True, but they're not really big factors in Afghanistan itself, which isn't strategically significant to anybody other than Pakistan anymore (at least not unless the Taliban and their affiliates start causing trouble in e.g. Xinjiang). India and China are more concerned with their shared border, and India is much more concerned with Pakistan and threats emanating from there. The great game for Turkey Iran and Saudi is being played out in Yemen and Syria (and to an extent Iraq), and in the waters around the Arabian Peninsula. I'm not sure what Saudi influence is in play in Afghanistan now, or what connections if any they have in the Taliban. I think that it was private money that kept AQ going there rather than a State initiative, but I could well be wrong.FalseBayFC wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 12:01 pm
I was thinking about the greater middle-east and the way that the Iran-Turkey-Saudi power struggle affects the localized conflicts. There are just so many factors at play here I guess. Then there are the Chinese and Indian influences which complicate things even more.
Terrible attitude to start with, and also it doesn't work. The world is a small place when it comes to geopolitics, and failed states have knock-on effects to the region and the globe.
I can't believe they aren't already operating from South Africa. Our intelligence and defense force is a complete mess. How long did it take the army to mobilize after the looting started. A week I think....FalseBayFC wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 11:48 am
I foresee another wave of Islamic terror emerging in the next few years. Already happening in East Africa, now creeping South into Mozambique.
The Greco-Bactrian Kingdoms are fascinating. The depictions of the Buddha are inspired by Hellenic art.
Yes but once they are a failed state again they become a potential haven for an Isis or AQ group don't they? Add in some money from Saudi and the Gulf states and hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in the West and suddenly shit starts blowing up in Paris and London again. I may be wrong but I think its all going to kick off again eventually. Nothing has fundamentally changed to eliminate the resentment and frustration felt by the populations in Muslim countries. The Arab spring has bought no positive change. The Israel/Palestine situation is more fucked up than ever.Thor Sedan wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 12:13 pm So what would happen if the US and others just withdrew everything from that area and said 'have at it fellas'? I'm guessing the US would hunker down in Israel to keep them safe and then what?
I know it isn't as simple as Afghanis wanting to have control of their country - tribal and religious bollocks. But surely there is a time to go - we're done - sort it out amongst yourselves.
I'm guessing that the world would have to pretend that absolute carnage and slaughter wasn't happening - BUT - can Afghanistan ever get back to this?
Fortunately there is quite a clear line in Northern Mozambique South of which they can't spread because the population is predominantly Christian. My worry is that they start a bombing campaign and if we step in they target our cities. The borders are so porous that smuggling in a crude fertilizer based truck bomb would be pretty easy.Sards wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 12:23 pmI can't believe they aren't already operating from South Africa. Our intelligence and defense force is a complete mess. How long did it take the army to mobilize after the looting started. A week I think....FalseBayFC wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 11:48 am
I foresee another wave of Islamic terror emerging in the next few years. Already happening in East Africa, now creeping South into Mozambique.
With that kind of response time our country would be invaded completely before they sent out requests for troops to assemble. it's a joke. And it's all run along factions....this amusing term that is quite simply tribalism. It's all so devided it would be like a king calling his knights to a conference. Giving them the instructions to assemble troops. And waiting for them to all arrive at the battlefield hoping like vok one of his
knights is not going to turn against him. It's still in the 18th century
Islamic terrorism has been in East Africa for a long time. Last week was the 23rd anniversary of the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar.
We're sending 1500 guys up there too. They better be on their toes.assfly wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 12:46 pmIslamic terrorism has been in East Africa for a long time. Last week was the 23rd anniversary of the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar.
Only now do things appear to be calming down on the terrorism front as Al Shabaab appear to be losing ground in Somalia.
I've heard that the Rwandan troops sent to Mozambique to assist have acquitted themselves quite well. Could be an interesting development.
No matter what you do in Afghanistan & how much you try to help, they stab you and each in the back eventually. They're a hopeless case.
