I was in favour of the initial post-9/11 campaign and frankly do not regret that. But as I and quite a few others said back in the day, the time for declaring victory and getting out came many years ago. The objective should never have been ‘nation building’, and this was not ‘for the Afghan people’, but rather a reprisal for the 9/11 attacks; a punitive mission rather than a forever war on ‘terrorism’. That should have been it. Make the point then let the perpetual civil war resume with a salutary reminder to keep the fight local. Oh well. As with Iraq, I vastly overestimated the ability of the ruling class in the USA to actually focus on what mattered (not that the UK version is any better, it is just the consequences of our own clown-class are rather less global than when their American counterparts screw the pooch for decades).
And so, the political masters of the now laughably mis-named ‘free world’ fly absurd flags, fretting about people being mis-gendered whilst the USA loses its longest war ever to a bunch of goat botherers with a good command of practical chemistry. Communo-fascist China must be wetting themselves with laughter. It is like a snuff movie set to a Benny Hill soundtrack.
Barrampta is the word you’re looking for.
I’m confused by “I vastly overestimated the ability of the ruling class in the USA to actually focus on what mattered.”
Political advantage, patronage, and government aggrandisement were well served,what else matters?.
One instance of irony is that, with their devotion to being seen as woke, they have likely engineered the largest murder of gays ever seen.
After 9/11 the Afghanistan War should have been:
1. Letters of marque and reprisal
2. Lobbing a few hundred/thousand missiles in
3. Bombing the shit out of their caves, training camps, HQs, military infrastructure, etc from the sky for a few weeks
No need to have boots on the ground. Really, no need.
But if you really want boots on the ground to root them out of their caves, fine. Should be a two month operation max. In and out. Ruthlessly. 50,000 Marines. Two months max. That’s it, end of story.
Yes, that is indeed the entirely correct term.
This is very true.
Also, as it turns out, the US not only ceased direct air support operations, we also blocked civilian contractors providing aircraft maintenance from entering the country. We basically grounded all military air assets. The Taliban now owns more Blackhawk helicopters than most nations. Plus vehicles, small arms, and ammo. It is impossible at this point to claim ignorance and incompetence. This. Was. Deliberate.
True. It was deliberate on the part of the US government, related deep state apparatus, and certain globalist interests.
I know what we can do, though! We can vote the politicians out of office!!! This will fix it, surely!
While I agree that trying to create a nation-state out of Afghanistan was a fools errand, there was absolutely zero chance of even a “massive” reprisal being anything other than a WOFTAM. The Saudi family, Iran, and Muslim “Charities” have been increasing their support for fundamentalist moslem organizations since the 80s.
Dropping bombs on people does a *really* poor job of killing them. You usually kill just enough (especially in the hills and mountains) to piss off the survivors.
There are three solutions to Afghanistan–one is to break it into pieces along tribal lines and hand those pieces to the nation that is already managing others of that tribe. Another is to use Afghanistan as sharpening stone for American military units, and a “finishing school” for SOCOM operators.
The last one is to make a serious effort at building a country with US/UK/Canada levels of corruption. This would involve things like throwing every state department weenie out of the country, keeping most of the defense contractors out, and a significant propaganda effort.
While I am a strong advocate of Letters of Marque and Reprisal for phone scammers and identity thieves, frankly you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.
In order to target caves, training camps and “the like” you need to identify them. In the current era you also need to *clearly* differentiate say between a chemical weapons factory and an aspirin factory.
You also need a press that is at least *nominally* on the side of western civilization and not completely in the tank for anyone trying to tear it down.
Consider Pallywood, and how utterly credulous the western media is about it’s products.
You need boots on the ground. You need well trained, well equipped, *WELL LEAD* troops with easy to understand RoE, and a clear mission,
If the Russians couldn’t keep Afghanistan under control, nobody could.
Of course, the Russians would have been able to do it if the West hadn’t supported the Taliban…err…mujahideen.. ( they’re the nice ones aren’t they..🤣🤣)
God knows why the West did…the Soviet Union was already collapsing…if it was ever a real threat in the first place.
The real problem was much nearer home.
