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Thread: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

  1. #61

    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Yippee for the forever war.



    Rep the light footprint gang.



    Lest we forget, the Communist terror bombing of Herat in 1979, Guernica on the Hari, is what instigated the unending civil war proper.

    U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan [2019]
    By Ahmad Sultan, Abdul Qadir Sediqi

    JALALABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) hideout in Afghanistan killed at least 30 civilians resting after a day’s labor in the fields, officials said on Thursday.
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian Schatz
    Maybe if you got all the wars wrong you are not an expert for a TV show but just a person who keeps getting foreign policy wrong.
    Henry Kissinger on why America failed in Afghanistan
    It was not possible to turn the country into a modern democracy, but creative diplomacy and force might have overcome terrorism, says the American statesman


    Why is the leading light of American imperial atrocity still getting published?

    spmetla, this whole thread should cheer you considerably, but I don't know how to feel.
    https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/statu...67884223037445


    Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
    Q for the Americans: is Biden blamed for these bombings, or is there an understanding that it was done by a group separate from the Taliban? In particular, I'd like to know the left's take on things. I know that Trump and his core will be laying on the blame.
    As far as I can tell the left are happy with Biden on Afghanistan, other than with him not doing much more to assist refugees from there (and Latin America), filtered through their constitutional dissatisfaction with the overall centrism of his politics. Nothing new on that front. The hard left, to the extent they mention Biden at all on Afghanistan, typically do so to remind us of the role he played in enabling the early War on Terror, and to condemn him for not unilaterally foreclosing American militarism worldwide. I suspect the left (and libertarians) who most prioritize anti-war politics have improved their estimation of Biden, at least for now, in solidarity against the bad criticisms of him.

    Here's as good an example of left coverage as any, though of course there's hundreds of relevant ones.


    Quote Originally Posted by spmetla View Post
    In hindsight there should have been the olive branch to the Taliban between 2003-2005 to get them involved in the political process but imagine that would have been a none starter for Bush Jr and they would have put the pressure on Karzai and the interim government that that was not going to happen.
    Between the international community, Pakistan, the ethnic/regional divisions, ISK (notably a Taliban splinter faction), the loyalist resistance, and civil societal dissent, in many ways the Taliban will be forced into power sharing unless they think they can bet on the Assad solution or on regional expansionism. But they appear to have been working on a portfolio of local accommodations over the past years, so it feels as though a relatively-stable government is on the table.


    Absolutely true, but that was to try and stem the corruption.
    When you put it that way, it just reinforces my impression of "boondoggle."

    If the airport had been under combat conditions as in the ANA fighting and the Taliban rocketing the airport while the evacuation was happening I could see the parallel work more but at Dunkirk the French kept fighting unlike the ANA.
    Clearly, without the Taliban's at-least tacit cooperation, Kabul would look less like Dunkirk and more like Dien Bien Phu (where constant fire from the looming hills and the loss of defensive positions around the strip quickly precluded the possibility of aircraft landings and thus condemned the foreign contingent to ultimate capture). Though realistically in that environment there really would be a US surge to bloodily retake enough of the capital to secure the evacuation of US and allied nationals, or a street battle with advancing Taliban fighters would have been ongoing from August 15th to that end, either way with very bad results for Kabul residents and Afghan asylum seekers, and I suppose any foreigners outside Kabul. A placated opposition has its benefits; there were many worse scenarios for the fall of the government than we've experienced.

    As for the current situation with the bombing. The ISIS-K rivalry with Taliban has certainly surfaced again and I imagine that any efforts by the Taliban to 'moderate' as needed to actually govern will cause ISIS-K to leach off the more radical Taliban members. It also shows why not securing other airfields was so stupid by the US. Kabul Airport is convenient for evacuating Kabul residents, yes, but from a security standpoint it's impossible to fully secure an airport in an urban areas without securing a good portion of the urban area too. In hindsight Bagram Air Base should have been the last foothold before pulling out while also doing the same at some of the other key airfields in the country.
    It depended on what the Taliban could tolerate, didn't it? Regarding Bagram, if I'm not misremembering, I heard that it's a defensible location for an airfield, with only one accessible path leading into the base, but then by that token Bagram would be useless as an evacuation point if the Taliban simply cut off access (without even resorting to an attack). As politically savvy as the Taliban have been, if I were Biden I wouldn't feel confident leaving behind a handful of isolated FOBs or even attempting to retake some airstrips for temporary operations. The refugee situation is best handled diplomatically; the Taliban were always, in the most optimistic intelligence assessments, the rising de facto government and you have to deal with them in that capacity for results.
    Vitiate Man.

    History repeats the old conceits
    The glib replies, the same defeats


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  2. #62

    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Here's the information I was looking for earlier on coordination with the Taliban:

    The Biden administration has been coordinating the evacuation effort and airport security with the Taliban, which is running the checkpoints outside the airport’s outer perimeter. Officials have been “in daily communication” with Taliban commanders about who to let in, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told reporters this week.
    Good.

    U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that's prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.

    The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city last week after the Taliban seized control of the country. It also came as the Biden administration has been relying on the Taliban for security outside the airport.
    Basically appropriate, "Afghan allies" isn't much of an undercover category today.

    Since the fall of Kabul in mid-August, nearly 100,000 people have been evacuated, most of whom had to pass through the Taliban's many checkpoints. But the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials.

    “Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

    Asked about POLITICO's reporting during a Thursday news conference, President Joe Biden said he wasn't sure there were such lists, but also didn't deny that sometimes the U.S. hands over names to the Taliban.

    "There have been occasions when our military has contacted their military counterparts in the Taliban and said this, for example, this bus is coming through with X number of people on it, made up of the following group of people. We want you to let that bus or that group through," he said. "So, yes there have been occasions like that. To the best of my knowledge, in those cases, the bulk of that has occurred and they have been let through.
    [...]
    The list issue came up during a classified briefing on Capitol Hill this week, which turned contentious after top Biden administration officials defended their close coordination with the Taliban. Biden officials contended that it was the best way to keep Americans and Afghans safe and prevent a shooting war between Taliban fighters and the thousands of U.S. troops stationed at the airport.
    This all improves my confidence in the administration's seriousness in governance.

    After the fall of Kabul, in the earliest days of the evacuation, the joint U.S. military and diplomatic coordination team at the airport provided the Taliban with a list of people the U.S. aimed to evacuate. Those names included Afghans who served alongside the U.S. during the 20-year war and sought special immigrant visas to America. U.S. citizens, dual nationals and lawful permanent residents were also listed.

    “They had to do that because of the security situation the White House created by allowing the Taliban to control everything outside the airport,” one U.S. official said.

    But after thousands of visa applicants arrived at the airport, overwhelming the capacity of the U.S. to process them, the State Department changed course — asking the applicants not to come to the airport and instead requesting they wait until they were cleared for entry. From then on, the list fed to the Taliban didn’t include those Afghan names.
    As of Aug. 25, only U.S. passport and green card holders were being accepted as eligible for evacuation, the defense official said.
    Uh oh, looks like the Biden admin has hit its limit for Afghan refugees.
    Vitiate Man.

    History repeats the old conceits
    The glib replies, the same defeats


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  3. #63

    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Couple pieces on Afghanistan:

    When I was about 25, I had a terrible break-up with a woman I really loved as best I could. I was an asshole. Not deliberately abusive, but I was a junkie and manipulative and suicidal and so angry all the time. Toxic as fuck. When we broke up, I just left. There were all kinds of reasons I might have wanted to "go back and check up on her." She was kind of a mess herself. The people she surrounded herself with sucked. I was very sure that I was going to get clean and be a decent guy. Between the ages of 25 and 30, the only thing I'm sure I did right was not trying to go back to her. Not checking on her (because we would have ended up entangled somehow).

    Was she in a good place when I left? Fuck no. Could i have been anything but terrible for her, despite my best intentions? No.

    To me, this is American imperialism. We have entangled ourselves so deeply in so many places, and made a mess of absolutely everything. All that said, is there anything we can do right now that is better than walking away? No. It's a situation that sucks. It hurts like hell, and it should. But here we are.

    eta: we were both charming and crazy smart. years later, she got back in touch with me. our lives were both good. we e-mailed for a little while, and then lost touch. she won on jeopardy! one night, and lost on the second and while she was in los angeles her husband bought her a pair of prada tights. her calves were a little too fat, and she threw a tantrum about that, but they had a great time anyway. i got married to a wonderful woman. the ex and i lost touch again, but i was so thankful for both of us.
    I disagree in strict terms that there's nothing for us to do. We could hypothetically, though politically impossible, pursue closer aid and development ties with the Taliban in order to invest in the reconstruction of the country to an extent we were apparently unwilling to undertake for 20 years, but...

    “No one can win here,” I found myself whispering as I looked at the distant mountain peaks surrounding Bagram Airfield. Single file out of the C-130 we came. It was 2013, a point at which we were told the war was all but over. We were not here to fight; we artillerymen were here to train the Afghans to shoot their Soviet-era howitzers and supervise. Most of the younger soldiers were disappointed, feeling as though they’d missed the war and were relegated to cleanup crew. I was one of them, itching to be a part of history, active history. At the back of my mind were the memories of watching the towers fall, watching the news coverage as soldiers entered Afghanistan. The silence surrounding my father’s Vietnam Era service. I hadn’t joined right out of high school, but the urge to be a part of history never went away. The urge to do rather than to speak. I found myself in my mid-20s, with a wife and children back home, surrounded by mountains larger than I’d ever seen, with a duffel bag on my back and an ill-fitting boonie cap on my head half a world away just so I could feel like I did something. I believed in America. I believed in democracy. And a healthy democracy demands participation. This was my service to the country. My civic duty. My moral duty.

    “Looks exactly like Arizona!” echoed back and forth between the Arizonians in our platoon. They felt oddly at home. I felt foreign. The terrain very unlike my native New England. Speaking a non-native language. Carrying a gun. I felt a defiance in the mountains. You do not belong here, they were saying in chorus. Nowhere else have I felt a terrain more alive than Afghanistan. The glowing purple mountains, the stark lines in the rocks, the snow that fell so unnaturally slow. Every rock pulsed with a soul. I fell in love with it instantly. I fell in love with the sunsets, the snow, and the defiant mountains. A bittersweet romance from the moment boot touched tarmac.

    Equally alive are the people whom the mountains have chosen. A selection of tribes who mirror the mountains in beauty and complexity. Prior to deployment, I had immersed myself in Afghan history and politics. I’d read every book I could. I also received an abbreviated training in Dari, which alongside Pashto are the two official languages of Afghanistan. The idea was that every platoon, regardless of job, would have one Dari and one Pashto speaker. With only so many interpreters and since we were no longer technically fighting, but training, having someone around at all times with a passing knowledge of terms was thought to be helpful. My elementary level Dari proved to be an open door to the Afghans I met. My faulting attempts at speaking with them was always met with surprise and enthusiasm.

    I found myself torn between so many differing sides of reality. I was madly in love with Afghanistan – its people, its land, its soul – All of which both embraced me and held me at arm’s length. You do not belong here, said the mountain chorus. Most of my fellow Americans did not share my love. Uninterested in the humanity of the land, they were content to stay to themselves, get the job done, hopefully kill someone, and then get the fuck back to ice cold beer and football on tv. I don’t blame them. My love affair with Afghanistan has given me nothing but heart break. Many nights I would find myself sitting cross-legged in front of a tv watching an Iranian soap opera, drinking chai and chewing sugar candies with the Afghan interpreters. The shows improved my conversation skills and the interpreters were always willing to point things out for me to pick up. These nights like any other night of friends sitting around watching tv. Except the moments they would speak Pashto between themselves, and the M4 carbine of mine I left resting on the door frame, that reminded us of our differences. Of a gap between what could be and what was. I would return to the American side those nights to snide remarks and questions regarding my feelings toward the Afghans. Many of the Afghans I worked with would say of me, “You are not American! You are Afghan!” They said this as a compliment. The truth was, I was neither Afghan, nor American. I was foreign. On all fronts.

    I was, and am, a lover. I love people. I love the land. I found myself, much like all of us, trying to grapple with what it was to be a citizen of your country. What it was to be a part of a piece of the Earth. So much gray area. All one human race? One nation helping to build another? Most Afghans aligned more with their tribe than the made up “Afghan” national idea. Were we truly helping these people? Were we avenging 9/11? There were, and still are, no clear answers. An existential crisis distilled in the air of that region.

    Our job, as well, was one of contradiction. We were not, as stated, training the Afghans to shoot artillery. There was a team who oversaw the Afghan battery of old Russian D 30 howitzers. On the other side of the base was our guns. When we were fired upon or needed to assist an Afghan platoon out on patrol, both Afghans and Americans would be called up. But only one fired at the enemy. The Afghans would be allowed to shoot, always before us, and never at the target. They were not trusted yet and the consensus from the team overseeing them was that they were a long way off from being ready. Our platoon was left feeling as though we were doing something, while being told we were not to be open about the something we were doing. The Combat Action Badge, that shiny piece of metal non-infantry combat men covet, was denied on the grounds that the Afghans officially engaged, not us.

    No end in sight. No clarity. It felt as though, on all sides, there never had been clear cut objectives. The existential paradox of that region radiating off those mountains confused and obliterated any idea of linear goals. Reflecting those mountains, the Afghans were never clear either. Many Afghans we worked with would hoot and holler when our guns went off. They’d cheer and yell “Yes! America!” But, in the quiet of the night, in the glow of an Iranian soap opera, I would hear brief wistful talk over the chai, “Sometimes I do miss the Taliban. At least with them you knew things. No smut around. People did right.” The divide between a religious state and a liberal nation were on display. Even the Afghans were unsure of our intentions, unsure of their own leadership, and unsure of what path would give them what they truly wanted.

