Amid this sea of hopelessness and untold human suffering to come it’s good to know that neoconservative pundits are able to keep things in perspective by alerting us to the REAL outrage here: American flags being hastily retired before Taliban forces can arrive to deface them.
The speedy fall is a clear sign that we never made any real progress other than killing civilians and generally spreading anti US sentiment.
Is this the same Secretary Blinken that used to sail in a wooden shoe with Secretaries Winken and Nod?
This thread is illuminating:
“morale within the units is shit, and the trust and mutual respect needed for effective small-unit combat actions to actually work doesn’t really exist.
Corruption runs wild, drug abuse is a big problem, and again, everyone’s got a cousin on the other side, so fuck it, right?”
And the comment about training and giving them equipment, but not checking if they might need glasses…
Sigh.
Turns out, 20 years of enforcing your will on a people and establishing a puppet government doesn’t instill a sense of self-actualization. Who knew?
ETA: I specifically mean the president and the military leadership, just to clarify. This is another in a long line of horrors the Afghan people have had thrust on them.
None of that surprises me, but what surprises me is that when Biden has been asked the question “will the Afghan forces continue to fall so quickly” you would think this obvious “intelligence” would have been offered to him before he put his fucking foot in his mouth. The statement of 300k troops was directly from him.
That tells me that his advisors don’t know everything that is fucking obvious to the rest of us.
“This is manifestly not Saigon. That was actually over 2800 miles further east.”
The United Nations security council is to hold an emergency meeting at 10am local time in New York (3pm in London, 2pm GMT, 6.30pm in Kabul) tomorrow.
That loud banging noise you can hear in your head is the sound of stable doors being closed after the horses have bolted.
The UN secretary General, Antonio Guterres, will brief council members on the latest situation, AP said, following the Taliban takeover of Kabul today.
As one of several leaders engaged in futile public finger-wagging, Guterres on Friday had urged the Taliban to immediately halt their offensive in Afghanistan and negotiate in good faith and noted that he was “deeply disturbed” by early indications (which many have predicted and are not surprised at) that the Taliban are imposing severe restrictions in the areas under their control.
I think part of the problem is that here in the US, and the reason for this apparent surprise that the Afghan forces essentially evaporated before we were even gone, is that we have a very different culture, and view the idea of a “country” or “society” very differently then most other cultures.
In the US (and a lot of western democracies) there is the idea of a loyalty to, and obligation to the country and society. We have a lot of people who believe that its the country that is important, and have loyalty to the country, and society as a whole. That the leaders are only temporary caretakers, and that the institutions are what is important.
We aspire to an ideal that we have the Rule of Law, and that everyone should be equal under it. Including the leaders. That (as the US declaration of independence puts it) “all men are created equal”. Granted, the US has frequently failed very badly at living up to those ideals, but at least we consider them ideals worth aspiring to.
In most other parts of the world, that just doesn’t exist. People have some loyalty to their family, and to their “tribe”, but anyone outside their family and tribe all interactions are transactional at best. There is loyalty to individual leaders, as long as you feel you can get something in return for the loyalty. And there’s a belief that any one who can gain power or authority, even if it’s “by hook or by crook”, that any sort of corruption or cruelty is perfectly justified if it leads to personal gain, and people who gain power by what we, in the west, would consider “evil ways” deserve to have that power, by virtue of their ability to attain it. There is no concept of “Rule of Law” or a belief in “fairness”. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and everyone has to look out for number 1. The idea of “defending the country/society” is ludicrous. People only feel oblications to people they know and interact with on a regular basis. There are only people who are currently in charge, and their ability to enforce their authority on you. The Institutions don’t really exist. Just strong-man leaders who bully their way into leading them and can keep followers obeying them. For the most part, the governmental institutions don’t give a damn about the people, (being run by self serving bureaucrats only out to enrich themselves), and corruption is the Way of Life, both accepted and expected. If you can finagle your way into a position of power, by any means, then you derive to have it, and anything you do with that power (no matter how corrupt) is your just rewards. It’s not surprising that people, including the military members, feel no loyalty to the country as a whole. There is no transfer of power in the sense that we see it in western democracies. There is either a strong-man who is able to enforce their power, or a power vacuum once that strong-man cannot, and everyone is left on their own needing to scramble to protect their own interests while new power hungry [corrupt] strong-men try to claw their own way to the top.
EDIT: And that’s why our attempts at imposing “democracy” on the rest of the world is doomed to failure in most cases. Unless/until the vast majority of the people there believe in the concepts underpinning it “Rule of Law”, “Equality”, etc) instead of “might makes right” and “anything is justified if you can get away with it”, all that will happen is that most people in the government are only going to be there for the opportunity to enrich themselves, and the institutions will remain fragile, as there will be so much corruption that there will be no way to (or desire to) stamp it out. And the people will never be willing to defend or uphold those institutions, because those institutions will behave no better then the mafia, demanding bribes and giving out personal favors to the leaders friends, at the expense of the common people.
So much all this. And even after a generation of occupation, we could only manage to make a small dent in these attitudes.
This is a little off topic but where else am I going to vent? Here’s what I don’t get…
According to all my wackadoodle Facebook freinds God takes care of America, he gave us the greatest country while kicking countries like Haiti and Afghanistan in the groin every chance he gets. Yet more than half of our country can’t be bothered to cherish what we have been given by doing the simplest of things to protect our neighbors and loved ones from a deadly pandemic.
I will be asking all my pro life family members if they would be okay with allowing Afghan refugees, especially women and children into our country that God has so blessed. You know, share those blessings with those who need it.
But like I said, they can’t even put on a damn mask so I’m guessin’ nope.
apparently, bush spends some of his spare time painting portraits of dead americans who served in iraq and afghanistan.
if there’s a more self indulgent, self serving “hobby” - i cant imagine it
We gave them trillions in weapons but never tackled (or could tackle) the systemic corruption.
If it makes you feel better, sure.
Fixed that for you AND explained why they will say no to your refugee idea in a single edit!
Sounds more like a variation on serial killer trophy-keeping behavior
I was reading an article that contrasted the rosy portrait the Pentagon was painting of conditions in Afghanistan over the years vs. what was actually happening and the disparity between what was said and the reality was so extreme that it couldn’t really be explained by incompetence alone. It was hard to come to any other conclusion than the US military was just lying/incredibly self-deluding to make themselves look/feel better. So if that’s the kind of information the president is getting, no wonder Biden’s being caught off guard here.
Maybe we should have tackled our OWN systemic corruption instead.
