Before you attack them, you have to find them. They're not walking around with foreign passports. They're part of the local population. The Taliban's actual enemies haven't been "eradicated." They have just melted into the population, just like the Taliban did when the US arrived.
You can melt into the population or you can launch attacks. You can try doing both, but it’s incredibly hard to do so without being caught, not least because by the very act of launching attacks, you put a bullseye on where you have been/are still based.
The Taliban could pull that trick on the US because the US didn’t have organic humint or persistent local level presence. So when the US soldiers came asking locals who was launching attacks, no one would give them them time of day. You think locals would be so hostile to the Taliban? If they were the Americans would never have been driven out
If it was that easy to root out agents and collaborators, there wouldn't be any terrorists/separatists/radicals/agents anywhere in the world. But they exist everywhere, including inside China. And Chinese agents exist inside the US. Their just not shooting at each other.
Wannabe terrorists and revolutionaries are a dime a dozen, but how many have the means and will to carry out meaningful attacks, and the skill and discipline to remain undetected while doing so who are on America’s side? If America had such a vast and effective local force, they sure showed amazing restraint on never ever using it even once
But in Afghanistan, if a bomb goes off, or people go missing, that's just Tuesday. And you're not going to find who did it either. This isn't TV where the bad guy gets caught at the end of the episode. Nor is this the South China Sea where you can see your enemy a hundred miles away on radar.
So how many bombs have gone off since the Taliban takeover? Not one a week I don’t think.
Clandestine troublemaking is easy even inside an actual country, let alone a pseudo-country, which is exactly what Afghanistan is right now. It will be like this for decades, even if development starts immediately.
As i said, it’s not remotely as easy as you seem to think. Especially when the state sponsors of such terror don’t have actual land boarders to support such attacks.
No foreign sponsored revolution/terror campaign have ever succeeded under such circumstances.
The Taliban's actual job has just begun. For the past 20 years they were just having fun shooting stuff and getting a ton of cash for free. Actual governing and making progress, that's a lot harder. And I bet the Taliban will tell you that themselves if you ask them. It's been a week and they're already dealing with protests and all the multi-dimensional problems that start once you actually get power.
True enough that governing is much harder, but we are not talking about governing, we are talking about finding and killing hostile enemy assets. Which I think you are vastly underestimating the Taliban’s effectiveness at.
That’s basically the holy grail of the American occupation effects, to create and grass roots organic local resistance to the Taliban that can stand up to them. Having failed so miserably at this task when they were in country and calling all the shots, what makes you think they can magically pull of this trick now that they have zero physical presence in country?
You don't "send in" proxies. They're already inside. They're part of the population. That's the whole problem.
Let’s see how many actually has the balls to stick their heads up and do something to the Taliban. And how quickly the Taliban literally chop their heads off when they do.
Look, if China sends in any personnel right now, there will be casualties. Which is why for now, China is not committing personnel. It needs to set the stage, send in aid etc. and ramp up building its own local assets and contacts. And even in a year, if it sends engineers etc., there will still be some casualties. Either you accept that and commit, or don't and stay home. There's no middle ground. And yes, it's a lot easier to say this theoretically, then to commit some poor worker's life who's got family back home. These are not easy decisions, but they are strategically important for nations.
Who ever said there would be zero Chinese casualties? The question isn’t one of whether China can avoid loosing anyone, if that was indeed the objective, then of course China is better off staying at home. The question is whether China, together with active support from the Taliban, can effectively safeguard any potential future Chinese investments and projects inside Afghanistan, to which the answer is very much yes.
Furthermore, any foreign sponsored terrorist attacks against Chinese assets in Afghanistan is almost certainly going to lead to vastly greater losses of deployed assets for said foreign state sponsor(s) of terror.
American CIA operatives and special forces were effectively untouchable in places like Syria because of the US military hard power in the AO, which gives them ultimate escalation dominance. If the Syrians or Russians tried to move of those US assets, they will get spanked hard by the might of the US military.
What is the US gonna do when China drops thousand pound bombs on any CIA missions or SpecOp FoBs in or around Afghanistan when said assets had just drawn first blood against Chinese forces in country?
That’s the unavoidable catch 22, state sponsorship of terrorism isn’t something you can do over zoom. You either need people on the ground to run your little state terror sponsorship deal, or you might as well set all your terror sponsorship money on fire because locals are going to flock to take your money and no one is going to actually go do any terrorism. Because they like living and don’t want to be killed painfully by the Taliban. You put boots on the ground without the means to protect them and those boots on the ground end up as stars on walls and headstones in military cemeteries.
Thats why all past successful foreign sponsored terrorism/revolutionary movements needed active support from a powerful land neighbour. Neither the US or India have that, which means any terrorism they do manage to incite will only be on the scale of annoyance rather than actual existential threat.