They are part of the "wider global family" FFS. They are humans too and they live on the same planet as us.
On July 28, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a high-profile official meeting with a delegation of nine Afghan Taliban representatives, including the group’s co-founder and deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. This was not the first visit by Taliban members to China, but the meeting was unprecedented in its publicity, the seniority of the Chinese attendees, and the political messages conveyed. Most notably, Wang used the meeting to publicly recognize the Taliban as a legitimate political force in Afghanistan, a step that has major significance for the country’s future development.
https://warontherocks.com/2021/08/a-rel ... e-taliban/
Chinese foreign policy seems orders of magnitude more pragmatic than the west.tabascoboy wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 2:33 pmOn July 28, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a high-profile official meeting with a delegation of nine Afghan Taliban representatives, including the group’s co-founder and deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. This was not the first visit by Taliban members to China, but the meeting was unprecedented in its publicity, the seniority of the Chinese attendees, and the political messages conveyed. Most notably, Wang used the meeting to publicly recognize the Taliban as a legitimate political force in Afghanistan, a step that has major significance for the country’s future development.
https://warontherocks.com/2021/08/a-rel ... e-taliban/
Thanks Brazil, have already downloaded the Fairweather.Brazil wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 12:19 pmTrue, but they're not really big factors in Afghanistan itself, which isn't strategically significant to anybody other than Pakistan anymore (at least not unless the Taliban and their affiliates start causing trouble in e.g. Xinjiang). India and China are more concerned with their shared border, and India is much more concerned with Pakistan and threats emanating from there. The great game for Turkey Iran and Saudi is being played out in Yemen and Syria (and to an extent Iraq), and in the waters around the Arabian Peninsula. I'm not sure what Saudi influence is in play in Afghanistan now, or what connections if any they have in the Taliban. I think that it was private money that kept AQ going there rather than a State initiative, but I could well be wrong.FalseBayFC wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 12:01 pm
I was thinking about the greater middle-east and the way that the Iran-Turkey-Saudi power struggle affects the localized conflicts. There are just so many factors at play here I guess. Then there are the Chinese and Indian influences which complicate things even more.
There's a degree to which Afghanistan should have been the lowest hanging fruit of all the problems in the region given its strategic irrelevance to everyone other than Pakistan, but the situation in Afghanistan itself and the inability of western policy makers to deal with it pragmatically and in a tailored way ensured that it was going to be a fuck up. At least the Afghans can console themselves that along with the Syrians, Yemenis, Somalis and Libyans, they're not alone in this experience.
Edit: The Good War by Jack Fairweather is a good book on the war post 9/11. Afgantsy is also good on the Russian Invasion
Well, yes, but it's an aggressively self-protective posture that doesn't really take into account things like human rights, which isn't really that surprising but it does make it much easier for them, not least since their electorate has no potential to disagree with it. That's particularly difficult for Western States to achieve - even in the growth of the American Empire they tried to give it a veneer of respectability. Supporting the Taliban fits perfectly with their Weltanschauung because it secures a potentially bothersome State on China's South Western Flank at no cost to China. I suspect that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar will have also been told in no uncertain terms that even a sniff of trouble in Xinjiang being traced back to Afghanistan will result in the biggest mass bumming since Alexander the Great passed through.Hugo wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 3:06 pmChinese foreign policy seems orders of magnitude more pragmatic than the west.tabascoboy wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 2:33 pmOn July 28, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a high-profile official meeting with a delegation of nine Afghan Taliban representatives, including the group’s co-founder and deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. This was not the first visit by Taliban members to China, but the meeting was unprecedented in its publicity, the seniority of the Chinese attendees, and the political messages conveyed. Most notably, Wang used the meeting to publicly recognize the Taliban as a legitimate political force in Afghanistan, a step that has major significance for the country’s future development.
https://warontherocks.com/2021/08/a-rel ... e-taliban/
It seems like the Chinese play what is in front of them rather than pie in the sky hoping that they can make the whole world emulate them. You can't build liberal, democratic, functional states out of countries that have no historical basis for them. China prefers to just deal with whoever is in charge and figure out areas of mutual interest. I'm sure its not any more moral than the wests approach it just appears to be more grounded in reality.
