Afghanistan is not just Afghanistan, it's also Pakistan. Which has historically considered Afghanistan it's "defense in depth" against India, and an avenue for retreat and fighting in case of war against them. It's also viewed as a nation under Pakistan's influence, no surprise given the amount of cross-border Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line.
Our goals in Afghanistan are in no particular order:
1. Message sending to the broader Muslim world that allowing AQ or groups like it to stage mass casualty terror attacks against the US is a very bad idea, i.e. removing the regime of Mullah Omar and keeping him from power.
So far, so good. Message sent and received.
2. Military presence in Afghanistan to pressure Pakistan to moderate it's rather extensive connections and help to AQ.
3. Develop human intel sources in and around Afghanistan and Pakistan through the US military (assistance to tribal chiefs) as a "human early warning system" which is critical given AQ's leadership abandonment of electronic comms.
4. Kill as many senior leaders of the Taliban and AQ cadre as possible, radically decreasing their ability to launch attacks on the US. [This was Putin's strategy after Beslan, it's proven to work.]
I agree with Derbyshire that "rubble doesn't make trouble" but politically that was impossible, Joe Biden at the time likened the bombing of Afghanistan such as it was as a war crime that merited Nuremburg style trials, the limited action Bush initiated was the most America's politics would allow.
America has real interests in making sure 9/11 is not repeated, Clinton's hands-off, ignore it strategy coupled with impotent missile strikes did not work. Bush's ongoing war may be costly, but 9/11 has not been repeated. Given Pakistan's nukes, any breakdown in preventing 9/11 style attacks can be catastrophic.
The flipside to globalization's cheap sneakers and motherboards from China, is that America, Britain, France, and Spain to name a few countries bear the costs of places like Afghanistan left to it's own chaos. Nothing comes for free. Particularly not now with the nuclear equalizer.
Both Alexander and the Mongols pretty much had their way with the Afghans. Neither the Russians nor the British ever put serious efforts into pacifying the Afghans (though each had the capacity to wipe out most of the Afghans in battles of annihilation). I suspect both wanted to use the Afghans as proxies against the rival empire. The Red Army of 1979 was a shadow of the force that rolled across Europe in 1945.
Win? War? The Afghanistan war was a war which took place in 2001/2002, it was won 7 years ago, dude. What has happened since has been an occupation, no war.
Same with Iraq, the war was over in a matter of weeks, everything since has been an occupation. Don't use the terminology of the "neo-cons", don't play their game. Iraq and Afghanistan were invaded, and have been occupied since. Saying it is a "war" gives the false impression that it still can be "won" and that the outcome has yet to be determined.
It is impossible for me to overlook that the Taliban had shut down opium production and were promptly invaded, I mean that's just too coincidental for my liking, nonsensical "neo-con" narratives notwithstanding.
Following that, there was and is a big push in Canada and other countries to encourage heroin use among the lumpenproletariat, with needle exchange programs and public "shooting galleries" for junkies, the backers of both just a little too eager to be doing it for the benefit of junkies.
The alleged perpetrators of 9/11 were not Afghanis; some of them kinda sorta were trained there, and were kinda sorta influenced by bin Laden - that's the justification for the invasion, which as a matter of public record Bush and co. were planning before 9/11. The links between Al-Qaeda and the alleged hijackers are pretty shaky, the justification for the invasion even shakier.
The Afghanistan invasion and occupation will go down in history as the Gay/Feminist war as well as the Third Opium war; we're there now to impose gay marriage and feminism and human rights commissions (look at this: http://www.aihrc.org.af/) on a people who, wisely, don't want them. It has stirred up hatred against whites as warmongers at a time we really don't need people hating whitey even more, not that it was whites who started this war - it was the "neo-cons".
Because if he is, then he must get high before he posts.
America can not afford our empire any longer. We will have to find a cheaper way to prevent 9/11 (like closing our borders and racial profiling at airports).
The Afghanistan invasion and occupation will go down in history as the Gay/Feminist war
Ha!
testing99
1. Message sending to the broader Muslim world
The post man delivered, got his hand stuck in the letter box, it is now being bitten by a rabid dog on the other side.
2. Military presence in Afghanistan to pressure Pakistan to moderate
Tell me what's easier: sticking an army behind a huge mountain range into the middle of civil war, or sailing the Fifth Fleet into the Arabian sea?
3. Develop human intel sources in and around Afghanistan and Pakistan
Why do we have to be there to do that? What about Somalia and other regions we should invade for "human intelligence"? I don't think Steve Sailer is the one out of his depth.
4. Kill as many senior leaders of the Taliban and AQ cadre as possible
That was the strategy: it's been done as best we can. The Taliban is now simply a vehicle for Pashtun nationalism. We (as a UK national) have no business fighting a war for one side in this civil conflict. There's not even any oil.
There is no "war" to be won. There is a half-assed occupation that will endure until (a) we remake the region into some neo-con's wet dream of PC-dreamland, (b) we bankrupt ourselves or (c) wake up and realize the futility of imposing decaying Western values upon a fundamentally hostile people. Option b is looking depressingly more likely.
Short of wiping out the people there and paving the country over, there is no way to win. Even today's most hardline powers like China and Israel cannot deal with dissidents with the force of old that could modify/suppress such fundamental opposition. For America where the elites and the nose ring-led masses weep over the fates of spotted owl such goals are hopeless.
The most workable solution would be long term containment ala Iraq: monitor all trade/traffic, constant survailence, fly overs and bombing the crap out of anything that looks threatening.
"We will have to find a cheaper way to prevent 9/11 (like closing our borders and racial profiling at airports)."
Gosh that would be cost-effective and commonsensical. Who would have ever thought of it???
But like T99 says we need to spend untold billions more to solve our immigration problems by invading foreign countries to escape some bugaboo nukular mumble mumble.
'Winning' for Bush meant preventing the return of the Taliban. Thus Bush was content to let Afghan warlords take large parts of the country. 'Winning' for Obama means transforming the Afghan culture to the Western liberal secular standard. We'll win when there's a GLBT Studies Dept. at Kabul U.
The flipside to globalization's cheap sneakers and motherboards from China, is that America, Britain, France, and Spain to name a few countries bear the costs of places like Afghanistan left to it's own chaos. Nothing comes for free. Particularly not now with the nuclear equalizer.
Uh, you wanna run that by me again? We're in Afghanistan to facilitate importing cheap crap from China?
And I really wish you'd get off this message-sending schtick. The only message our occupation of Afghanistan is sending is that we're naive, social democratic fools who can be hoodwinked into giving goatherders (I'm being charitable here) millions of dollars in foreign aid. Back home, we can't even preserve Anglo-America's cultural and territorial integrity. Not a very tough people, I'm afraid.
The reason the Soviets did not defeat the Afghan insurgency is they did not want to defeat the Afghan insurgency. They were there for another reason - to put pressure on the Iranians. Most of the Soviet troops were in the West of Afghanistan by the Iranian border, while most of the insurgents were in the East, by the Pakistan border, so pretty obviously the Soviets didn't care too much about defeating the insurgency per se. When the Iran-Iraq War ended, the Soviets left Afghanistan shortly afterward because at that point their policy of pressure had failed and they didn't care about defeating the insurgents.
We're in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to pressure Iran. We'll leave regardless of the status of the counter-insurgency fight when we decide that the efforts to pressure Iran either have succeeded (in which case we'll see some sort of regime change in Iran) or cannot succeed.
Why don't we just attack Pakistan, kill their nuclear scientists, and take possession of all their nuclear material? Then forbid Paki immigration to the US and kick out the ones who live here.
Terrorism and the American obesity problem solved -- since all those mini mart gas stations selling candy bars, Little Debbie snacks, and peppermint schnapps will be boarded up.
All we have to do is to "stay the course" long enough to get young,uneducated,religously fanatical,inbred,low IQ,no pussy-having,no job-having muslem men to give up the idea of jihad!
It is impossible for me to overlook that the Taliban had shut down opium production and were promptly invaded, I mean that's just too coincidental for my liking, nonsensical "neo-con" narratives notwithstanding.
Following that, there was and is a big push in Canada and other countries to encourage heroin use among the lumpenproletariat, with needle exchange programs and public "shooting galleries" for junkies, the backers of both just a little too eager to be doing it for the benefit of junkies.
testing99 is wrong on two counts. First, about Steve supposedly being out of his depth: Steve is right that Afghanistan really is worthless to America as a "base." AQ didn't need Afghanistan or Pakistan as a base to perpetrate 9/11. It used cell phones in Hamburg and Florida and California and Boston. And AQ depended on our lax immigration laws and incompetent security officials. This is Fourth Generation War, not Second Generation, something neither Bush nor Obama understood either.
The main strategy of Fourth Gen War, as William Lind keeps telling us, is to stop stirring up hornets' nests. That means pulling all our troops out of the Middle East and elsewhere. Instead of "Invade the world, invite the world" (Steve's phrase), we should adopt "Exit the world, expel the world").