Thank goodness Nancy Pelosi is on top of things:
So, between Biden’s rainbow flag over the embassy and Pelosi’s command to the Taliban to talk nice to women, the Taliban have their targeting orders. This is going to make Cambodia’s death look like a cakewalk.
The question of refugees, with something very real to fear and flee from for once, will soon raise its ugly head.
However I wonder if the Taliban’s attitude to women means that they and their children will generally not be permitted to leave and risk severe (they don’t do mild) punishment if they attempt to. In that case it will largely be men of fighting age who declined the opportunity to do so in recent days. An army of 300,000 doesn’t just blend back in and judging by their reluctance to fight the chances of them sticking around in Iran, Pakistan or some other adjoining “Stan” to carry out a guerilla struggle are low. A huge number will be heading west.
In favor of attacking and driving Iraq out of Kuwait. If there were to be a larger campaign, that was the time to do it.
Not if favor of Blair’s invasion of Iraq nor the subsaquent attack and occupation of Afganistan, both of which were supported and advocated by that lying drunkard scum Alastair Campbell. And of course the equally lying psychopathic scum, Tony Blair. Both of which were supported by outrageous lying by General Powell and the US at the UN security council.
Costing the death of an honourable man Dr David Kelly. Which more than ever, looks like a murder. Not to mention untold millions in the Middle East and Afganistan.
A horible, costly adventure, which may well have bankrupted the US.
That is the default for Afghanistan, not something the USA can ‘impose’. And having handed over turf to this tribe over that tribe, will that status quo endure for a month? A year? Let them kill each other, make it expensive for them to sponsor ventures outside Afghanistan. Realistically the options are either mass extermination or occasional punitive strikes (as Staghounds points out, the relevant local term is barrampta when the Khyber Rifles were sent to show a village why venturing across a border to steal someone else’s goats in the Raj is a bad idea).
That is nation building and it did not work. The American way is to throw taxpayer money at problems, which increases, not decreases corruption locally. You are advocating that actually happened. No one can turn a primitive tribal place like Afghanistan into something in the image of the West; that conceit lies at the very heart of where we are now. The problem was not the military effectiveness of US or UK troops, it was that after the shooting stopped after each operation, the bad guys for today were dead but the underpinning realities of Afghan society remained unchanged, because the society is too primitive and basic to change (unlike, say Japan or Germany circa 1945).
I refer the honourable gentleman to the image at the top of the original post & the articles title. That is what modern propaganda looks like from the ruling class in places like USA; a fountain of absurdities and obsessions with preposterous divisive identities. The values you want Americans to inculcate into Afghans are not even supported by the American (or British) government, who think flying gender identity flags and demanding more woman in positions of power in Afghanistan will show the Taliban’s audience the wisdom of the West.
The West doesn’t do nation building; it does nation deconstructing…their own.
Four solutions, leave them alone.
The British already tried the ‘break up’ solution in India, giving us Pakistan. Well, that worked out well.
Looks like Libertarians are as blood thirsty as the NeoCons.
I am laying out the options. My point was anything in the middle between genocide and punitive strikes are pointless. As genocide is clearly not a politically viable option, and doing nothing when attacked is also not a politically viable option, punitive strikes is really the only option when responding to something like 9/11.
I have seen such flags fly on Western churches.
And the Churches (at least the “mainstream” ones) declare that they are NOT interested in converting people (Pope Francis has said this – and the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury has said much the same, just in a more confused way) – i.e. that they do not really believe in the doctrines of their churches (if they did believe these doctrines – they would want to share belief in them, “spread the Good News”).
Instead the Churches and every other institution (public and private) says they want to “help the poor” (via more government spending and regulations – which end up meaning MORE, not less, poverty than would otherwise be the case), and they say the believe in the “Diversity and Inclusion” agenda of the Frankfurt School of Marxism – except that many of them do not even know this agenda is from Frankfurt School (“Woke”) Marxism. They support the agenda (hence the flag flying and so on) without even really knowing what it is.
So does General Milley – he knows that Critical Race Theory (and the LGBTI stuff and ….) is Frankfurt School Marxist, and he is NOT a Marxist – but he does not care. He is just a mercenary who has still (as I type this) not resigned, even though the Afghan Army (that he trained) has just collapsed.
What does Mr Joseph Biden believe?
