More Afghanistan Misadventure
BY Herschel Smith
3 years, 5 months ago
Bagram Air Base evacuated. Without even informing the ANA about their departure, likely because some of the ANA would have shot at them. In those pictures I saw heavy equipment which doubtless cost a lot of money.
Well, I guess KBR made a fortune on its construction.
More than 1,000 Afghan soldiers have fled to neighbouring Tajikistan after clashing with Taliban militants, officials have said.
The troops retreated over the border to “save their own lives”, according to a statement by Tajikistan’s border guard.
Violence has risen in Afghanistan, with the Taliban launching attacks and taking more territory in recent weeks.
The surge coincides with the end of Nato’s 20-year military mission in the country.
The vast majority of remaining foreign forces in Afghanistan have been withdrawn ahead of a September deadline, and there are concerns that the Afghan military will collapse.
And collapse they will.
How sad. It would have been possible to put the Marines and Rangers on the border with Pakistan to prevent the hardened fighters from escaping, kill off those who gave aid and comfort to AQ, and then put General Dostum in charge of the country to kill any additional Taliban – as he surely would have done.
But we wanted to play armed social workers. Many perished from this misadventure, still others came home without legs, arms or eyesight.
On July 5, 2021 at 10:42 pm, SemperFi, 0321 said:
Never, never, never sign on as an ally of the U.S., or let them tell you they will make things better.
It’s like doing a background check on new renters, ask around first.
On July 6, 2021 at 2:08 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
William Lind, the great historian and military affairs analyst, has said in so many words that those who form alliances with occupying armies do so at their peril, since occupying armies eventually go home.
The hill people of Vietnam, the Montagniards, learned this truth the hard way when the U.S. came out with ‘Vietnamization’ of the war effort, bureaucrat-speak for transferring the burden of the war off U.S. shoulders and onto South Vietnamese ones.
Just as our so-called ‘Afghan allies’ have learned the same hard truth. That is, if any of them were genuinely allies in the first place. Remember: Islamic doctrine councils the forming of fake alliances and false truces when it suits Islamic purposes. Such agreements and treaties can be broken at any time by a Muslim, with the approval of their prophet.
On July 6, 2021 at 6:51 am, The Old Freedom Fighter said:
If Afghanistan is the “graveyard of empires”, look for the FUSA to be laid to rest very shortly in that forsaken dirt bed of history. Just remember what happened to the former USSR after withdrawing in 1989. It collapsed a little over two years later, at least on the surface. Then came the real trouble.
Georgiaboy 61: Fill us in on what transpired in the former USSR & the Eastern Block nations after the collapse of communism. Expect much of this to happen in the FUSA, especially what occurred in Yugoslavia as many have been predicting recently. Many thanks for your outstanding commentaries & knowledge of military history.
On July 6, 2021 at 7:01 am, George said:
The US military has forgotten how to retreat. They did not destroy anything that could be used by the enemy. They did not booby trap anything.
No demolition at all. Many things could have been done but weren’t.
On July 6, 2021 at 8:11 am, George 1 said:
No more wars? TPTB won’t allow that for long. I wonder where they will choose to strike next?
Maybe the “Elites” think that they will need all available troops for the coming hot war with the “White Supremacists? Or is it “White Insurrectionists”? Or “White Supremacist Insurrectionists”?
Well, the important thing is it will be White.
On July 6, 2021 at 9:11 am, Fred said:
The US already collapsed. What you see is the mirage of debt based inflationary money printing. It’s an illusion, a vapour. A “service economy” in the first place is economicly destructive as it merely measures the volocity of money and doesn’t create wealth.
I would expect the dot mil to be fully turned against the American people in training and propoganda, a process that has been well underway for decades.
On July 6, 2021 at 12:53 pm, Rommel's Sdkfz 250 Grief said:
We didn’t get any ROI on the $21 trillion?
Democracy, comrade.
The super duper MIL is going to go domestic?
The pampered pretty pink Petraeus wannabes at the Pentagram couldn’t win at toy soldiers.
On July 6, 2021 at 12:54 pm, Sean said:
Having a Vietnam flashback here, hundreds of helicopters, artillery, rifles, millions of rounds of all types of ammo, Tan San Nhut air base, with it’s first class runways and hardened hangers, port facilities, trucks, warehouses, roads, bridges, the list was mind boggling. And we went for the whole thing again, in Afghanistan. With the same results. No wonder the communists are so confident.
