Yeah the NeoCons, especially the Nato cheerleaders in the UK will always want to go in everywhere, all the time.
After all, its not THEM who have to go in.
As far as the arguments above..
I don't want to get in to personal squabbles or disputes about this. Nothing against anyone individually.
I do think there is a need to re-assess some of the arguments here, especially the simplicity of some of the arguments that are being presented.
The Fash the Nation podcast "The Rape of Beijing" makes frequent reference to 'Lightswitch Thinking'
ie: binary thinking .. "Jack's wrong so.. Paul must be right"
That now seems to be very common logic on this forum.
So the US Deep State (Military Industrial complex) = ZOG so.. the enemies of ZOG are to be praised, or defended, or at the very least have their successes celebrated? That seems odd.
Anyway, some anecdotal evidence:
1. In 2004 I lived with migrants in a UK town. One of these guys was a Turkmen from Afghanistan who was claiming benefits and free English lessons from the UK government.
In 2001 Tony Blair had said that it was 'time for the west not to turn their back on Afghanistan" that ISAF would "destroy the poppy fields" etc.
Well, this guy worked for NATO/ISAF as part of a drugs task force and since he was from an uber rich local family who also had big stakes in the drug trade he was able to leverage his new position and new uniform into crushing his families competitors and/or winning them over and levying huge bribes whilst driving around sampling all the fruits of his new monopoly thanks to NATO/his role.
His entire family had relocated to the same UK town and were back and forth between there and their old home in Afghan whilst claiming huge UK tax payer benefits and whilst also reaping huge dividends from their NATO-protected Afghan drug operation.
We lived on the Oxford Road in Reading which was both the local red light district and highly Pakistani-Muslim dominated. In fact, close to my doorstep, on my road, three black drug dealers had just been shot by their Pakistani rivals.
The Turkmen guy had a few insights into the Heroin flow into the UK and the role of Saudi money flowing into the Oxford Road and their building of new mosques locally and radicalising the local Pakistani youth whilst providing a financial cushion for their drug activities and crime, similar to their role with the Bengalis in Tower Hamlets in London.
2. Afghans I knew in London all said the same thing that the WikiLeaks cables revealed. Namely, that Hamid Karzai was not only a puppet but that he was mentally unwell.
Karzai's brother (right up until his death) was the biggest crook, drug-lord, gangster, thug in all of Afghan and Karzai's regime was hugely resented by most Afghans as a result.
So there we do have a close parallel with the US backed ARVN regime in South Vietnam or the Nixon backed Lon Nol regime in Cambodia.
3. The Bachi Bazouk Afghan National Army ANA.
I had an Australian friend who was front line infantry in Afghan. Every base they had or even LUP in the field had to have two sets of pickets - one set facing out against Taliban attacks from without. One set facing inwards ready for their ANA to try and kill them in their sleep either by their own hand or (more likely) coordinating with external Taliban.
A UK soldier who helped train them said that they were an absolute disaster to train and a liability to fight alongside, resorting to standing around and nervously giggling when coming under fire.
Another UK guy who was in Helmand with the Parachute Regiment had some interesting experiences.. they severely upset the ANA attached to them.
The ANA explained that there was a status quo where the Taliban controlled much of the surrounding countryside and the ANA/Nato kept the roads open by tacit agreement not to upset the Taliban too much. Everybody's happy.
The Paras (much like the Rangers in the US) were built upon seeking and destroying their enemy and so they ripped up the playbook and spent the next few weeks and months going out to find and kill as many Taliban as they could.
A major problem had been that previous and subsequent UK regiments cycled in had weak officers who ended up negotiating with the ANA commanders so that their activities didn't upset them or the Taliban too much.
The Paras befriended their embedded interpreters who were cock-a-hoop that someone was finally taking it to the Taliban. The Taliban were very entrenched locally and often experienced and combat-tough adversaries (as you would expect).