Second, testing99 writes, "The Red Army of 1979 was a shadow of the force that rolled across Europe in 1945."
Wrong. The 1979 Soviet Army was the second most powerful army up to that point in history, after the U.S. Army of 1979 (in which I was serving in West Germany at the time as a Russian linguist, by the way).
In 1979, the Sovs had MiG 27s, T-72's, AKs, ZSU-23-4's, SCUDs, etc., which would have cut through any 1945 army. And in 1945, the Sovs depended on American Lend-Lease for mobility -- all those jeeps and Dodge trucks (back when we had an auto industry) -- whereas in 1979 they didn't.
The one "advantage" the Red Army would have had in 1945, if it had invaded Afghanistan, was that Stalin would not have hesitated to kill every Afghan man, woman, child, and dog, whereas in 1979 Brezhnev was into nation-building commie style, so he and his successors killed only about 3 million Afghans.
testing99 is talking crap. The issue in Afghanistan is not AQ or Bin Laden (who is probably dead) but the drugs. Nobody, not even the Taliban, have gotten that under control yet, ever. The West has been paying farmers to stop planting poppies and instead grow wheat or some other shit. All they do is cash the money and grow poppies someplace else. Heroin is such a fat profit maker, and even though the locals only get a small cut, the money will keep this thing going. So, it’s not about the Taliban, AQ or Pakistan, it’s about control of the drug source. The West cannot win this one because the force driving it cannot be sustainably financed against, the drugs are plaguing the West, and it does not have the stomach to fight a war you cannot win. The US has also lost the drug war in Central America and only keeps going so it does not have to tell it’s frightened parents that their kids are a the mercy of druglords.
I read somewhere that Iran almost went to war with the Taliban. Too bad we couldn't get those 2 to mix it up. Hey, let's you and him fight! Cheap and fun to watch. We could have probably made some $ selling them stuff too. Another missed opportunity...
If we win a war in Afghanistan we will get fantastic prizes.
If we, (meaning everyone in the USA), get a yearly allotment of Afghan war spoils opium in proportion to the taxes we've paid for that year that we are free to sell to whomever we like without legal repercussions, I guess that might make it worth it. But only if the opium sales exceed my tax burden for funding the war.
The Sikhs ruled large parts of Afghanistan successfully
Their secret was mass reprisals against jihadis and mullahs and complete civilian massacre of any village harboring jihadists
Yeah, uh, that's the only thing we haven't tried. We've tried giving out prayer rugs, worshiping Allah, handing out gigabux to the Pashtuns, etc. The only thing we haven't tried is wasting them all because we're told that won't work/make them think we're at war with Islam. Newsflash infidels: the Muslims hate you anyway!
The flipside to globalization's cheap sneakers and motherboards from China, is that America, Britain, France, and Spain to name a few countries bear the costs of places like Afghanistan left to it's own chaos. Nothing comes for free. Particularly not now with the nuclear equalizer.
Cheap sneakers and motherboards are precisely the reason I want globalization ended, and to that extent, the old line mullahs and I have common ground.
Of course, anyone still alive responsible for 9/11 or any other such act should be shot, but in a broader sense, opposition to globalization in the Middle East is an ally of opposition to globalization in the First World (which is what WNs want).
The Middle Easterners have a right to not be Westernized, and we have a right to not be Middle Easternized, Mexicanized, and Chinaized.
Paradoxically, as even WLP discovered late in his career, nationalists of different countries must unite to fight globalization.
"Is there a tin foil shortage I should know about?"
The people who use this phrase have been so wrong about so many things that it only further convinces me. It's not as if there isn't precedent (Opium Wars) or huge gobs of money at stake. The Taliban wiped out production and were promptly invaded, then a big pro-heroin push in Western countries appears - we don't ignore those kinds of coincidences.
We'll win when there's a GLBT Studies Dept. at Kabul U
Wasn't there something like this in Kandahar already?
Even easier to have airfields with long runways conveniently located adjacent to Iran, Pakistan, and western China.
Afghanistan isn't known for its plethora of flat land, especially not places you can put airstrips out of range of people shooting at you from higher elevations.
The Chinese are currently beating the stuffing out of muslims in Xinjiang, apparently just for shits and giggles. Yet as far as I can tell, no blood-curdling fatwas have been issued nor have jihadi fighters been dispatched to take on the PLA, bomb Beijing or attack Chinese targets. Notice the PRC doesn't suffer from muslim terror.
Have you not noticed that the Uighurs started this round? So far, there are more Han Chinese dead than Uighur dead, though that will change as soon as the Chinese get serious. If I were Han Chinese living in Urumchi, I'd be pretty worried - when hours count, the People's Liberation Army is only days away.
I don't understand why the costs of maintaining the hegemony of oil is not clear. You would think the table of government should be cleared of all programs except that of energy independence.Compulsory downsizing of engines, mileage driven etc. I really look forward to the day that no young Americans have to die so some doofuss can drive a pickup fast. And expel all the Muslims.
When I saw the topic I knew testing99 was going to post something, and he didn't disappoint.
T99, I get the impression you mean well, but you manage to suggest the least effective and the most complicated way to get there.
As others have suggested, stopping and reversing Muslim immigration into the US/West is much easier, cheaper and more effective than sending our troops to chase goat herders half way around the world.
As far as nukes, we agree that Pakistan shouldn't have them. To that end, commando actions to get rid of them, if we were serious, would actually accomplish way more than chasing aforementioned goat herders.
And if were really serious, we would simply threaten massive retaliation, which worked well with the USSR. As in, should a nuke go off on our soil, and it can be traced back to any Muslim agents (state or not), we would retaliate on Mecca and the capitals of home countries of any involved.
Of course we're not serious enough to do that, so we're blowing smoke by chasing those goat herders... you get the point.
The previous Afghanistan War against Russia was a CIA project. And the latest Afghanistan War has been a CIA project from the start. They invented the Taliban and they control both sides of the current conflict. Similar to Hussein in Iraq the Taliban were former CIA operatives who outlived their primary mission: *controlled ally* ... and then were ushered into the next phase of usefulness: *controlled enemy* .
The same strategy took out Pineapple Face in Panama and there are many more examples. CIA involvement in Iran goes way way back.
What is interesting is whether Obama is actually in control of the CIA/Pentagon in Afghanistan or anywhere else. The CIA-Mossad Iran Plan seems to be unfolding whether Obama gets on board or not.
I read somewhere that Iran almost went to war with the Taliban. Too bad we couldn't get those 2 to mix it up. Hey, let's you and him fight! Cheap and fun to watch. --
India, Iran and Russia were supporting the northern alliance by shipping arms and giving medical teams to Ahmed Shah Massoud
During this time, the Taliban captured some Shia Hazara towns and massacred Iranian diplomats and Iran made a lot of anti-taliban speeches
But the Northern alliance was fighting a losing battle until the US intervened after 9-11 --
As far as Russian losses in Afghanistan, they only lost about 20,000, just equal to one days worth of dead at Battle of Kursk, 1943
The entire US supported Mujahideen was no more than a pin-prick in terms of casualties to the Russians
Steve also has the Bush-Obama policy as: "Invade the world, invite the world, in hock to the world."
So, what we need is: "Exit the world, expel the world, export to the world."
And by export, I don't mean protectionism, but cutting the immense burden government places on businesses and citizens to keep up the imperial welfare-warfare state.
I think testing99 has parts of it right this time. The weaknesses of his arguments are exceeded by the weakness of his critics, anyway. Rigor is lacking in favor of getting in anti-neocon shots.
First, steve's opening comment that if we win a war...we will only have won a war... Not really. That is all we will be able to definitively prove, which is not the same thing. Anything that changes the game has consequences. People will argue that we gained unnoticed benefits. Others will argue that Afghanistan created unnoticed security losses. Each must be judged on its own persuasiveness. But to claim that it did nothing is the one thing we know to be untrue. Useless on balance, perhaps, but never nothing.
I also grant that all of the benefits t99 touts might have been accomplished in some less expensive way. Nonetheless, we have achieved benefits similar to those listed. The subsequent arguments lean strongly toward the liberal tendency of arguing by making the insult clever, rather than engaging the argument. (Several did address, content, BTW.)
There is always a tendency in retrospective analysis to believe that any decision we made differently would have no other effect than the one variable we are playing with. It is called the problem of silent evidence. We have not been attacked and terrorist attacks have diminished against our allies. We cannot assume that this would also have been the case if we had chosen to hit no one. As we cannot prove historical counterfactuals either way, the nod has to be given to those who took these actions to effect this result. If I give you medicine and you get better, I cannot prove it was the medicine that healed you. But it is certainly not foolish to start from that assumption.
Presumably AQ didn't feel that cell phones in Hamburg were quite enough to train terrorists, which is why they built training camps.
Utter stupidity. Here's a short list to research- The Phillipines, Japan, Germany, the American Southwest and any number of colonial nations whose occupations were won and then they were given sovereignty.