John O’Sullivan pointed out on Twitter today (by the way Twitter has finally blocked me – demanding I type a code which includes letters, on a system that only accepts numbers) that Senator Biden in 1975 (yes he was a Senator even then) said that not a single Vietnamese person who wanted to escape the Marxists should be helped – not one.
Mr Biden was always a terrible person.
They may not have had extreme Islam as a multiplier, but the American Indians lived in a society quite similar to Afghanistan when Europeans got here. Bloody, tribal, honor-driven, primitive . . . So it can be done, but (as you said) we have no appetite for genocide, which is what it would take.
bobby b.
Neither Afghanistan nor Congresswoman Omar’s District in Minnesota (or Congresswoman Talib’s District in Michigan) is really about a “tribal society”. They may be tribal – but that is not the key factor.
As for the American indians – talk of “genocide” would have surprised the man who was elected Vice President of the United States as long ago as 1928. The “genocide” stuff (together with absurdly inflated estimates of the number of people living in what is now the United States when Europeans first arrived) is AgitProp pushed in the education system and the media (especially the entertainment media).
The “American Eagle look” did not come from mating with birds. And people who (on Twitter – before I was blocked today – “give us this code that includes letters” in a system that will only accept numbers) attack such people as the Governor of South Dakota for standing on “stolen Native American land” should have a look at the ancestry of the lady (clue – she is a person who would have a “suntan” even if she never went out in the sun).
Up to 1924 one could not be a American citizen and a member of a tribe at-the-same-time – but that was not race, it was a matter of political loyalty. And some members of tribes were doing fairly well in the 1920s – running their own farms, ranches, and other business enterprises.
Then came the 1930s – and the revival of communal collectivism (pushed by the Federal government) – you know vastly better than I do what Pine Ridge and other “islands of socialism” are like.
Membership of a tribe should be like membership of a fraternity or kinship group (like a Scottish Clan) – and that is the way things were developing, till the Federal Government started pushing communal land ownership and “free” services.
If you want to know what the “Sustainable Development” “Agenda 21 – Agenda 2030” pushed by every major international body (public and corporate) would be like in practice – then look at Pine Ridge in South Dakota.
That is the system (communal land ownership, basic income, “free” services) that the international establishment elite (U.N., World Economic Forum, all of them) want to impose on the whole world – they want to make the whole world one vast Pine Ridge.
And that is why they will fail, that is why their Credit Bubble international system will come crashing down (taking Biden, Harris, and all the rest of them with it) – because their ideas are wrong.
1+1=2 is vastly more powerful than all their nuclear weapons and the other fancy bits of kit that the evil-wreak-of-a person who sits in the Oval Office, gloats about when musing about how he will crush dissent in the United States.
Objective truth, basic economic logic, will destroy him – and the rest of the international establishment.
There was some justification for going into the ME. After 9/11 the PTB realized they had 330million+ soft targets. One option would be to take the battle to the enemy. There are a lot of very good reasons for the saying “The best defense is a good offense.” In a way sending troops into the Middle East could also function like a Honey Pot defense.
If what I suggest is a consideration, they would have and should have spent the time to harden potential targets and infrastructure, as well as beef up intelligence. Key would be exploring ways to eliminate dependence on that region for oil. At the end of the day, except for a brief period of energy independence, they did a mediocre job.
This is what I can’t reconcile. The PTB obviously are eager to remain dependent on the ME and do what they can to diminish energy independence.
The Taliban and its supporters must have some vulnerabilities. What are they? I realize they are not as dependent on technology as your average Westerner, even so what happens if the cell towers are disrupted, infrastructure is compromised, and energy flow is cut off? Destroying their crops? Prevent them from building a pipe line? Undermining the morale of the public?
Exasperated – yes the Taliban and so on have vulnerabilities, but they are nothing to do with what you are talking about.
Their vulnerabilities are to do with the teachings of their belief system and the moral character of the man who created it many centuries ago – but we in the West are not allowed to engage in ideological conflict because our own Western establishment will punish us if we do.
“Destroying cell towers” and “preventing them from building a pipe line” are of no more relevance in Afghanistan than they are in Minneapolis or London. You are not going to win this conflict by blowing stuff up and shooting people – if you do not understand that after 20 years, it is hard to know what more to say.