    I’m sitting on a granite boulder on the edge of a pine forest. Woods and mountains. The only places I feel at home anymore. Only wild areas show any clarity. I’m on my phone, talking with a battle buddy from deployment. He too moved to the woods for clarity. We’ve been watching the American troop withdrawal. Seeing the bodies cling to the same C 130s that brought us there. Receiving the million and one emails from every veteran organization under the sun with links to crisis lines and resources to talk. I think about the Vietnam vets. The support they lacked. How truly on their own they were when Saigon fell. I owe them a lot. Many crying alone. Many sitting at wood’s edge alone. They found each other. They built vet centers. They advocated and lobbied so that soldiers like me would not be alone like them. I sit alone in the woods, a place I wouldn’t have been able to get to had it not been years of help from all those organizations and crisis lines they built. My friend is nonchalant about the Taliban’s quick retaking of Afghanistan. Numb, I feel. Both of us. Numb to all.

    So hard to not be cynical. To shrug your shoulders and say, “Oh well, so much death and suffering for nothing.” It would be true, of course, to say that. But it feels so inhumane. However, we just experienced twenty years of people not telling the truth. Not being brutally honest and it only brought more suffering. It feels as though we all wanted a linear story. What is our purpose? How do we get to it? Without those questions answered there’s no winning, whatever winning would mean. What was it we wanted to do with Afghanistan? What is it the Afghans want? Again, we are in an existential grey area. To feel nothing. To feel too much. Maybe my friend and I are just overwhelmed and our brains are protecting us from what could happen if we dwell on it. I am, after all, more content to be alone in the woods. “Fuck it, man, I’m just going for a hike,” my friend says before hanging up. “Me too,” I say, slide off the boulder, and walk into the woods. Only two days later we’re on the phone again, “I’m just so torn up,” he says, “I don’t know what to think or feel.” Me too. I think about the news coverage. The phone calls I’m receiving from concerned people, many of whom I haven’t spoken with in years. Why care now? Why the moral outrage now? Afghanistan’s withdrawal is just the newest outrage of the month for people. Last month was the Uighurs (remember that genocide still happening?) and tomorrow will be something else. And the people of Afghanistan will continue to die and the veterans will continue to mourn. I never much respected moral outrage, less so now. The same inclination against it brought me to serve. I needed to do something. Action. I find that many people love to be outraged, but few are willing to follow that up with action. Moral outrage has its place, it can humanize us animals. Provided we do something to help, even something small. But it can also be addicting. Make you feel good. Feel like a good person. Then go back to your beer and tv – no sacrifice required. Sadly, this is the majority position. I don’t blame them, though. Entering into these things, truly entering into them, requires a blood sacrifice. It requires your time and your effort with no hope of reward. It’s not thirty second videos you watch one after the other, it’s a rich story in which you must be a character and hold out until the end.

    And me, and all of those decades of veterans. And all those Afghans. Families. Children. We stand before those mountains having offered our blood sacrifices. Years of it. Palms outstretched, waiting for an answer. For connection and honesty. To feel victory. As though we did something and won.
    Last edited by Montmorency; 08-29-2021 at 01:49.
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  4. #64

    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    So we're out. The war, at least for us, has informally formally concluded. Plans for international cooperation with the Taliban on safe passage of asylees out of the country, as well as any foreign national stragglers.

    Articles on the successful aspects of the evacuation.
    Vitiate Man.

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  5. #65
    Coffee farmer extraordinaire Member spmetla's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    End of an era for sure. I'm apprehensive about the future but will hope that Afghanistan has brighter times than it looks at the moment.

    "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
    -Abraham Lincoln


    Four stage strategy from Yes, Minister:
    Stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
    Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
    Stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
    Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

  6. #66

    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    What an era. spmetla, do you have any insight on the drone strike aimed at eliminating an 'imminent ISIK-K threat" shortly before the final exfiltration? News reports indicate this attack, whose target seems to have been engineer Zemarai Ahmadi, also killed 8 children and a former ANA/interpreter from the same family. If the target was appropriate, a suicide bomber as claimed, that's still an, um, incredible ratio.
    Vitiate Man.

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    The glib replies, the same defeats


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  7. #67
    Darkside Medic Senior Member rory_20_uk's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Yes - its "self defence" to fire a missile from a drone in someone else's country inside their capital city if you think they might be approaching the airport you've currently occupying. And you can even then say you take civilian deaths seriously after killing loads of civilians.

    The mess due to the abrupt withdrawal is a mess and although was never going to be clean this was worse than it could have been; this was - if not done by the USA - state sponsored killing.

    An enemy that wishes to die for their country is the best sort to face - you both have the same aim in mind.
    Science flies you to the moon, religion flies you into buildings.
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  8. #68
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Yes - its "self defence" to fire a missile from a drone in someone else's country...
    Just imagine if a foreign country decided a particular group in the US presented an "existential" threat to their own country and decided on a drone strike to kill members of that group without consulting the US government. OMG WWIII would ensue...

    What we are going to see is more of the same in Afghanistan, just in a different form.

    https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Tra...am-hank-taylo/

    We are in -- not in a position to dispute it right now, Idrees, and as the general said, we're assessing and we're investigating. Look, make no mistake, no military on the face of the Earth works harder to avoid civilian casualties than the United States military and nobody wants to see innocent life taken. We take it very, very seriously.
    [from Gen Taylor]

    Commanders will always minimize collateral damage. That is one of the key tenets of what we -- how we operate. In this case, just like Mr. Kirby said, that this strike prevented a high profile attack against both, you know, coalition, U.S. forces, and other Afghan civilians. And so as we looked at the information that we had during the time of the strike, we took all those measures in place. And the decision was made to strike and thwart that attack.
    Tell that to the thousands of civilians killed by drone/air attacks around the world in the past, and the 8 children you just killed with the latest drone strike...jeeesus the hypocrisy.

    Now here's the intentionally vague part:

    [question from reporter]

    And -- and then can you -- a little bit more on the -- the continuing strike from ISIS-K. After the U.S. is completely out on the 31st, will you coordinate with the Taliban or get them notice that you plan to conduct more strikes against ISIS?
    [answer from Press Sec John Kirby]

    I don't think it's useful to get into hypothetical operations for future operations one way or the other. The only thing I would tell you is that the president has made it very clear that we will maintain robust over-the-horizon counterterrorism capability, the kinds of capabilities that you've seen us use in just the last 24/36 hours, and -- and we'll have the ability to react in ways that are in keeping with our national security interests and help prevent attacks on the homeland. We still have that capability. We will use that capability.
    [reporter question]

    And then does the U.S. -- does the Pentagon or CENTCOM or whomever it would be -- to have the authority to continue to -- to conduct strikes against ISIS-K after August 31st, or do those decisions have to go to the president on a case-by-case basis?
    [Kirby answer]

    The commander -- the commander on the ground has the authorities he needs right now. I'm not going to talk about authorities going forward. I will say this, not -- in terms of, I know what you're asking, you know, specific approval authority for each and every strike. I -- I won't talk about policy decisions going forward, except to say that the entire interagency, certainly the entire military chain of command understands the -- the existence of this threat and the possibility of this threat to continue to exist over time, and we have the capability to deal with it.
    And now the real answer:

    [reporter question]

    If the IS-K terrorists continues terrorism in Afghanistan even after the withdrawal of U.S. troops on the 31st, will the United States get involved with it in the War on Terror again?
    [Kirby response]

    The president has made it clear that our combat mission, our -- the war we have been fighting in Afghanistan, that -- that's going to end and it's going to end very soon here. But what's not going to end is our commitment, especially here at the Defense Department, to protect the American people from -- from threats and particularly from any terrorist threat that could emanate from Afghanistan again.
    So there you have it---boots-on-the-ground: out; drone strikes and other air attacks: in. And the US wonders why many groups of Muslims hate Americans?
    High Plains Drifter

  9. #69
    Coffee farmer extraordinaire Member spmetla's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    What an era. spmetla, do you have any insight on the drone strike aimed at eliminating an 'imminent ISIK-K threat" shortly before the final exfiltration? News reports indicate this attack, whose target seems to have been engineer Zemarai Ahmadi, also killed 8 children and a former ANA/interpreter from the same family. If the target was appropriate, a suicide bomber as claimed, that's still an, um, incredible ratio.
    I've got no actual intel on it so I'm operating off the same info as everyone else. One of the problems in the global war on terror are that they enemy is based out of the civilian population. They don't exactly create bomb factories in an industrial area, it's typically someone's home. Usually the whole family assists in the process too. Like I've mentioned, I've had an interpreter get fired because we found out he was communicating with and informing for the Taliban so it's very possible. It's very possible that the suicide bomber was coerced too, we saw it happen in Iraq all the time that someone would be forced to wear a vest or drive a vehicle to a check point and someone else would detonate the bomb remotely with the coercion being the threat of violence against the family. So it may be that this bomber was willing to kill himself to protect his family and ironically that got his family killed.

    Usually the US would be able to investigate afterward together with the ANA/ANP but as it's all in Taliban control now there's no way to verify after the fact outside the intel communities intercepts of ISIS/Taliban communications and informants.

    Fighting any sort of against civilian based 'insurgents' be it religious as in this case or communist as in past wars in Africa and Asia, will sadly always have civilian casualties. The enemy doesn't wear uniforms, don't have 'bases' and instead operate out of homes. They don't mind endangering their or others families as they'll either be martyrs to the cause or collaborators that deserve to die with the plus side that even if a target is legitimate there will always be collateral to spin the coverage and message afterward.

    Yes - its "self defence" to fire a missile from a drone in someone else's country inside their capital city if you think they might be approaching the airport you've currently occupying. And you can even then say you take civilian deaths seriously after killing loads of civilians.
    You saw the amount of deaths that a suicide bomb can cause in a crowded area. If the guy was a bomber then it's tragic that his family suffered too but less tragic than the dozens to hundreds that could have been killed. If the intel was faulty and it was another group of innocents then yes, a closing warcrime.
    As for the occupation, it's clearly been with the tacit okay of the Taliban otherwise as Montemorcy has pointed out it'd be a Dien Bien Phu type of fight going on.

    Tell that to the thousands of civilians killed by drone/air attacks around the world in the past, and the 8 children you just killed with the latest drone strike...jeeesus the hypocrisy.
    Kill a dozen to save a hundred? The morality in this type of fight is never clear cut.

    Just imagine if a foreign country decided a particular group in the US presented an "existential" threat to their own country and decided on a drone strike to kill members of that group without consulting the US government. OMG WWIII would ensue...
    You could say that's exactly what happened and led to the US going to war in Afghanistan. Al Queda attacked the US in New York and in D.C. in order to fight the infidels 'occupying' (having Air bases in Saudi Arabia due to the Iraqi threat) the land of Mecca. They perceive the US, UK, and Israel as an existential threat to muslims. The Pentagon was attacked, the White House was targeted, and of course the twin towers were brought down. Everything happening now is still a trickledown effect of that event.

    So there you have it---boots-on-the-ground: out; drone strikes and other air attacks: in. And the US wonders why many groups of Muslims hate Americans?
    They were attacking Americans long before drone strikes and air attacks. Helping muslims in Kosovo, the Mujahadeen against the Soviets and so on never helped. Bringing peace between Israel and Egypt only brought scorn and the death of the Egyptian President who agreed to peace (the US through the MFO organization still maintains that peace too). The past twenty years of war in the middle east are of course good reasons for them to hate us but even if the US were to completely isolate itself there will still be muslim extremists that attack us. For US civilians abroad the greatest threat is terrorism from muslim extremists, domestically it's from right-wing extremists shooting up our own citizens.

    Unfortunately there are violent people that want to spread Islam by the Sword. They attack our civilians so 'we the west' attack them and unfortunately kill their civilians. We may end the formal 'War on Terror' but the war goes on as it's a clash of civilizations. It goes back before european colonies, before Ottoman invasions, before reconquistas and crusades. Their extremists want to kill us and don't care about the costs, there's always the option of taking the attacks and turning the other cheek though. That option is usually unacceptable so we're always left with the no good options of kill them and some innocents or let them kill us and some innocents. It's a dirty war, no side is clean, no matter how hard we try to keep clean.
    Last edited by spmetla; 08-31-2021 at 19:44.

    "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
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    Four stage strategy from Yes, Minister:
    Stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
    Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
    Stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
    Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

  10. #70
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    They perceive the US, UK, and Israel as an existential threat to muslims. The Pentagon was attacked, the White House was targeted, and of course the twin towers were brought down. Everything happening now is still a trickledown effect of that event.
    As far as Afghanistan was concerned, most of it was unnecessary...the Taliban had volunteered to turn over Bin Laden. The war hawks saw things the way they always do...might makes right.

    They were attacking Americans long before drone strikes and air attacks.
    And who do you think aided and abetted that process? We did:

    https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/...nsible-taliban

    Many Afghan specialists criticized the United States for merely walking away from Afghanistan after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ed Girardet, a journalist and Afghanistan expert, observed, "The United States really blew it. They dropped Afghanistan like a hot potato." Indeed, Washington's lack of engagement created a policy void in which radical elements in the ISI eagerly filled.

    Islamist commanders like Hikmaytar, upset with the U.S.-led coalition in the Persian Gulf, broke with their Saudi and Kuwait patrons and found new backers in Iran, Libya, and Iraq. [Granted, while the break was sudden, the relationship with Tehran was not. Hikmaytar had started much earlier to collaborate with Iran]. It was only in this second phase of the Afghan war, a phase that developed beyond much of the Western world's notice, that Afghan Arabs first became a significant political, if not military, force in Afghanistan.
    Is the United States responsible for creating the Afghan Arab phenomenon? It would be a gross over-simplification to ascribe the rise of the Taliban to mere "blowback" from Washington's support of radical Islam as a Cold War tool. After all, while many mujahidin groups are fiercely religious, few adhere to the combative radicalism of the Arab mercenaries. Nor can one simply attribute the rise of Islamic fundamentalism to U.S. involvement, for this ignores the very real fact that a country preaching official atheism occupied Afghanistan. Nevertheless, by delegating responsibility for arms distribution to the ISI, the United States created an environment in which radical Islam could flourish. And, with the coming of the Taliban, radical Islam did just that.
    And of course, our support for the Mujahidin.

