'Ukraine is like Afghanistan; Russians are the Taliban'

...that's apophany, the false belief everything's connected

Afghanistan. Photo by nasim dadfar on Unsplash

According to The New York Times (NYT), Ukraine’s current situation — with the Russian bear breathing down its neck — is like Afghanistan when the Taliban was poised to take over that country.

You can hear this rather remarkable leap of logic yourself. Just go to the February 15 edition of NYT’s The Daily podcast. About six minutes towards the end, the host asks correspondent Michael Schwirtz if Ukraine isn’t entirely comparable with Afghanistan in August when the Taliban took control. At the time, she reasoned, the Afghan people were exhausted by war, their government suddenly fled the country, the army had given up and “a whole other power just occupied the place without a fight”. She said that something similar could happen to Ukrainians for all their fighting talk in the face of the Russian military threat.

The NYT podcast host’s imputation, of course, is that the Taliban are, to Afghanistan, what the Russians are to Ukraine: a foreign po…