Jock, please feel free to tell me to bugger off if you don’t want to answer, and no offence at all will be taken, but I was wondering why you feel like this?
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles ... -%20112017War,” the late French prime minister Georges Clemenceau famously remarked, “is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.” That is a good way to think about the United States’ odyssey in the “war on terror.” For 20 years, Washington has struggled and mostly failed to reduce the overall level of global terrorism and to create a healthier political climate in the Muslim world. It has also endured slow, grinding quagmires and sharp, humiliating setbacks. Yet on the most fundamental level, the United States has achieved its strategic objective: it has prevented catastrophic attacks against the U.S. homeland, mainly by becoming extremely proficient at destroying terrorists’ sanctuaries and pulverizing their networks.
The United States has paid too high a price for this success. Yet that price has fallen dramatically over time as Washington has developed what is, on balance, a better counterterrorism approach. After conducting unsustainably expensive military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States underreached by pulling back from the broader Middle East too fast and allowing old threats to reemerge. But since around 2014, Washington has settled on a medium-footprint model based on modest investments, particularly in special operations forces and airpower, to support local forces that do most of the fighting and dying. When combined with nonmilitary tools such as intelligence cooperation, law enforcement efforts, and economic aid, this approach provides reasonably good protection at a reasonable price.
A medium-footprint strategy is no silver bullet. It offers only incremental and incomplete solutions to the political problems underlying extremist violence. It also necessitates tradeoffs with other priorities, such as competing with China, and is politically vulnerable because of its association with long, frustrating wars. Yet the experience of the past two decades suggests that the medium-footprint strategy is still the best of bad options available to the United States.
The war on terror certainly hasn’t gone as U.S. policymakers would have liked. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, few would have predicted that the United States would spend two decades fighting in Afghanistan, only to leave with the Taliban on the march; that it would invade Iraq in 2003, withdraw in 2011, and a few years later send troops back to destroy a self-proclaimed caliphate that Washington’s earlier missteps had helped to produce; and that it would spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice thousands of lives in an endless global battle against terror.
On some dimensions, this effort can be simply described as a failure. Overall levels of global terrorism are higher now than they were in 2001. Depending on how one measures, the number of terrorist attacks and people killed by terrorists around the world each year is three to five times as high as it was in 2011, although few of the victims are Americans.
This failure reflects another: the United States has had relatively little success transforming the underlying political conditions in the greater Middle East and in parts of Africa. Across this expansive region, rapidly growing populations, lack of economic opportunity, and legacies of corruption and misrule have bred instability and repression. Mishandled U.S. interventions, especially in Iraq and Libya, have sometimes made the situation worse.
Despite these setbacks, the United States has achieved its most important goal in the war on terror: preventing major mass-casualty attacks on the U.S. homeland. Although Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and the United Kingdom all suffered major terrorist attacks in the four years after 9/11 and Europe endured a slew of attacks between 2014 and 2017, the United States has suffered only around 100 fatalities at the hands of jihadi terrorists since 9/11—a tiny fraction of the number of Americans who were murdered by others in the last two decades.
The United States has achieved its most important goal in the war on terror: preventing major mass-casualty attacks on the U.S. homeland.
The United States has protected itself by blending aggressive law enforcement, intelligence, and diplomatic efforts with military operations against the most dangerous jihadi organizations. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and elsewhere, the United States has repeatedly disrupted or destroyed territorial safe havens carved out by the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), al Qaeda, and their offshoots and affiliates. It has also developed an unparalleled ability to decapitate terrorist organizations; decimate their ranks of financiers, facilitators, and operational-level commanders; and keep them under pressure and off balance.