    That option is usually unacceptable so we're always left with the no good options of kill them and some innocents or let them kill us and some innocents. It's a dirty war, no side is clean, no matter how hard we try to keep clean.
    Been hearing that sort of rhetoric since the Vietnam War. Didn't buy it then, don't buy it now. In this country, you are far and away more likely to get killed by some right-wing gun activist screaming my FREEEEEEDOMS before yours, than any of those 8 children killed in the most recent drone strike growing up and coming to the US as a Jihadist.
    Last edited by ReluctantSamurai; 08-31-2021 at 23:48.
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  11. #71
    Coffee farmer extraordinaire Member spmetla's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    As far as Afghanistan was concerned, most of it was unnecessary...the Taliban had volunteered to turn over Bin Laden. The war hawks saw things the way they always do...might makes right.
    They 'sorta' offered up Bin Laden if you accept that the US would have to provide solid proof that he was behind the attacks together with that they would only give him up to a third party, not the US. Their offer was certainly not a straight up concession which we turned down. The US posture of no negotiation and unconditional compliance with our demands was of course unacceptable to the Taliban too. You remember the blood lust in the immediate post-9/11 period though, Bush negotiating with the Taliban would have been domestically unacceptable.

    Been hearing that sort of rhetoric since the Vietnam War. Didn't buy it then, don't buy it now. In this country, you are far and away more likely to get killed by some right-wing gun activist screaming my FREEEEEEDOMS before yours, than any of those 8 children killed in the most recent drone strike growing up and coming to the US as a Jihadist.
    In this specific example though, those 8 kids were killed in fear that there'd be another attack on the airport killing dozens to hundreds. Doesn't make it right to do, but when it comes to weighing 'us' versus them the decision makers in each country usually choose 'us'.

    What would your choice, be? You've got a 70% chance that person X can kill 100 people, killing him may kill 8 totally innocent kids. Do you strike or wait for the attack that you likely can't stop if you don't use the opportunity to strike while you know person X is in a certain location. There's no such thing as perfect intel, just % confidence in the data and analysis, I'm sure the intel that warned of the car bombing that killed all those people a few days ago had a person that a drone strike could have killed but without that precipitating event that then skewed the decision making to saving our own versus the deaths in a drone strike, right or wrong intel analysis. It doesn't make it right, those eight kids are dead, zero future for them and not by their choice. However if the intel was right, then perhaps dozens to hundreds of people do have a future. It's life and death gambles, it's dirty, and wrong but there are no easy black and white choices.

    I agree for the most though, that's why I mentioned right wing extremists as our primary domestic threat. Peoples fears aren't logical though, one 'outsider' attacking always has an outsized effect. Eating less cheeseburgers and emphasizing more fitness culture in our youths would save far more lives than the money spent to fight terrorists. The fear of terrorists versus health complications isn't logical, something in the human psyche of attacks on the tribe rather than what can we do.
    Internationally though it tends to be islamists that attack tourist locations, bomb embassies, kidnap foreigners and sell them to other terrorist groups ect...
    Islamists extremists aren't even the most dangerous terrorists in the world but they are the most dangerous to the international community. The Naxalites maoists in India do more attacks and damage to India than any other group and are the largest terrorist organization in the world (excluding now the Taliban). They don't garner international efforts to kill them as their attacks are domestic in scope and not really aimed at the west. The same is true in the Philippines, the New People's Army is a much bigger threat to Philippine stability than the various moro groups in the south, the NPA doesn't try and target foreigners though so they don't really get the attention. In short they don't mess with 'the west' so there's no need for 'us' to mess with them, none of our business, right?

    The difference with Islamist extremism is it's international character. The aforementioned maoist groups no longer have the outright backing of the Soviets and the PRC, they confine themselves to domestic attacks which is generally acceptable in the international order. Islamic groups tend to export their terrorism and usually aim it at the west due to a host of reasons including support for Israel, the threat of western liberal concepts to conservative reactionary religions, and revenge for any attacks against the Ummah.

    Nevertheless, by delegating responsibility for arms distribution to the ISI, the United States created an environment in which radical Islam could flourish. And, with the coming of the Taliban, radical Islam did just that.
    US support for the Mujahadeen was an enabling element of the Taliban, yes, but the primary thing was the lack of any central control to limit Afghan warlord abuses following the soviet departure. US didn't create the environment though, could blame the soviets for their invasion, could blame their communist revolution that overthrew the king in Afghanistan. The creation of Pakistan as a state with Islam as its central identity as the neighboring country is more to blame than anything. Even Ghandi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan together couldn't get the extremists in British India to accept Hindi majority rule. Might be easy to blame the British but even if the Mughal state had survived to present day I doubt that muslim minority rule would conditions for peace there in regards to Mughal attitudes to central asia.

    "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
    -Abraham Lincoln


    Four stage strategy from Yes, Minister:
    Stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
    Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
    Stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
    Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

  12. #72

    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Asshole argues that we should have stayed in Afghanistan for generations and patiently watched the society change. He never explains why this would have been a reasonable option, why the American people should endorse it, why it would be of concrete benefit to the Afghan people, or why it would reduce international tensions.

    A look at our own history is instructive. Corruption was endemic in New York, Boston and Chicago through much of the 19th and into the 20th centuries. It took us time to grow the institutions and legal structures that would eventually make corruption the exception rather than the norm.
    And that is why a decade later after 9/11, Pakistan welcomed the return of the United States — and U.S. assistance. It would work with us against Al Qaeda. But we soon learned that the Taliban were a sticky matter. I was ambassador to Pakistan from 2004 to 2007. I pushed Pakistani officials repeatedly on the need to deny the Taliban safe havens. The answer I got back over time went like this: “We know you. We know you don’t have patience for the long fight. We know the day will come when you just get tired and go home — it’s what you do. But we aren’t going anywhere — this is where we live. So if you think we are going to turn the Taliban into a mortal enemy, you are completely crazy.”
    Clearly, what the United States was lacking in Afghanistan was unlimited "patience" then. Might as well have claimed it as a territory and promised a path to statehood, to the maximal reassurance of skeptical regional actors. We were halfway there with the Philippines, and that involved hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths as well, so...

    How about we generate some of that patience toward rescuing our own country first, and once we've built out a credible roadmap, we can collaboratively and peacefully export that model. Or are American bombs and bullets in perpetuity, irrespective of human suffering, the one and only key to good things in this world?

    The more reserved frustrations of an Afghan general.

    Justin Amash is one of the few principled conservatives in government.

    There was no perfect time or way to exit Afghanistan. President Biden directed the evacuation of more than one hundred thousand people and got our troops out. I disagree with the president on a lot, but I’m grateful he pushed through despite all the pressure.
    This is also an interesting idea, for Biden to threaten to withdraw from all foreign deployments that Congress does not affirmatively license before the end of his presidency, but he won't do it because it would give all the milsec and media people a stroke on the spot.

    Broken clock mic drop:

    A month ago I thought I was a cynic about our 20-year war in Afghanistan. Today, after watching our stumbling withdrawal and the swift collapse of practically everything we fought for, my main feeling is that I wasn’t cynical enough.

    My cynicism consisted of the belief that the American effort to forge a decent Afghan political settlement failed definitively during Barack Obama’s first term in office, when a surge of U.S. forces blunted but did not reverse the Taliban’s recovery. This failure was then buried under a Vietnam-esque blizzard of official deceptions and bureaucratic lies, which covered over a shift in American priorities from the pursuit of victory to the management of stalemate, with the American presence insulated from casualties in the hopes that it could be sustained indefinitely.

    Under this strategic vision — to use the word “strategic” generously — there would be no prospect of victory, no end to corruption among our allies and collateral damage from our airstrikes, no clear reason to be in Afghanistan, as opposed to any other failing state or potential terror haven, except for the sunk cost that we were there already. But if American casualty rates stayed low enough, the public would accept it, the Pentagon budget would pay for it, and nobody would have to preside over anything so humiliating as defeat.

    In one way, my cynicism went too far. I guessed that the military and the national-security bureaucracy would be able to frustrate the desire of every incoming U.S. president to declare an endless-seeming conflict over, and I was wrong. Something like that happened with Obama and Donald Trump in their first years in office, but it didn’t happen with Joe Biden. He promised withdrawal, and — however shambolically — we have now actually withdrawn.

    But in every other way the withdrawal has made the case for an even deeper cynicism — about America’s capacities as a superpower, our mission in Afghanistan and the class of generals, officials, experts and politicos who sustained its generational extension.

    First, the withdrawal’s shambolic quality, culminating in yesterday’s acknowledgment that 100 to 200 Americans had not made the final flights from Kabul, displayed an incompetence in departing a country that matched our impotence at pacifying it. There were aspects of the chaos that were probably inevitable, but the Biden White House was clearly caught flat-footed by the speed of the Taliban advance, with key personnel disappearing on vacation just before the Kabul government dissolved. And the president himself has appeared exhausted, aged, overmatched — making basic promises about getting every American safely home and then seeing them overtaken by events.

    At the same time, the circumstances under which the Biden withdrawal had to happen doubled as a devastating indictment of the policies pursued by his three predecessors, which together cost roughly $2,000,000,000,000 (it’s worth writing out all those zeros) and managed to build nothing in the political or military spheres that could survive for even a season without further American cash and military supervision.

    Only recently the view that without U.S. troops, the American-backed government in Kabul would be doomed to the same fate as the Soviet-backed government some 30 years ago seemed like hardheaded realism. Now such “realism” has been proven to be wildly overoptimistic. Without Soviet troops, the Moscow-backed government actually held out for several years before the mujahideen reached Kabul. Whereas our $2,000,000,000,000 built a regime that fell to the Taliban before American troops could even finish their retreat.

    Before this summer, in other words, it was possible to read all the grim inspector general reports and document dumps on Afghanistan, count yourself a cynic about the war effort and still imagine that America got something for all that spending, no matter how much was spent on Potemkin installations or siphoned off by pederast warlords or recirculated to Northern Virginia contractors.

    Now, though, we know that in terms of actual staying power, all our nation-building efforts couldn’t even match what the Soviet Union managed in its dotage.

    Yet that knowledge has not prevented a revival of the spirit that led us to this sorry pass. I don’t mean the straightforward criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal. I mean the way that in both the media coverage and the political reaction, reasonable tactical critiques have often been woven together with anti-withdrawal arguments that are self-deceiving, dubious or risible.

    The argument, for instance, that the situation in Afghanistan was reasonably stable and the war’s death toll negligible before the Trump administration started moving toward withdrawal: In fact, only U.S. casualties were low, while Afghan military and civilian casualties were nearing 15,000 annually, and the Taliban were clearly gaining ground — suggesting that we would have needed periodic surges of U.S. forces, and periodic spikes in U.S. deaths, to prevent a slow-motion version of what’s happened quickly as we’ve left.

    Or the argument that an indefinite occupation was morally necessary to nurture the shoots of Afghan liberalism: If after 20 years of effort and $2,000,000,000,000, the theocratic alternative to liberalism actually takes over a country faster than in its initial conquest, that’s a sign that our moral achievements were outweighed by the moral costs of corruption, incompetence and drone campaigns.

    Or the argument that a permanent mission in Afghanistan could come to resemble in some way our long-term presence in Germany or South Korea — a delusional historical analogy before the collapse of the Kabul government and a completely ludicrous one now.

    All these arguments are connected to a set of moods that flourished after 9/11: a mix of cable-news-encouraged overconfidence in American military capacities, naïve World War II nostalgia and crusading humanitarianism in its liberal and neoconservative forms. Like most Americans, I shared in those moods once; after so many years of failure, I cannot imagine indulging in them now. But it’s clear from the past few weeks that they retain an intense subterranean appeal in the American elite, waiting only for the right circumstances to resurface.

    Thus you have generals and grand strategists who presided over quagmire, folly and defeat fanning out across the television networks and opinion pages to champion another 20 years in Afghanistan. You have the return of the media’s liberal hawks and centrist Pentagon stenographers, unchastened by their own credulous contributions to the retreat of American power over the past 20 years. And you have Republicans who postured as cold-eyed realists in the Trump presidency suddenly turning back into eager crusaders, excited to own the Biden Democrats and relive the brief post-9/11 period when the mainstream media treated their party with deference rather than contempt.

    Again, Biden deserves plenty of criticism. But like the Trump administration in its wiser moments, he is trying to disentangle America from a set of failed policies that many of his loudest critics long supported.

    Our botched withdrawal is the punctuation mark on a general catastrophe, a failure so broad that it should demand purges in the Pentagon, the shamed retirement of innumerable hawkish talking heads, the razing of various NGOs and international-studies programs and the dissolution of countless consultancies and military contractors.

    Small wonder, then, that making Biden the singular scapegoat seems like a more attractive path. But if the only aspect of this catastrophe that our leaders remember is what went wrong in August 2021, then we’ll have learned nothing except to always double down on failure, and the next disaster will be worse.
    Vitiate Man.

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  13. #73
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    However if the intel was right...
    Ay, and there's the rub. The intel is too often wrong. There was a piece written a ways back by an officer who was in charge of coordinating drone strikes in the Middle East, and he didn't have a lot of positive things to say about how those strikes were handled from intel gathering to the actual strike. I'll see if I can dig it up....

    And from many different sources that I've read (which certainly doesn't make me qualified in any way to speak definitively about drone warfare), drone strikes often increase terrorist attacks for a period of time afterwards as a matter of vengeance...
    High Plains Drifter

  14. #74

    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Some miserable graphics from this Economist retrospective.

    Why does the foreign mainstream media - or is it just the Commonwealth media - seem to be reflexively pro-Americans-making-and-keeping-warzones? And to think people always used to enjoin looking to foreign news sources for more objective perspectives on American foreign policy.


    Quote Originally Posted by rory_20_uk View Post
    Yes - its "self defence" to fire a missile from a drone in someone else's country inside their capital city if you think they might be approaching the airport you've currently occupying. And you can even then say you take civilian deaths seriously after killing loads of civilians.

    The mess due to the abrupt withdrawal is a mess and although was never going to be clean this was worse than it could have been; this was - if not done by the USA - state sponsored killing.

    It's important to separate the intelligence failures before and during the Taliban offensive from the conduct of this or any civilian evacuation. For the record, the actual exfiltration of Afghans - and the refugee situation was always going to be messy since most people have a bias against cutting bait (?) until catastrophe is under their noses* - went quite well. The main reasons why it went as well as it did, in terms of volume of persons safely moved, is because of the Taliban's active cooperation (the linchpin) and our own military's well-known proficiency in moving lots of people in a short time. The latter is legitimately our specialty.