Assistant Village Idiot said... I think testing99 has parts of it right
You're just repeating the Bush neocon talking point: invading Afgan prevented illerate Pashtun goat hearders living in barren remote mountaintops from magically engineering, delivering and detonating countless nuclear containers, cars and now suitcases in major US cities... sure as medicine cures illness.
You should check out the actual bios of the 9/11 terrorists. Nary an illiterate Pashtun among them. Most, certainly the leaders, were well educated, middle-class men who studied, lived and or immigrated to the West.
These guys have just the kind of profile that the Neocons love to see as our post-national global citizenry. It's almost like a makework, guaranteed job-for-life with these Neocons: grossly misdirected efforts to fight terrorism while effectively sowing the seeds for terrorism both abroad and providing the means for such events within the US.
"It's not as if there isn't precedent (Opium Wars) or huge gobs of money at stake. The Taliban wiped out production and were promptly invaded, then a big pro-heroin push in Western countries appears - we don't ignore those kinds of coincidences."
Afghanistan isn't known for its plethora of flat land, especially not places you can put airstrips out of range of people shooting at you from higher elevations.
The Soviets chose the Bagram location because it is out on a flat, bare plateau. See the photo in the Wikipedia piece:
Bagram Air Base From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bagram Air Base
IATA: BPM – ICAO: OAIX Summary Airport type Military Operator United States Army Location Bagram, Afghanistan Elevation AMSL 4,895 ft / 1,492 m Coordinates 34°56′46″N 069°15′54″E / 34.94611°N 69.265°E / 34.94611; 69.265 Runways Direction Length Surface m ft 03/21 3,003 9,852 Concrete
The Bagram Air Base[1][2] - officially known and referred to as Bagram Airfield[3][4] - (IATA: BPM, ICAO: OAIX) is a militarized airport and housing complex that is located next to the ancient city of Bagram, southeast of Charikar in Parwan province of Afghanistan. It is often referred to as Bagram Air Base, however the senior mission commander at Bagram is an Army two-star general, making it an Army Airfield in US military parlance. The base is currently occupied and maintained by the 5th Aviation Battalion (Assault),and 6th Aviation Battalion (GSAB) of the United States Army, with the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing of the United States Air Force and other US Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and their coalition partner units having sizable tenant populations.
Bagram Air Base has three large hangars, a control tower, and numerous support buildings. There are more than 32 acres (130,000 m²) of ramp space and five aircraft dispersal areas, with a total of over 110 revetments. Many support buildings and base housing built by the Red Army during their occupation were destroyed by years of fighting between various warring Afghan factions after the Soviets left. New barracks and office buildings are slowly being constructed at the present time. There is also Bagram Theater Internment Facility, a detention centre which has been criticized in the past for its abusive treatment of prisoners.[5]
The ICAO ID is OAIX and it is specifically at 34.944N, 69.259E at around 1500 m above sea level. The base had a single 3003 m (9852 ft) runway built in 1976. A new 3.5-kilometre long runway was built and completed by the US military in late 2006, at a cost of US$68 million. This new runway is 2000 feet longer than the previous one and is 11 inches thicker, which gives it the ability to handle larger aircraft if necessary, such as the C-5 Galaxy, C-17 Globemaster III or the Boeing 747.[6]
On a flight from Israel to Turkey years ago, I talked with a half Jew-half Russian who'd fought in Afghanistan. He said one of the tactics used by the invaded Afghanis against the Soviets was to gang rape captured soldiers, videotape the fun, and make random copies available to the occupiers so they could see for themselves what they were up against. Anecdotal, but the recounting is true.
Though Vernunft may be camera shy, his tough guy words lead me to believe that he'd be an excellent soldier for the current occupation. Anyone who speaks so cavalierly about "killing terrorists" would certainly prefer to be at the heart of the action, rather than gearing up to be an LSAT tutor.
"Short of wiping out the people there and paving the country over, there is no way to win. "
You mean like fire bombing Dresden and nuking Japan?
Oh, yeah, I remember now, we wanted to win and were willing to kill people in order to win. Of course it didn't hurt that we were honestly afraid of losing. Unfortunately it is easier to kill people than it is to change their minds.
Yes, I now remember reading about how Germany and Japan were militarily defeated in a matter of weeks/months but how the Allied occupation drags on even today with orders of magnitude more casualties despite heavy Allied presence, tremendous financial commitments and overwhelming technological superiority. I just heard yesterday on CNN experts explain decades of German and Japanese instability have left them financial basket cases due to continual violence, civil unrest and terrorism arising out these non-Western, deeply non-homogenous and religiously fragmented societies.
Neocon talking point #3: It’s Bush’s fault. He didn’t execute our plan correctly (or didn’t understand from the patent absurdity of our New Soviet Man claims about the Iraqis and Pashtuns that we were only joking).
On a flight from Israel to Turkey years ago, I talked with a half Jew-half Russian who'd fought in Afghanistan. He said one of the tactics used by the invaded Afghanis against the Soviets was to gang rape captured soldiers, videotape the fun, and make random copies available to the occupiers so they could see for themselves what they were up against.
How is that possible? I can understand that someone might want to hurt another by raping him, but -- physically - how can that be done? Are Afghans naturally homosexual, or what? Seriously, what do the HBD experts have to say about it?
Yeah, I also thought the "videtape Afghanis gang raping captured soldiers" story was really unusual, so I have doubts about its authenticity. Homosexuality is frowned upon in Islam, to say the least. Also, the intended effect to intimidate the Soviets might backfire. It would probably just piss them off, and fight with a "you'll never take me alive" tenacity.
Don't be so sure. The reason the Taliban came to power in 1995 was that two formerly allied Afghan warlords got into a shooting war over a pretty boy.
Look up the section in the book "Charlie Wilson's War" where one of the famous neocons comes up with the idea that it would be a brilliant propaganda coup to persuade Soviet soldiers to defect to the Muj. I can't remember exactly CIA director William Casey's response but it was pretty funny: something along the lines of "You'd have to be really defective to want to defect to those animals," followed by a graphic description of what the Muj routinely did to the poor Russkie bastards who fell into their hands.
Here's Kipling's advice to any foreign soldier left behind in Afghanistan:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Er, yeah I thought it was established that in ME Muslim societies in general, and Afghan society in particular, boy-buggery was far more common than in the west.
It isn't rocket science. Lock away all the women and many men will find something else. Sailors and prisoners? Herders?
The interesting thing about Xinjiang is I think of America.
The low achieving group, Uighurs, gets angry that they are unemployed and poor while the majority Han Chinese live much better. Uighurs feel discriminated and things boil over. They riot or rather get into a big mob and kill as many Han before the army arrives.
"How is gang rape possible?" You ask. A fascinating topic. Without going into too much detail, any 100% male culture where women are completely unavailable for extended periods of time tends to…umm…adjust. It seems to be more prevalent in some races and cultures.
Google search for Donny the Punk (Stephen Donaldson). In a wonderful essay he explains the phenomenon of straight men procuring the services of other men when they are incarcerated and reverting back to women upon release:
As Donnie notes, there are significant race and power aspects to prison rape. (translated: you skinny white boys best watch out for the bruthas). You might also want to find his more famous essay "Jockers, Punks, and Queens" in which he explains the prison sexual taxonomy and hierarchy.
It might show up... but not to support the majority side. Eisenhower had no qualms about using the army to enforce desegregation. One thing we know for sure is that the army can never be used to defend the borders. That would violate the civil rights of the invaders or something like that.
Back in 2002 I was single and a member of an organization called Table for Six. It origanized weekly dinners for members - three men and three women.
At one dinner I sugested that while there seemed to be a lot of controversy over the question of Iraq having Weapons of Mass Desstruction, there was no controversy about us, we definitely had them. And so, I continued, all we had to do to win in Afganistan was to scatter Anthrax in all those bad land refuges. The civilized parts of Afganistan are in the low lands. I suggested denying the highlands to the terrorists.
As you might imagine, I went home alone that night. My idea was "unthinkable" at least to all those nice women who wanted to meet a nice man.
The point remains, Afganistan is easy to defeat. Its only advantage is its terrain. Poison that terrain and Bob's Your Uncle.
Yeah, I also thought the "videtape Afghanis gang raping captured soldiers" story was really unusual, so I have doubts about its authenticity. Homosexuality is frowned upon in Islam, to say the least. Also, the intended effect to intimidate the Soviets might backfire. It would probably just piss them off, and fight with a "you'll never take me alive" tenacity.""
Yeah, and that's why male-on-male rape is so rare in our prisons. The Afghanis are notorious practicers of buggery. That whole "homosexuality is frowned on in Islam" stuff isn't true. Or rather, it is true, but they just don't define buggery as homosexual, just as is the case among prison gangs.
I say again, if our policy makers had only read "Flashman" they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble. It was written by George MacDonald Frazier - a british serving officer - who was steeped in the lore of the british army, and who was a much better judge of human nature than all those neo-con whiz kids.
The only way to "win" such an occupation is to be absolutely brutal - Ghengis Kahn like brutual - i.e. genocidal. The russians didn't have it in 'em to bring the requisite brutality to bear. And if the russians weren't brutal enough to do the job, then we certainly don't have a chance.
