Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats
- Thread starter GasBandit
- Start date
"Anything else?"
"I'm still in January."
"I'm still in January."
I'm pretty sure it's still mavembuary the 56th of 2020.
Anakin and Padme meme:
"But 2021 is going to be better, right?" 
"..." 
"2021 is going to be better, right?"I'm seeing articles about how Biden's presidency will be judged on his infrastructure bill, and his Afghanistan withdrawal.
One of which is good, great, awesome, long-overdue, and the other is a costly mistake that will come back to bite you in the ass for decades to come.
And it...I dunno, saddens me, angers me, makes me feel disappointed, I can't quite pin down how to name the feeling, that a large part of Americans, if not the majority, will apply those labels in the exact opposite way of how they should be.
In other and completely unrelated news, the Taliban have already taken over almost half of Afghanistan, most of the Afghan regulars are surrendering without a fight or are deserting, only the US- or EU-trained troops and commandos offer any form of resistance. Kandahar has fallen, Kabul is expected to follow in a few weeks/months at the latest, and the Taliban, who were numerous but lacked proper material, are now heavily armed with tanks, planes, jeeps, and guns, all provided by the US Army. So next time will be thrice as hard. At least 6000 Afghani have already died, and in many cities and villages, those who supported the USA are being treated like the collaborators with the Germans after the end of WWII - hair shaved off, flogged naked through the streets, girl schools are being now used as girl prisons and in some cases (apparently though unsubstantiated) the class attendance lists are being used as rape lists to easily follow up on who else needs a good lesson in how to behave.
Top notch job done there, and leaving at this point in time was a wonderful choice - as in, it makes anyone wonder why the F anyone could think it was the right one. Anything that had been built up is gone, any good will has evaporated because allies were deserted in hostile territory, and 20 years was not long enough now and won't be long enough next time. Congratulations on replacing Vietnam as your country's biggest fuckup. You should never have gone there, and if you did, you should not have left.
One of which is good, great, awesome, long-overdue, and the other is a costly mistake that will come back to bite you in the ass for decades to come.
And it...I dunno, saddens me, angers me, makes me feel disappointed, I can't quite pin down how to name the feeling, that a large part of Americans, if not the majority, will apply those labels in the exact opposite way of how they should be.
In other and completely unrelated news, the Taliban have already taken over almost half of Afghanistan, most of the Afghan regulars are surrendering without a fight or are deserting, only the US- or EU-trained troops and commandos offer any form of resistance. Kandahar has fallen, Kabul is expected to follow in a few weeks/months at the latest, and the Taliban, who were numerous but lacked proper material, are now heavily armed with tanks, planes, jeeps, and guns, all provided by the US Army. So next time will be thrice as hard. At least 6000 Afghani have already died, and in many cities and villages, those who supported the USA are being treated like the collaborators with the Germans after the end of WWII - hair shaved off, flogged naked through the streets, girl schools are being now used as girl prisons and in some cases (apparently though unsubstantiated) the class attendance lists are being used as rape lists to easily follow up on who else needs a good lesson in how to behave.
Top notch job done there, and leaving at this point in time was a wonderful choice - as in, it makes anyone wonder why the F anyone could think it was the right one. Anything that had been built up is gone, any good will has evaporated because allies were deserted in hostile territory, and 20 years was not long enough now and won't be long enough next time. Congratulations on replacing Vietnam as your country's biggest fuckup. You should never have gone there, and if you did, you should not have left.
Many of the fears expressed when the US announced the withdrawal earlier this year do seem to have come to pass, with the Taliban winning at this point. And major powers with world-spanning interests should be careful about making drastic policy changes, since the furtherance of those interests is often impacted by co-operation from local and regional powers, who need to see the US as a dependable ally.
Still, this has been a very long operation. The US went to Afghanistan in 2001. A decade later, Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011, and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was pretty much finished. Yet the US has stayed there for another decade, as it was feared that the Afghan security forces might not be able to keep order in the country on their own (Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai said in 2011 that it would take 10 billion USD per year for 10 years), and preliminary peace talks with the Taliban were also began in 2011. Now, the operation has lasted 20 years, at a cost of around 1 trillion USD. If we haven't reached an acceptable end state by this point (whatever that end state might be), what could we realistically still gain, and how long would it still take?