    Neither the city nor the airport were under siege, a circumstance that would have dramatically lowered the quota for refugees and produced the equivalent of a year's worth of Afghan casualties in a week, dozens to hundreds of American deaths on top. For an extraction of this nature, what we saw is almost as good as it gets. The implication of that proposition should really be not to create such messes for ourselves and others, that we'll later need to hop out of, in the first place...


    Quote Originally Posted by spmetla View Post
    I've got no actual intel on it so I'm operating off the same info as everyone else. One of the problems in the global war on terror are that they enemy is based out of the civilian population. They don't exactly create bomb factories in an industrial area, it's typically someone's home. Usually the whole family assists in the process too. Like I've mentioned, I've had an interpreter get fired because we found out he was communicating with and informing for the Taliban so it's very possible. It's very possible that the suicide bomber was coerced too, we saw it happen in Iraq all the time that someone would be forced to wear a vest or drive a vehicle to a check point and someone else would detonate the bomb remotely with the coercion being the threat of violence against the family. So it may be that this bomber was willing to kill himself to protect his family and ironically that got his family killed.

    Usually the US would be able to investigate afterward together with the ANA/ANP but as it's all in Taliban control now there's no way to verify after the fact outside the intel communities intercepts of ISIS/Taliban communications and informants.

    Fighting any sort of against civilian based 'insurgents' be it religious as in this case or communist as in past wars in Africa and Asia, will sadly always have civilian casualties. The enemy doesn't wear uniforms, don't have 'bases' and instead operate out of homes. They don't mind endangering their or others families as they'll either be martyrs to the cause or collaborators that deserve to die with the plus side that even if a target is legitimate there will always be collateral to spin the coverage and message afterward.
    No idea how to weigh the accuracy of such claims, but family members from the scene allege that not only were the two men killed not terrorists, they were asylees waiting for approval to be evacuated. To be sure, if true then this incident constitutes the single worst "botching" of Biden's withdrawal. Of course, it's also possible sigint was on the ball and these men were using such pretexts to infiltrate the perimeter for another devastating attack. I wonder if we'll ever know.

    They were attacking Americans long before drone strikes and air attacks. Helping muslims in Kosovo, the Mujahadeen against the Soviets and so on never helped. Bringing peace between Israel and Egypt only brought scorn and the death of the Egyptian President who agreed to peace (the US through the MFO organization still maintains that peace too). The past twenty years of war in the middle east are of course good reasons for them to hate us but even if the US were to completely isolate itself there will still be muslim extremists that attack us. For US civilians abroad the greatest threat is terrorism from muslim extremists, domestically it's from right-wing extremists shooting up our own citizens.

    Unfortunately there are violent people that want to spread Islam by the Sword. They attack our civilians so 'we the west' attack them and unfortunately kill their civilians. We may end the formal 'War on Terror' but the war goes on as it's a clash of civilizations. It goes back before european colonies, before Ottoman invasions, before reconquistas and crusades. Their extremists want to kill us and don't care about the costs, there's always the option of taking the attacks and turning the other cheek though. That option is usually unacceptable so we're always left with the no good options of kill them and some innocents or let them kill us and some innocents. It's a dirty war, no side is clean, no matter how hard we try to keep clean.
    This kind of 'in sorrow' method would be easier for critics of American styles of engagement to accept if it was paired with genuine economic and social incentives to Muslim countries that would benefit the people, besides offering alternatives to violent confrontation from that part of the grassroots. How much do American policy makers care about regional security and keeping terrorism (Muslim or otherwise) out of the homeland Heimat? It seems like for the most part we're about alienating "clash of civilizations" anxiety and dealing weapons and money to noxious local elites over maximizing human wellbeing (or even minimizing militant activity). Is "over the horizon" to be more than a euphemism for shooting at a leaking dike?

    For instance, how many Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan refugees are Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan hosting? Ballpark 10 million? Though Pakistan, like certain other governments, seems committed to digging its own grave, these are the pillars of the Middle East. How much more can they take? How much more do we expect them to take, sight unseen? If the contagion of instability overburdens them, I assume it will just engender more self-defeating Clash of Civilizations militarism from the "Western" end, rather than being received as a straightforward and preventable humanitarian catastrophe that we had large part in.

    How can the West defend itself if it can't transcend jealous indifference and complacent cruelty to preserve common interests and spot looming challenges not over, but sprawled all along, the horizon? Surprised pikachus abound.

    But actionable foresight is at odds with human nature by all appearances, whether in pandemics or climate change or above all the survival of the national state. At the very least we must try to learn from our failures on paper.
    (Speaking of which, @ReluctantSamurai you're going to get a kick out of this document, especially the "Effects on Society at Large" section.)

    Those Economist graphs:






    What would your choice, be? You've got a 70% chance that person X can kill 100 people, killing him may kill 8 totally innocent kids. Do you strike or wait for the attack that you likely can't stop if you don't use the opportunity to strike while you know person X is in a certain location.
    One suggestion I heard is that the US perimeter should have been widened to reduce the risk of security breaches becoming mass casualty events. But in the end, as alluded to above, we don't have access to the exact information, or its reliability, available to decision makers in this instance. It's best not to miss the forest for the trees!
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  15. #75
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Jeezus do I love these quotes:

    Additionally, national, local, and state officials all operated in the same way. At best, they communicated half-truths, or even out-right lies. As terrifying as the disease was, the officials made it more terrifying by making little of it, and they oftenunderplayed it. Local officials said things like “if normal precautions are taken, there is nothing to fear” but then they would close all businesses.
    “Worry kills more people than the disease itself,” a Chicago public health official was quoted as saying. Other quotes were: “Don’t get scared,” and “The so-called Spanish influenza is nothing more or less than old fashioned grippe.”
    Communication was rarely honest, because honesty would hurt morale. One of the first newspapers that started telling the truth in Milwaukee saw its editor jailed, so they stopped telling the truth. In Philadelphia, after a public health official finally closed all public gatherings and public funerals, the newspaper said, “This is not a public health measure.”
    There was a lot of cognitive dissonance. People heard from authorities and newspapers that everything was going fine, but at the same time, bodies were piling up. Imagine your spouse lying dead in bed for six to eight days. There were coffin shortages. The dead were piled up where they died. There were police going around asking people to “bring out their dead.”
    There is a tremendous amount of wishful thinking that the virus won’t come here. In 1918 the shaping of the cognitive environment varied dramatically from location to location some places elected officials and public officials locked arms on some things. Some tentative evidence shows that social distancing interventions did help. However, Baltimore is a case example of how to do it wrong (e.g., not close the schools). In Baltimore there were fights between elected officials and public health officials. Another example of doing it wrong was Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, the Mayor actually told the public to ignore the public health officials.
    There's a few others, but I realize my response would be better placed in the COVID thread. For sake of continuity, I put it here.

    We haven't learned a GD thing in 100 years, apparently....
    Last edited by ReluctantSamurai; 09-01-2021 at 04:19.
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  16. #76
    Coffee farmer extraordinaire Member spmetla's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Ay, and there's the rub. The intel is too often wrong. There was a piece written a ways back by an officer who was in charge of coordinating drone strikes in the Middle East, and he didn't have a lot of positive things to say about how those strikes were handled from intel gathering to the actual strike. I'll see if I can dig it up....

    And from many different sources that I've read (which certainly doesn't make me qualified in any way to speak definitively about drone warfare), drone strikes often increase terrorist attacks for a period of time afterwards as a matter of vengeance...
    No idea how to weigh the accuracy of such claims, but family members from the scene allege that not only were the two men killed not terrorists, they were asylees waiting for approval to be evacuated. To be sure, if true then this incident constitutes the single worst "botching" of Biden's withdrawal. Of course, it's also possible sigint was on the ball and these men were using such pretexts to infiltrate the perimeter for another devastating attack. I wonder if we'll ever know.
    Absolutely agree with both you guys, big thing I was trying to point out is that there is someone trying to make decisions in that fog of war. We'd been warned about possible ISIS-K attacks for days into the evacuation, I'm sure a decision maker erred on not doing strikes in the city prior to the big suicide attack last week. Now the pendulum likely swung to conducting a strike and erring on the side of security and damn the collateral. Probably also weighing in was the pile-on that Biden is getting from everyone that suddenly remembered that Afghanistan and the Taliban exist and his trying to deflect the criticism of being 'soft' through his making such a difficult decision no previous administration has done.

    The intel is often times wrong, as for the neighbors and family, it's always hard to judge. You can't ignore them, they might be completely right and the US just bombed good people for no reason which has happened all too often.

    Despite my arguments on here I'm very on the fence with drone strikes as I am with cruise missile strikes as it takes the danger away too much from our side. When there's an actual pilot that may get shot down or actual soldiers on the ground to spill blood and die that makes people weigh the risks much more. If 13 US servicemembers hadn't been blown up last week I'm sure the decision to conduct the drone strike wouldn't have happened no matter how many Afghans had been killed in the suicide attack. With that one bomb attack causing 16% of the KIA sustained by the US (13/77) since we stopped taking a lead in fighting back in 2014 the threat of another successful attack seems to have made the decision makers weigh 'our' security over questionable intel and 'collateral damage.'
    Last edited by spmetla; 09-01-2021 at 05:27.

    "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
    -Abraham Lincoln


    Four stage strategy from Yes, Minister:
    Stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
    Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
    Stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
    Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

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  17. #77
    Coffee farmer extraordinaire Member spmetla's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    This kind of 'in sorrow' method would be easier for critics of American styles of engagement to accept if it was paired with genuine economic and social incentives to Muslim countries that would benefit the people, besides offering alternatives to violent confrontation from that part of the grassroots.

    For instance, how many Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan refugees are Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan hosting? Ballpark 10 million? Though Pakistan, like certain other governments, seems committed to digging its own grave, these are the pillars of the Middle East. How much more can they take? How much more do we expect them to take, sight unseen? If the contagion of instability overburdens them, I assume it will just engender more self-defeating Clash of Civilizations militarism from the "Western" end, rather than being received as a straightforward and preventable humanitarian catastrophe that we had large part in. Part of it too that those neighboring countries meddle in their neighbors politics too. Turkey has contributed to instability hosts migrants and also uses them as pawns in the threat of the migrant hordes coming into Europe.

    How can the West defend itself if it can't transcend jealous indifference and complacent cruelty to preserve common interests and spot looming challenges not over, but sprawled all along, the horizon? Surprised pikachus abound.

    But actionable foresight is at odds with human nature by all appearances, whether in pandemics or climate change or above all the survival of the national state. At the very least we must try to learn from our failures on paper.
    (Speaking of which, @ReluctantSamurai you're going to get a kick out of this document, especially the "Effects on Society at Large" section.)
    Well part of the problem in those countries hosting so many refugees is that they are just put into a camp and kept there forever. The Palestinians in Lebanon were never given a chance at integrating so they just ended up being a stateless, hostile entity that further destabilized Lebanon and led to the civil war.
    Part of it is that people keep expecting the all or nothing solutions, especially with Israel. Demands that Israel go back to 1948 borders with so many decades in between seem as likely as getting Russia to give up Crimea.
    As for help, well, the West sends an incredible amount of aid to those nations. That foreign aid unfortunately becomes part of the problem too, give country X million for education, they then cut their education by X million and reallocate into other things suddenly building a dependency.

    How much do American policy makers care about regional security and keeping terrorism (Muslim or otherwise) out of the homeland Heimat? It seems like for the most part we're about alienating "clash of civilizations" anxiety and dealing weapons and money to noxious local elites over maximizing human wellbeing (or even minimizing militant activity). Is "over the horizon" to be more than a euphemism for shooting at a leaking dike?
    Well it's a damned if you and damned if you don't world. Support a dictatorship in Egypt that keeps regional stability, maintains trade through the Suez, and abides by it's peace treaty with Israel or support a democratically elected Islamist that wants to start a regional war to kick Israel out of the Holy Land. Support pro-democracy elements in Syria and Libya against brutal dictatorships but not actually send in troops to either eliminate the dictatorship (syria) or create some on the ground security for the transitional government (Libya). Support the Shah in Iran to support british oil or support the democratic elements there that might create enough instability for the soviets to expand their influence. Support Turkey as it slides into dictatorship or standby principles and kick it out of NATO only to see it become our biggest opponent in the region eclipsing even Iran?
    Hands off foreign policy won't work, too much military intervention won't work either. Being a global cash cow is politically a dead end and in the long run doesn't help.
    It'd be great if the US didn't have to engage the middle east so much but the post-colonial woes of France and the UK combined with the US betrayal of them in the Suez crisis haven't fostered a leadership role for Europe in the middle east despite them being the best ones to do so with the regional knowledge, neighborly interest, and historic (for better and worse) ties. This viewpoint is of course western centric, the idea that an outside power broker is necessary seems ludicrious but the Arab infighting nationalism vs. political Islam, the Sunni/Shia woes, neo-Ottomanism, and recurring flareups in Palestine together with US/NATO/EU actions (military, economic, diplomatic etc) that incite the muslim mainstream against the west while ruining themselves economically by spending on militaries that are larger than their economies can realistically afford.
    Last edited by spmetla; 09-01-2021 at 08:10.

    "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
    -Abraham Lincoln


    Four stage strategy from Yes, Minister:
    Stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
    Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
    Stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
    Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

  18. #78
    Praefectus Fabrum Senior Member Anime BlackJack Champion, Flash Poker Champion, Word Up Champion, Shape Game Champion, Snake Shooter Champion, Fishwater Challenge Champion, Rocket Racer MX Champion, Jukebox Hero Champion, My House Is Bigger Than Your House Champion, Funky Pong Champion, Cutie Quake Champion, Fling The Cow Champion, Tiger Punch Champion, Virus Champion, Solitaire Champion, Worm Race Champion, Rope Walker Champion, Penguin Pass Champion, Skate Park Champion, Watch Out Champion, Lawn Pac Champion, Weapons Of Mass Destruction Champion, Skate Boarder Champion, Lane Bowling Champion, Bugz Champion, Makai Grand Prix 2 Champion, White Van Man Champion, Parachute Panic Champion, BlackJack Champion, Stans Ski Jumping Champion, Smaugs Treasure Champion, Sofa Longjump Champion Seamus Fermanagh's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    @ReluctantSamurai

    A query good sir...

