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Post by artraveler on Aug 14, 2021 11:56:03 GMT -8
Afghanistan, on the other hand, is a degraded, tribal, and primitive place Yes, and it hasn't changed in 3000 years. I'm certain that the Greeks and Romans said the same thing. The best of its culture, such as it is, is the worst of the rest of the world including the shit holes in Africa. We should have left there after six months to a year with a warning of don't make us come back. The 20 year attrition of our best and brightest and the billions of dollars could have been saved. Perhaps since they share proximity we should have encouraged the PRC to share their special social skills with the mullahs from hell. I bet that would have been a lasting friendship. |
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 14, 2021 14:26:34 GMT -8
Perhaps the biggest reason for our elites' continuous failure in such foreign wars and policy is their belief that everywhere wants to be like Americans, which many associate with things like Coca Cola and blue jeans.
This delusion has cost Americans trillions in treasure and tens-of-thousands American deaths. (It has cost some of those lands who we found out didn't actually want to be like us, millions of deaths.)
One of the biggest lies was that opening up trade with these countries would somehow make them more like us, democratic, open and free. I have never understood this type of thinking and have had arguments with naive Americans who believe such rubbish.
What those foreign lands wanted was the wealth of America, Coke and blue jeans were completely compatible with authoritarian regimes.
It's like the parable from the New Testament. If you build your house upon a rock i.e. a firm foundation, you will be fine. If you build it on sand, not so much. The American foreign-policy elite have been trying to build whole cites on sand, with disastrous results for all involved, except for the avaricious elites who belong to the military-industrial-financial, intelligence, foreign-policy complex.
Truth is the foundation upon which universal success is based. We have been deluded ourselves as regards what is and what isn't true for decades.
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Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 14, 2021 16:26:15 GMT -8
Speaking of sweet illusions, I read (skimmed) this article by Bill Wanker (that’s, Wenger, actually). Let me just post this comment by a poster: If this guy had been in charge of policy, we could have saved a lot of money and lives. |
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 14, 2021 20:50:33 GMT -8
I believe the writer has some fundamental misunderstandings of the situation. As I understand it, there are something like 50 different tribes in Afghanistan. These people have been fighting each other for power for centuries. Sometimes they work with each other, sometimes the work against each other. Things can be fluid. One thing for sure is that the mere presence of a bunch of Western infidels brought many of these groups together.
Perhaps worse, the "Coalition Forces" worked closely with a group of Afghans who had been educated in the West and spoke Western languages. These people will often have a gloss of "Western Culture," but should one scratch the surface, the old country quickly becomes apparent. (Benazir Bhutto was famous for this. Some of those who had gone to school with her in the U.K. could not understand how she was so ruthless and dishonest in Pakistan.) This type of misunderstanding is common among Westerners. They are overly impressed with "civilized" natives. People like Karsai took advantage of this misunderstanding to the hilt. They understood the ignorance of the Americans in charge and their prejudices. He, his brother and their underlings made off like the bandits they are. The USA army tilted the scales in their favor. Of course, many of the Americans in charge and their friends and families made off like bandits as well. Can you imagine spending almost US$3 billion for an embassy in Kabul? Those in charge officially say that we spent something like US$62 billion in training and supplying the "Afghan Army." I understand it was actually more than US$100 billion. What did we get for this? US$2 trillion spent over twenty years. Something like 6,000 dead Americans, when one includes American contractors who were killed while working there.
Many Westerners, but particularly Americans have a hubris about their position in the universe, which can make them particularly stupid overseas. While I lived in Asia, I had to explain to a number of Western businessmen that just because a local spoke English well didn't mean that that local had any power, represented common local thought or even thought like Westerners. It simply meant that the local spoke a particular foreign language well. And if that local stood to gain something from the Westerner in question, odds were that that local would tell the Westerner what he thought the Westerner wanted to hear. Playing on a foreigner's ignorance was sometimes like a game.
People across the world don't need us teaching them what is good for them. They will look at what we have to offer, take from us what they believe is to their advantage and try to ignore the rest. If they want things to change, they will decide among themselves how to bring this about.
