I've seen this oddly specific yet vague comment about familiar "trigger and muzzle discipline" a few times now - what are you guys insinuating? As in they hold their guns pointed down like they were trained by US soldiers, instead of the hollywood Taliban with AK47 up indiscriminantly firing into the air?
They clearly learned it from Hollywood, as every action movie has the same snapshot muzzle down finger outside the guard.
Most military's in the world train that way, especially in urban combat settings.
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
An army’s effectiveness is largely a factor of its willingness to fight. And that’s difficult for outsiders to assess.
The U.S. military trained and equipped the Afghan army. I doubt they were under any delusions that they were leaving behind an elite fighting force. However, it seems they miscalculated just how unmotivated the soldiers were. They didn’t even put up token resistance in areas where they had superior numbers and firepower.
I also understand the military hasn't been paid since January.
Flightradar 24 has been interesting to keep an eye on lately, especially around Dubai and the Gulf of Oman. Several Stratotankers in the area at the moment, but in the past 48 hours have spotted an RAF C-17 going back and forth through southwestern Pakistan and over Kandahar to Kabul, several USAF C-17s, a smaller USN cargo plane, Spanish C-17, Turkish A-400 (that one taking off from northern Pakistan to Kabul), even a B-52 (that one over Dubai and the Gulf of Oman anyway). Not much in the way of transport flights visible on the northern borders of Afghanistan. Several C2A Greyhounds in the area as well, though the USN having carrier(s) in the area isn't really a surprise I suppose.
Coverage over Afghanistan proper is poor but planes sometimes show up when near Kandahar or Kabul.
This whole situation is obviously very upsetting, so "watching" the airlift after a fashion has been kind of helpful as an alternative to doom-scrolling twitter.
Last edited by RoadGame; 08-18-2021 at 11:53 AM.
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Apparently there are between 5000-10,000 Americans scattered throughout Afghanistan, cut-off from the airport in Kabul and there aren't any plans, according to Biden spox John Kirby, to get them to the airport.
Here is what is unspoken and I will say so now because no one else is: The conditions are set right now for the Kabul airport to be a 2021 replay of the last stand of Gandamak, but with the USMC & 82nd Airborne playing the role of the 44th (East Essex) Regiment of Foot.
video here showing the difficulties in training the Afghan Army.
Interesting. I wonder if this played a part too:
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For decades, the American political class has intervened relentlessly and recklessly in countries whose people they hold in contempt. And once again they are being aided by America’s credulous mass media, which is uniformly blaming the Taliban victory on Afghanistan’s incorrigible corruption.
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Almost every modern US military intervention in the developing world has come to rot. It’s hard to think of an exception since the Korean War. In the 1960s and first half of the 1970s, the US fought in Indochina – Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia – eventually withdrawing in defeat after a decade of grotesque carnage. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, and his successor, the Republican Richard Nixon, share the blame.
In roughly the same years, the US installed dictators throughout Latin America and parts of Africa, with disastrous consequences that lasted decades. Think of the Mobutu dictatorship in the Democratic Republic of Congo after the CIA-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba in early 1961, or of General Augusto Pinochet’s murderous military junta in Chile after the US-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973.
In the 1980s, the US under Ronald Reagan ravaged Central America in proxy wars to forestall or topple leftist governments. The region still has not healed.
An aside:
Anyway, back to the article:
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What these cases have in common is not just policy failure. Underlying all of them is the US foreign-policy establishment’s belief that the solution to every political challenge is military intervention or CIA-backed destabilization.
That belief speaks to the US foreign-policy elite’s utter disregard of other countries’ desire to escape grinding poverty. Most US military and CIA interventions have occurred in countries that are struggling to overcome severe economic deprivation. Yet instead of alleviating suffering and winning public support, the US typically blows up the small amount of infrastructure the country possesses, while causing the educated professionals to flee for their lives.
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Even a cursory look at America’s spending in Afghanistan reveals the stupidity of its policy there. According to a recent report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the US invested roughly $946 billion between 2001 and 2021. Yet almost $1 trillion in outlays won the US few hearts and minds.
Here’s why. Of that $946 billion, fully $816 billion, or 86%, went to military outlays for US troops. And the Afghan people saw little of the remaining $130 billion, with $83 billion going to the Afghan Security Forces. Another $10 billion or so was spent on drug interdiction operations, while $15 billion was for US agencies operating in Afghanistan. That left a meager $21 billion in “economic support” funding. Yet even much of this spending left little if any development on the ground, because the programs actually “support counterterrorism; bolster national economies; and assist in the development of effective, accessible, and independent legal systems.”
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In short, less than 2% of the US spending on Afghanistan, and probably far less than 2%, reached the Afghan people in the form of basic infrastructure or poverty-reducing services. The US could have invested in clean water and sanitation, school buildings, clinics, digital connectivity, agricultural equipment and extension, nutrition programs, and many other programs to lift the country from economic deprivation. Instead, it leaves behind a country with a life expectancy of 63 years, a maternal mortality rate of 638 per 100,000 births, and a child stunting rate of 38%.
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The US should never have intervened militarily in Afghanistan – not in 1979, nor in 2001, and not for the 20 years since. But once there, the US could and should have fostered a more stable and prosperous Afghanistan by investing in maternal health, schools, safe water, nutrition, and the like. Such humane investments – especially financed together with other countries through institutions such as the Asian Development Bank – would have helped to end the bloodshed in Afghanistan, and in other impoverished regions, forestalling future wars.
Yet American leaders go out of their way to emphasize to the American public that we won’t waste money on such trivialities. The sad truth is that the American political class and mass media hold the people of poorer nations in contempt, even as they intervene relentlessly and recklessly in those countries. Of course, much of America’s elite holds America’s own poor in similar contempt.