    Almost all of those who deem themselves our enemies are also fully aware of the futility of facing the USA military in a conventional fashion. Not being any stupider than anyone else, these opponents almost always adopt an insurgency approach so as to minimize or avoid the nearly insurmountable conventional advantage of the USA. Some of those enemies operate not simply with the support (coerced or otherwise) of a local population as do most insurgencies, but by actively basing themselves in and among such populations (whether because culturally/ideologically they draw no distinctions between combatant and non-combatant; because they are callously exploiting our views on non-combatants, or by happenstance with little thought).

    Since this is the condition that obtains and is likely to do so in future, RS, how can/should the USA use military force (violence) against these enemies?
    "The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman

    "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken

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  19. #79
    Darkside Medic Senior Member rory_20_uk's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Perhaps another thing to look into is why peoples all over the world have such a "strong" view of the USA as opposed to, say, Germany, or indeed even China. Spoiler alert... it has a lot to do with all the killing, invading and so on for the last 60 or so years.

    Perhaps calming down and not firing cruise missiles / drone attacks might be a nice change of pace - perhaps even wait for a situation where people are complaining the USA isn't getting involved as opposed to their lives being ruined with either sanctions or other, more violent interventions.

    An enemy that wishes to die for their country is the best sort to face - you both have the same aim in mind.
    Science flies you to the moon, religion flies you into buildings.
    "If you can't trust the local kleptocrat whom you installed by force and prop up with billions of annual dollars, who can you trust?" Lemur
    If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain.
    The best argument against democracy is a five minute talk with the average voter. Winston Churchill

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  20. #80
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Since this is the condition that obtains and is likely to do so in future, RS, how can/should the USA use military force (violence) against these enemies?
    My reply is to stop using the stick approach in the Middle East, and everywhere else, for that matter. How about doing some of the things that Monty hinted at with economic and social incentives. In fact, we could be doing a huge service to countries outside the G20 by lifting patent rights on vaccines (even if only temporary) so that these countries could at least get a start on controlling SARS-2. Ease economic sanctions against certain countries for the very same reason.

    Why is it so GD important that (X) militant get targeted for a drone strike, when all involved know there will be civilian casualties? Who gave us the right to cut short innocent lives because of our political agenda?

    Yes, I understand there are radical militants around the world who want to do us harm even if we acted in a benevolent manner, for either cultural or religious reasons. I would venture, however, that hacking from foreign countries like Russia, China, and Iran, cause far more damage (ie the recent pipeline hack, among others) than a radical Jihadist who somehow manages to evade our border security.

    That was the long answer....the short---stop all drone strikes except in extreme cases where intel is so overwhelming, and the target so extremely dangerous, that it warrants the risk of civilian deaths....
    Last edited by ReluctantSamurai; 09-01-2021 at 22:59.
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  21. #81
    Praefectus Fabrum Senior Member Anime BlackJack Champion, Flash Poker Champion, Word Up Champion, Shape Game Champion, Snake Shooter Champion, Fishwater Challenge Champion, Rocket Racer MX Champion, Jukebox Hero Champion, My House Is Bigger Than Your House Champion, Funky Pong Champion, Cutie Quake Champion, Fling The Cow Champion, Tiger Punch Champion, Virus Champion, Solitaire Champion, Worm Race Champion, Rope Walker Champion, Penguin Pass Champion, Skate Park Champion, Watch Out Champion, Lawn Pac Champion, Weapons Of Mass Destruction Champion, Skate Boarder Champion, Lane Bowling Champion, Bugz Champion, Makai Grand Prix 2 Champion, White Van Man Champion, Parachute Panic Champion, BlackJack Champion, Stans Ski Jumping Champion, Smaugs Treasure Champion, Sofa Longjump Champion Seamus Fermanagh's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    A cogent response, thank you. I even find myself agreeing with a number of points you make.

    Vaccine: Lift the patents and compensate the companies (it is not as though we aren't tossing them wads of cash anyway) or maintain the patents but buy tons of it and give it away. Both for economic improvements for the USA in the long term and basic human decency it would be the right thing to do.

    Cyber-war: This is a war we can fight and win. It is, as you and other have noted, a greater threat to the USA than any terrorist operation. We lose people in automobile related incidents, every month, in nearly the same number as those killed on 9-11-2001 by terrorists. We lose more to opioid abuse every month than died on 9-11-2001. The potential for economic and physical harm from cyber attacks dwarfs anything short of a nuclear strike (terror sponsored or otherwise).

    Carrot v Stick: We use the former but not enough and not well. We do not factor in the needed bribes to get aid sent in proper amounts. We do not educate others and send them home. I would probably accept the use of the 'stick' under more circumstances than you advocate, but cannot disagree that it should be used less and used more effectively.

    NOTE: How do we change the media coverage? The standard terrorist attack films much better than a cyber strike and its counters. This sort of thing makes it difficult to get a pol to focus on what matters most as a threat v what affects her reelection most.
    "The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman

    "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken

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  22. #82
    Headless Senior Member Pannonian's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Quote Originally Posted by ReluctantSamurai View Post
    My reply is to stop using the stick approach in the Middle East, and everywhere else, for that matter. How about doing some of the things that Monty hinted at with economic and social incentives. In fact, we could be doing a huge service to countries outside the G20 by lifting patent rights on vaccines (even if only temporary) so that these countries could at least get a start on controlling SARS-2. Ease economic sanctions against certain countries for the very same reason.

    Why is it so GD important that (X) militant get targeted for a drone strike, when all involved know there will be civilian casualties? Who gave us the right to cut short innocent lives because of our political agenda?

    Yes, I understand there are radical militants around the world who want to do us harm even if we acted in a benevolent manner, for either cultural or religious reasons. I would venture, however, that hacking from foreign countries like Russia, China, and Iran, cause far more damage (ie the recent pipeline hack, among others) than a radical Jihadist who somehow manages to evade our border security.

    That was the long answer....the short---stop all drone strikes except in extreme cases where intel is so overwhelming, and the target so extremely dangerous, that it warrants the risk of civilian deaths....
    Violence wins votes among enough voters to win elections. Or perhaps more precisely, lack of violence loses enough votes to lose elections. Either voters grow up enough to recognise that machismo isn't an effective policy driver. Or you go with wherever democracy drives you, however inefficient the direction.

    Compare with China's neocolonialism. Not something that our societies would tolerate. But by heck they are effective at getting foreign influence through coercion.

  23. #83

    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    You've got to respect the people who tried to integrate into and deeply comprehend Afghan society. Moreover, this is some thicc investigative journalism. NB. This is a Jewish woman embedding directly into Afghan society.

    I’ve been silent for a while. I’ve been silent about Afghanistan for longer. But too many things are going unsaid.

    I won’t try to evoke the emotions, somehow both swirling and yet leaden: the grief, the anger, the sense of futility. Instead, as so often before, I will use my mind to shield my heart. And in the process, perhaps help you make some sense of what has happened.

    For those of you who don’t know me, here is my background — the perspective from which I write tonight.

    I covered the fall of the Taliban for NPR, making my way into their former capital, Kandahar, in December 2001, a few days after the collapse of their regime. Descending the last great hill into the desert city, I saw a dusty ghost town. Pickup trucks with rocket-launchers strapped to the struts patrolled the streets. People pulled on my militia friends' sleeves, telling them where to find a Taliban weapons cache, or a last hold-out. But most remained indoors.

    It was Ramadan. A few days later, at the holiday ending the month-long fast, the pent-up joy erupted. Kites took to the air. Horsemen on gorgeous, caparisoned chargers tore across a dusty common in sprint after sprint, with a festive audience cheering them on. This was Kandahar, the Taliban heartland. There was no panicked rush for the airport.

    I reported for a month or so, then passed off to Steve Inskeep, now Morning Edition host. Within another couple of months, I was back, not as a reporter this time, but to try actually to do something. I stayed for a decade. I ran two non-profits in Kandahar, living in an ordinary house and speaking Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two commanders of the international troops, and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (You can read about that time, and its lessons, in my first two books, The Punishment of Virtue and Thieves of State.)

    From that standpoint — speaking as an American, as an adoptive Kandahari, and as a former senior U.S. government official — here are the key factors I see in today’s climax of a two-decade long fiasco:

    Afghan government corruption, and the U.S. role enabling and reinforcing it. The last speaker of the Afghan parliament, Rahman Rahmani, I recently learned, is a multimillionaire, thanks to monopoly contracts to provide fuel and security to U.S. forces at their main base, Bagram. Is this the type of government people are likely to risk their lives to defend?

    Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me — the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries to distort or report their words. Over candied almonds and glasses of green tea, they would get to some version of this: “The Taliban hit us on this cheek, and the government hits us on that cheek.” The old man serving as the group’s spokesman would physically smack himself in the face.

    I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were. Note: it took me a while, and plenty of my own mistakes, to come to that realization. But I did.

    For two decades, American leadership on the ground and in Washington proved unable to take in this simple message. I finally stopped trying to get it across when, in 2011, an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts. That’s when I knew today was inevitable.

    Americans like to think of ourselves as having valiantly tried to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Afghans, so the narrative goes, just weren’t ready for it, or didn’t care enough about democracy to bother defending it. Or we’ll repeat the cliche that Afghans have always rejected foreign intervention; we’re just the latest in a long line.

    I was there. Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for.

    And what did we stand for? What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules.

    Is that American democracy?


    Well…?

    Pakistan. The involvement of that country's government -- in particular its top military brass -- in its neighbor’s affairs is the second factor that would determine the fate of the U.S. mission.

    You may have heard that the Taliban first emerged in the early 1990s, in Kandahar. That is incorrect. I conducted dozens of conversations and interviews over the course of years, both with actors in the drama and ordinary people who watched events unfold in Kandahar and in Quetta, Pakistan. All of them said the Taliban first emerged in Pakistan.

    The Taliban were a strategic project of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. It even conducted market surveys in the villages around Kandahar, to test the label and the messaging. “Taliban” worked well. The image evoked was of the young students who apprenticed themselves to village religious leaders. They were known as sober, studious, and gentle. These Taliban, according to the ISI messaging, had no interest in government. They just wanted to get the militiamen who infested the city to stop extorting people at every turn in the road.

    Both label and message were lies.

    Within a few years, Usama bin Laden found his home with the Taliban, in their de facto capital, Kandahar, hardly an hour’s drive from Quetta. Then he organized the 9/11 attacks. Then he fled to Pakistan, where we finally found him, living in a safe house in Abbottabad, practically on the grounds of the Pakistani military academy. Even knowing what I knew, I was shocked. I never expected the ISI to be that brazen.

    Meanwhile, ever since 2002, the ISI had been re-configuring the Taliban: helping it regroup, training and equipping units, developing military strategy, saving key operatives when U.S. personnel identified and targeted them. That’s why the Pakistani government got no advance warning of the Bin Laden raid. U.S. officials feared the ISI would warn him.

    By 2011, my boss, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Taliban were a “virtual arm of the ISI.”

    And now this.

    Do we really suppose the Taliban, a rag-tag, disjointed militia hiding out in the hills, as we’ve so long been told, was able to execute such a sophisticated campaign plan with no international backing? Where do we suppose that campaign plan came from? Who gave the orders? Where did all those men, all that materiel, the endless supply of money to buy off local Afghan army and police commanders, come from? How is it that new officials were appointed in Kandahar within a day of the city’s fall? The new governor, mayor, director of education, and chief of police all speak with a Kandahari accent. But no one I know has ever heard of them. I speak with a Kandahari accent, too. Quetta is full of Pashtuns — the main ethnic group in Afghanistan — and people of Afghan descent and their children. Who are these new officials?

    Over those same years, by the way, the Pakistani military also provided nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea. But for two decades, while all this was going on, the United States insisted on considering Pakistan an ally. We still do.

    Hamid Karzai. During my conversations in the early 2000s about the Pakistani government’s role in the Taliban’s initial rise, I learned this breathtaking fact: Hamid Karzai, the U.S. choice to pilot Afghanistan after we ousted their regime, was in fact the go-between who negotiated those very Taliban’s initial entry into Afghanistan in 1994.

    I spent months probing the stories. I spoke to servants in the Karzai household. I spoke to a former Mujahideen commander, Mullah Naqib, who admitted to being persuaded by the label and the message Karzai was peddling. The old commander also admitted he was at his wits’ end at the misbehavior of his own men. I spoke with his chief lieutenant, who disagreed with his tribal elder and commander, and took his own men off to neighboring Helmand Province to keep fighting. I heard that Karzai’s own father broke with him over his support for this ISI project. Members of Karzai’s household and Quetta neighbors told me about Karzai’s frequent meetings with armed Taliban at his house there, in the months leading up to their seizure of power.

    And lo. Karzai abruptly emerges from this vortex, at the head of a “coordinating committee” that will negotiate the Taliban’s return to power? Again?

    It was like a repeat of that morning of May, 2011, when I first glimpsed the pictures of the safe-house where Usama bin Laden had been sheltered. Once again — even knowing everything I knew — I was shocked. I was shocked for about four seconds. Then everything seemed clear.

    It is my belief that Karzai was a key go-between negotiating this surrender, just as he did in 1994, this time enlisting other discredited figures from Afghanistan's past, as they were useful to him. Former co-head of the Afghan government, Abdullah Abdullah, could speak to his old battle-buddies, the Mujahideen commanders of the north and west, and their comrades within the Afghan armed forces. You may have heard some of their names as they surrendered their cities in recent days: Ismail Khan, Dostum, Atta Muhammad Noor. The other person mentioned together with Karzai is Gulbuddin Hikmatyar -- a bona fide Taliban commander, who could take the lead in some conversations with them and with the ISI.

    As Americans have witnessed in our own context — the #MeToo movement, for example, the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, or the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — surprisingly abrupt events are often months or years in the quiet making. The abrupt collapse of 20 years’ effort in Afghanistan is, in my view, one of those cases.