Our war on terror will be won or lost at the arrival gate of JFK, not in the barren wastes of that non-nation called Afghanistan. Keep them out. Throw them out.
Following that, there was and is a big push in Canada and other countries to encourage heroin use among the lumpenproletariat, with needle exchange programs and public "shooting galleries" for junkies, the backers of both just a little too eager to be doing it for the benefit of junkies.
I only wish that western countries would actually have the brains to do that, and get over their superstitious horror of heroin and other hard drugs.
Alcohol is not exactly Diet Pepsi; of all psychoactive drugs, it is the most violence-inducing (even more than cocaine, and much more that pot and psychedelics). It would be safer for everyone if the lumpenproletariat, street people, homeless, bums, and hobos were happily zonked out on heroin, rather than pumped up on booze. But "morality" rates urban trash fighting, vandalizing, and making noise as better than them slumped over bus benches.
The truth is, that alcoholics make great crusaders - and that junkies, pot-heads, coke-heads, and acid-heads don't.
The interesting thing about Xinjiang is I think of America. The low achieving group, Uighurs, gets angry that they are unemployed and poor
You're on the right track but you're going in the wrong direction. The Uighurs are angry that the government is flooding their towns with Hans, another ethnic group with different social ideas. Similarly, Red State Americans are angry that the American government is flooding their towns with Mexicans, another ethnic group with different social ideas.
The only way to "win" such an occupation is to be absolutely brutal - Ghengis Kahn like brutual - i.e. genocidal.
Don't you worry, Mr. Anon. Good Americans, like testing99 and Rec1man, with only America's interests at heart, will help us get over that whole, don't go halfway around the world to fight the ethnoreligious conflicts of aliens.
Um, I mean, help America just for the sake of helping Americans. How could you doubt them? How?
Boy-buggery's big in Afghanistan. I assume those Russian conscripts were sufficiently boyish. Derbyshire had a nice article distilling the real, bewildering species of homosexuality. A big one is boy-banging, and the Pashtuns are lovin' it.
Other than that I agree with everyone: it's grotesquely stupid to perpetuate war there. More terrorist attacks won't change that, either, even if they deluded the populace further. Good for the Afghanis, I wish them well with their heroin and child-molestation, you know? Heroin deaths and terrorism are possibly the feeblest actors on the world stage since the incompetent CIA.
War is over! In retrospect, all this foreign policy commotion will look grotesquely dark agey, as Cold War antics are increasingly looking. Revenge of the hippies? Sailer's points are sort of the revenge of the Man, anyway, so it all evens out, to "flatten" the world, Friedman-like, into mediocrity and economic stagnation.
If our safety requires that we clean out every godforsaken sh-thole in the world, every Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, various Palestinian territories, Zimbabwe, Myanamar, Haiti, etc., then we're screwed. We can't do it short of becoming a completely different kind of country, an empire with massive numbers of foreign troops holding down the colonies, pouring all our treasures down the drain to maintain that empire.
"The low achieving group, Uighurs, gets angry that they are unemployed and poor while the majority Han Chinese live much better. Uighurs feel discriminated and things boil over. They riot or rather get into a big mob and kill as many Han before the army arrives."
It's not alright for Mr. He-Man to get buggered himself, nor to make a lifestyle out of it.
A lot of western liberals just do not get that.
A standard liberal line about rape (of women) is that its not about sex, its all about power. Of course there is some truth in that but when Mr. He-Man is buggering beardless boys its very much about power (yes, and sex too).
Yet where are the pro-homosexual liberals then?
They are complaining about the hypocrisy of Mr. He-Man denying his homosexuality. In other words their analysis is founded purely on the sexual element and the whole power relationship is right out of contention.
"The point remains, Afganistan is easy to defeat. Its only advantage is its terrain. Poison that terrain and Bob's Your Uncle."
Yet more shameless posturing on this board, this time by an elderly meterosexual. Do you have any sense of self, opera singer? You sit at a table in some yuppie restaurant squeaking about your ideal method of murdering men thousands of miles away who have never done you any wrong and you comment on it here because why? Do you think it sounds cool? Do you think you'll come across as clever? Tough? Because your comment reads to me like something out of the mealy mouth of some emasculated SWPL half-man who isn't worth a hair on the head of a Pashtun.
"The Uighurs are angry that the government is flooding their towns with Hans, another ethnic group with different social ideas."
The city where the riot occurred is on the side of Xinjiang that is very Han. The other side is very Uighur. The Han side is a buzz of new economic activity. The Uighur side still looks like unchanged Central Asia. Uighurs have actually been migrating to the Han side lately because that is the only place where there is work.
A standard liberal line about rape (of women) is that its not about sex, its all about power. Of course there is some truth in that
No, actually there's no truth to that. Yes, there's a power aspect to rape, but that's not how you phrased it, and it's not how "they" phrase it either. And then there's the fact that the male sex drive has a huge power aspect, too, so the distinction has little difference.
I mean c'mon, "rape is about power, not sex" is so bloody stupid on its face. Yeah, 'cause so many men pull women into the bushes and force them to cook them dinner and iron their shirts, LOL.
Ah, but something just occurred to me - maybe this misconstruction is "their" way of trying to distance sex and the power urge, apart from the rape thing. That sounds like the kind of thing they'd want to do.
--I mean c'mon, "rape is about power, not sex" is so bloody stupid on its face. Yeah, 'cause so many men pull women into the bushes and force them to cook them dinner and iron their shirts, LOL.--
Well, this is certainly an eye opener for me. Let's hope that the poor American soldier that was recently captured is being held by strict Islamic radicals, instead of a "Let's do this guy in the ass and hope Allah doesn't notice" bunch.
Judging from the historical record of imperial excursions into Afghanistan, that would be no mean feat!
ReplyDeleteNo Steve, this is why you get out of your depth.
ReplyDeleteAfghanistan is not just Afghanistan, it's also Pakistan. Which has historically considered Afghanistan it's "defense in depth" against India, and an avenue for retreat and fighting in case of war against them. It's also viewed as a nation under Pakistan's influence, no surprise given the amount of cross-border Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line.
Our goals in Afghanistan are in no particular order:
1. Message sending to the broader Muslim world that allowing AQ or groups like it to stage mass casualty terror attacks against the US is a very bad idea, i.e. removing the regime of Mullah Omar and keeping him from power.
So far, so good. Message sent and received.
2. Military presence in Afghanistan to pressure Pakistan to moderate it's rather extensive connections and help to AQ.
3. Develop human intel sources in and around Afghanistan and Pakistan through the US military (assistance to tribal chiefs) as a "human early warning system" which is critical given AQ's leadership abandonment of electronic comms.
4. Kill as many senior leaders of the Taliban and AQ cadre as possible, radically decreasing their ability to launch attacks on the US. [This was Putin's strategy after Beslan, it's proven to work.]
I agree with Derbyshire that "rubble doesn't make trouble" but politically that was impossible, Joe Biden at the time likened the bombing of Afghanistan such as it was as a war crime that merited Nuremburg style trials, the limited action Bush initiated was the most America's politics would allow.
America has real interests in making sure 9/11 is not repeated, Clinton's hands-off, ignore it strategy coupled with impotent missile strikes did not work. Bush's ongoing war may be costly, but 9/11 has not been repeated. Given Pakistan's nukes, any breakdown in preventing 9/11 style attacks can be catastrophic.
The flipside to globalization's cheap sneakers and motherboards from China, is that America, Britain, France, and Spain to name a few countries bear the costs of places like Afghanistan left to it's own chaos. Nothing comes for free. Particularly not now with the nuclear equalizer.
Roddy --
ReplyDeleteBoth Alexander and the Mongols pretty much had their way with the Afghans. Neither the Russians nor the British ever put serious efforts into pacifying the Afghans (though each had the capacity to wipe out most of the Afghans in battles of annihilation). I suspect both wanted to use the Afghans as proxies against the rival empire. The Red Army of 1979 was a shadow of the force that rolled across Europe in 1945.
If we win a war in Afghanistan we will get fantastic prizes.
ReplyDeleteWin? War? The Afghanistan war was a war which took place in 2001/2002, it was won 7 years ago, dude. What has happened since has been an occupation, no war.
ReplyDeleteSame with Iraq, the war was over in a matter of weeks, everything since has been an occupation. Don't use the terminology of the "neo-cons", don't play their game. Iraq and Afghanistan were invaded, and have been occupied since. Saying it is a "war" gives the false impression that it still can be "won" and that the outcome has yet to be determined.
It is impossible for me to overlook that the Taliban had shut down opium production and were promptly invaded, I mean that's just too coincidental for my liking, nonsensical "neo-con" narratives notwithstanding.
Following that, there was and is a big push in Canada and other countries to encourage heroin use among the lumpenproletariat, with needle exchange programs and public "shooting galleries" for junkies, the backers of both just a little too eager to be doing it for the benefit of junkies.