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Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor at Columbia University, is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as adviser to three UN Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres. His books include The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, The Age of Sustainable Development, Building the New American Economy, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism, and, most recently, The Ages of Globalization.
AltaGuy has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000.
Underlying all of them is the US foreign-policy establishment’s belief that the solution to every political challenge is military intervention or CIA-backed destabilization.
Every political challenge? Really?
Here are the U.S. military interventions by decade:
80s
Libya
El Salvador
Nicaragua
Lebanon
Grenada
Honduras
Bolivia
Iran
Philippines
Panama
IMPORTANT GEOPOLITICAL EVENT HAPPENED
90s
Panama
Liberia
Iraq (as part of international coalition)
Haiti
Somalia (as part of UN operation)
Yugoslavia (as part of NATO operation)
Zaire
Sudan
Afghanistan
2000s
Macedonia
Afghanistan
Iraq
Haiti
Columbia
Yemen
2010s
Iraq
Afghanistan
Libya (as part of NATO operation)
Yemen
Syria
And not all of these interventions were cynical acts to protect American interests. The intervention in Macedonia, for instance, was an evacuation of Armenian separatists. The air attacks on Libya were intended to safeguard Libyans from the violent suppression by the regime.
See a trend? The U.S. is becoming increasingly isolationist in recent decades. Increasingly reluctant to deploy forces in global hotspots. It is not routinely using the military or CIA coups as a tool of foreign policy. It isn’t 1982 anymore.
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Originally Posted by fotze
If this day gets you riled up, you obviously aren't numb to the disappointment yet to be a real fan.
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Trudeau also pledged to bring back the endangered interpreters while the embassy was closed and no Canadians were left.
Saying and doing are entirely different. I mean politically what are they going to say when they do not have control of the situation, sucks to be you?
The US does not have control of the situation.
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Trudeau also pledged to bring back the endangered interpreters while the embassy was closed and no Canadians were left.
Saying and doing are entirely different. I mean politically what are they going to say when they do not have control of the situation, sucks to be you?
The US does not have control of the situation.
Okay? Not sure what Trudeau has to do with my post.
Azure claimed Biden doesn’t care about the Americans that are there. That’s false.
I'm not going to do the research on it right now, but I watched a video before that talked about wars and conflicts, and the biggest contributors to long lasting peace. The angle of the study was to establish whether peace-keeping missions actually worked to establish peace. The answer was yes, peace-keeping works in general, but not always and usually takes an extremely long time.
The number one factor for bringing about long lasting peace was a quick undisputed defeat for one side. The longer a war lasted, the harder peace would be to establish. Even destruction and casualties played a smaller role.
Basically, the formula for winning a war is that you have to pound one side into oblivion so that they never want war again. By slow-burning them, you condition them for perpetual war. By trying to negotiate peace between two sides who don't feel like they have actually lost, you just buy time before someone breaches the peace again.
It's tough these days because wars are on TV and politicians have to appease people at home by not showing them how horrific "victory" actually looks.
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"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
I'm not going to do the research on it right now, but I watched a video before that talked about wars and conflicts, and the biggest contributors to long lasting peace. The angle of the study was to establish whether peace-keeping missions actually worked to establish peace. The answer was yes, peace-keeping works in general, but not always and usually takes an extremely long time.
The problem with these studies is that they're ultimately pure hypotheticals. There's no test laboratory with the same country without a peacekeeping operation to compare to.
Long lasting peacekeeping operations also don't just randomly appear in one country but not in another. Certain kinds of situations get peacekeepers and others don't, and the things that affect whether or not a peacekeeping operation starts also affect whether peace happens.
This is not a comment on whether or not peacekeeping works, just pointing out that this is something that's borderline impossible to study conclusively.
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The number one factor for bringing about long lasting peace was a quick undisputed defeat for one side. The longer a war lasted, the harder peace would be to establish. Even destruction and casualties played a smaller role.
Basically, the formula for winning a war is that you have to pound one side into oblivion so that they never want war again.
By slow-burning them, you condition them for perpetual war. By trying to negotiate peace between two sides who don't feel like they have actually lost, you just buy time before someone breaches the peace again.
This makes sense until you realize it's just a bunch of truisms spinned into the shape of a study.
The kind of war that can be solved quickly and decisively is obviously going to be the kind that's less likely to start again, because that tells you that it's a war where all sides are willing to make peace.
You can't pound forces like the islamist troops into oblivion through military forces. That wasn't for lack of trying, it's just that they're not the kind of armies that can be destroyed with military force.
Quick decisive wars also don't end in peace treaties for numerous obvious reasons, such as there being a clear winning side that has nothing to gain from giving up anything in negotiations, and there not being a pressing need to settle the matter through negotiations (because a military solution will appear anyway).
The idea that you shouldn't try to negotiate a quick peace between two sides who feel they haven't lost is also in direct contradiction to the idea that prolonged wars breed new conflicts while quick wars don't.
Also, most wars have more than two sides. Afghanistan for example has had at least three at any given moment, and that's if you bundle all the western countries as one, all the islamists as the second, presume the government actually controls all the troops that are under it's flag and ignore all the local militias.
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It's tough these days because wars are on TV and politicians have to appease people at home by not showing them how horrific "victory" actually looks.
This is completely upside down.
Decisive military victories play extremely well to any public and create fantastic PR imagery, while prolonged conflicts are the types of conflicts that creates endless stories about human suffering.
Ordering the military to create decisive victories is exactly what politicians do when they want to appease the public.