As for oil – Mr Biden and his associates have busy UNDERMINING the American energy industry from their first day.
And that is naught to do with Climate Change – as Mr Biden, as Vice President, helped undermine the nuclear industry in the United States.
These people are the enemies of the United States and the West in general – and by “these people” I do NOT mean the forces of Islam. I mean the international Western establishment – of whom Mr Biden is a puppet.
As for people who blame terrorist attacks against Americans on “our interference in the Middle East” – have you ever heard of the Barbary Pirates (clue they did NOT consider themselves pirates – they were fighting for their belief system) – indeed do you know nothing of the history of the last 14 centuries?
But turning back to the Western Establishment.
It is not Covid 19 and it is not Climate Change – they have wanted to turn the world into a vast Pine Ridge Reservation for many decades.
They want their communal (collective) land ownership, they want the “basic income”, they want the “free” services, they want their “public-private partnership” Fascism – for example Klaus Schwab’s book on “Stakeholder Capitalism” came out in 1971 (so how can it be a “response” to Covid 19 or a “response” to a Global Warming theory that DID NOT EVEN EXIST in 1971).
They want Collectivism – call it Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development, or whatever you want to call it. And they do NOT want it because of Covid 19 or Climate Change – the international government and corporate establishment have wanted collectivism for many decades.
And it does not work – collectivism does not work.
That is why they will fail – that is why their whole Credit Bubble society will collapse.
The Pine Ridge Reservation does not work – it depends on outside subsidies to survive at all.
They are turning the whole Western World into one vast Pine Ridge Reservation – and that will be vastly too big to subsidise.
1+1=2 will destroy the international Credit Bubble establishment. Objective economic truth will destroy them.
And screaming that mathematics (and objective truth generally) are “racist” (whilst they create ever more money from nothing) will not save them. It will not save the bankers, it will not save the Woke Corporations, and it will not save the political establishment either.
That flag is one reason for the fourth item in my list.
It is a good list Niall – although, to be fair to them, the intelligence services DID warn the Biden/Harris Administration about Afghanistan. Biden and co are lying when they say they were not warned.
I agree with bobby b (August 16, 2021 at 10:48 am) that making a little bit of social progress in the two decades we spent in Afghanistan was not an impossible goal, and with Perry that the flag flying less than two months before this collapse perfectly symbolises why failure was not an option but inevitable.
As bobby b notes (August 15, 2021 at 11:45 pm), we must add to various interpreters, open friends of US forces, women rash enough not to keep an old burkha in the bottom drawer and etc., anyone foolish enough to trust woke urging to come out under that flag.
However the few of them who were furthest along in their western LGBTQUERTY alphabet will have learnt PC eagerness to treat boys as girls – and our two decades of boots on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., has brought back anecdotal evidence of the locals’ practical toleration of pedophilia. Thomas Sowell explained how PC patronage usually divides a group into a few first-comer/advanced beneficiaries versus a majority that suffers from the policy’s side-effects more than it gains from the policy’s intended effect. It could be so here too; the most ‘advanced’ may redefine their lifestyle into the Taliban, while the rest can ask Joe Biden to bomb any tall buildings their liberators left behind lest they be assigned another use – but I doubt he’ll bother.
(As I did at the end of this post, so now at the end of this comment, I apologise to any who find the humour of that reflection too grim for a smile. I’m smiling pretty grimly myself.)
“even so what happens if the cell towers are disrupted, infrastructure is compromised, and energy flow is cut off?”
Absolutely. Those jeeps and trucks with mounted machine guns don’t run on camel’s dung. You need petrol. Destroy the petrol infrastructure. Destroy bridges, roads, tunnels. Power stations. Fuel storage tanks. Communication infrastructure. Block mountain passes. Total embargo – no flights, civilian or any others.
It was silly to try to run down every last mujahedeen in his mountain caves.
This should have been done when a good pretext existed, 20 years ago.
For now – keep out, impose total embargo, and wait for the next pretext.
Of course, for the US is best to do nothing. That’s one thing they ,ight succeed in doing.
Doing nothing is 9 times out of 10 the best option, as Cool Cal said.