The alleged perpetrators of 9/11 were not Afghanis; some of them kinda sorta were trained there, and were kinda sorta influenced by bin Laden - that's the justification for the invasion, which as a matter of public record Bush and co. were planning before 9/11. The links between Al-Qaeda and the alleged hijackers are pretty shaky, the justification for the invasion even shakier.
The Afghanistan invasion and occupation will go down in history as the Gay/Feminist war as well as the Third Opium war; we're there now to impose gay marriage and feminism and human rights commissions (look at this: http://www.aihrc.org.af/) on a people who, wisely, don't want them. It has stirred up hatred against whites as warmongers at a time we really don't need people hating whitey even more, not that it was whites who started this war - it was the "neo-cons".
Is testing99 for real?
ReplyDeleteBecause if he is, then he must get high before he posts.
America can not afford our empire any longer. We will have to find a cheaper way to prevent 9/11 (like closing our borders and racial profiling at airports).
Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteThe Afghanistan invasion and occupation will go down in history as the Gay/Feminist war
Ha!
testing99
1. Message sending to the broader Muslim world
The post man delivered, got his hand stuck in the letter box, it is now being bitten by a rabid dog on the other side.
2. Military presence in Afghanistan to pressure Pakistan to moderate
Tell me what's easier: sticking an army behind a huge mountain range into the middle of civil war, or sailing the Fifth Fleet into the Arabian sea?
3. Develop human intel sources in and around Afghanistan and Pakistan
Why do we have to be there to do that? What about Somalia and other regions we should invade for "human intelligence"? I don't think Steve Sailer is the one out of his depth.
4. Kill as many senior leaders of the Taliban and AQ cadre as possible
That was the strategy: it's been done as best we can. The Taliban is now simply a vehicle for Pashtun nationalism. We (as a UK national) have no business fighting a war for one side in this civil conflict. There's not even any oil.
There is no "war" to be won. There is a half-assed occupation that will endure until (a) we remake the region into some neo-con's wet dream of PC-dreamland, (b) we bankrupt ourselves or (c) wake up and realize the futility of imposing decaying Western values upon a fundamentally hostile people. Option b is looking depressingly more likely.
ReplyDeleteShort of wiping out the people there and paving the country over, there is no way to win. Even today's most hardline powers like China and Israel cannot deal with dissidents with the force of old that could modify/suppress such fundamental opposition. For America where the elites and the nose ring-led masses weep over the fates of spotted owl such goals are hopeless.
The most workable solution would be long term containment ala Iraq: monitor all trade/traffic, constant survailence, fly overs and bombing the crap out of anything that looks threatening.
"We will have to find a cheaper way to prevent 9/11 (like closing our borders and racial profiling at airports)."
ReplyDeleteGosh that would be cost-effective and commonsensical. Who would have ever thought of it???
But like T99 says we need to spend untold billions more to solve our immigration problems by invading foreign countries to escape some bugaboo nukular mumble mumble.
Another fewtril.
ReplyDeletethese are occupations, not wars.
ReplyDeleteyou don't win occupations.
I don't understand why people even bother responding to Testing99's posts at all. The guy is completely out of it or has some sort of agenda.
ReplyDeleteEither way, who cares? Just let him rattle on and on and..
'Winning' for Bush meant preventing the return of the Taliban. Thus Bush was content to let Afghan warlords take large parts of the country.
ReplyDelete'Winning' for Obama means transforming the Afghan culture to the Western liberal secular standard. We'll win when there's a GLBT Studies Dept. at Kabul U.
The flipside to globalization's cheap sneakers and motherboards from China, is that America, Britain, France, and Spain to name a few countries bear the costs of places like Afghanistan left to it's own chaos. Nothing comes for free. Particularly not now with the nuclear equalizer.
ReplyDeleteUh, you wanna run that by me again? We're in Afghanistan to facilitate importing cheap crap from China?
And I really wish you'd get off this message-sending schtick. The only message our occupation of Afghanistan is sending is that we're naive, social democratic fools who can be hoodwinked into giving goatherders (I'm being charitable here) millions of dollars in foreign aid. Back home, we can't even preserve Anglo-America's cultural and territorial integrity. Not a very tough people, I'm afraid.
The reason the Soviets did not defeat the Afghan insurgency is they did not want to defeat the Afghan insurgency. They were there for another reason - to put pressure on the Iranians. Most of the Soviet troops were in the West of Afghanistan by the Iranian border, while most of the insurgents were in the East, by the Pakistan border, so pretty obviously the Soviets didn't care too much about defeating the insurgency per se. When the Iran-Iraq War ended, the Soviets left Afghanistan shortly afterward because at that point their policy of pressure had failed and they didn't care about defeating the insurgents.
ReplyDeleteWe're in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to pressure Iran. We'll leave regardless of the status of the counter-insurgency fight when we decide that the efforts to pressure Iran either have succeeded (in which case we'll see some sort of regime change in Iran) or cannot succeed.
Afghan is a pointless sideshow.
ReplyDeleteWhy don't we just attack Pakistan, kill their nuclear scientists, and take possession of all their nuclear material? Then forbid Paki immigration to the US and kick out the ones who live here.
Terrorism and the American obesity problem solved -- since all those mini mart gas stations selling candy bars, Little Debbie snacks, and peppermint schnapps will be boarded up.
testing99 is for real. He's really busy though. He's got a standing Saturday afternoon game of Risk with Ritholz.
ReplyDeleteAll we have to do is to "stay the course" long enough to get young,uneducated,religously fanatical,inbred,low IQ,no pussy-having,no job-having muslem men to give up the idea of jihad!
ReplyDeleteking obama: racial profiling at airports
ReplyDeleteO - your head is about to explode from your own internal self-inconsistencies.
It is impossible for me to overlook that the Taliban had shut down opium production and were promptly invaded, I mean that's just too coincidental for my liking, nonsensical "neo-con" narratives notwithstanding.
ReplyDeleteFollowing that, there was and is a big push in Canada and other countries to encourage heroin use among the lumpenproletariat, with needle exchange programs and public "shooting galleries" for junkies, the backers of both just a little too eager to be doing it for the benefit of junkies.
Is there a tin foil shortage I should know about?
testing99 is wrong on two counts. First, about Steve supposedly being out of his depth: Steve is right that Afghanistan really is worthless to America as a "base." AQ didn't need Afghanistan or Pakistan as a base to perpetrate 9/11. It used cell phones in Hamburg and Florida and California and Boston. And AQ depended on our lax immigration laws and incompetent security officials. This is Fourth Generation War, not Second Generation, something neither Bush nor Obama understood either.
ReplyDeleteThe main strategy of Fourth Gen War, as William Lind keeps telling us, is to stop stirring up hornets' nests. That means pulling all our troops out of the Middle East and elsewhere. Instead of "Invade the world, invite the world" (Steve's phrase), we should adopt "Exit the world, expel the world").
Second, testing99 writes, "The Red Army of 1979 was a shadow of the force that rolled across Europe in 1945."
Wrong. The 1979 Soviet Army was the second most powerful army up to that point in history, after the U.S. Army of 1979 (in which I was serving in West Germany at the time as a Russian linguist, by the way).
In 1979, the Sovs had MiG 27s, T-72's, AKs, ZSU-23-4's, SCUDs, etc., which would have cut through any 1945 army. And in 1945, the Sovs depended on American Lend-Lease for mobility -- all those jeeps and Dodge trucks (back when we had an auto industry) -- whereas in 1979 they didn't.
The one "advantage" the Red Army would have had in 1945, if it had invaded Afghanistan, was that Stalin would not have hesitated to kill every Afghan man, woman, child, and dog, whereas in 1979 Brezhnev was into nation-building commie style, so he and his successors killed only about 3 million Afghans.
Re: Feminist and homosexual wars
ReplyDeleteAfghanistan and Iraq have more women in their parliaments than the US does.
Maybe that was the plan all along. Destroy the Muslims through war and feminism. It's like Testing planned the whole thing!
Maybe on some forum out there there's an Ahmed99 complaining about ARABIC WOMEN destroying civilization and their contempt for the beta Mohamed Ricci.
testing99 is talking crap. The issue in Afghanistan is not AQ or Bin Laden (who is probably dead) but the drugs. Nobody, not even the Taliban, have gotten that under control yet, ever. The West has been paying farmers to stop planting poppies and instead grow wheat or some other shit. All they do is cash the money and grow poppies someplace else. Heroin is such a fat profit maker, and even though the locals only get a small cut, the money will keep this thing going. So, it’s not about the Taliban, AQ or Pakistan, it’s about control of the drug source. The West cannot win this one because the force driving it cannot be sustainably financed against, the drugs are plaguing the West, and it does not have the stomach to fight a war you cannot win. The US has also lost the drug war in Central America and only keeps going so it does not have to tell it’s frightened parents that their kids are a the mercy of druglords.
ReplyDeleteI read somewhere that Iran almost went to war with the Taliban. Too bad we couldn't get those 2 to mix it up. Hey, let's you and him fight! Cheap and fun to watch. We could have probably made some $ selling them stuff too. Another missed opportunity...