Strategy is the art of balancing ends and means, and the great questions of the coming decades are unlikely to be decided on the plains and mountains of Afghanistan. With limited interests in Afghanistan, the costs of remaining, and the uncertainty of the benefits that could be gained by remaining, at what point does it become reasonable to call it quits and let the chips fall where they may?
There is a reason that Afghanistan is known as the place where Empires die. To put it bluntly... this has happened any and every time anyone from outside the region has gotten involved, the locals knew this and were mostly playing along until business as usual inevitably returned. I mean... how do you defeat a foe that only needs to bury it's weapons for a generation and wait for you to leave? Short of just wiping every living soul in the region off the map, I mean. What is the actual net global security gain if we do?
And we knew that going in because that's what has been going on in the American South since the end of Reconstruction.
Assuming I understood your position correctly (and please feel free to correct me if I didn't), I agree. The challenges were known from the beginning, as was known by all that the allies won't be in Afghanistan forever, 20 years and one trillion dollars weren't enough to find a solution that would work, limited interests to stay in the country at least post-2011, uncertainty over what staying would serve to accomplish any more beyond maintaining a messy stalemate as long as you're still there, and the costs of maintaining a presence (in both blood and treasure).
I think it was high time to go home. The aftermath won't be pretty which is unfortunate, but there just isn't enough reason to stay anymore.
15 years ago, I was reading an article about the US Army Corp of Engineers working with local Afghans to keep a power station running. The local engineers (who would be left to keep the place running) kept using jerry rigged solutions to fix problems whenever they came up, to the annoyance of the US engineers. Worse, the new parts that were being sent to the station to fix these problems would keep disappearing right after delivery. Eventually command got sick of the situation and demanded answers, so one of the US engineers sat down with the local engineers and asked them what the deal was. Their response was simply: they buried everything in the desert so the Taliban wouldn't steal it when they came through, so they would have the parts when they absolutely needed to use one instead of their jerry rigs. They knew from Day One that the US would leave eventually and that this was their only solution to ensure they would have power 30-40 years down the line and to give them plausible deniability when the Taliban came back into town ("The Americans took the parts when they left!") because they'd just steal it all and sell it on the black market.
This was relayed to command. Command acknowledged the report... and told them to prepare to pull out of the area because fighting was getting to hot between US forces and the Taliban. They were gone two weeks later, leaving the local Afghan engineers to maintain everything until the next invasion.
SO yes... to put it mildly, everyone involved knew this was going to happen and did it anyway because Conservatives demand the blood of brown people and the War Economy of the US demands War be an economic action and not a political one, because the only jobs in some places of the US are related to making weapons for export.
So...yeah, I don't know what to say to this.
And then you realize, these aren't economic immigrants or gay people in restrictive communities looking for a better life...These guys are, in large part, the employees and allies of the US government and US companies being left behind to die because "ehh, what's in it for us to stay, really?".
Also notice how there aren't many women there, because, unsurprisingly, in Kabul right now, non-burka'd, unaccompanied Afghan women are already being targeted by both sides.
This may be an even worse moral stain on US history than Vietnam: there was never any reason to go, thousands of innocents died, thousands more radicalized, and anything that was built up has been left to be distorted or torn down. American moral high ground, gone. American trustworthiness, gone. American interests in the region, permanently damaged.
Aside from keeping a couple of companies in the black, this has had no positive impact whatsoever.
Also notice how there aren't many women there, because, unsurprisingly, in Kabul right now, non-burka'd, unaccompanied Afghan women are already being targeted by both sides.
This may be an even worse moral stain on US history than Vietnam: there was never any reason to go, thousands of innocents died, thousands more radicalized, and anything that was built up has been left to be distorted or torn down. American moral high ground, gone. American trustworthiness, gone. American interests in the region, permanently damaged.
