Kabul Liberation

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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby Kurt » Thu Aug 26, 2021 9:21 pm

Back to Kabul .... 12 US servicemen dead in a blast.
So much for the "it was until it wasn't" smooth evacuation I was praising the other fay.
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby vagabond » Thu Aug 26, 2021 11:06 pm

It doesn't negate what you pointed out, the fact that so many people were already evacuated. But every headline and reporter on the ground was saying that there was a great big target with the crowds there so unfortunately it was more likely than not.

RYP talked about it on the Tweeterz: https://twitter.com/RYP__/status/1430965219463946245

As predicted things are going sideways in Kabul. ISIS Khorasan is lighting things up around the airport. Let’s see some angry beardie on angry beardie violence.

Apparently the Haqqanis tipped off the talibs who told the US about the potential threat. As expected the talibs did nothing to prevent the murder of their own citizens. So that’s kinda the next few months in Kabul on a nutshell . A dozen splinter groups jostling for control.


I think that they'll stick it out til Aug 31 then GTFO regardless like you and others have said. I guess Kabul airport is the last stand because of easy access from the city but seems like a clusterfuck to control vs Bagram.
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby Tarkan » Fri Aug 27, 2021 2:16 am

vagabond wrote:Wow, that's nuts. Then again, this would be that place.

Re: Pat Tillman/Bobby Sands - Nail on the head.

All the wasted lives over the past 20 years (and counting). I was a freshman in college when this shit started.


Some American kids probably died today who weren't even born before Sep 11, 2001. Hard to believe we have been talking shit to each other for 20 years. The US defeated a much more industrialized and populated Japan and Italy and gave an assist to beating the Germans in under 4 years. If we didn't win in Afghanistan it's not because of ability, it's because the powers that be never intended on winning. A long war pays the grifters off much better than a short one does. I have always said that ISIS was a CIA op, and just like magic when it looks like we are going to pull out, there's a suicide attack to put pressure on Biden to stay. That being said, this has been an unnecessary clusterfuck.
I'd whore myself out just one more time if I knew who to screw to get out of this grind.
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby Kurt » Fri Aug 27, 2021 11:12 am

Tarkan wrote:
vagabond wrote:Wow, that's nuts. Then again, this would be that place.

Re: Pat Tillman/Bobby Sands - Nail on the head.

All the wasted lives over the past 20 years (and counting). I was a freshman in college when this shit started.


Some American kids probably died today who weren't even born before Sep 11, 2001. Hard to believe we have been talking shit to each other for 20 years. The US defeated a much more industrialized and populated Japan and Italy and gave an assist to beating the Germans in under 4 years. If we didn't win in Afghanistan it's not because of ability, it's because the powers that be never intended on winning. A long war pays the grifters off much better than a short one does. I have always said that ISIS was a CIA op, and just like magic when it looks like we are going to pull out, there's a suicide attack to put pressure on Biden to stay. That being said, this has been an unnecessary clusterfuck.


Yep. And some Talib rolled into Kabul who was born with the Americans there.

Anyway, this is done.

I would now like to focus on getting the US to never fight in the next East Asian war. That is a situation where the non combatants will be the only winners.
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby vagabond » Fri Aug 27, 2021 2:47 pm

Kurt wrote:
Tarkan wrote:
vagabond wrote:Wow, that's nuts. Then again, this would be that place.

Re: Pat Tillman/Bobby Sands - Nail on the head.

All the wasted lives over the past 20 years (and counting). I was a freshman in college when this shit started.


Some American kids probably died today who weren't even born before Sep 11, 2001. Hard to believe we have been talking shit to each other for 20 years. The US defeated a much more industrialized and populated Japan and Italy and gave an assist to beating the Germans in under 4 years. If we didn't win in Afghanistan it's not because of ability, it's because the powers that be never intended on winning. A long war pays the grifters off much better than a short one does. I have always said that ISIS was a CIA op, and just like magic when it looks like we are going to pull out, there's a suicide attack to put pressure on Biden to stay. That being said, this has been an unnecessary clusterfuck.


Yep. And some Talib rolled into Kabul who was born with the Americans there.

Anyway, this is done.

I would now like to focus on getting the US to never fight in the next East Asian war. That is a situation where the non combatants will be the only winners.