By some estimates, U.S. forces and their international partners have killed or captured 80 percent of al Qaeda leaders and operatives in Afghanistan—even if new leaders have stepped into their place, at least until meeting their own demises as well. How exactly the United States has managed to prevent a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil over the last two decades remains a hotly debated question, but one answer, clearly, is that Washington has inflicted devastating losses on its enemies and forced them to focus more on surviving than thriving.
This success came at a much higher price than most policymakers initially expected—by a conservative estimate, some $4 trillion in direct and indirect costs, 7,000 U.S. military fatalities, and the diversion of government attention away from other foreign policy priorities. But the rate of expenditure has come down markedly in the last decade. Since 2015, the number of U.S. service members killed in combat has been in the low dozens or less each year, compared with the high hundreds at the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And whereas those wars once cost as much as $200 billion a year in all, the annual cost of the U.S. campaign against ISIS from 2014 to 2019 was just a few billion dollars. The entire U.S. military presence in the broader Middle East, which covers counterterrorism and other priorities such as deterring Iran, now runs between $50 billion and $60 billion annually—about a third of its peak levels during the latter Bush and early Obama years.
Just as important, the war on terror is no longer a bleeding strategic or diplomatic wound. And as Washington has scaled back its military presence in the broader Middle East, it has been able to focus more on other priorities. In short, the war on terror does not cost what it once did, mainly because the United States has found a more sustainable approach—one that emphasizes managing intractable problems rather than solving them or simply walking away.
This strategy was born of trial and error. In the decade after 9/11, the United States found that heavy-footprint interventions such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan were a recipe for military and strategic exhaustion. But too light a counterterrorism footprint could invite catastrophic reversals. When the United States withdrew completely from Iraq in 2011 while also drawing down counterterrorism operations elsewhere, it created dangerous security vacuums. In particular, the pullout from Iraq, coupled with the chaos created by civil war in Syria, fueled the rise of ISIS, which conquered territory in Iraq and Syria and destabilized vast swaths of the Middle East.
The upshot was a medium-footprint strategy, meant to be both aggressive and limited. This strategy involved the direct use of U.S. military power—especially special operations forces, drones, and manned airpower—against ISIS and other prominent terror groups. But it wielded these and other tools (such as training and advisory missions, intelligence, and logistics) primarily to empower local forces that could clear and hold terrain.
In the struggle against ISIS, for example, the Iraqi security forces, Baghdad’s elite Counter-Terrorism Service, and a motley crew of Kurdish and Arab allies in Syria provided the vast majority of the ground forces that fought on the American side. The Pentagon simultaneously adopted a similar approach in Afghanistan, using a combination of direct military action and support for government forces to target al Qaeda (and, later, ISIS) while keeping the Taliban in check.
The medium-footprint strategy was more sustainable and effective than anything Washington had tried before.
This approach allowed the United States to maintain the regional military footholds needed to keep pressure on extremist groups and outsource the heaviest human and military costs to partners and allies. It also leveraged unique U.S. advantages, such as drones and special operations forces, to enable much larger military campaigns. And it dialed back unrealistic political expectations for host countries, promising only marginal improvements, such as empowering less sectarian leaders in Iraq, as potential down payments on deeper reform once conditions stabilized. On the whole, the medium-footprint strategy was more sustainable and effective than anything Washington had tried before.
It also had plenty of problems, of course. In Afghanistan, the strategy could not break the stalemate with the Taliban: at best, it kept pressure on al Qaeda and ISIS and prevented the Taliban from defeating the government. In Syria, the U.S. approach could not solve the underlying problems posed by a vicious civil war. Nor could it spur the dramatic improvements in political stability and effective governance that would have allowed the United States to safely disengage from contested areas. The medium-footprint approach is akin to what Israeli leaders call “mowing the grass”—it delivers results only if repeated indefinitely.