Aside from keeping a couple of companies in the black, this has had no positive impact whatsoever.
Taliban decide they may as well keep going till they hit France
The Taliban has decided that, as no one really seemed that bothered about them retaking Afghanistan by force, they may as well keep on going until they get to France.
newsthump.com
People keep asking me how the Taliban is taking over so quickly considering how much gear and training we gave the Afghan army, and I have to remind them that it's because nearly no one is actually resisting them. Other then small pockets, most of the local governments and military have been handing over their weapons and surrendering because they feel the conquest is inevitable without the US there to intervene, and so they are trying to get on the Taliban's good side so they are hopefully shown mercy. As much as Biden deserves a lot of blame on this, I don't think anyone really saw nearly the entire Afghan government and military basically give up city by city before a bullet could even be fired.
Yup. The...15.000? I think? US-trained commandos put up some fight and a few thousand of them died. The rest of that "300.000 man strong army" mostly just folded right up. They may have had an air force, but not a single plane ever took off. They had tanks but didn't use them. In some cases it was personal cowardice, but mostly it was just acceptance of the facts in front of them...Plus a whole lot of them actually agreeing with the Taliban, of course. Just like the army in most Western countries skews strongly to the right, politically, so it does in the East. But their "right" is of course Islamic extremism rather than Christian/nationalistic extremism. A total lack of leadership and command, no confidence, lack of knowledge and experience in handling the fancy equipment they had, being aware that your biggest ally just dropped you like a stone and can't be expected or trusted to have your back...Who exactly thought these guys would be up to facing the Taliban? You didn't need much of a psychologist degree to see this was doomed. The whole country needed to be transformed, over a period of generations. That didn't happen, so half the population got stuck in their backwards "just waiting for those others to leave" mentality. You know, like happened after the Civil War in the USA :-P
He wanted us to keep pumping trillions into Afghanistan for generations? Fuck that nonsense.
Either we annex Afghanistan as a territory or state or leave. What the administration needs to own is that they did not plan for how quickly things would fold and how to exit everyone on that circumstance.
Many military people have an “If we failed, it must be because we didn’t Military hard enough” mindset, which is an attitude I find uncomfortably stratocratic.
—Patrick
The last US soldiers who were in Western Germany to protect against the communist invasion, who'd arrived in 1944, didn't leave until 1995 (yes, long after the Wall fell) (and technically, there's still a presence there in the form of the US bases, now as bases in allied territory).
Leaving the Afghan army to greens for themselves was foolish and short sighted and set up to fail. Reduce presence and leave it to the Ana but with some bases and the clear message to the Taliban "if you start trouble we'll be back" might have worked. "go right ahead, we're fucking off, we don't care anymore" was... A bad message.
Leaving the Afghan army to greens for themselves was foolish and short sighted and set up to fail. Reduce presence and leave it to the Ana but with some bases and the clear message to the Taliban "if you start trouble we'll be back" might have worked. "go right ahead, we're fucking off, we don't care anymore" was... A bad message.
Western Germany had a legitimate government, Western Germany had a working army Afghanistan had neither despite 20 years and trillions spent.
It wouldn't have worked because there was no legitimate government or army. To think that warning the taliban would have helped is ignorant as hell. There was never going to be anything resembling a good outcome in Afghanistan and the only thing stupider than the US leaving was the US staying even one more day.
America taught Afghanis to fight like Americans, then took away the air support and propped up an impossibly corrupt government, which stole billions.
The whole thing stinks and all you managed was untold deaths and a generation of girls who grew up outside of the oppressive Taliban only to be tossed back to them.
They deserved better than outright abandonment to sex slavery.
The whole thing stinks and all you managed was untold deaths and a generation of girls who grew up outside of the oppressive Taliban only to be tossed back to them.
They deserved better than outright abandonment to sex slavery.
They do deserve much better. But so did every American that went hungry cause we fucking burned trillions in that fucking money pit and every American that died trying to achieve an impossible objective.
If you think Canada has a surplus of innocents and money feel free to go on over there. It's not a good idea at all but at least then you'll put your money where your mouth is.