In your scenario, non-combatants = US military industrial complex? Because they're the winners here and, I guess we could say ARE, starting to be now. Those folks including the contractors, generals, and a bunch of politicians on our side, not to mention whoever in the Afghan gov't was able to secure some cash, got paid off in this one. Oh, and it looks like fucking Erik Prince was over there just now charging $6500 a flight.The trillions of dollars was spent somewhere, but not on local folks.

All the think tank people have been pushing for this new 'great powers' war narrative for a while, along with their media accomplices, as if we're really going to have a WW2-style war with China or Russia.

Those two, plus some other actors, already seem to be winning in the cyberwar and economic warfare space. Look at the lack of resilience the US had when China and other countries shut down their factories in the early COVID period and there were huge issues getting anything that the US outsources there. I was at the end of that pipeline trying to procure IT equipment and it wasn't great even if not exactly fatal to people.
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby sparrow » Sun Aug 29, 2021 6:17 am

Wait 'til they want to start the next war. Don't kid yourself. It's coming.

Money gotta be made right?
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby Kurt » Sun Aug 29, 2021 4:18 pm

sparrow wrote:Wait 'til they want to start the next war. Don't kid yourself. It's coming.

Money gotta be made right?

War is the dumbest way to make money. The problem was that the Post WWII "boom" happened because our industrial competitors were destroyed and about 250k employable men were killed.

We would have had a post war boom if we had never fought.

Best scenario for the US would be India Vs. China and we sell stuff to Japan, Tiawan and South Korea while we remain nuetral except towards allies we have treaties to protect.

If we fight, we will have more complicated obligations.
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby rickshaw92 » Sun Aug 29, 2021 5:23 pm

Hey Bobby. I hope you are keepin well mate.
Im reallly fuclimg pissed but fespite that I can still hit a tarfet at 1000m plus. mayVRVe bnot tonight but it qint beyond the wit if man. Nowhammy.
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby ROB » Mon Aug 30, 2021 3:16 am

Tarkan wrote:If we didn't win in Afghanistan it's not because of ability, it's because the powers that be never intended on winning. A long war pays the grifters off much better than a short one does.


Define "winning" in the context of Afghanistan.
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby sparrow » Mon Aug 30, 2021 4:25 am

Kurt wrote:
sparrow wrote:Wait 'til they want to start the next war. Don't kid yourself. It's coming.

Money gotta be made right?

War is the dumbest way to make money. The problem was that the Post WWII "boom" happened because our industrial competitors were destroyed and about 250k employable men were killed.

We would have had a post war boom if we had never fought.

Best scenario for the US would be India Vs. China and we sell stuff to Japan, Tiawan and South Korea while we remain nuetral except towards allies we have treaties to protect.

If we fight, we will have more complicated obligations.

Of course it is but it is what they do. Lots of people want wars because they make money from it. And they make a lot. Otherwise why would the US and Canada still be doing business with SA? We both sell them war machines even after that unconscionable act against their own citizen in their own embassy in Turkey. (Chopping up their own citizen, a journalist named Jamal Khashoggi, and hauling him out in suitcases if anyone needs a reminder.) There's no ethics any more, it's all about the money.

Never mind an actual war involving us. Just wait. It'll happen. There's always another GWB. And the citizenry, especially yours, eats that shit up.
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby Tarkan » Mon Aug 30, 2021 1:22 pm

ROB wrote:
Tarkan wrote:If we didn't win in Afghanistan it's not because of ability, it's because the powers that be never intended on winning. A long war pays the grifters off much better than a short one does.


Define "winning" in the context of Afghanistan.


Well, there is winning in the classical imperial sense where we conquer and absorb the conquest. That was never on the table.

There is winning in the neo-imperial sense where we conquer Afghanistan and set up a client state that furthers our interests in the area.

There is winning in a more limited sense which was defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban and permanently eroding their ability to use Afghanistan as a safe base with which to launch terrorist jihads across the world.

There is winning in a neo-liberal sense which was defeating Al Qaeda and making Afghanistan into a shining beacon of democracy and human rights.

Technically speaking, it was within the power of the United States to effect any and all of those outcomes (last one might have taken a few more generations though).

