Well they won’t need to do much of that at the moment yall seam to be doing a damn fine job of making afghans hate you on your own.
This I see as the biggest problem with the immigrants.
I don’t believe they wanted to come to the US they just wanted their country not ruled by cunts .
Now the US/NATO has abandoned their country and left many on their side to suffer under the Taliban what exactly can we expect of these people ?
Many will now hate the west more than they hate the Taliban .
So whilst I whole heartedly agree we should all take those that supported us I also think more should be done to help them stay where they are safely .
This is what the West is up against. Our Western sensitiblities aren’t very compelling compared to old world corruption. That’s something Bush and Obama didn’t seam to understand until it was too late. They were much more alike than a lot of people like to agree with. Both of them were idealists whose foreign policy was doomed to failure out of a lack of pragmatic assessment. I think the withdrawal was pragmatic but clearly poorly executed. I think everyone knows what I think of Mr spray tan in chief.
Great article Sam. How hard would it be to get this set of facts before the world through the media? Sadly, it won’t happen. Because corruption runs deep and many fortunes were made.
As close as I can figure out, once Mike Mullins retired she lost her “in” into any decision making. In reality, by the time she found his ear, late 2000s) it was probably too late to stop the epidemic corruption, though we might have been able to waste less money that was getting stolen or misdirected.
We didn’t leave them twisting in the wind, their 300,000 strong military abandoned post the minute we tossed them the keys and hit the door.
Their own people betrayed them far worse than we did.
The only excuse the Taliban and Russia need to hate is our opposition to brutal authoritarian regimes that use state resources to sponsor terrorism and overthrow peaceful benevolent governments.
It’s been Russia’s entire GD schtick since before they started gunning down the women and children of political targets in the snow during the Bolshevik revolution. Russia’s whole motis operandi hinges on state sponsorship of terror mislabeled under one lie or another. They’ve never treated any matter of benevolent principle or virtue as anything other than pretext for waging war on every other government that shares a border with them or any of the other nations they already occupied with a puppet government.
I really fucking wish people understood how this game was played. It would make things much easier. They are playing tribal warfare politics on the global stage and have never cared one whit about domestic prosperity serving any purpose other than yet another Potemkin village of lies over an old fashioned diorama of brutality and contempt for the serfs crushed under their boot heels.
Honestly, I very much doubt most of them read the Koran or care much what the scripture says when its inconvenient. Like every other group of dimwit thugs the name of the game is cash and ass.
I would bet serious coin that the Afghani national army and police force never had 300,000 soldiers and police at any given time. Based on reporting about their soldiers not getting paid, they never had a centralized payroll system (or at least one that was successfully implemented) and payments made to their commanders were kept by these commanders. There was also a serious problem with “Ghost Soldiers”, police and military people who were kept on the books, so said commanders could appropriate their salaries. This was also a problem we had with the South Vietnamese Army.
Somewhere the State Department and CIA probably have documents where they give a better estimate of how many of those 300,000 soldiers and police were “real” who would actually show up on a regular basis. I will predict it would be a much lower number.
I also suspect the U.S. Army could have this information but may also have used other more optimistic figures because their incentive was to lie about the severity of such problems.
That’s true. Basically the ANA were paid in cash and the cash would be paid down through the ranks. So for example a Coy Commander would say he had 150 men when in fact he had 80. He’d get cash for 150, pay his subordinates to pay the lower ranks and he’d pocket the rest. His subordinate commanders would do exactly the same thing going down the ranks.
So yeah, it was undermanned and a huge money pit but that’s Afghan. Corruption is good business.
Good point but it got former Afghan President Amin shot by the KGB so I guess it’s not that good. But yeah, point taken and it illustrates the difficulties of doing business like this in Asia. They (Southwest Asian tribesmen) will rob and cheat to get money even when they desperately need that money. They did it to the USSR, the did it to the US and the Pakistani’s are already doing it to China.
Edit: Inversely, the same corruption that stymied the US has stymied Russia as noted with former Soviet puppet President Amin and now with China. One of the notable leaders in the Chinese belt and road initiative has been noted to have history with international organized crime. China is already cutting off the tap with Pakistan and offering to only provide engineers and workers to help build the vital roads necessary for the BRI but when the bribe money ran out Pakistani Taliban suddenly started killing their people.
I suspect that graft is what destroyed the Silk Road in the first place and doomed all of those nations 2500 years of poverty. Rather than getting rich from trade, they decided instead to just steal. That’s why we wanted an ocean trade route to India in the first place. Not because overland was too long, it was because there was no way to cross the territory without being consistently robbed. It’s why Ancient Persia, the Ottomans, Alexander the Great and England all invaded. Not to take the land but to force trade access.
I remember someone here called me racist when I mentioned a regional corruption problem. It’s not racist attribution inherent to the people that’s the problem. It’s the foolish greed of the uneducated. The regional tribesmen don’t understand that the country with the most trade passing through it often eventually becomes the wealthiest. It just doesn’t happen immediately. They could facilitate trade by bringing goods in from their neighbors but the foolish and lazy would rather just rob both to get a quick dollar rather than a steady dime.
I know I run long at the mouth but this is one of the great historic tragedies.
It’s what tore apart Greece. The Athenians started getting rich from trade but their neighbors, notably the Spartans would just rob the shit out of them.
It comes down to the three elements of game theory.
Cooperate, compete, betray.
Cooperation produces the best long term strategy for success for all parties but it takes longer and it leaves parties open to betrayal.
Competition produces the best short term gain for one side but the longer the contest goes on the greater the cost in aggregate to all parties.
Betrayal is a hybrid strategy wherein a party cooperates until it is in position to betray to compete at the best possible advantage and then seizes a greater share than they otherwise would have gotten. The problem then is that because good faith has been broken, the other parties are prone to escalating the conflict which can spiral out of control indefinitely. This short sightedness is the rule rather than the exception in my experience.
For example, the Afghanis tend to cooperate with the people that share a border but due to the false perception of security they falsely weigh the risk to be lower by betraying or competing against neighbors too far away to retaliate effectively. This has the result of them losing trade opportunities further away that could have otherwise made them far more wealthy in the long run. That describes an awful lot of countries doesn’t it?
The steady dime always beats the quick buck in the long run. Never cheat a man if you don’t have to. Patience can make people very rich in very little time.
The same thing that keeps bringing down Afghanistan also brought down Babylon, Greece, Rome, etc, etc, etc. See how that works? It made them all rich one by one and then when the shoe was on the other foot, they all got torn apart by the same dirty strategy in turn.
We should of gotten out of that country years ago after Bin Laden was dead. We shouldn’t be in the business of nation building. Not all cultures are compatible with Democracy
So I’m still generally not well informed about Afghanistan and I’m sure the withdrawal could have been better managed. However, what I am concluding thus far based on some de minimus research is that withdrawal was going to be a cluster fuck whenever it ultimately happened.
I watched this the other night (This Is What Winning Looks Like - Wikipedia) and while I concede that the film maker certainly has biases, there are clear indicators of just how messed up the situation was for a very long time. You can find fault in how the situation was managed in all administrations since it began.
To me, it doesn’t seem that achieving a functional democratic regime with the institutional rule of law was a realistic or achievable goal.