On July 6, 2021 at 2:00 pm, Ned said:
It has occurred to me that TPTB wants more soldier bodies here in the FUSA than they want in their trillion dollar playground. Meanwhile, there’s “leaked” information that the DOD is going to make everyone in the military take the vax.
On July 6, 2021 at 2:24 pm, bob sykes said:
“It would have been possible to put the Marines and Rangers on the border with Pakistan to prevent the hardened fighters from escaping…”
No, it would not have been possible. The Taliban are merely the militia of 40 million Pashtuns living on both sides of the border. Defeating the Pashtuns is no more possible than defeating the Vietnamese communists was. Both wars were delusional from the outset.
But the lunatics who run this country might still have a go at Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine, North Korea… There are still plenty of places to waste American lives and treasure.
On July 6, 2021 at 3:20 pm, Herschel Smith said:
@Bob,
Yes it would have. I didn’t say kill all the Pashtuns. I said kill all of the protectors of AQ, and no, all of the goat herders in Afghanistan weren’t protectors of AQ. My point is that it should have been quick in and out, and it could have been. The goal should never have been to remake the “country,” it should have been a quick retaliation.
And if they did it again, retaliate again, quickly. In and out.
On July 6, 2021 at 4:19 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ The Old Freedom Fighter
Re: “Fill us in on what transpired in the former USSR & the Eastern Block nations after the collapse of communism. Expect much of this to happen in the FUSA, especially what occurred in Yugoslavia as many have been predicting recently.”
Thank-you for the kind words, as they say in Texas I’d better go get a bigger hat. Happy to help in any way possible.
Unfortunately, vis-a-vis your question, I am not a specialist in that area, but I can offer a few observations and tid-bits of information, for what they are worth. So, in no particular order…
An interesting phenomenon observed by historians and political scientists over the last half century or so concerns the effect of global communications and international travel – our world getting more-networked and smaller, if you will.
Many futurists have predicted that as the world grew smaller and the barriers to communication, travel and commerce were reduced or outright eliminated, the barriers of ethnicity, nationalism, and so forth would come down as well. People would tend to disaggregate themselves and become more international in character. That was the thinking. In fact, the opposite has happened.
As globalism and its effects have been felt, these have intensified all-the-more the feelings of ordinary people to identify with their ancestry, home and place they call home. La Patrie as the French say. In Spain, the Basques have intensified their drive for their own homeland. In Canada, the separatists in Quebec; in Scotland, Scots who wish to break free of Great Britain, and so on.
As it turns out, modern man wants to belong to something and somewhere just as badly as his ancestors did. He still wants a place to call home where he can be amongst his own kind, a place to plant the flag, if you will.
Paradoxically, the globalist ruling class, the jet-setting types who fly to Davos every year and who express their net worth with large numbers with lots of commas – they have become more international in their focus, not less. The same is true of many of the largest Fortune 500 firms. General Motors may be an American auto maker in terms of where it was founded, but a great deal of its market share now lies in places outside of the U.S. like the PRC, which is why their executives sound like internationalists at the UN and not Americans like the people who ran the company in 1955.
A second observation is that Balkanization needn’t be an inevitably violent or chaotic process. If the political will, wisdom and temperance of mind are there on both sides, separation can be peaceful. The now-famous “Velvet Revolution” – the amicable divorce between Slovakia and the Czech Republic which broke up the former Czechoslovakia, is one well-known example of that.
If, on the other hand, there are simmering animosities on all sides, and the desire to separate peacefully isn’t there to any great extent, then that portends badly for the outcome being bloodless or peaceful. President Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918-1989) ruled communist Romania with an iron fist for more than two decades as one of the most-brutal tyrants alive.
However, with the coming of 1989 and the crumbling of communism across Europe and the USSR, the Romanian people rose up and toppled his hated regime. After a brief period of fighting between regime and anti-regime forces, Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, were apprehended by members of the military (who had defected to the anti-regime side) while trying to flee via helicopter.
After being charged/convicted with genocide, economic sabotage, and other crimes, they were both executed by firing squad.
The break-up the former Yugoslavia is perhaps the prototypical example of a worst case scenario, in terms of the long-term unrest, warfare, and chaos which plagued the region for a solid decade before some semblance of stability and civil society returned.