The neo-liberal objective is the one that is used to pitch most wars in the United States. It's also the one that the United States fails most spectacularly in.

It's easy to assume that we fail because of hubris and because we have a lot of stupid people running our government. Hubris, yeah. But we don't really have stupid people running our government. Not really. Yeah, Biden and Harris are potted plants, but what are they *really* running? I have a counter theory. We actually have some really smart people running things in the government. The kind of people that can sneak the Heartbleed bug into the OpenSSL library. The kind of people that can bypass Congressional restrictions of sending weapons to the Contras by setting up a drug trafficking enterprise to bring in drugs by the planeload into the United States and use the profits from that (and the clandestine sale of weapons to our arch enemy Iran) to fund the Contras. These aren't stupid people and they are very successful, they just aren't pursuing the publicly stated policy goals. Their agenda is something different, and largely hidden from public view.

Hell, the Bin Laden family and the Bush family were in business together and knew each other pre 9-11. Does that mean that 9-11 was an inside job? No. But it does cast some shadows. And there's more shadows from there. CIA and the ISI had a good relationship. ISI created the Taliban. The Taliban were, in effect, a proxy force pursuing Pakistani policy objectives. Taliban are mostly Pashtun. 2/3rd of all Pashtuns...live in Pakistan. The Taliban was hosting Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda planned 9-11. But somehow the CIA didn't know about it, despite the relationships that existed between the CIA, the ISI, Bush and the Carlyle Group and the Bin Laden group.

In more tactical terms, given that the Taliban insurgency was primarily a Pashtun led and manned insurgency, we were never going to defeat the Taliban when 2/3rds of the population of potential fighters were living in Pakistan.

But winning in terms of power dynamics - did we have enough power to effect our (stated) policy goals, yes or no? Did we achieve our policy goals, yes or no? If we did not achieve our policy goals, why not? Was it a poor implementation of policy? Poor set of policies? Insufficient allocation of resources? I think, fundamentally, "bad policies" and "poor implementation" is a cover. I think someone or some set of someones achieved their objectives. I think the people calling the shots have a completely different set of objectives than what we see on the surface. I think many of those objectives and interests are inimical to what we like to think of as belonging to the common man (and woman) in the west (and most definitely inimical to the common man and woman in Afghanistan) but are ostensibly executed at their behest and to their benefit.

I can't tell you what those objectives were. I can tell you that in classical and neo-classical imperial terms, the outcome was disastrous. In human rights and democracy terms, disastrous. In setting up a client state, also disastrous. It's easy to say Graveyard of Empires, blah blah blah. That's a bullshit excuse. Taliban lost every single force on force engagement (with the exception of the whole SEAL debacle of Extortion 17).

I've argued from the outset that ISIS was a CIA outfit. And if it wasn't, it should have been. Too many pieces fit. Evan McMullin's activities in Syria and Iraq circa 2010. Arab Spring. The US trying to overthrow Assad, and the overthrow of Gaddafi - where the US allied with and assisted Al Qaeda in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi, and then tried to use the same blueprint - with smuggled weapons from Libya to overthrow Assad. The CIA intervening to save Muqtada al-Sadr after he instigated an uprising that killed dozens of American soldiers and after the military kicked the shit out of his militia and had him surrounded...CIA swoops in and saves him. So, open source not disputed, we have the US:

- working with Al Qaeda in Libya
- working with Al Qaeda in Syria
- saving a Shia leader/terrorist responsible for dozens of American deaths in Basra and Baghdad

Then we have US probable support in creating ISIS.
The US pretty clearly throwing their support behind the Taliban.

ISIS-K attacking and killing Americans just as we are pulling out, giving ammunition to the hawks that want forever war in Afghanistan, and so now maybe we don't pull out after all (which, while awfully inconvenient for Biden, is convenient for certain factions within the US government).