That need for persistence has come to seem more burdensome over time, as U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan confirmed. The pull of the Indo-Pacific has grown stronger as U.S.-Chinese competition has intensified. Because the initial costs of the war on terror were so high, moreover, it has become difficult to sustain even much-reduced military commitments without provoking charges of perpetuating pointless “forever wars.” The experience of witnessing a largely futile troop surge in Afghanistan in 2009 appears to have weighed on Biden’s decision to terminate a less onerous military mission there today, just as the tragic early years in Iraq seemed to influence President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from that country in 2011.
These competing priorities and costs of persistence are real, but they are not reasons for Washington to abandon its current counterterrorism approach. For one thing, the tradeoff between counterterrorism and great-power competition is neither zero-sum nor unmanageable. The military commitments required to sustain progress in the counterterrorism fight are relatively modest. They typically involve a few thousand troops in a given country, most of whom do not see ground combat on a regular basis, supported by airpower capable of delivering thousands of strikes a year in certain circumstances. These troop and resource commitments do not meaningfully detract from the United States’ ability to project power into Asia, and the broader U.S. military presence in the Middle East actually provides leverage over China, giving Washington the ability to choke off Beijing’s energy supplies in the event of war and thereby bolstering deterrence.
Moreover, the United States needs a minimum level of stability in the greater Middle East—and a minimum level of safety from terrorist threats—to focus properly on the challenge from China and Russia. Without these, it risks the dreaded “yo-yo effect,” whereby withdrawal leads to surging threats that then require renewed intervention at a higher price. That is a formula for failure in counterterrorism and great-power competition alike.
The history of the past 20 years suggests that the United States must pace itself. Overextension inevitably leads to frustration and the dissipation of limited resources. Yet outright withdrawal can jeopardize counterterrorism and regional security interests that are still important to American voters and to U.S. global strategy. So long as the jihadi threat persists in its current form, the United States needs a counterterrorism approach that allows it to avoid exhausting interventions and damaging retreats.
Finally, the United States has little choice but to play a very long game with respect to political reform. Without greater political inclusion and stability in the Muslim world, there will be no escaping the cycle of threats and response that has trapped the last three U.S. presidents. But as the United States learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, seeking to dramatically accelerate the pace of change involves enormous risks and costs. The only reasonable approach is to promote constructive improvement at the margins, while recognizing that the primary impetus for reform must come from within Muslim societies themselves. This strategy requires patience, but as the history of the Cold War demonstrated, the United States has the capacity for more strategic patience than pundits sometimes give it credit for.
The medium-footprint strategy is not an ideal solution to the ongoing problem of jihadi terrorism. But there is no ideal solution. Perhaps the two most important lessons of the past 20 years are that all of the United States’ counterterrorism options are imperfect, and that as bad as things seem in the greater Middle East, they can always get worse. As the United States reaches a generational milestone in the war on terror, it should acknowledge what has gone wrong—but also preserve the strategy that has allowed it to get a fair amount right.
Yeah, China are singularly focused on usurping the United States this century and want nothing to deter them from that objective. They will want stability in Afghanistan more than anything else.Brazil wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 4:02 pmWell, yes, but it's an aggressively self-protective posture that doesn't really take into account things like human rights, which isn't really that surprising but it does make it much easier for them, not least since their electorate has no potential to disagree with it. That's particularly difficult for Western States to achieve - even in the growth of the American Empire they tried to give it a veneer of respectability. Supporting the Taliban fits perfectly with their Weltanschauung because it secures a potentially bothersome State on China's South Western Flank at no cost to China. I suspect that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar will have also been told in no uncertain terms that even a sniff of trouble in Xinjiang being traced back to Afghanistan will result in the biggest mass bumming since Alexander the Great passed through.Hugo wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 3:06 pmChinese foreign policy seems orders of magnitude more pragmatic than the west.
It seems like the Chinese play what is in front of them rather than pie in the sky hoping that they can make the whole world emulate them. You can't build liberal, democratic, functional states out of countries that have no historical basis for them. China prefers to just deal with whoever is in charge and figure out areas of mutual interest. I'm sure its not any more moral than the wests approach it just appears to be more grounded in reality.