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 14, 2021 21:05:42 GMT -8
While I am pretty sure that the PRC and Taliban will eventually come to blows, I am 100% sure that China has much better reasons to be concerned with Afghanistan than we do. Geography cannot be changed. Most, perhaps all, of the raw materials which are presently in the ground in Afghanistan will be sold to China. Transport charges dictate this fact. Future railroads and highways might change this somewhat, but being a landlocked country has its disadvantages.
China will likely try to bring Afghanistan into its "belt and road" system asap. Watch for a pipeline to be built which crosses parts of Afghanistan and connects Iranian oil supply with Chinese demand.
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Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 14, 2021 21:31:36 GMT -8
That’s great analysis. I’ve read nothing like this anywhere. That’s another way of saying how the American military and American leaders have been so gullible, beholden to their sweet illusions about Islam.
I really do think that they come from the expectation that Islam does not define these people. It’s just another religion like Christianity. (Well, actually better than.). I know this is what is taught. I’ve heard it too often from friends and acquaintances. This is a deeply programmed idea. If you went to college, this is what you almost certainly believe.
Sure, there were other factors, as you mentioned.
No doubt.
The impetus for 20 years of pouring lives and money down the drain came from a variety of factions. I suppose it had to in order to last so long. Conservatives supported it. And the way it was handled (rules of engagement, "democracy" goals, sweet delusions) made it a Progressive-style program.
After all, what is Big Government (mostly Leftist, but by no means absent from the right) but them teaching us what is good for us. They will decide how we live. Our government has become a de facto invading army. That's not to condone the violence perpetrated by the Taliban. But there are parallels indeed.
I’m not close to the situation but I’ve gathered bits here and there. I read that one of the defining issues that created the Taliban was opposition to the rampant boy-love and other homosexual stuff. If you’re the Taliban and you view Westerners, how do you not see them as anything but decedent? Materially wealthy, for sure. But these populations can’t even bother to reproduce themselves. Instead (particularly in Europe), they import Muslims to be (as Mark Steyn notes) the children that they aren’t having…the whole point being to prop up the welfare state pyramid.
Abortion. Gender weirdo-ism. Heck, just look at what’s on TV or in movies. If you’re the Taliban, there is ample evidence that God is on your side and that Westerners are the enemy of decency.
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Post by artraveler on Aug 15, 2021 5:18:01 GMT -8
Moslems are different. Ok that gets my award as the understatement of the century. One Muslim by himself can be friendly, polite, even trustworthy. Two Muslims might be all of the above, although keeping secrets, (yours) comes into question. Three Muslims is a conspiracy to undermine a government that is not Islamic or not Islamic enough. Any number over four is a jihad to install islamic law and culture. Currently the Muslim population of the US is about 2.5 million |
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 15, 2021 8:27:09 GMT -8
A good piece on some basic flaws in our elites' thinking with regard to foreign policy. Why we lost in Afghanistan I want to point out that the terms "nation building" and "institutions trumping over culture and history" are just ways of saying that everyone in the world wants to be like Americans. On such infantile hubris has much of American foreign policy been built. Of course, our intelligence apparatus has failed us once again. If it were up to me, I would cut the CIA's and NSA's budgets by, at least, 50%. These agencies are responsible for wildly incorrect intel going all the way back to the "Missile Crisis." CIA fails again Weren't we told that things would be ok at the embassy for at least three months after the military pulled out? |
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 15, 2021 14:24:29 GMT -8
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 15, 2021 15:04:04 GMT -8
The "withdrawal" from Afghanistan is going to be a worse debacle than Vietnam. It appears the Taliban is now in control of the US Embassy and there are still many Americans stuck in country. How did this happen? Once again, our elites have shown their utter incompetence to, and utter disregard for, the American people. Forget how this fool got to where he is, how is it that he is still there? Milley Vanilli I believe he is about as genuine as the group which is now his homonym. The question is, "who is his Frank Farian?" Milli Vanilli |
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Post by artraveler on Aug 15, 2021 15:44:48 GMT -8
I will offer an alternate theory to incompetence.