Especially if, like the US military, you usually achieve nothing no matter what you set out to do.
It is also cheaper (in men and treasure)
Trump said he would get out of Afghanistan and failed to deliver. Trump said he would get out of Syria and failed. We must applaud Biden’s success in delivering on Trump’s promises, even if the method was not so elegant.
Among other things. Maybe I’m naive to think that the Taliban has to have some popular support; I can’t believe that the Taliban would be immune to a backlash. Imagine what would happen if cell phones were cut off in any major western country; the public would be outraged; they wouldn’t tolerate it. I don’t imagine that Afghans, including the Taliban, are any less addicted.
I’m really curious to see how Biden will handle the upcoming public address. (Why in the afternoon, by the way, and not in prime time?)
Something is off about what the media has been leading us to believe. Does anyone believe that Joey formulated any plan or comprehended a plan in enough detail to stipulate in what order the withdrawal would be handled, or that he had the chops to argue for his Plan, demand its implementation over all objections, and see it through to execution? Per the Intelligence community we hear that Biden over rode their objections and warnings. Over the last 20 years wouldn’t you imagine that the Pentagon had drawn up many withdrawal, evacuation, and bug out plans down to the smallest details, with pages and pages of contingencies. I’m just assuming the most current one would be pulled from the shelf. I can’t conceive of this decision being made unilaterally and without consulting allies.
Am I naive? Here’s what’s strange, if Biden was going against the advise of the Intelligence agencies, why did the DOD execute the plan? They had no qualms about undermining and defying Trump. If it had been Trump, they would have sabotaged it or slow walked it, and lied about it while leaking and smearing Trump. What gives? It doesn’t add up; something must have happened. Who benefits? What are we missing?
Why do we need to fight the Taliban?
There are only two reasons to fight the Taliban that I can think of:
A. to prevent them from attacking military or civilian targets in the West or
B. as a punitive reprisal for any terrorist attack they commit against military or civilian targets in the West
Right now there is absolutely no reason to attack them.
Destroy infrastructure — cell phone towers, gas lines/stations, bridges, etc, what could go wrong? The liars and media (BIRM) will paint the whole thing as a humanitarian disaster, putting us in the worst light. A bunch of crying kids on the 6PM news forever.
As much as I’d like to say that Abbottabad should have had a 48 hour warning after Bin Laden’s capture/execution before being glassed, that couldn’t happen. Pakistan had nukes from the 1990s, and Pakistan’s ISI would have ‘accidentally’ let one be captured and shipped to a major western city.
Even now, I’d still want a short warning then Bagram air force base should be hit by a small nuke. And a note saying “behave yourself.” Captured materiel shouldn’t be allowed to persist.
If I tell my kid it’s time to empty the dishwasher, and he decides the job must be finished in seven seconds and he thus breaks half the dishes, I’m not going to share in the blame with him.
You are reaching so far here to rescue your leader that it’s painful to watch. Have some self-respect. No one is complaining about the decision to get out. The problem is with how little competence went into accomplishing it.
bobby b,
The problem is competence? The Fake News wants you to think this, but it’s false. Please read what George Atkisson said (August 16, 2021 at 12:47 am):
Was it deliberate by Biden? Not directly. But western intelligence services, CCP, China, certain decision makers in Pentagon, certain corporations, globalist organizations such as World Bank and IMF and others all wanted this to happen. And they made sure it happened.
Now, did they want it to happen this quickly? No. They wanted what happened in the past 12 days to take about 12 weeks so the media can whitewash it and nobody would know that giving Afghanistan to the Taliban was deliberate.
I do not know if the American Government undermined the air power of their allies – but it would not surprise me if they did.
After all a young Senator Joseph Biden voted to block ammunition and spare parts to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, and to forces in Laos and Cambodia. He knew the Marxists would murder millions – but it did not both him, indeed he denied that people even had a right to flee (after all people fleeing Marxism and coming to the United States are not the sort of immigrant he wanted – not even in 1975, after all Cuba refugees from Marxism in Florida vote Republican).
In the past the left in the United States bureaucracy (and media) enforced an arms embargo (and so on) against the Shah of Iran, and against Somoza in Nicaragua – with the deliberate intent of bringing the enemies of the United States (and the West in general) to power in these countries.