ReplyDeleteIf we win the war in Afghanistan, all we would have done is win a war in Afghanistan.
ReplyDeleteBeats losing a war there.
Tell me what's easier: sticking an army behind a huge mountain range into the middle of civil war, or sailing the Fifth Fleet into the Arabian sea?
Even easier to have airfields with long runways conveniently located adjacent to Iran, Pakistan, and western China.
Short of wiping out the people there and paving the country over, there is no way to win.
Winning might be defined as defending our military enclaves and denying Muhammedan terrorists safe havens in Afgan. and Pak.
If we win a war in Afghanistan we will get fantastic prizes.
ReplyDeleteIf we, (meaning everyone in the USA), get a yearly allotment of Afghan war spoils opium in proportion to the taxes we've paid for that year that we are free to sell to whomever we like without legal repercussions, I guess that might make it worth it. But only if the opium sales exceed my tax burden for funding the war.
"testing99 is for real. He's really busy though. He's got a standing Saturday afternoon game of Risk with Ritholz."
ReplyDeleteLOL. Thanks, bro.
The Sikhs ruled large parts of Afghanistan successfully
ReplyDeleteTheir secret was mass reprisals against jihadis and mullahs and complete civilian massacre of any village harboring jihadists
Yeah, uh, that's the only thing we haven't tried. We've tried giving out prayer rugs, worshiping Allah, handing out gigabux to the Pashtuns, etc. The only thing we haven't tried is wasting them all because we're told that won't work/make them think we're at war with Islam. Newsflash infidels: the Muslims hate you anyway!
Dead terrorists is bad how, exactly?
ReplyDeleteThe flipside to globalization's cheap sneakers and motherboards from China, is that America, Britain, France, and Spain to name a few countries bear the costs of places like Afghanistan left to it's own chaos. Nothing comes for free. Particularly not now with the nuclear equalizer.
ReplyDeleteCheap sneakers and motherboards are precisely the reason I want globalization ended, and to that extent, the old line mullahs and I have common ground.
Of course, anyone still alive responsible for 9/11 or any other such act should be shot, but in a broader sense, opposition to globalization in the Middle East is an ally of opposition to globalization in the First World (which is what WNs want).
The Middle Easterners have a right to not be Westernized, and we have a right to not be Middle Easternized, Mexicanized, and Chinaized.
Paradoxically, as even WLP discovered late in his career, nationalists of different countries must unite to fight globalization.
"Is there a tin foil shortage I should know about?"
ReplyDeleteThe people who use this phrase have been so wrong about so many things that it only further convinces me. It's not as if there isn't precedent (Opium Wars) or huge gobs of money at stake. The Taliban wiped out production and were promptly invaded, then a big pro-heroin push in Western countries appears - we don't ignore those kinds of coincidences.
We'll win when there's a GLBT Studies Dept. at Kabul U
ReplyDeleteWasn't there something like this in Kandahar already?
Even easier to have airfields with long runways conveniently located adjacent to Iran, Pakistan, and western China.
Afghanistan isn't known for its plethora of flat land, especially not places you can put airstrips out of range of people shooting at you from higher elevations.
The Chinese are currently beating the stuffing out of muslims in Xinjiang, apparently just for shits and giggles. Yet as far as I can tell, no blood-curdling fatwas have been issued nor have jihadi fighters been dispatched to take on the PLA, bomb Beijing or attack Chinese targets. Notice the PRC doesn't suffer from muslim terror.
Have you not noticed that the Uighurs started this round? So far, there are more Han Chinese dead than Uighur dead, though that will change as soon as the Chinese get serious. If I were Han Chinese living in Urumchi, I'd be pretty worried - when hours count, the People's Liberation Army is only days away.
I don't understand why the costs of maintaining the hegemony of oil is not clear. You would think the table of government should be cleared of all programs except that of energy independence.Compulsory downsizing of engines, mileage driven etc. I really look forward to the day that no young Americans have to die so some doofuss can drive a pickup fast.
ReplyDeleteAnd expel all the Muslims.
When I saw the topic I knew testing99 was going to post something, and he didn't disappoint.
ReplyDeleteT99, I get the impression you mean well, but you manage to suggest the least effective and the most complicated way to get there.
As others have suggested, stopping and reversing Muslim immigration into the US/West is much easier, cheaper and more effective than sending our troops to chase goat herders half way around the world.
As far as nukes, we agree that Pakistan shouldn't have them. To that end, commando actions to get rid of them, if we were serious, would actually accomplish way more than chasing aforementioned goat herders.
And if were really serious, we would simply threaten massive retaliation, which worked well with the USSR. As in, should a nuke go off on our soil, and it can be traced back to any Muslim agents (state or not), we would retaliate on Mecca and the capitals of home countries of any involved.
Of course we're not serious enough to do that, so we're blowing smoke by chasing those goat herders... you get the point.
D. from Seattle
The previous Afghanistan War against Russia was a CIA project. And the latest Afghanistan War has been a CIA project from the start. They invented the Taliban and they control both sides of the current conflict. Similar to Hussein in Iraq the Taliban were former CIA operatives who outlived their primary mission: *controlled ally* ... and then were ushered into the next phase of usefulness: *controlled enemy* .
ReplyDeleteThe same strategy took out Pineapple Face in Panama and there are many more examples. CIA involvement in Iran goes way way back.
What is interesting is whether Obama is actually in control of the CIA/Pentagon in Afghanistan or anywhere else. The CIA-Mossad Iran Plan seems to be unfolding whether Obama gets on board or not.
---If I were Han Chinese living in Urumchi, I'd be pretty worried - when hours count, the People's Liberation Army is only days away.---
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't be...
Anon wrote
ReplyDeleteI read somewhere that Iran almost went to war with the Taliban. Too bad we couldn't get those 2 to mix it up. Hey, let's you and him fight! Cheap and fun to watch.
--
India, Iran and Russia were supporting the northern alliance
by shipping arms and giving medical teams to Ahmed Shah Massoud
During this time, the Taliban captured some Shia Hazara towns and massacred Iranian diplomats
and Iran made a lot of anti-taliban speeches
But the Northern alliance was fighting a losing battle until the US intervened after 9-11
--
As far as Russian losses in Afghanistan, they only lost about 20,000, just equal to one days worth of dead at Battle of Kursk, 1943
The entire US supported Mujahideen was no more than a pin-prick in terms of casualties to the Russians
Steve also has the Bush-Obama policy as: "Invade the world, invite the world, in hock to the world."
ReplyDeleteSo, what we need is: "Exit the world, expel the world, export to the world."
And by export, I don't mean protectionism, but cutting the immense burden government places on businesses and citizens to keep up the imperial welfare-warfare state.
I think testing99 has parts of it right this time. The weaknesses of his arguments are exceeded by the weakness of his critics, anyway. Rigor is lacking in favor of getting in anti-neocon shots.
ReplyDeleteFirst, steve's opening comment that if we win a war...we will only have won a war... Not really. That is all we will be able to definitively prove, which is not the same thing. Anything that changes the game has consequences. People will argue that we gained unnoticed benefits. Others will argue that Afghanistan created unnoticed security losses. Each must be judged on its own persuasiveness. But to claim that it did nothing is the one thing we know to be untrue. Useless on balance, perhaps, but never nothing.
I also grant that all of the benefits t99 touts might have been accomplished in some less expensive way. Nonetheless, we have achieved benefits similar to those listed. The subsequent arguments lean strongly toward the liberal tendency of arguing by making the insult clever, rather than engaging the argument. (Several did address, content, BTW.)
There is always a tendency in retrospective analysis to believe that any decision we made differently would have no other effect than the one variable we are playing with. It is called the problem of silent evidence. We have not been attacked and terrorist attacks have diminished against our allies. We cannot assume that this would also have been the case if we had chosen to hit no one. As we cannot prove historical counterfactuals either way, the nod has to be given to those who took these actions to effect this result. If I give you medicine and you get better, I cannot prove it was the medicine that healed you. But it is certainly not foolish to start from that assumption.
Presumably AQ didn't feel that cell phones in Hamburg were quite enough to train terrorists, which is why they built training camps.
You don't win occupations.
ReplyDeleteUtter stupidity. Here's a short list to research-
The Phillipines, Japan, Germany, the American Southwest and any number of colonial nations whose occupations were won and then they were given sovereignty.
t99 sez:
ReplyDelete"The Red Army of 1979 was a shadow of the force that rolled across Europe in 1945."
Figures. t99 really hates white babes and Germans.
Assistant Village Idiot said...
ReplyDeleteI think testing99 has parts of it right
You're just repeating the Bush neocon talking point: invading Afgan prevented illerate Pashtun goat hearders living in barren remote mountaintops from magically engineering, delivering and detonating countless nuclear containers, cars and now suitcases in major US cities... sure as medicine cures illness.
You should check out the actual bios of the 9/11 terrorists. Nary an illiterate Pashtun among them. Most, certainly the leaders, were well educated, middle-class men who studied, lived and or immigrated to the West.