So now the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division is reportedly turning away busses full of Americans from the airport and those Americans were taken into custody by the Taliban. When/if the Taliban murder those Americans, then we get to go back to war to avenge the deaths of the American citizens that our proxies killed because our American military wouldn't let them pass into the airport and relative safety. In this view of the world, US soldiers, US citizens, the Taliban, ISIS, ISIS-K, Al Qaeda, etc, are all pawns. And the same player is moving them all around and sacrificing them when it's convenient.
I'd whore myself out just one more time if I knew who to screw to get out of this grind.
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Postby el3so » Mon Aug 30, 2021 10:07 pm

Kurt wrote: Whats-his-head...the "Can of Beans for a Blow-Job Obama Rape Camp" guy threatened to rat out a user from Egypt to Mubarek's secret police because the Egyptian made the simple mistake of being smarter than Rape Camp in an argument.
docwatson. I remember that was an easy mistake to make ;)
Egyptian guy went by Arctic.
Tarkan wrote: Well, there is winning in the classical imperial sense where we conquer and absorb the conquest. That was never on the table.
No sh!t. A landlocked place with (1) Muslim, (2) non-white and (3) poor people? In 2001?
Tarkan wrote:There is winning in the neo-imperial sense where we conquer Afghanistan and set up a client state that furthers our interests in the area.
No offence to any Turkish lurkers but you already had and still have Inçirlik. Lots of US presence in the Pacific and rest of Asia.
Tarkan wrote:There is winning in a more limited sense which was defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban and permanently eroding their ability to use Afghanistan as a safe base with which to launch terrorist jihads across the world.
The almighty American stick. And that did happen in the first what, 2 or 3 years?

Getting OBL wasn't even the cherry on top by then, ten years in. Cream of the US intelligence apparatus hunting him, years later he and his 5 or so guards get wasted by a couple of helicopters full of door-kickers. The secret lair has some laptops, AKs, money. Not even sex-slaves, bales of opium, suitcases filled with cash and kruger rands, just his wives and kids. If it was a movie, I'd ask for a refund.
Tarkan wrote: There is winning in a neo-liberal sense which was defeating Al Qaeda and making Afghanistan into a shining beacon of democracy and human rights.
And the carrot part of the story.
Kinda inherent if part of the spiel was how the Taliban and Islamic extremists are opposed to democracy and human rights so we don't just go there to kill people, we'll also build infrastructure, teach kids to read and provide whatever we think are building stones for a functioning modern society. Helps it sell to a lot of people. I am not a total cynic so maybe a lot of that was sincere and perhaps some of it might be worth it.

Sticking your dudes out in outposts, not a military man but I doubt that ever worked, guess it's just one of the things they always do.
Tarkan wrote: I think someone or some set of someones achieved their objectives. I think the people calling the shots have a completely different set of objectives than what we see on the surface. And the same player is moving them all around and sacrificing them when it's convenient.
I disagree, life is way more complicated than that. Most of the things just happened. In 20 years time, a lot of things can and do. There isn't much long-term, grand scheme planning involved with that many people and politicians involved.

You want to talk hubris, how about the Patriot Act.
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby vagabond » Mon Aug 30, 2021 10:45 pm

Tarkan - The government does have a lot of civil servants that *are* intelligent people. Sometimes they're listened to, sometimes they're not. Unfortunately, the politicians give the commands and they're not exactly beholden to the general populace anymore.

As to our (still in progress) "War on Terror" and diminishing the capabilities of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and whoever else comes along...well, in less than 48 hours, though more likely 24, most people in the US will forget about the drone strike that killed a family of 10:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/3 ... e-in-kabul

A family that were supposedly about to leave the country on special visas: https://twitter.com/Natsecjeff/status/1 ... 3302120455

So, whoever remains of that family, and people in that neighborhood, probably aren't going to forget, unlike the US media and regular folks who forgot about Afghanistan a long time ago. And we'll move onto some other dusty poor place and do the same and the same in the name of freedom and all this other shit and our military welfare system will go on.

At least we're out, officially.

el3so - Yeah, thought it was Arctic but didn't want to name names. When looking at some old posts, saw one where he was excited about their first democratic election in 2012. A lot has happened in that time.
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby Buzzsaw » Thu Sep 23, 2021 10:13 pm

If the Taliban gets the seat at the UN will they be able to have the four guys with ARs stand behind their Ambassador when he's on the podium?
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Re: Kabul Liberation

Postby ROB » Fri Sep 24, 2021 8:01 am

Buzzsaw wrote:If the Taliban gets the seat at the UN will they be able to have the four guys with ARs stand behind their Ambassador when he's on the podium?


I wonder if they will sign up to Kyoto.
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