One massive difference between Vietnam; & Afghanistan is; that, I've never heard anyone in the NATO sides saying that they'd backed the wrong side !Torquemada 1420 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 10:05 amI shouldn't be surprised but it's a f**king disgrace. You could read Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets or watch Ken Burns' The Vietnam War and substitute Afghanistan for Vietnam in every f**k up made in Indo China bar the illegal expansion of the war into neighbouring countries: and even here, the US had a bit of a nibble in Pakistan.Brazil wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 9:13 amThis is a pretty good analysis. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... n-rumsfeld
Essentially the imbalance in quality across the ANSF and strategic errors in spreading themselves too thin in the face of the Taliban insurgency has resulted in a collapse on all fronts. The Afghan veterans on the board will have a better perspective.
On that article - there's some irony in Kagan holding forth given his thinktank was one of the architects of Bush's little imperial adventures in the first place, but him and his brother are the sort of strategic thinkers that always rely on the uncertainty of events ensuring they're never wrong (and the petro-dollars can keep rolling in).
It's all of the above, I'll always have a huge place in my heart for Afghan (I'm getting soppy in my auld age). Maybe a little annoyance at myself as I was probably a bit naive when we deployed (2009) and believed that we were in it for the long run as per the political chaff.Slick wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 8:43 pmJock, please feel free to tell me to bugger off if you don’t want to answer, and no offence at all will be taken, but I was wondering why you feel like this?
Is it because of the personal sacrifices of you and your mates? Because of emotional ties to Afghanis you met? Pissed off at serving there and seeing it go to shit because of leadership, A mixture of them? Other reasons?
I must stress, there is absolutely, 100%, no agenda in me asking this, just a genuine interest.
Great post. I've mentioned above that ANA/P troops were regularly deployed outwith their ethnic areas. There's some sense in that in the regards to protecting their families from any retribution but I don't think that higher up the chain (much higher) realised that you effectively had some bloke who joined up in Kent fighting "as the local" in Normandy.fishfoodie wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 9:56 pmOne massive difference between Vietnam; & Afghanistan is; that, I've never heard anyone in the NATO sides saying that they'd backed the wrong side !Torquemada 1420 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 10:05 amI shouldn't be surprised but it's a f**king disgrace. You could read Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets or watch Ken Burns' The Vietnam War and substitute Afghanistan for Vietnam in every f**k up made in Indo China bar the illegal expansion of the war into neighbouring countries: and even here, the US had a bit of a nibble in Pakistan.Brazil wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 9:13 am
This is a pretty good analysis. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... n-rumsfeld
Essentially the imbalance in quality across the ANSF and strategic errors in spreading themselves too thin in the face of the Taliban insurgency has resulted in a collapse on all fronts. The Afghan veterans on the board will have a better perspective.
On that article - there's some irony in Kagan holding forth given his thinktank was one of the architects of Bush's little imperial adventures in the first place, but him and his brother are the sort of strategic thinkers that always rely on the uncertainty of events ensuring they're never wrong (and the petro-dollars can keep rolling in).
In Vietnam; the grunts, & others, rapidly realized they'd chosen to side with the bad guys; because they'd foolishly assumed that the commies were the bad guys; & thus anyone opposed to them, were clearly the good guys.
Everyone is very clear that the Taliban are detestable cunts; & very definitely the bad guys; but equally clearly; there is no unified group, you can call the good guys.
Afghanistan is the epitome of Arab countries; Family, Tribe, gap, Alliances, & nowhere is there any notion of Nation.