These guys have just the kind of profile that the Neocons love to see as our post-national global citizenry. It's almost like a makework, guaranteed job-for-life with these Neocons: grossly misdirected efforts to fight terrorism while effectively sowing the seeds for terrorism both abroad and providing the means for such events within the US.
"It's not as if there isn't precedent (Opium Wars) or huge gobs of money at stake. The Taliban wiped out production and were promptly invaded, then a big pro-heroin push in Western countries appears - we don't ignore those kinds of coincidences."
ReplyDeleteUm, overlooking something? Try 2. and 3.
1. Taliban wipes out opium. (really?)
2. AQ flies planes into WTC.
3. Taliban refuses to surrender AQ leaders.
4. Taliban is attacked.
"Dead terrorists is bad how, exactly?"
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's what they say about the dudes who invaded their country.
Afghanistan isn't known for its plethora of flat land, especially not places you can put airstrips out of range of people shooting at you from higher elevations.
ReplyDeleteThe Soviets chose the Bagram location because it is out on a flat, bare plateau. See the photo in the Wikipedia piece:
Bagram Air Base
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bagram Air Base
IATA: BPM – ICAO: OAIX
Summary
Airport type Military
Operator United States Army
Location Bagram, Afghanistan
Elevation AMSL 4,895 ft / 1,492 m
Coordinates 34°56′46″N 069°15′54″E / 34.94611°N 69.265°E / 34.94611; 69.265
Runways
Direction Length Surface
m ft
03/21 3,003 9,852 Concrete
The Bagram Air Base[1][2] - officially known and referred to as Bagram Airfield[3][4] - (IATA: BPM, ICAO: OAIX) is a militarized airport and housing complex that is located next to the ancient city of Bagram, southeast of Charikar in Parwan province of Afghanistan. It is often referred to as Bagram Air Base, however the senior mission commander at Bagram is an Army two-star general, making it an Army Airfield in US military parlance. The base is currently occupied and maintained by the 5th Aviation Battalion (Assault),and 6th Aviation Battalion (GSAB) of the United States Army, with the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing of the United States Air Force and other US Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and their coalition partner units having sizable tenant populations.
Bagram Air Base has three large hangars, a control tower, and numerous support buildings. There are more than 32 acres (130,000 m²) of ramp space and five aircraft dispersal areas, with a total of over 110 revetments. Many support buildings and base housing built by the Red Army during their occupation were destroyed by years of fighting between various warring Afghan factions after the Soviets left. New barracks and office buildings are slowly being constructed at the present time. There is also Bagram Theater Internment Facility, a detention centre which has been criticized in the past for its abusive treatment of prisoners.[5]
The ICAO ID is OAIX and it is specifically at 34.944N, 69.259E at around 1500 m above sea level. The base had a single 3003 m (9852 ft) runway built in 1976. A new 3.5-kilometre long runway was built and completed by the US military in late 2006, at a cost of US$68 million. This new runway is 2000 feet longer than the previous one and is 11 inches thicker, which gives it the ability to handle larger aircraft if necessary, such as the C-5 Galaxy, C-17 Globemaster III or the Boeing 747.[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagram_Air_Base
On a flight from Israel to Turkey years ago, I talked with a half Jew-half Russian who'd fought in Afghanistan. He said one of the tactics used by the invaded Afghanis against the Soviets was to gang rape captured soldiers, videotape the fun, and make random copies available to the occupiers so they could see for themselves what they were up against. Anecdotal, but the recounting is true.
ReplyDeleteThough Vernunft may be camera shy, his tough guy words lead me to believe that he'd be an excellent soldier for the current occupation. Anyone who speaks so cavalierly about "killing terrorists" would certainly prefer to be at the heart of the action, rather than gearing up to be an LSAT tutor.
"Short of wiping out the people there and paving the country over, there is no way to win. "
ReplyDeleteYou mean like fire bombing Dresden and nuking Japan?
Oh, yeah, I remember now, we wanted to win and were willing to kill people in order to win. Of course it didn't hurt that we were honestly afraid of losing. Unfortunately it is easier to kill people than it is to change their minds.
Silly Girl... You mean like fire bombing Dresden and nuking Japan?
ReplyDeleteTesty99, is that you? You gave it away by suddenly dropping the insecure feminine ingénue facade to cut to the sarcastically confrontational neocon talking point #2: Germany/Japan(1941-1945) = Iraq/Afgan(2001-?).
Yes, I now remember reading about how Germany and Japan were militarily defeated in a matter of weeks/months but how the Allied occupation drags on even today with orders of magnitude more casualties despite heavy Allied presence, tremendous financial commitments and overwhelming technological superiority. I just heard yesterday on CNN experts explain decades of German and Japanese instability have left them financial basket cases due to continual violence, civil unrest and terrorism arising out these non-Western, deeply non-homogenous and religiously fragmented societies.
Neocon talking point #3: It’s Bush’s fault. He didn’t execute our plan correctly (or didn’t understand from the patent absurdity of our New Soviet Man claims about the Iraqis and Pashtuns that we were only joking).
Dead terrorists is bad how, exactly?
ReplyDeleteThis comment is relevant how, exactly?
On a flight from Israel to Turkey years ago, I talked with a half Jew-half Russian who'd fought in Afghanistan. He said one of the tactics used by the invaded Afghanis against the Soviets was to gang rape captured soldiers, videotape the fun, and make random copies available to the occupiers so they could see for themselves what they were up against.
ReplyDeleteHow is that possible? I can understand that someone might want to hurt another by raping him, but -- physically - how can that be done? Are Afghans naturally homosexual, or what? Seriously, what do the HBD experts have to say about it?
Yeah, I also thought the "videtape Afghanis gang raping captured soldiers" story was really unusual, so I have doubts about its authenticity. Homosexuality is frowned upon in Islam, to say the least. Also, the intended effect to intimidate the Soviets might backfire. It would probably just piss them off, and fight with a "you'll never take me alive" tenacity.
ReplyDeleteDon't be so sure. The reason the Taliban came to power in 1995 was that two formerly allied Afghan warlords got into a shooting war over a pretty boy.
ReplyDeleteLook up the section in the book "Charlie Wilson's War" where one of the famous neocons comes up with the idea that it would be a brilliant propaganda coup to persuade Soviet soldiers to defect to the Muj. I can't remember exactly CIA director William Casey's response but it was pretty funny: something along the lines of "You'd have to be really defective to want to defect to those animals," followed by a graphic description of what the Muj routinely did to the poor Russkie bastards who fell into their hands.
Here's Kipling's advice to any foreign soldier left behind in Afghanistan:
ReplyDeleteWhen you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
"his tough guy words"
ReplyDeleteNone in evidence. You misread me completely. Oops!
Er, yeah I thought it was established that in ME Muslim societies in general, and Afghan society in particular, boy-buggery was far more common than in the west.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't rocket science. Lock away all the women and many men will find something else. Sailors and prisoners? Herders?
~Svigor
The interesting thing about Xinjiang is I think of America.
ReplyDeleteThe low achieving group, Uighurs, gets angry that they are unemployed and poor while the majority Han Chinese live much better. Uighurs feel discriminated and things boil over. They riot or rather get into a big mob and kill as many Han before the army arrives.
"...kill as many Han before the army arrives"
ReplyDeleteIn the US the army never shows up...
"How is gang rape possible?" You ask. A fascinating topic. Without going into too much detail, any 100% male culture where women are completely unavailable for extended periods of time tends to…umm…adjust. It seems to be more prevalent in some races and cultures.
ReplyDeleteGoogle search for Donny the Punk (Stephen Donaldson). In a wonderful essay he explains the phenomenon of straight men procuring the services of other men when they are incarcerated and reverting back to women upon release:
http://www.justdetention.org/en/docs/doc_01_lecture.aspx
As Donnie notes, there are significant race and power aspects to prison rape. (translated: you skinny white boys best watch out for the bruthas). You might also want to find his more famous essay "Jockers, Punks, and Queens" in which he explains the prison sexual taxonomy and hierarchy.
In the US the army never shows up...
ReplyDeleteIt might show up... but not to support the majority side. Eisenhower had no qualms about using the army to enforce desegregation. One thing we know for sure is that the army can never be used to defend the borders. That would violate the civil rights of the invaders or something like that.
Back in 2002 I was single and a member of an organization called Table for Six. It origanized weekly dinners for members - three men and three women.
ReplyDeleteAt one dinner I sugested that while there seemed to be a lot of controversy over the question of Iraq having Weapons of Mass Desstruction, there was no controversy about us, we definitely had them. And so, I continued, all we had to do to win in Afganistan was to scatter Anthrax in all those bad land refuges. The civilized parts of Afganistan are in the low lands. I suggested denying the highlands to the terrorists.
As you might imagine, I went home alone that night. My idea was "unthinkable" at least to all those nice women who wanted to meet a nice man.
The point remains, Afganistan is easy to defeat. Its only advantage is its terrain. Poison that terrain and Bob's Your Uncle.
"MacSweeney said...
