this stuff can be viewed as shades of grey. Apart from the facts that war is awful, and that that despite that, certain people are happy to get rich from it.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/killing-time-fo... see also https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-military-and-...

Please explain the shades of grey in executing a woman for getting raped by two men

"Compulsory military service" is not even in the same vicinity as being dragged out of your home at gunpoint and being told to fight or your family dies.

Also worth pointing out what the Taliban has been condemned for in the last decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Condemned_practices

I forgot they also conscript children.

These are terrible things being conducted by the state. There still very much was/is a Taliban regime, even if you consider them a terrorist group. I believe the US would refer to them as a "rogue state."

It does not matter that they are 'merely performing "typical state administrative functions". The great accolade for Mussolini was that he kept the trains running on time.

Dealing with such people is a losing game - they always deceive and always take more until stopped.

The only proper response to authoritarians, despots, fascists etc. was provided by the Snake Island garrison to the Russian destroyer: "Go F*k Yourselves".

And the same goes for apologist-type responses like yours.

If you have not figured this out from this week's events, you need to seriously rethink your life.

Just for reference... Mussolini did not keep the trains running on time, he made it dangerous to complain about the trains not running on time.

Not even close to the same.

Perhaps true, but quite offtopic

The POINT was that "merely performing typical state administrative functions" somehow makes them a legitimate government.

That is beyond absurd

Whether or not Mussollini made or failed to make the trains run on time, these administrative functions, whether performed well or poorly does not make any difference - they make them no less a criminal or despot.

EVERY warlord needs to perform some admin functions, and it does NOT in any way confer legitimacy if they do so. Mafia dons contribute to hospitals and festivals, but it does not make them less criminals.

Legitimacy is not a matter of opinion. Either they control the territory and the people in it, or they don't.

FARC, for example, never tried administering anything. But the Taliban has actual courts where they enforce actual written and published laws. We don't like the laws they enforce, but nobody says they are not doing it. (By all accounts, their enforcement is much less corrupt than what they supplanted.)

That doesn't make it good government, but it certainly is government.

The Taliban got demonized by the US 20 years ago but they were not "pursuing political outcomes" - the relevant definition of terrorist - as they had already achieved them. Just because we don't like them or respect them doesn't mean we can warp the definition of terrorist to include them, the US' mission was only to ensure that Al Queda was not leveraging Taliban military infrastructure. Obviously we know that any superpower saying "we're just targeting military" is bullshit. But it happened there too, and then the scope increased to ousting the Taliban and it failed.

A terrorist group doesn't stop being a terrorist group because they control some territory. Their lack of state apparatus in the areas they controlled prevents them from being called a state, and the continued use of terror tactics like public beheadings and rapes. Maintaining the objectives they had already achieved is still political.

There are regimes we respect in that region that do public beheadings, as detailed in law. Like I said, once you have sovereign immunity the standard for criticism or even airtime changes. Practically dissipates from the collective conscious, aside from a footnote in an obscure right’s group annual report.

I'm really confused by this take. From the use of the word "demonized" to your direct assertion that the definition of terrorist is somehow "warped" to make it fit the Taliban. Can you take a look at this non-exhaustive list and let me know what you believe is "warped" based on public record? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Condemned_practices

It should be pretty clear that the post is about a specific definition of terrorism and not my opinion on their practices, the only thing being warped is the definition. If its not clear, compartmentalize it and reapply everything said until it is clear.

I am asking how you can justify using those words in light of their documented behavior. If it's not clear, I'd like you to put your argument in plaintext with clear citations as to how the Taliban was demonized (eg: how things that people fear them for are not true) and how we changed the definition of "terrorism" to fit them.

By their political aims already having been met in 2000. They already controlled Afghanistan. They control it again.

The US went on a war with a group that was hoping for political aims. It was very clear about that, and then eventually went on a 10-20 year war with the Taliban anyway. Here is Vice President Joe Biden affirming that in 2011. Their domestic policy in Afghanistan is not terrorism, while their external policy needs to be reconciled.

https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/vp-biden-says-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-afgha...

Try to find a source you happen to respect that says the same thing.