    Thinking this hypothesis through, I find myself wondering: what role did U.S. Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad play? An old friend of Karzai's, he was the one who ran the negotiations with the Taliban for the Trump Administration, in which the Afghan government was forced to make concession after concession. Could President Biden truly have found no one else for that job, to replace an Afghan-American with obvious conflicts of interest, who was close to former Vice President Dick Cheney and who lobbied in favor of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan when the Taliban were last in power?

    Self-Delusion. How many times did you read stories about the Afghan security forces’ steady progress? How often, over the past two decades, did you hear some U.S. official proclaim that the Taliban’s eye-catching attacks in urban settings were signs of their “desperation” and their “inability to control territory?” How many heart-warming accounts did you hear about all the good we were doing, especially for women and girls?

    Who were we deluding? Ourselves?

    What else are we deluding ourselves about?

    One final point. I hold U.S. civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for today’s outcome. Military commanders certainly participated in the self-delusion. I can and did find fault with generals I worked for or observed. But the U.S. military is subject to civilian control. And the two primary problems identified above — corruption and Pakistan — are civilian issues. They are not problems men and women in uniform can solve. But faced with calls to do so, no top civilian decision-maker was willing to take either of these problems on. The political risk, for them, was too high.

    Today, as many of those officials enjoy their retirement, who is suffering the cost?
    Followup post:

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    I write this post with the dizzying impression of having stepped into a hall of mirrors.

    In international development circles, it’s fashionable to speak of “fragile” or “failing” states. But such states are deceptive. They are in fact run by sophisticated networks. These networks may be failing at governing, but governing is not their objective. Self-enrichment is. And at that they are highly successful.

    NB. The preferred term for such units is "feral" state. They're a common feature of cyberpunk and science-fiction.

    Now consider the McMansions that have sprung up like growths around Washington in the past twenty years. Consider the properties in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, the pay packages and portfolios, the offshore bank accounts — and the no-bid tenders — enjoyed by executives of defense contracting and financial investment firms, pharmaceutical and fossil fuel giants, and the lawyers and brokers who service them. Under administrations of both parties, many of those executives have cycled in and out of government.


    This is the story explored in On Corruption in America — And What Is at Stake.


    What is at stake, indeed? Now consider the public policies these executives have influenced or authored. They include two lost wars, a financial meltdown that nearly brought down the world economy, an addiction crisis and a bungled response to a global pandemic, both of which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. And the destruction of the irreplaceable habitat upon which we depend for our very survival, which has reached runaway speed in the same two decades. As I write, heaven — meaning the earth — is burning. Or flooded out.


    This is what I mean by “Afghanistan holds up a mirror to us.” How competently have our own leaders been governing for the past twenty years? Meanwhile, how successful have they been at achieving that other objective: adding zeroes to their bank accounts? Which of those was in fact their primary objective?


    Given the consequences, are terrorists really the greater threat to our homeland?



    Those are the questions that have been flooding my mind. I’ll return to them below. But let me first take up some of yours.


    Warning: many issues were surfaced, none of them simple. This post is long. Italicized headings and underlined sub-headings should help you skip to those that interest you.


    How to help. One of you wrote questioning the international relief organizations I mention below. They all have marred records, and the caution was well-founded. I double-checked. One of the best groups working on the ground in Afghanistan, at least the north and west, is the Relief Organization for Afghan Women and Children (ROAWC), with offices in Kabul and Mazar-i Sherif. Support can be provided through Goodweave, which works to end child labor in the region.

    My trusted friend who has been in development since 2002 -- and has implemented numerous projects through ROAWC -- says this about his earlier recommendation in favor of well-known international organizations. His experience with The International Rescue Committee, OxFam, and Save the Children UK is based on their performance on the ground. In my own experience, the activities of such large humanitarian groups depend on who is implementing them in a specific context. So if you do donate to any of them -- or any others -- I recommend you ensure that your money goes to a fund earmarked exclusively for Afghanistan.


    And please, if any of you has connected with organizations in your own area and learned of ways you can assist incoming refugees, inform me via my “contact” form. I will post a separate blog as I gather information on other ways to help.


    And now…back to cold-blooded analysis.

    Revenue streams. More than at any time in a century, money is what we count — and what counts. It means social standing. It means winning. And who controls Afghanistan, controls great sums of money.

    -- A number of you have correctly pointed to opium. The Taliban controlled that trade when they were in power. Credited for shutting down production in 2000, they were in fact pulling an OPEC move. The market was glutted and prices were low, and Taliban warehouses were full.


    After 2001, the international community’s approach to Afghan opium focused on cultivation, not trafficking, and not on any of the well-known kingpins. I spoke to numerous farmers whose fields were dense with the strangely beautiful, tulip-like poppy blooms. The farmers were ashamed. But there were no banks, no loans. After six years of drought, many of their pomegranate and apricot trees were dead. Fruit trees take a half dozen years to begin producing. Poppy is an annual crop, and a hardy one. Desperate, farmers turned to opium traffickers. The loans they received came at 100% interest, to be repaid not in cash, but in poppy. If you missed your payment, some said, you owed double the next year. In that context, eradicating poppy in the field was counterproductive. It only forced farmers to put more land into production to pay off their ballooning debts.


    We have heard that the Taliban return to Afghanistan, which picked up momentum from around 2006, was largely financed by opium. There is truth to that assessment.


    Also true is that many of our Afghan government partners had a hand in that same trade. President Karzai’s late half-brother Ahmad Wali, for example, and the governor of Kandahar and then Jalalabad, Gul Agha Shirzai, ran rival trafficking networks. You can read more about that dynamic in The Punishment of Virtue.


    Back in power, the Taliban will control the traffic once more, including developments in refining opium into more easily transported heroin and perhaps other derivatives. But I expect the same type of rivalry to emerge among different Taliban trafficking networks as existed between Karzai’s and Shirzai’s.


    I have no doubt that some Pakistani officials also now stand to profit from the opium industry.


    As for any U.S. involvement in that trade, I have no personal insight. But close ties, especially between the CIA and several key figures (including Ahmed Wali Karzai, Shirzai and Razziq — a brutal border police chief who became Gen. David Petraeus’s spearhead for a surge into the region) lent at least tacit approval to trafficking activities, and protection in the eyes of the population.


    -- Afghanistan’s strategic location is a second major financial asset.


    Picture the three great basins of civilization: Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Iranian plateau. Picture a massive, craggy rock wall dividing them. Afghanistan owns two doors in that wall. Southern spurs of the ancient Silk Road ran through that land. Part of why Pakistan’s military government spun up the Taliban in the first place was likely to clear the highways for long-distance trade. After 2001, customs dues — or bribes for allowing drivers to dodge them — poured into the coffers of the strongmen who controlled the main crossings (clockwise from the south: Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i Sherif, and Jalalabad). Now the Taliban gain access to that revenue.


    Note: anyone who claims to be able to estimate the revenues from any of these sources, or even to place them in relationship to each other, should be asked to provide his or her sources. I defy anyone to arrive at an accurate estimate of the total sums.


    -- I include in the above statement the international assistance that has poured into Afghanistan for two decades, with little or no oversight. “No effective measures were taken to abate corruption,” one of you commented to “The Ides of August.” An Indian engineer, the writer was part of the team that rebuilt the main highways linking Kabul to Kandahar and Herat, losing forty-two colleagues out of a hundred, he tallied.


    Billions of dollars in international humanitarian and development money has washed through Afghanistan yearly since 2001, not to mention military assistance. (Totals are impossible to calculate. US congressional appropriations add up to approximately $86 b., from 2001-2020, according to Forbes Magazine. Add private philanthropy, and all assistance from other countries.)


    Presuming that a Taliban regime hopes to tap into some of that financing, the money spigots may represent the only leverage the international community has left.


    Washington’s stubborn embrace of the Pakistani government. The why of it honestly beats me. Here is some informed speculation about possible factors.


    -- Loyalty. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, there was almost no expertise within the U.S. government on Afghanistan — a country and people we pivoted away from once they finished helping us bring down the Soviet Union. Whatever U.S. “expertise” there was resided within the agency that had supported the Afghan fighters against the Soviets: the CIA. Its support had been funneled through its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI. That control was Islamabad’s condition for allowing U.S. personnel to operate among the refugees living inside Pakistan. After 9/11, Washington reached for the same formula, relying heavily on the CIA and its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI. Personal ties between intelligence operatives also count for a lot.


    -- Too big to fail. I wonder: Who would have had the job of breaking the news to the American public, if the U.S. government had changed course? Who would have informed us that a billion dollars of our money had been paid every year to the very government that was ginning up the guerrilla forces our fellow-citizens were fighting — as though we had been financing North Vietnam while fighting the Vietcong? How would that person justify contributions to the agency that was harboring our supposed arch-enemy, Usama bin Laden? What about the conversation with a grieving Gold Star family? Who would sit down with the parents and explain that they had helped pay for the IED that killed their daughter?


    One of you, a Vietnam vet, wrote in to “The Ides of March" about how his own superior officers were more interested in 'how they looked' to their chain of command than the truth, no matter the consequences for U.S. national security or those whose lives were lost. I think he understands what I’m getting at.


    -- A suicide bomber twice the size of California. Pakistan is a nuclear country, as is its neighbor, India. Islamabad’s communications with Washington have always included a subtext: ‘Watch out: get too tough on us and we might just blow ourselves up.


    -- Conducting operations. Once they swing into action, organizations — and not just the military — often let day-to-day operations overshadow their ultimate objectives. Consider places where you’ve worked. Does this description fit? To win the war in Afghanistan, it was necessary to confront Pakistan. But to continue conducting operations in Afghanistan, it was necessary to mollify Pakistan, so our supply convoys could keep driving its roads, and our drones could keep picking off targets inside that country. Note: that meant that only ISI-approved targets were struck.



    Pakistan’s objective? For an informed view of the Pakistani government’s motivations and practices, read The Wrong Enemy, by Carlotta Gall. Bear in mind that my thoughts are less well-grounded than her work, but here are a few:


    -- The term “strategic depth,” which often comes up in this context, is wonky and vague. The sense of it may be that the Pakistani government, in its preoccupation with India, wants to control the territory at its rear. Or, short of controlling it, wants it too chaotic to matter. Note: Pakistanis’ assertions that India represents a genuine existential threat to their country are unfounded. It is Pakistan, not India that has mounted most of the cross-border violence in the past two decades, usually via extremist proxies analogous to the Taliban. (Remember the Mumbai Bombing?)


    Why is that? Why, if you’re afraid of someone, would you punch them in the eye? Why does Islamabad want to keep India riled up?


    Perhaps because those making the decisions in Islamabad are the leaders of a military dictatorship. A good pretext for asking your citizens to allow unelected military officers to rule them is the fear of an existential military threat.


    -- Pashtuns, also called “Pathans” in Pakistan, comprise very roughly 15% of that country’s population. It was not in the interest of its military rulers for a largely Pashtun nation next door to develop into a prosperous, happy, democratic country. Pakistani Pashtuns might start agitating for a similar democracy at home.


    -- U.S. and Afghan officials engaged in provocation, unwittingly in some cases, willfully in others. Think back on our friend the Indian engineer, whom I quoted above. What was he even doing working on the Kandahar to Kabul road? He and his team of 100 Indians deployed on a highway that close to the border were guaranteed to arouse Pakistani suspicions. USAID should not have contracted their company.


    Why did the Afghan government permit India to set up three consulates, including one in Kandahar? What was that consulate, other than a listening post? Did the Indian government spare many thoughts for the likely impact on Afghanistan and its people?


    And why did Afghan government and security officials provide vocal support and safe haven inside Afghanistan for separatist Pakistani Baluchis? Nose-thumbing, if you’re the little guy, can cost you more than your nose. These Afghan officials were handing Islamabad a pretext.


    -- Roads. As per the “revenue streams” section above, long-distance ground transport, especially for heavy agricultural goods, is important to Pakistan. As are the associated smuggling and trafficking opportunities to certain Pakistanis.


    Other countries. Pakistan is not the sole villain here, as a number of you noted.

    -- That other purported U.S. ally, the Saudi Arabian regime, has for decades been exporting a virulent distortion of Islam, and funding fundamentalist madrassas — religious schools-cum-training camps — across the region, including in Pakistan.


    One member of our little community adds the depth of lived experience to this sketch of Saudi activities. She is an Afghan-American who, in the late 1980s, lived with her family in Saudi Arabia, near the border with Yemen. Usama bin Laden and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, she tells me, were already comrades at the time. Gulbuddin had a network of fellow-tribesmen who owned shops in Mecca, and he collected donations through them. More chillingly: there was, she says, a well-known pipeline of Afghan women the two were supplying to their followers in the region. Bin Laden and Gulbuddin would then pocket the brideprice.


    Gulbuddin, always close to the ISI, is remembered for his troops' wanton shelling of Kabul, in a battle for control of the city after the Soviet-backed government eventually fell, in 1992. They reduced as much as a third of the city to rubble, and assassinated numerous journalists, women, and university professors during those years. Hikmatyar has boasted of helping Bin Laden escape pursuing U.S. and Afghan troops in 2001 and 2002.


    -- China, a diplomatic and financial backer of the Pakistani government, also stands to gain from its client’s proxy control of Afghanistan. Not that there was likely to be much resistance from Kabul under any Afghan government to Beijing’s brand of development investment. A Chinese company, for example, holds the contracts to exploit an enormous untapped copper deposit a few dozen miles outside Kabul. And then there’s the Belt and Road initiative.


    -- The Russian embassy remains open. Evidence for years has indicated covert Russian support for the resurgent Taliban. Meanwhile, the Embassy wined and dined some U.S. officials, including, to my knowledge, ISAF intelligence chief Mike Flynn, in 2009 and 2010.

    Asymmetric warfare. Though U.S. officials have been calling the conflict in Afghanistan an “insurgency” for years, they have not been fighting the war that way. This is the principle criticism I reserve for the officers I’ve worked for. They are supposed to know something about warfare.

    Afghans are competent fighters — they drove out the Soviets, after all. So why was it so important that we spend so much effort teaching them to fight? Why do we keep hearing about the air support we were supplying, supposedly so critical to the Afghan war effort? Has any reporter asked why the Afghan military needed air cover when the Taliban didn’t?