There is a large swath of CIA analysts 2nd and 3rd tier who have been predicting this for months since the election in November. For the most part they were told sit down and shut up by the elite on the 7th floor which is completely in the hands of their political masters in congress and the White House. Every person in the Biden Administration knew this was going to happen and they just don't give a damn. They don't care about the thousands of troops dead and injured over the last 20 years. They don't care about the thousands of innocent Afghans who are going to be murdered, tortured and raped by the troglodytes from hell. They don't care about the billions of dollars in equipment left behind or the trillions of dollars spent.
They don't care that the average American does care about all those things. The only reason for sending combat brigades back is political show the ROE is so strict that a soldier will not return fire even if he is shot. And no one in the Administration cares of we add a few more body bags to the total. They are going to blame the entire mess on Trump. They don't care that this will be a political issue next year. In their pea brains they think of the American people as a mass of uneducated, knuckle dragging brutes to be manipulated by the likes of CNN and MSNBC. This is main reason they have allowed this to happen this year and not next. They believe it will be forgotten and even if it hasn't they have control of the election process to ensure the appearance of victory in November 2022.
Call out your representatives and senators on either side of the political spectrum tell them you know what has been done and remind them you don't like it.
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 15, 2021 16:39:57 GMT -8
Then this is the absolute best they deserve.  |
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Post by artraveler on Aug 15, 2021 18:48:41 GMT -8
Hang e'm High
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Post by artraveler on Aug 16, 2021 6:30:24 GMT -8
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Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 16, 2021 8:52:51 GMT -8
Such statistics are ripe for exploitation…just like the Wuhan Flu. How many suicides were because of the war and how many were caused by other things? It’s hard to know. But that there would be despair over taking risks and incurring injuries for a perceived nothing makes tragic sense. I knew this years ago and yet was truly astonished when some of my friends or acquaintances told of themselves (or their sons) enlisting in order to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan. I guess that could be an adventure unto itself. But clearly these guys had little idea of the clusterfuck that the situation was. Or (and I've had experience talking to someone who was a Canadian UN "peacekeeper" in Europe) they had wide-eyed Progressive-style ideas of "saving the world" — basically buying into the idea of the U.S. military as more of a social program than an agency to "kill people and break things." Well…yeah. But from where is that “foreign policy establishment” drawn ultimately? What animates most people nowadays? I’ll tell ya. It’s that there is a weirdo somewhere who isn’t being validated. This mindset has no capacity to deal with the realities of real war, let alone difficult entities (that have no specific boundaries) such as Islamism (who, quite arguably, despite their overt primitivism, are smarter than the Joint Chiefs of Staff combined). This is especially the case when this same establishment has declared officially that Islam is a religion of peace and that the violence done is by a few “extremists.” I’m not talking about the guy who stays at home and hordes guns and ammo. But for those conservatives who engage the world politically, the above paragraph mostly describes them as well. They don’t have a clue. First and foremost will be shock (perhaps feigned) that some weirdo somewhere is not being validated. Quite a Wagnerian article, Artler. |
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 16, 2021 10:06:23 GMT -8
Let's amend that a little. "This mindset has no capacity to deal with reality." There, that's better.  This has been a problem in the USA for a long long time. America is famous for the ability to come up with euphemisms for just about everything. We rarely look at a thing straight on and without trying to soften the edges. Today's American has taken this "make-believe" creed to extreme heights. This makes it very difficult for us to see something as it truly is, and as we all know, you can't solve a problem until you can articulate what the problem is. Kung Fu Zu said it best. Dear Reader, our "gentlemen" have not been using correct language for a long time. This is coming home to roost. We are in a similar situation to that which I saw in the early-to-mid 1970s, but now it is worse. The quality of people who rule us is substantially less than that of 50 years ago. Even worse, the country has allowed a foreign, Godless creed to seep throughout the land. We are now ruled by corrupt incompetents, which is the worst combination imaginable. What is happening in Afghanistan is being observed throughout the world. It is being seen for what it is, a tragic farce. Thank you Biden, or whoever isn't running our foreign policy. Be warned, we are living in very dangerous times and worse is sure to follow. This is much bigger than just a failure to understand Islamism. Look to the South China Sea. Stolen elections have results. |
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Post by artraveler on Aug 16, 2021 10:17:45 GMT -8
The Bug-Out and Fall of Afghanistan
Over the last few years political pressure has been applied to three administrations to bring the Afghanistan War to a conclusion, to a close. President Obama reduced troop levels as did President Trump both announced that the US should leave. President Trump proposed leaving as soon as possible, perhaps in 2021. Following up with the change in administrations President Biden announced that 2021 would be the exit year with September 11, 2021, as the target date.