Something else noteworthy about that and similar conflicts, such as the civil war now ongoing in the Ukraine between government and anti-government forces, is that civilians will not – or may not always -be spared.
In irregular conflicts, not everyone wears a uniform who fights for this faction or the other. Regular troops of an organized military, maybe, but irregulars wearing a hodge-podge of clothing, or perhaps a mixture of military issue gear and clothing and civilian garb, may be tough to tell apart.
Identification friend-or-foe is of vital importance. So is knowing which terrain is safe and which is not. During the height of the Balkans crisis, the simple act of crossing the wrong stretch of open ground could see you picked off by sniper fire. Didn’t matter whether you were a civilian or not; if you were there, you were assumed to be a target by the other side. Shoot first, ask questions later.
Another observation, perhaps banal but never-the-less true, is that if wars are ugly things, then civil wars are the ugliest of all wars. Acts of terrorism are common, as are atrocities of various kinds – ethnic cleansing, genocide, instances of mass rape, starvation deliberately used as a weapon, the use of WMDs of various kinds, the deliberate targeting of children and the elderly, the use of weapons now prohibited by many international bodies, i.e., such as flame-throwers and incendiary weapons, land mines, bobby-traps and so forth.
Such barbarity is especially common in conflicts of balkanization because there are so many points of friction between the sides involved (and there may be multiple or even dozens of actors involved). The Russian Wars in Chechnya are a prime example.
The Chechens harbor much hatred and ill-will towards Russia because they view Moscow as aggressors who won’t let them go their own way, but there is much else besides: Russians burn with hatred against the Chechens and wish to see them destroyed for committing acts of terrorism such as the 2005 Beslan School siege and subsequent massacre of more than 330 people, many of whom were children. And as the Russians are mostly Christian and the Chechens mostly Muslim, this is also a flash point.
One final point before concluding: The potential for civil wars to widen into major – or even world – wars is considerable. Many Americans do not know it, but thanks to the bumbling of that idiot, Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeline Albright, and her equally-idiotic colleague, NATO head General Wesley Clark, we almost found ourselves involved in a hot, shooting war with Russian forces deployed to the region on behalf of protecting Serbia, a nation with which Russia has had ties for centuries.
The more moving parts there are, the greater the potential for something to get out of hand. A civil war or similar irregular conflict may involved multiple groups just from that immediate area, and once you add in personnel or forces from neighboring countries, international agencies like the UN, NATO or the like, you are talking about a lot of complexity and a lot of uncontrolled variables. Ditto when/if the largest/most-powerful nations intervene as well.
The “war to end all wars,” World War One, began as a localized conflict in the Balkans, with the firing of an assassin’s bullets, but ended as the largest and most-costly war ever fought by humanity.
On July 6, 2021 at 4:28 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Sean
Re: “Having a Vietnam flashback here, hundreds of helicopters, artillery, rifles, millions of rounds of all types of ammo, Tan San Nhut air base, with it’s first class runways and hardened hangers, port facilities, trucks, warehouses, roads, bridges, the list was mind boggling.”
The manner in which the U.S. government repeated this abandonment of such a huge stockpile of equipment, gear, weapons, ammo, and who knows what else, compels one to ask if there isn’t something else going on. I’m sure if you raised such an objection, the official answer would be that it was/is too-costly to air/sea-lift all of our war material back to CONUS, but I can’t help but wonder, especially in the case of the Muslims over in the ‘Stan and Iraq, if it wasn’t thinly-veiled “welfare” of a sort. You know: “We’re leaving, but wink, wink, you guys can have this stuff when we’re gone….”
Back in the day, the engineers would have been put to work doing demolitions on everything/anything in sight of potential value to the enemy. Why? Because you don’t Hajji turning those 155mm howitzers upon you and dropping a barrage of shells upon you paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, that’s why. Maybe we’re not even that smart anymore….
On July 6, 2021 at 10:03 pm, Berglander said:
Spent most of 2008 in Kabul. Had a lot of fun, though never understood exactly what the end game was supposed to be.
Somehow I doubt that there was a PowerPoint titled “Slinking Away in the Night Like an Abused Dog.”
That said, the US was there twenty years too long. Should have studied the three British Afghan Wars, and the Soviet Afghan War before deciding on this folly.
On July 7, 2021 at 9:27 am, Fred said:
That got a hardy laugh. Thanks.