    The problem is, we built a conventional army in Afghanistan, rather than the type of clever, nimble unit that we ourselves depended on in the field — special forces. An agile, deceptive, mobile team that can easily melt away into rough terrain will almost always defeat a lumbering conventional army, dependent on its cinderblock headquarters and long supply chains. Read Freedom by my lifelong friend Sebastian Junger.


    So why did we spend two decades and billions of dollars to try to build the Afghan army into one of those? Who was banking the bulk of those dollars? Did Afghans themselves intuit that such a flat-footed army would never beat hardened guerrillas? Did that realization add to their sense of doom once we were gone?


    Our own military, descended from the Minutemen of the American Revolution, has come to resemble the Redcoats those 18th century insurgents fought. What an irony. As special advisor to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, I found myself — a rank civilian — begging him not to send a Stryker brigade into the densely cultivated orchards of Arghandab District, north of Kandahar. The lanes between those walled orchards are just too narrow for oversized, high-tech Stryker vehicles. That’s OK, McChrystal assured me, the troops could always be dismounted.


    What an absurd proposition: You’d strip a brigade of the very asset it was built and trained and conditioned to use? How physically fit are soldiers accustomed to sitting in vehicles all day? Are they even in shape to patrol difficult terrain on foot?


    The result was catastrophic. More than a dozen frustrated and out-of-control officers were court-martialed or otherwise disciplined for their behavior in the field, including the notorious homicide of several villagers, "for sport." The brigade's casualty rate was disturbingly high. After an investigation, the commander was barred from future combat deployments.


    Becoming the Redcoats also meant we forgot how asymmetric warfare works.


    In such contests, the poorer, “weaker” insurgents aren’t trying to rack up the bodies of opposing soldiers. That’s conventional warfare. Insurgents aim to achieve the maximum psychological impact for as little human and material investment as possible. They target emblematic people and kill them in demonstrative ways. They hang the body to a sacred tree, like some gruesome offering. They pin a note to the dead man’s tunic: “If you do what he did, this will happen to you.” They disfigure a young woman’s face with acid.


    Or they put a half dozen guys up in an unfinished building in downtown Kabul with a couple of rusty mortar-launchers. This is 2011. The guys shoot at the U.S. embassy and ISAF headquarters across the street. They shut down the whole strategic complex for more than nineteen hours.


    If those fighters had wanted to kill people, they would have. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to demonstrate to the whole of Afghanistan that they could. It was to demonstrate U.S. vulnerability — to Afghans and to Americans.


    In other words, the Taliban communicate with actions, not words. They communicate to the side of our brains that understands body language. If you want to get a sense of their intentions, watch what they do.


    But we Westerners have been neglecting that side of our brains for a long time. We like meanings spelled out in words. The Taliban are delighted that we cling to their words this way, endlessly parsing them in media and intelligence analyses. That focus allows them to send double messages: words to us, contrary gestures to those who know how to read them.


    Why am I only hearing this now? I can almost feel the dismay in many of your comments.

    The bulk of the information in my “Ides of August” post is developed in my first book, The Punishment of Virtue. It came out in 2006. I was afraid of the explosive nature of the revelations about Karzai. But in the end, the only reviewer or interviewer who noticed them was an inner-city talkshow host in Pittsburg.


    The Kabul press corps did a remarkable job. Re-read Dexter Filkins’ 2011 New Yorker article “The Afghan Bank Heist” Earlier, he reported on these issues for the New York Times. Matt Rosenberg was probing Afghan government corruption for the Wall Street Journal. Or look up work by some of the best Canadian reporters, including Declan Walsh and Graeme Smith.


    But television coverage was sparse. Afghanistan is rough terrain. And these stories are hard to get with quick, top-heavy in-and-outs. It took me two years living in Kandahar to realize that what I had reported to NPR listeners back in December 2001 about Afghan ground forces fighting the Taliban was false. I had been handed a cover-story.


    And there was Iraq. And there was the 2008 financial meltdown...


    But perhaps most important is this: We hadn’t lost yet. So there was no way to prove the validity of what I was saying.


    When you haven’t lost -- when calamity somehow hasn’t yet struck -- it’s easy to assume you’ll “muddle through.” That’s how many officials put it at the time: The Afghan government will muddle through. We'll muddle through.


    Now, Afghanistan is waving a mirror in our faces. Calamity hasn’t struck -- not real calamity. Not yet. But let’s not assume our democracy will “muddle through.”


    What I would have done differently. That is a long-answer question. A taste is available in the “Afghanistan Action Plan” I distributed to top U.S. civilian and military officials in January 2009. I continued to provide equally detailed, though sometimes more tailored, planning documents to my superiors through 2011. A truly inclusive peace process would have involved bringing together people whom ordinary Afghans recognized as representing them, not just the officials of the two entities most held in equal contempt: their own government and the Taliban.


    “Democracy” and “freedom.” I have read a number of thoughtful comments on these interwoven themes, and a few not so thoughtful ones. ‘We should never have tried to bring democracy to Afghanistan,’ goes one of the tropes I’ve heard repeated over the years. ‘Why did we get sucked into nation-building?’ ‘It should have just been a counter-terror mission.’ ‘Every other great power has failed in Afghanistan, what were we thinking?’

    What would have happened if we had just toppled the Taliban regime and left? Minus the cost, would the result have been better? If that was the way to go, why didn't we do that in Germany and Japan after World War II. Seems we still have troops there? Does a country like Afghanistan need more help or less help than a Germany in birthing a representative democracy?


    And were we really trying to bring democracy to Afghanistan, anyway? Were we nation-building? That’s what some of you have been poignantly wondering.


    If we were, why were there so few mentors for Afghan government officials, and so many for Afghan army officers? Is it easier to run a city than to command an infantry company?


    Decisions aren’t on-off switches. It doesn’t just matter what you decide to do — stay or go, for example. At least as important is how you do it.


    And if it was democracy we were peddling, what kind of democracy?


    What is the condition of our democracy?


    That is the question this fiasco poses.


    A word, in closing, for “essential workers.” Entry- and mid-level civil servants have been going without sleep for days, trying to salvage at least something from the wreckage. Trying to incarnate a scrap of human decency, while their higher-ups defend their decisions. Like medical personnel and garbage collectors around the world, these are the truly essential workers.


    My heart goes out to them in thanks.



    AMERICA STOP EXPORTING CORRUPTION



    Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
    @ReluctantSamurai

    A query good sir...

    Almost all of those who deem themselves our enemies are also fully aware of the futility of facing the USA military in a conventional fashion. Not being any stupider than anyone else, these opponents almost always adopt an insurgency approach so as to minimize or avoid the nearly insurmountable conventional advantage of the USA. Some of those enemies operate not simply with the support (coerced or otherwise) of a local population as do most insurgencies, but by actively basing themselves in and among such populations (whether because culturally/ideologically they draw no distinctions between combatant and non-combatant; because they are callously exploiting our views on non-combatants, or by happenstance with little thought).

    Since this is the condition that obtains and is likely to do so in future, RS, how can/should the USA use military force (violence) against these enemies?
    To add to Samurai's response with slightly different framing:

    Pick enemies more judiciously, and with a different toolset. Don't accept the inevitability of entanglement with foreign insurgencies. (We should be planning on RoEs for domestic insurgencies, btw.)

    Less laconically, are you guys aware of that Youtube channel that attempts to hike cross-countries in a perfectly straight line? Even when it involves traversing private properties, scaling ravines, or trudging through bogs and rivers. They do it for the adventure.

    We don't have to take the international relations Straight Line challenge!! Let's get off the trolley and take the Road Less Traveled instead.

    NOTE: How do we change the media coverage? The standard terrorist attack films much better than a cyber strike and its counters. This sort of thing makes it difficult to get a pol to focus on what matters most as a threat v what affects her reelection most.
    We've watched how the media covered Trump for 5 years, and how it covered the late extrication from Afghanistan. There are some very strong editorial tendencies among mainstream media, simultaneously financial and ideological/normative. I have seen these biases termed "pro-Empire." Admittedly all our ideas on progressive internationalism are pie in the sky without solving the media puzzle, and it's fair to argue that if we can't solve the media puzzle, we couldn't even be expected to succeed on straight implementation. I don't have any ideas.

    Prior to WW2, the NYT's coverage of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party was - according to archival research - overwhelmingly either neutral or pro-Nazi. Maybe we just need Congress to declare war on something instead of the Executive for a change.

    Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
    Compare with China's neocolonialism. Not something that our societies would tolerate. But by heck they are effective at getting foreign influence through coercion.
    I think America and Europe have, potentially, a better value proposition in that we can offer development with less of the rampant inegalitarianism, neocolonialism, and hostage-taking clientelism. Potentially. But China has a track record of living up to its, uh, what it advertises and no more, and we don't, so it's hard to place a bet on 'Western justice.'
    Last edited by Montmorency; 09-02-2021 at 01:53.
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  24. #84
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Violence wins votes among enough voters to win elections. Or perhaps more precisely, lack of violence loses enough votes to lose elections.
    There is a certain value for current and wannabe legislators in pandering to war-hawks. However, in the case of US foreign policy, it's the big weapons/munitions businesses that exert the most influence. I posted on that earlier, where defense industry stocks outperformed the S&P 500 standard by almost 60% since 2001.

    Pointedly, we have just wound down 20 years of war in Afghanistan, and Congress is now considering INCREASING the defense budget.....AGAIN.

    I also think that in the current state of affairs here in the US, Republican legislators and candidates are calling for an INCREASE of violence. That mentality has trickled all the way down to local situations where you have politicians advocating violence against school board members if they institute mask mandates for school children.

    We are so effed, IMHO....
    High Plains Drifter

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  25. #85

    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    I'm surprised this hasn't been commented on, but the Supreme Court has approved the Texas abortion ban (near-unlimited liability for being associated with abortion after 6 weeks). Roe and Casey considered likely to be fully defunct within a year.

    In responding to Rory earlier, I forgot to include the footnote to

    the refugee situation was always going to be messy since most people have a bias against cutting bait (?) until catastrophe is under their noses*
    *While there were thousands of natives ready to go anytime for months, they were concentrated among special visa/refugee programs that the Trump administration all but shut down; reconstituting these programs bureaucratically was a challenge. The Biden admin's culpability depends on one's willingness to waive requirements of documentation and attestation. We might also have consulted more sensitively and emphatically with NATO allies, who apparently felt they weren't given enough notice to arrange the evacuation of their civilians and allies, whom they also allege were deprioritized in the exfiltration from Kabul - though it's not clear how they may have benefited materially from more respectful consultation.


    “The so-called Spanish influenza is nothing more or less than old fashioned grippe.”
    Is this the real life, or is it fantasy?

    Quote Originally Posted by spmetla View Post
    Well part of the problem in those countries hosting so many refugees is that they are just put into a camp and kept there forever. The Palestinians in Lebanon were never given a chance at integrating so they just ended up being a stateless, hostile entity that further destabilized Lebanon and led to the civil war.
    Part of it is that people keep expecting the all or nothing solutions, especially with Israel. Demands that Israel go back to 1948 borders with so many decades in between seem as likely as getting Russia to give up Crimea.
    As for help, well, the West sends an incredible amount of aid to those nations. That foreign aid unfortunately becomes part of the problem too, give country X million for education, they then cut their education by X million and reallocate into other things suddenly building a dependency.


    Well it's a damned if you and damned if you don't world. Support a dictatorship in Egypt that keeps regional stability, maintains trade through the Suez, and abides by it's peace treaty with Israel or support a democratically elected Islamist that wants to start a regional war to kick Israel out of the Holy Land. Support pro-democracy elements in Syria and Libya against brutal dictatorships but not actually send in troops to either eliminate the dictatorship (syria) or create some on the ground security for the transitional government (Libya). Support the Shah in Iran to support british oil or support the democratic elements there that might create enough instability for the soviets to expand their influence. Support Turkey as it slides into dictatorship or standby principles and kick it out of NATO only to see it become our biggest opponent in the region eclipsing even Iran?
    We need much more than aid, we need a comprehensive program of wealth transfer. If that sounds scary, remember that it's a positive-sum, not a zero-sum, project. The groundwork involves transnational standards and regulatory bodies on labor rights, industrial and environmental codes, and the like, beginning with the G7, G2, OECD; the ongoing negotiations on a minimum corporate tax are a very belated demonstration. Then it involves subsidizing private investment and interstate partnerships and professional education and training, and much more, in lower-wealth (not just Islamic) countries. If globalists claim that globalization promotes peaceful interactions between countries, then imagine what economic integration through directly helping build middle classes would achieve (note that there's a lot of opportunity in this for participating Westerners as well, in the short and long term). We must NOT look to perpetuate compliant resource cows! Democratic countries can disagree with each other, learn to live with it. A resilient and wealthy international community is pretty much the cure to most of our ills. All the above also has the natural effect of relieving push factors in permanent international migration, if that's considered a priority.

    (Indeed, that the costs and causes of migration are so straightforwardly addressed, even along coarse lines, just makes the perfidy of European xenophobes all the more heinous. A transparent, standards-based system of very generous payments to poor countries, with enforceable oversight and local democratic buy-in, to develop domestic institutions for absorbing and integrating global refugees, plus a quota and resource-sharing convention to spread the burden. That's like the very bare minimum if you just don't want the mud people polluting your blood culture, but ineffectual xenophobes want to have their cake (racist fearmongering and oppression) and eat it too (refugee boats for naval target practice).)

    Of course, raw mercantilist economic investment as such isn't bound to produce the desired result - look at the Gulf states, or Belt and Road. The objective is to bootstrap self-sustaining, mutually-reliant and diverse economies with empowered citizenries. It means (civilian) boots on the ground, not aid checks. It's a messy and contested long-term process of exchange. But it's part of what has to happen if we don't want Africa and the Eastern Med in 50 years to resemble an apocalyptic wasteland, one putting relentless pressure on a sclerotic Festung Europa whose majority population consists of over-60s (Millenials and Zoomers!).