Subsequently President Trump continued direct negotiations with them, which never broke our "not negotiating with terrorists policy" because............. I think you're starting to get it. With now President Biden fulfilling the pullout deadline that Trump negotiated, giving their country back to them because turns out there was ... a ... group trying to fulfill a political aim - something I've avoided saying as to not dilute and distract from my point.

The US campaign against the Taliban required demonizing them as terrorists under the definition of terrorists which is simply inaccurate, this observation has nothing to do with their human rights record it has to do with political aims that they hadn't already have achieved, the US was required to leverage its media and general islamophobia that allowed for the public to not distinguish between distinct groups. This was successful, while on the ground the people that mattered had to treat them separately for diplomacy, which continues to this day with an outcome that isn't surprising at all when understanding why we shouldn't have attempted marginalizing the Taliban to begin with. Now they have Afghanistan back, the way it was before we got involved.

I'm not sure if any of this information is new to you, but ultimately this is purely semantics. The human rights record isn't a factor.

Another interesting take.

2011 is when I was in Afghanistan and I can attest that both Joe Biden and Barack Obama lied to the American people about the progress in the war during that time because they ultimately wanted out. Let me juxtapose my experience with Mr Biden's words:

> "We are in a position where if Afghanistan ceased and desisted from being a haven for people who do damage and have as a target the United States of America and their allies, that's good enough. That's good enough. We're not there yet.

To be clear, the Taliban is the only force we were fighting in Helmand and Nimroz provinces.

> Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That's critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests.

The only thing I can think of during that time that this correlates to is the fact that they wanted out so bad they were willing to make peace with the Taliban. The Taliban's guerilla techniques and crafty use of IEDs and VBIEDs were having a huge impact on US troops and were dessimating the local population. To the extent that the Taliban figured out that if they just bombed places we went that local populaces would blame us for attracting the Taliban to their area.

> If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us."

This is almost a complete reverse course in what he had just said. Basically, the Taliban is not a threat until they are. He's basically trying to coax the people guilty of a series of heinous war crimes that they can also be regarded as a political entity. I'm reminded of the whitewashing of the IRA, who shouldn't have been a political party either.

Human rights has everything to do with their connection to the word "terrorism".

Its just not our place to bother with organizations already in power. And I’m glad this is the not an “edgy” take anymore.

Due to a third party, we went in to deal with the third party and used the opportunity to oust the first party. We took their state and designated them as non-state enemy combatants, colloquially calling them terrorists. That’s kinda messed up. It also didn’t work.

Promoting American isolationism isn't an edgy take, it's pretty age old. Nationalists have done it for quite some time with varying degrees of success. It's also why we didn't join WWII until we were attacked.

What's an edgy take here is your clear lack of understanding between the Taliban and the Afghan populace, the history of Afghanistan, and your ignorance to the definition of terrorism.

To correct some of the misinformation you're echoing:

> Due to a third party, we went in to deal with the third party and used the opportunity to oust the first party.

First, your speech is really confusing. If you could just directly mention who you're talking about then it'd be easier to track. I'm assuming "third party" here is the Taliban, who started a violent civil war in 94. [1]

> We took their state and designated them as non-state enemy combatants

It never was their state. The Taliban fought with the Mujahideen, whom are also terrorists, to unseat a democratic government. [1]

> We took their state and designated them as non-state enemy combatants, colloquially calling them terrorists

I'm going to assume in good faith that you did not know that at the time Al Qaeda was partnered with the Taliban [2]. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are bent on localized islamic states, while ISIL had global motivations, which is why they were partnered.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1992%E2%80%9... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Afgh...

I weigh the scope creep of the US negatively. I'm aware they partnered and that the US was initially making sure that Al Queda could not use Taliban resources.

If this is something you are passionate about, somebody else should have attempted to deal with the Taliban, which is the future we are currently in.

Doing business with someone implicitly supports them. There is no way around that.

As an infrastructure provider, it makes it tough because pulling out of a country is going to harm normal folks at least as much, if not more, than whoever is in charge you are refusing to do business with.

But that doesn’t mean providing critical infrastructure services to literal terrorists is ok.

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