They also had a arms embargo against Batista in Cuba in the late 1950s – in order to help the Marxists to power. And against the government of the Republic of China in the late 1940s (even in 1946 they ordered Chang to STOP the Manchurian offensive – because the Marxists were losing, and that is not what powerful people in the American bureaucracy and establishment wanted) – in order to bring the Marxists to power (they knew this would mean the murder of tens of millions).
The people who call themselves “liberals” or “Progressives” in the United States may not be formal Marxists – but they do have a deep (indeed fanatical) hatred of the United States, and Western principles in general.
They practice “Projection” – they call other people what they themselves are.
Want to know who the traitors are?
Watch and listen who calls, for example, the January 6th protestors (not the Antifa types such as John Sullivan of “Insurrection USA”, or the stooges of the FBI who were instructed to cause as much trouble as possible – but rather the ordinary protesters against the blatantly rigged 2020 Presidential Election) “traitors” or “insurrectionists”.
The people who use those words in relation to the January 6th protestors are themselves traitors – except their insurrection has been successful (their long march through the institutions) – the enemies of the West now control the institutions of the West.
“Why do the military not defy Biden as they defined Trump?”
Exasperated – do you really not know?
President Trump never controlled the FBI and the “Justice” Department.
Defying him did not mean being sent to prison on fake charges, or having your family viciously persecuted.
Even when President Trump was in office – he could not stop the Deep State persecuting conservatives and covering up the crimes of the left.
These days the FBI (if they felt like it) could sexually mutilate your children – and if you complained you would be punished for “Transphobia”.
Still going to defy the state?
“They would never do that” – why not? Who is going to stop them? The courts? The same courts that refused to enforce basic Election Laws?
They have already arrested people, held them for months (without trial) and had them beaten and abused in prison.
The media thought it was nice – they purred their approval.
Only economic collapse will bring these vermin (government and “Woke” Corporate) down. And economic collapse will come.
What Kipling called “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” (what we might call “the justice that is 1+1=2”) will destroy them.
Obviously the Biden administration did not cover itself in glory for their Afghan withdrawal. Biden admitted that the accelerated time table caught them unprepared.
Biden did a decent job defending his decision to withdraw. What ever the date or year, it would be arbitrary. Biden did defend himself in part by blaming the at risk Afghan population’s resistance and reluctance to leave in a timely manner. If his claim is true he is not totally off base. This tendency to procrastinate and hedge, is not unusual, even in the face of eminent catastrophe. Consider how populations on barrier islands or low coastal areas are warned and warned to evacuate in the face of a Category 4 Hurricane, but they still wait until the last minute, when it is too late, and the result is mass panic and chaos.
General Keane did a good job rebutting Biden’s justification for withdrawal. He went on to defend the Afghan military as patriotic and insisted that they had taken heavy casualties over the years, battling the Taliban to a stalemate. The General claims that to maintain the status quo the Afghans only required a small contingent of Western personnel and intelligence assets, but without it they fall. He takes the position that the US could have backed the Afghans for the time being, like South Korea.
Bottom line, the optics were terrible. America is perceived as callously, ruthlessly, abandoning an ally.
You must not read me or you would know that I know.
My apologies Exasperated – I accept that you do know why people do not defy the Woke, because they know the FBI (and other such) will viciously persecute them, and viciously persecute their families.
By the way if any one objects to the term “Trans Cult” then I would remind them that the Scottish government (and the international Woke) wish to extend this to FOUR YEAR OLD CHILDREN.
Yes the SNP are evil with their campaign to exterminate Freedom of Speech and their effort to extend “Trans” to four year old children – and all their other evil. But it is nothing to do with them being Scottish. They are but an example of the international Woke – the Frankfurt School in action (“Repressive Tolerance” and all).
The creatures whose puppet is Mr Joseph Biden, are the same.
How can the West oppose the evil of the Taliban (and the Islamic Republic of Iran – and so on) when the West itself is dominated by evil, the evil of the “Woke”.
Clean your own house before you attack the mess in the house of someone else. Or the world will see your hypocrisy.
Biden has asked OPEC to increase output., apparently. Yet this fool is squeezing the US shale oil and gas fracking industry.