    As with so many challenges, procrastination since 2001 and earlier makes these tasks much harder in every respect, but all the more necessary from even a self-interested view. You know what would have been the exact place to test out these motives? Post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. The West has squandered so much time and more since the end of the Cold War...

    My heart breaks for the suffering we will leave behind in Afghanistan. But we do not know how to fix Afghanistan. We failed in that effort so completely that we ended up strengthening the Taliban. We should do all we can to bring American citizens and allies home. But if we truly care about educating girls worldwide, we know how to build schools and finance education. If we truly care about protecting those who fear tyranny, we know how to issue visas and admit refugees. If we truly care about the suffering of others, there is so much we could do. Only 1 percent of the residents of poor countries are vaccinated against the coronavirus. We could change that. More than 400,000 people die from malaria each year. We could change that, too.

    “I want America more forward-deployed, but I want it through a massive international financing arm and a massive renewable energy arm,” Senator Murphy told me. “That’s the United States I want to see spread across the world — not the face of America today that’s by and large arms sales, military trainers and brigades.”

    Hands off foreign policy won't work, too much military intervention won't work either. Being a global cash cow is politically a dead end and in the long run doesn't help.
    It'd be great if the US didn't have to engage the middle east so much but the post-colonial woes of France and the UK combined with the US betrayal of them in the Suez crisis haven't fostered a leadership role for Europe in the middle east despite them being the best ones to do so with the regional knowledge, neighborly interest, and historic (for better and worse) ties. This viewpoint is of course western centric, the idea that an outside power broker is necessary seems ludicrious but the Arab infighting nationalism vs. political Islam, the Sunni/Shia woes, neo-Ottomanism, and recurring flareups in Palestine together with US/NATO/EU actions (military, economic, diplomatic etc) that incite the muslim mainstream against the west while ruining themselves economically by spending on militaries that are larger than their economies can realistically afford.
    The record of our coercive and authoritarian solutions in the region everywhere isn't a secret. Just saying, if the Homeland is the #1 priority it's odd to continue to invest in corrosive, unethical measures that, at best, objectively won't preserve security.

    The American Establishment can't be acting like a Befuddled TV Commercial Husband who doesn't know how sinks or yogurt function.

    I doubt Egypt's Morsi, for example, was poised to invade the Holy Land, and if he detectably were, that seems like an easy lesson to remediate...

    Referring to the 2006 report on lessons from the 1919 pandemic quoted by Samurai, I can sometimes empathize with pessimistic conservatism, on the core axiom of the futility of human betterment. Our times carry the distinct odor of moldering Long Defeat. But we know exactly what we need to do, and on a basic level how to do it; if we inexorably can't execute due to some flaw or lacuna in our constitutions or cultures, that points more closely to nihilism than to any conservative philosophy, conservatism indeed then being recast as the Original Sin that ultimately condemns the species.


    Quote Originally Posted by ReluctantSamurai View Post
    We are so effed, IMHO....
    Rep. Madison Cawthorn:

    Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., on Sunday promoted false claims about election fraud and warned that there could be “bloodshed” over any future elections Republicans consider to be rigged.

    “The things that we are wanting to fight for, it doesn’t matter if our votes don’t count,” he said at the Macon County Republican Party headquarters in Franklin, North Carolina. “Because, you know, if our election systems continue to be rigged, and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed.”

    Cawthorn’s spokesman, Luke Ball, said Tuesday in a statement that the lawmaker was advocating against violence.

    “In his comments, Congressman Cawthorn is clearly advocating for violence not to occur over election integrity questions," Ball said. "He fears others would erroneously choose that route and strongly states that election integrity issues should be resolved peacefully and never through violence.”

    A video of Cawthorn's remarks was first posted by the county party on Facebook but has since been taken down. A brief clip of his comments still appears on Twitter and has been verified by NBC News. Lawmakers are currently back in their districts for Congress' annual August recess.

    The 26-year-old freshman lawmaker, the youngest member of Congress, has repeated false claims made by former President Donald Trump that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

    Cawthorn then implied that he would resort to using a gun if necessary to defend against voter fraud in the future.

    “I will tell you, as much as I am willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there is nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American,” said Cawthorn, who added that they need to “passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states.”
    Last edited by Montmorency; 09-02-2021 at 04:31.
    Vitiate Man.

    History repeats the old conceits
    The glib replies, the same defeats


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  26. #86
    Darkside Medic Senior Member rory_20_uk's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    I think America and Europe have, potentially, a better value proposition in that we can offer development with less of the rampant inegalitarianism, neocolonialism, and hostage-taking clientelism. Potentially. But China has a track record of living up to its, uh, what it advertises and no more, and we don't, so it's hard to place a bet on 'Western justice.'
    I don't think that we do. The West doesn't even know what it is trying to do most of the time.

    The West has two diametrically opposite approaches to dealing with the world - "Western values" are great and are to be fought for and exported, or else different societies have their own approaches and we should respect different cultures. And the constant vacillating between the two is what causes the mess we see where the only easy way to square the circle is to pretend that the two are the same - and really anyone would want the Western Values if only they understood. For some the only way to make them understand is to kill them, sadly. And often their families. And anyone nearby. And anyone who takes offence at these killings. Honestly - they really are so difficult to work with!

    Or we conflate what others want for what we want others to want - Aung San Suu Kyi is a great example as we seemed to think she wanted to be a head of state in Western Europe and she wanted to be head of state. She didn't heroically put up with house arrest to help the downtrodden, she did it until she got the power.

    China on the other hand, are clear that their way is the best way for China and that they have little interest in how countries work outside of China and that's that. Countries like that. If you do what you agreed to do you'll get what you want. Countries might get into debt from this and be beholden to China? Yes - and Western companies do exactly the same thing. Countries end up giving long term leases for assets? I don't think the West can really take the moral high ground on this either.

    Countries therefore now have increasingly two options - one is a purely transactional approach. And one that is highly unlikely to change for years. The other is so capricious that policy can radically change in a handful of years, previous friends overthrown after being accused of owning weapons the West sold them.

    In a nutshell, we constantly overvalue what we have compared to what others might actually want.

    An enemy that wishes to die for their country is the best sort to face - you both have the same aim in mind.
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  27. #87
    Coffee farmer extraordinaire Member spmetla's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    I think the biggest problem for the "West" is it has no goals anymore, where does the US or the EU want to be in fifty years or a hundred years, how to we work to achieve that etc....
    If the EU had a long range plan and clear policies in regards to the neighborhood then it could make plans to work toward that. We makes plans for climate change, for green energy, but not coherent foreign policy.
    I hate the attempted hegemonic way of China but as you guys have said it makes it clear where they stand.

    The US is especially bad at this and has been completely lost since the end of the Cold War. I think it just like Europe has achieved a "end of history" stance and just wants to maintain the status quo. We aren't even clear in regards to our neighbors or allies. When we expand NATO do we consider the reactions from Russia, will those reactions make us less secure than if we expanded NATO membership? We want to contain China and are pursuing DIME engagements with the countries in the region, what's the long term goal and how does that tie into China?

    That's not to say there's no long term planning being done, I've seen US, UK, German, and EU white papers on the next twenty years and next fifty years but that's just the products of the government and not necessarily with the knowledge or even backing of the its people. That's why NATO countries can say they want to create more military deterrent against Russia but in reality don't really match it in terms of what would effectively deter further aggression in the Ukraine or the Baltics. The US war on drugs focused on interception of smuggling not so much on the domestic use that fuels the smuggling through high demand. How does the UK and its Commonwealth fit into the future? Is it just going to be a cultural exchange and sporting club?

    Russia wants warm water ports, buffers-states with NATO in Europe and a non-threatening middle east/central asia.
    China wants regional hegemony to resume their 'rightful place' as the middle kingdom with no neighborhood threats, especially from the US, Japan, India, or Russia.
    What does the US, UK, or EU want that that can be clearly defined? A democratic and/or stable mediterranen? Energy independence? Colonization of the moon or mars? Strong industrial base? The US can't define clear goals for its relations with Mexico or Cuba much less the middle east, how can that be rectified?

    "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
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    Stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
    Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
    Stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
    Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

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  28. #88

    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Quote Originally Posted by rory_20_uk View Post
    I don't think that we do. The West doesn't even know what it is trying to do most of the time.

    The West has two diametrically opposite approaches to dealing with the world - "Western values" are great and are to be fought for and exported, or else different societies have their own approaches and we should respect different cultures. And the constant vacillating between the two is what causes the mess we see where the only easy way to square the circle is to pretend that the two are the same - and really anyone would want the Western Values if only they understood. For some the only way to make them understand is to kill them, sadly. And often their families. And anyone nearby. And anyone who takes offence at these killings. Honestly - they really are so difficult to work with!

    Or we conflate what others want for what we want others to want - Aung San Suu Kyi is a great example as we seemed to think she wanted to be a head of state in Western Europe and she wanted to be head of state. She didn't heroically put up with house arrest to help the downtrodden, she did it until she got the power.

    China on the other hand, are clear that their way is the best way for China and that they have little interest in how countries work outside of China and that's that. Countries like that. If you do what you agreed to do you'll get what you want. Countries might get into debt from this and be beholden to China? Yes - and Western companies do exactly the same thing. Countries end up giving long term leases for assets? I don't think the West can really take the moral high ground on this either.

    Countries therefore now have increasingly two options - one is a purely transactional approach. And one that is highly unlikely to change for years. The other is so capricious that policy can radically change in a handful of years, previous friends overthrown after being accused of owning weapons the West sold them.

    In a nutshell, we constantly overvalue what we have compared to what others might actually want.

    I agree, but my point is that "Western values" - to paraphrase Gandhi - while pretty good, have rarely been tried before. Our biggest flaw, besides the caprice you note, is our hypocrisy. Where the potential lies is in matching Chinese inducements with genuine generative good will among peers. Don't laugh.

    The big prerequisite does seem to be to get the Euro-Anglosphere populations to proactively identify with the wellbeing and advancement of their own nations, rather than fractal individualism and the fatalism of decline. Nation building at home! We're not yet at the stage of placing what hope remains in a 2099 Hegelian Caesar unifying the scattered domains of Oceania and Eurasia into a Neo Holy Roman Empire...

    Look, recall the topic. By all accounts, upwards of a hardly-exaggerated 99% of all the countless billions of American government spending on Afghanistan has ended up within 4 categories:

    1. In American pockets.
    2. In the pockets of Afghan elites (who often played for both sides, or their own)
    3. Up in smoke - literally - on the battlefield
    4. In the Taliban's arsenal

    Try to imagine inverting these allocations to make the 99% the 1% (no double meaning intended), or inverting the proportion of military personnel to civilians - technicians, teachers, nurses, entrepreneurs... - or inverting the process of engagement from imposed violence to consensual co-discovery.

    Wouldn't it be nice to build something for a change? If not 'there', starting here, to prove that we can.
    Last edited by Montmorency; 09-03-2021 at 01:48.
    Vitiate Man.

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  29. #89
    Headless Senior Member Pannonian's Avatar
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    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    I agree, but my point is that "Western values" - to paraphrase Gandhi - while pretty good, have rarely been tried before. Our biggest flaw, besides the caprice you note, is our hypocrisy. Where the potential lies is in matching Chinese inducements with genuine generative good will among peers. Don't laugh.

    The big prerequisite does seem to be to get the Euro-Anglosphere populations to proactively identify with the wellbeing and advancement of their own nations, rather than fractal individualism and the fatalism of decline. Nation building at home! We're not yet at the stage of placing what hope remains in a 2099 Hegelian Caesar unifying the scattered domains of Oceania and Eurasia into a Neo Holy Roman Empire...

    Look, recall the topic. By all accounts, upwards of a hardly-exaggerated 99% of all the countless billions of American government spending on Afghanistan has ended up within 4 categories:

    1. In American pockets.
    2. In the pockets of Afghan elites (who often played for both sides, or their own)
    3. Up in smoke - literally - on the battlefield
    4. In the Taliban's arsenal

    Try to imagine inverting these allocations to make the 99% the 1% (no double meaning intended), or inverting the proportion of military personnel to civilians - technicians, teachers, nurses, entrepreneurs... - or inverting the process of engagement from imposed violence to consensual co-discovery.

    Wouldn't it be nice to build something for a change? If not 'there', starting here, to prove that we can.
    How would you do that? It's hard enough getting a high enough proportion of government funds to those who are supposed to receive it at home, and we control the government and the populace is positively inclined and are educated to cooperate. 30 bn GBP meant to prop up the health service during covid and instead directed to friends of the Tory government. I don't suppose it's any more efficient on your side of the water.

    Government is inclined to waste. With the Republican and Tory governments, you have the added friction of not having any intention of directing the funds to those that need it, but instead to friends of the government. You'll never get the proportion of money to your 4 categories to 1%,

  30. #90

    Default Re: ISIS and Afghan Taliban

    Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
    How would you do that? It's hard enough getting a high enough proportion of government funds to those who are supposed to receive it at home, and we control the government and the populace is positively inclined and are educated to cooperate. 30 bn GBP meant to prop up the health service during covid and instead directed to friends of the Tory government. I don't suppose it's any more efficient on your side of the water.
    The starting point has to be enforceable pan-national regulatory floors alongside shared governmental subsidies to private investment abroad (with high priority to oversight mechanisms). Rich countries should supply capital, technology, education, and expertise, while poor countries have to find democratic buy-in and independently generate domestic institutions capable of guiding the distribution of resources and investment toward broad benefit. The difficult part is achieving shared political will and operational stability; I don't think the details on paper would be hard to figure out for expert commissions, who would ultimately be laying a framework for millions of private actors.

    These aspirations would have to be realized over decades, but the US could, for example, multiply this agency by 10 and expand its scope without breaking a sweat.
    https://www.dfc.gov/

    Government is inclined to waste. With the Republican and Tory governments, you have the added friction of not having any intention of directing the funds to those that need it, but instead to friends of the government. You'll never get the proportion of money to your 4 categories to 1%,
    It's a rhetorical device. In principle, if a government project cannot avoid 99% waste as to its formal objectives, it should not exist and should never have existed. Yet most government projects are not quite that wasteful somehow.
    Vitiate Man.

    History repeats the old conceits
    The glib replies, the same defeats


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