The locals were utterly burnt out with it all, victimised by Taliban and ANA alike and had no faith in any foreign army changing anything at all.
When the Taliban found themselves being outflanked by the Paras in combat who tended to attack and mobilise every time they were ambushed and ripped into by mobile soldiers with .50 cal and Machine-gun-grenade-launchers then.. then the radio chatter started.
The ANA were sharing as much details of their movements in advance and in real time to the Taliban as they could (Interpreters translating as fast as they could in real time) in hopes that the Taliban would kill the Paras.
So the Paras were returning to base to share facilities with the ANA who were doing everything they could to get them killed. And the interpreters were taunting the ANA with how many of their Taliban 'friends' they had just killed. Not good for morale when you consider that when the Paras cycled out and were replaced by weaker reservist UK troops then the interpreters would be left vulnerable.
It seems that the ANA had fallen into the So-bel trap, "Soldier-Rebel", where commanders of both Taliban and ANA coordinated to divide up terrain and supplies and profit from joint predation upon the local populace.
The collapse of the ANA is the least surprising development there is.
The ANA were always a joke, they never amounted to a pinch of snuff and most onlookers are aware of this.
4. On the subject of left behind equipment.
I had a long conversation in 2014 with a senior officer in the British RAF who saw this coming.
He explained that the cost of shipping the equipment home was three times that of the equipment itself. Therefore, en totale, it was way cheaper for NATO to invest that money in new equipment to replace what would be left behind than shipping it out.
He worked alongside the US Marine Corps and Afghan Generals who repeatedly thanked NATO for "your blood and treasure that you have given us".
He said "I know what's coming. At some point in the future we will be out of there and the press will seize on images of a £1 million
Artillery piece lying beside the road in what will be Taliban territory.. and isn't it terrible .. but they don't realise that its cheaper for us to replace it than take it home."
"There'll be outrage but seriously, someone has to service those weapons if we haven't already made them safe and even if they can service them someone has to pay for and provide the artillery shells .. we won't give them shells, someone has to and they have to be compatible, not all artillery rounds are the same."
"It looks bad but all they will inherit of any worth will be a bunch of trucks and armoured cars. And they are mobile enough anyway."
5. Conquering Afghan? An electrician I knew in Sheffield UK was an old-ish Lithuanian man. His little Lithuanian community worshipped him quite a bit.. why? He was an ex-Spetsnaz sniper who had served with the Soviets in Afghan in the 80s and who himself had been shot at long range through the stomach by a Mujahedin sniper.
He said to me one night on the vodkas "you will never win there.. everywhere I went I saw 7 year olds who could strip down and re-assemble a rifle faster than any of my comrades could."
6. Afghanistan vs Korea/ Vietnam etc. I knew a burnt out old hippy who had driven across Asia on the old hippy trail.. Kabul-Kathmandhu-Khao San Raod in the late 60s and early 70s and who also visited Saigon during the Vietnam war.
He told the story of a Californian hippy who wanted to go horse riding in the hills around Kabul with his white girlfriend.
He was repeatedly advised against it but sourced the horses and the guides only to return days later on foot having seen his girlfriend gang raped and butchered in front of his eyes.
He went around with a romantic notion of putting together a posse to go and get revenge.
Sure enough a little expedition left and then trotted back a few days later with a story about a dead American and weighed down with the divvied up funds that the Californian had promised them at the start of their adventure.
Blood and treasure eh?
As the hippy said "It was always a wild country full of tribes who hated one another. I was in Vietnam and Vietnam was civilised, Vietnam Afghanistan was not.."
Graveyard of Empires - the campaign never made sense and was planned and implemented by armchair generals and politicos who had no idea how their impractical plans would translate on the ground.
Especially because the Taliban could run away into Pakistan at all times during the occupation whilst NATO was largely restricted to only fighting them in Afghan.
8. the Taliban were famous for their savagery during the 90s. not just blowing up the Bamiyan caves or carving up young girls or anally raping boys.