No words.Happyhooker wrote: ↑Sat Aug 14, 2021 12:49 am Current estimate (live) is 80k executions and about 150k forced rapes/marriages. The place is fucked. The Taliban are claiming they've got the wakhan corridor which has never happened before
Don't think it was ever that b/w in Vietnam: not least because the South Vietnamese govt was not really representative of its people so were definitely crooks/bad guys. But don't think that meant the populace necessarily wanted to be communist either. See the Buddhist protests (esp 1963 on).fishfoodie wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 9:56 pm
One massive difference between Vietnam; & Afghanistan is; that, I've never heard anyone in the NATO sides saying that they'd backed the wrong side !
In Vietnam; the grunts, & others, rapidly realized they'd chosen to side with the bad guys; because they'd foolishly assumed that the commies were the bad guys; & thus anyone opposed to them, were clearly the good guys.
Everyone is very clear that the Taliban are detestable cunts; & very definitely the bad guys; but equally clearly; there is no unified group, you can call the good guys.
Afghanistan is the epitome of Arab countries; Family, Tribe, gap, Alliances, & nowhere is there any notion of Nation.
If those figures are correct, and they very well could be, that could generate some fairly intense ill-feeling toward the Taliban. And these Afghans are pretty good at grudge-holding. Apart from Western intervention, one of the main reasons for the collapse of Isis was the Kurdish resistance. I'd hope that eventually something like that springs up there.Happyhooker wrote: ↑Sat Aug 14, 2021 12:49 am My b-I-l who was over there until quite recently as a serving officer is really pissed off about certain aspects of this.
The Afghan special forces are, apparently, phenomenal.
The normal rank and file (who he was training) were stable enough. BUT, we trained them to have the back up that our troops had. From vehicle maintenance to resupply, to basically all the logistics.
Which was all the western troops have been doing for the last couple of years.
Now the support staff are gone and the world has been swept away from under their feet and they've folded like a pack of cards.
Current estimate (live) is 80k executions and about 150k forced rapes/marriages. The place is fucked. The Taliban are claiming they've got the wakhan corridor which has never happened before
Thanks mateJock42 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 10:06 pmIt's all of the above, I'll always have a huge place in my heart for Afghan (I'm getting soppy in my auld age). Maybe a little annoyance at myself as I was probably a bit naive when we deployed (2009) and believed that we were in it for the long run as per the political chaff.Slick wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 8:43 pmJock, please feel free to tell me to bugger off if you don’t want to answer, and no offence at all will be taken, but I was wondering why you feel like this?
Is it because of the personal sacrifices of you and your mates? Because of emotional ties to Afghanis you met? Pissed off at serving there and seeing it go to shit because of leadership, A mixture of them? Other reasons?
I must stress, there is absolutely, 100%, no agenda in me asking this, just a genuine interest.
We were based in Kandahar Airfield, although probably did just over half our ops out of Bastion, so I've literally fought over the ground we're talking about (admittedly not Kandahar City itself).
I think I'm also annoyed that people who, certainly outwardly, didn't give a fuck last week do now as its the hot topic to be righteous about. That's not a dig at people here talking about it btw
The Mozambique mess is more complicated than first meets the eye.FalseBayFC wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 12:46 pm Fortunately there is quite a clear line in Northern Mozambique South of which they can't spread because the population is predominantly Christian. My worry is that they start a bombing campaign and if we step in they target our cities. The borders are so porous that smuggling in a crude fertilizer based truck bomb would be pretty easy.
Not really as they were paid for their work at the time. Short term greed without seeing the bigger picture may end badly.
Try not to be a cuntBlueCollarRugby wrote: ↑Sat Aug 14, 2021 10:48 pmNot really as they were paid for their work at the time. Short term greed without seeing the bigger picture may end badly.
But the begging bowl from these shiftless shitholes is always out isn’t it, and always extended to ordinary Westerners who don’t have an iota of a say in the policies of TPTB. And I’m getting fed up of copping the blame for the entire world’s problems.
They can go and beg to those slime Bush and Blair and their clique, I know they have a few shekels rattling around.
That’s all most wars are and always have been about. The blood of millions = trillions of dollars for the elite cabal that drive the bulk of humanity like cattle