For reasons passing understanding, the Biden administration decided to accelerate the withdrawal process with the last US troops to leave almost immediately. Since the first of August 2021 the administration has been imploring Taliban leaders to allow American’s to peacefully leave; a request the Taliban has ignored. Over the last few days, August 13-16, Taliban fighters have taken the capital and declared an Islamic state.
Why has this been allowed to happen? Our biased media has attributed this disaster to President Trump. The alternate target is the intelligence agencies, specifically CIA. This is, of course, nonsense. CIA annalists consistently said the supposed Afghan army was never able to act as a unified force against the Taliban.
One of the methods I learned was to say to myself what is the worst possible reason for a person or nation action and how does it fit their history of past action and predict their current action? Following that concept, I asked myself:
1. Has President Biden ever expressed support either by action or inaction for anti-American activities?
2. Has President Biden ever expressed support either by action or inaction for lowered expectations of successful American policy?
3. Has President Biden undermined American policy resulting in American dead in other countries, or acted as a supporter for a potential adversary government?
The instances of yes answers to this question creates a profile of an American president who is not acting as an American but at the bidding of foreign governments. So, what then is the goal? I have come to believe the goal is nothing less then the destruction of the United States as a functioning consensual government.
I wish I could speculate, as many have, that this debacle is the result of a senile old man in an office he cannot handle, or just common incompetence. It is not either. It is the result of planned and executed policy of quislings seeking financial and political advantage at the expense of the American people. I have vivid memories of the helicopters leaving Saigon in 1975 and the even more vivid images of people falling from the landing gear of C-17s leaving the only airport in Afghanistan.
This disaster should haunt Biden every day he is in office, but it won’t. Media will make excuses cover up and lie. Like the border fiasco this was carefully planned and executed by traitors in our government to create chaos. Out of this will come more diktats on every subject you can imagine and increased power to the entrenched bureaucracy. I have over the last two years speculated that we stand at the cusp of real civil war. Take a deep breath, I fear the plunge is about to begin.
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Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 16, 2021 10:42:59 GMT -8
So amended. Motion carried.
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 16, 2021 10:50:09 GMT -8
You beat me to it. I am convinced that we have had traitorous activity in the highest echelons of our government. Biden and his family have clearly and explicitly been shown to be compromised to the CCP. The heads of our alphabet-soup agencies such as the CIA, FBI and NSA have known this for years. Yet nothing has been done to stop the rot. In fact, it was actively promoted by them. The FBI had Hunter's computer since 2019 and did not about it.
The USA's standing in the world has taken a huge hit over the last few days. Friends and allies around the globe are standing aghast at our actions/inactions in Afghanistan. Enemies and others are laughing at our failure. It is even funnier to them because it is self-imposed through arrogance, greed and incompetence.
A large number of our elites must be brought to account and punished severely. Unfortunately, I doubt this will happen. By the time the Biden regime is out of office, untold damage will have been done.
Stolen elections have consequences.
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 16, 2021 11:22:40 GMT -8
I have heard several people saying that Trump wanted to get out of Afghanistan too, so you can't blame Biden for this debacle. As usual, we are dealing with stupid or dishonest people. Probably both.
Let me give a concise example demonstrating the importance of exiting a situation properly.
Say one is on board an airplane and wants to get off. There are basically three different ways one can leave the plane.
1. Wait for the plane to land and exit through a ramp or on stairs.
2. Jump out of the plane while aloft, using a parachute.
3. Jump out of the plane while aloft, without the use of a parachute.
I am sure we will all agree that the results of the above mentioned exits will be very different from each other. Biden has, figuratively, chosen number three.
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