I heard about in London the example of the "Human Dog" the long haired man in chains who was brought out at a Taliban checkpoint to eat into/savage the genitals of randomly selected male passengers with his teeth in front of others in order to terrorise them into paying bigger bribes.
So based.
There is no evidence that this new Taliban will make life any better for civilians than their predecessors did.
Just because Jack (ZOG) is wrong.. doesn't mean Paul is right. Can we dispense with the romanticism and this binary "light switch" thinking on the Taliban?
7. Just on the subject of Vietnam: a little known Lon Nol backwater on the internet whose name rhymes with "Scoop the World" had a conversation about Vietnam a while back that went something like this:
A: "Hey, how easy is it to get injectable needles in Vietnam?"
B: "Well let me tell you its really hard, there is a long history of Opioids and Colonisation in the South china Sea area going back years which began when the Sassoons and the Rothschilds.."
Some Random interrupts: "Yeah they're easy to get, just go to x place or failing that.. y place (here's a map).
B: "Er, yeah..well, yes, yes - there is also that."
Jon Swain, a good correspondent who was in Saigon and also in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge invaded, and who barely got out with his life - spent years in Vietnam before Saigon's fall and revisited Vietnam under communism.
He revealed his real identity to his Vietnamese guides and, after a lot of arguments, they said that he 'got' the Vietnamese and that they had respect for him and his take on their country. Swain came away saying that the Viets (ARVN and Communist) down the years were consistently dishonest, untrustworthy, corrupt, self defeating and infuriating.
Right now the Viets (for all their many strengths) are going a little bit crazy under Lockdown and showing just how irrational Communist govts can be (see also CCP China).
Vietnam was an absolute disaster under communism. Up to 2 M people died of starvation. The huge exodus of boat people and the rise of uncontrollable smuggling and Triads (both in the South and North of the country) led to the regime being forced to open up to the world and to abandon their communist policies.
I know people who can show pictures of their dead loved ones, young and old, from back then. there are vintage posters one can buy that say "One Pig, One Bag of Rice per month for every household!!!" (those were propaganda promises to big BIG communal households as well.. starvation rations) -
That was the height of what the new commie rulers could sometimes offer or provide to the Viet people after the war. Healthcare? Medicine? A disaster. Absolute disaster.
As for prostitution? A Vietnamese institution to this day.
Every reasonable size Viet town has many brothels on street corners dispensing chlamydia and gonnorhea/ herpes far and wide which are regularly visited by men in the local neighbourhood thus spreading it amongst married couples on each street. Its the reason antibiotic-resistant STDs are out of control in Vietnam.
If anybody wants blaming for that it would be the longstanding influence of the Usurious and money lending Chinese-Vietnamese over many many years.
8. Dubai is a major trafficking centre for prostitution (similar to similarly Muslim Kuala Lumpur).
Just recently a huge amount of prostitutes were rounded up by their pimps in LockDown Thailand especially in places like Pattaya and shipped to Dubai en masse.
The girls were quite open about what was happening which caused a stir as many of them have since complained that they didn't want to go (partly as Thais are steadfastly icky/racist about Muslims and Indians coming close to them).
Some have been barracking to come back and some are having their phones taken off them by their pimps in Dubai. One girl who is 19, with a kid, has now disappeared entirely for months now (presumed dead or possibly an indentured hostage) and has become a cause celebre amongst local people in Chon buri province as they are extremely annoyed at the predations of Muslim mongering and Dubais trafficking needs upon their Thai women. Even under lockdown within Thailand the 19 yr old had made enough money to send home, add to that she was very well liked amongst locals in her hometown and amongst locals in Pattaya and one can understand why the word Dubai has a negative feel in the mouths of many poor Thais right now.
So, in total..
Can we just tone down this "light switch thinking"?
Can we stop romanticising any and all enemies of ZOG?
last time I checked Two Wrongs don't make a right.