ReplyDeleteYeah, I also thought the "videtape Afghanis gang raping captured soldiers" story was really unusual, so I have doubts about its authenticity. Homosexuality is frowned upon in Islam, to say the least. Also, the intended effect to intimidate the Soviets might backfire. It would probably just piss them off, and fight with a "you'll never take me alive" tenacity.""
Yeah, and that's why male-on-male rape is so rare in our prisons. The Afghanis are notorious practicers of buggery. That whole "homosexuality is frowned on in Islam" stuff isn't true. Or rather, it is true, but they just don't define buggery as homosexual, just as is the case among prison gangs.
I say again, if our policy makers had only read "Flashman" they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble. It was written by George MacDonald Frazier - a british serving officer - who was steeped in the lore of the british army, and who was a much better judge of human nature than all those neo-con whiz kids.
The only way to "win" such an occupation is to be absolutely brutal - Ghengis Kahn like brutual - i.e. genocidal. The russians didn't have it in 'em to bring the requisite brutality to bear. And if the russians weren't brutal enough to do the job, then we certainly don't have a chance.
Our war on terror will be won or lost at the arrival gate of JFK, not in the barren wastes of that non-nation called Afghanistan. Keep them out. Throw them out.
Following that, there was and is a big push in Canada and other countries to encourage heroin use among the lumpenproletariat, with needle exchange programs and public "shooting galleries" for junkies, the backers of both just a little too eager to be doing it for the benefit of junkies.
ReplyDeleteI only wish that western countries would actually have the brains to do that, and get over their superstitious horror of heroin and other hard drugs.
Alcohol is not exactly Diet Pepsi; of all psychoactive drugs, it is the most violence-inducing (even more than cocaine, and much more that pot and psychedelics). It would be safer for everyone if the lumpenproletariat, street people, homeless, bums, and hobos were happily zonked out on heroin, rather than pumped up on booze. But "morality" rates urban trash fighting, vandalizing, and making noise as better than them slumped over bus benches.
The truth is, that alcoholics make great crusaders - and that junkies, pot-heads, coke-heads, and acid-heads don't.
Steve,I think that Kipling verse was:"...and go to your Gawd like a beta male..."
ReplyDeleteVernunft is also a Neocon.
ReplyDeleteThe interesting thing about Xinjiang is I think of America. The low achieving group, Uighurs, gets angry that they are unemployed and poor
ReplyDeleteYou're on the right track but you're going in the wrong direction. The Uighurs are angry that the government is flooding their towns with Hans, another ethnic group with different social ideas. Similarly, Red State Americans are angry that the American government is flooding their towns with Mexicans, another ethnic group with different social ideas.
The only way to "win" such an occupation is to be absolutely brutal - Ghengis Kahn like brutual - i.e. genocidal.
ReplyDeleteDon't you worry, Mr. Anon. Good Americans, like testing99 and Rec1man, with only America's interests at heart, will help us get over that whole, don't go halfway around the world to fight the ethnoreligious conflicts of aliens.
Um, I mean, help America just for the sake of helping Americans. How could you doubt them? How?
Boy-buggery's big in Afghanistan. I assume those Russian conscripts were sufficiently boyish. Derbyshire had a nice article distilling the real, bewildering species of homosexuality. A big one is boy-banging, and the Pashtuns are lovin' it.
ReplyDeleteOther than that I agree with everyone: it's grotesquely stupid to perpetuate war there. More terrorist attacks won't change that, either, even if they deluded the populace further. Good for the Afghanis, I wish them well with their heroin and child-molestation, you know? Heroin deaths and terrorism are possibly the feeblest actors on the world stage since the incompetent CIA.
War is over! In retrospect, all this foreign policy commotion will look grotesquely dark agey, as Cold War antics are increasingly looking. Revenge of the hippies? Sailer's points are sort of the revenge of the Man, anyway, so it all evens out, to "flatten" the world, Friedman-like, into mediocrity and economic stagnation.
"The low achieving group, Uighurs, gets angry that they are unemployed and poor while the majority Han Chinese live much better."
ReplyDeleteTsk, tsk, those Wiggers will never be able to overcome the disadvantage of their partial caucasian heritage.
If our safety requires that we clean out every godforsaken sh-thole in the world, every Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, various Palestinian territories, Zimbabwe, Myanamar, Haiti, etc., then we're screwed. We can't do it short of becoming a completely different kind of country, an empire with massive numbers of foreign troops holding down the colonies, pouring all our treasures down the drain to maintain that empire.
ReplyDelete"If our safety requires that we clean out every godforsaken sh-thole in the world..."
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't. Not that that's going to stop the morons in charge.
Oddly enough, the MSM is nowhere near as interested in the whole Uigher/Han clash like they were over the Iran v. Iran stuff. Can't imagine why...
ReplyDelete"The low achieving group, Uighurs, gets angry that they are unemployed and poor while the majority Han Chinese live much better. Uighurs feel discriminated and things boil over. They riot or rather get into a big mob and kill as many Han before the army arrives."
ReplyDeleteSigh.
It's not alright for Mr. He-Man to get buggered himself, nor to make a lifestyle out of it.
ReplyDeleteA lot of western liberals just do not get that.
A standard liberal line about rape (of women) is that its not about sex, its all about power. Of course there is some truth in that but when Mr. He-Man is buggering beardless boys its very much about power (yes, and sex too).
Yet where are the pro-homosexual liberals then?
They are complaining about the hypocrisy of Mr. He-Man denying his homosexuality. In other words their analysis is founded purely on the sexual element and the whole power relationship is right out of contention.
Typical arse-about-face liberal thinking.
"The point remains, Afganistan is easy to defeat. Its only advantage is its terrain. Poison that terrain and Bob's Your Uncle."
ReplyDeleteYet more shameless posturing on this board, this time by an elderly meterosexual. Do you have any sense of self, opera singer? You sit at a table in some yuppie restaurant squeaking about your ideal method of murdering men thousands of miles away who have never done you any wrong and you comment on it here because why? Do you think it sounds cool? Do you think you'll come across as clever? Tough? Because your comment reads to me like something out of the mealy mouth of some emasculated SWPL half-man who isn't worth a hair on the head of a Pashtun.
""The point remains, Afganistan is easy to defeat. Its only advantage is its terrain. Poison that terrain and Bob's Your Uncle."
ReplyDeleteNo army is "easy" to defeat, if it was, you'd enlist.
War is Hell.
"What? Marshall Mathers doesn't look like he's partly Chinese."
ReplyDelete"Satire" would still be pre-high school vocabulary wouldn't it? Or have the schools been dumbed down that much?
--War is Hell.--
ReplyDeleteThanks, Sherman. But I'd stay with the Buddhist stuff. Better schtick for you.
"Thanks, Sherman. But I'd stay with the Buddhist stuff. Better schtick for you."
ReplyDeleteThat is Buddhist stuff.
"The Uighurs are angry that the government is flooding their towns with Hans, another ethnic group with different social ideas."
ReplyDeleteThe city where the riot occurred is on the side of Xinjiang that is very Han. The other side is very Uighur. The Han side is a buzz of new economic activity. The Uighur side still looks like unchanged Central Asia. Uighurs have actually been migrating to the Han side lately because that is the only place where there is work.
A standard liberal line about rape (of women) is that its not about sex, its all about power. Of course there is some truth in that
ReplyDeleteNo, actually there's no truth to that. Yes, there's a power aspect to rape, but that's not how you phrased it, and it's not how "they" phrase it either. And then there's the fact that the male sex drive has a huge power aspect, too, so the distinction has little difference.
I mean c'mon, "rape is about power, not sex" is so bloody stupid on its face. Yeah, 'cause so many men pull women into the bushes and force them to cook them dinner and iron their shirts, LOL.
Ah, but something just occurred to me - maybe this misconstruction is "their" way of trying to distance sex and the power urge, apart from the rape thing. That sounds like the kind of thing they'd want to do.
~Svigor
--I mean c'mon, "rape is about power, not sex" is so bloody stupid on its face. Yeah, 'cause so many men pull women into the bushes and force them to cook them dinner and iron their shirts, LOL.--
ReplyDeleteWow, Have I been doing it wrong!
"That is Buddhist stuff."
ReplyDeleteGood old Wikipedia.
Wow, Have I been doing it wrong!
ReplyDeleteHeh.
"Make sure you get dat starch right, butch!"
Put out an APB on a dude last seen carrying an extension cord and a hot plate.
Well, this is certainly an eye opener for me. Let's hope that the poor American soldier that was recently captured is being held by strict Islamic radicals, instead of a "Let's do this guy in the ass and hope Allah doesn't notice" bunch.
ReplyDeleteSvigor - re rape/power.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry my phrasing came out all liberal. I'll try to do better next time.
I take it you don't disagree with point otherwise?
Svigor - re rape/power.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry my phrasing came out all liberal. I'll try to do better next time.
I take it you don't disagree with point otherwise?
I worried that might be the inference, but it wasn't intended. I just figured I'd risk it, lol.
~Svigor