Originally published at: Ten years ago, The Onion predicted west's Irish Goodbye from Afghanistan | Boing Boing
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Memories of 1974, only the Taliban is going to be even worse than the North Vietnamese ever were.
Oh, and the Chinese are already moving up to be the next into the meat grinder known as Afghanistan.
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What a waste of lives and treasure. Just what many of us predicted two decades ago when the U.S. took its shot at the Graveyard of Empires.
Sucks for the people of Afghanistan that hateful and sexist religious fanatics are filling the post-imperial power vacuum this time.
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The united Vietnam, to its credit stopped the genocide in Cambodia by invading and ousting Pol Pot.
No chance of such magnanimous action by the Taliban.
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Oh yeah, that’s the real twist here, is that the Taliban are taking their inspiration from Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
It’s like a J J Abrams reboot this time around, with less logic and bigger disasters.
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Everything went according to plan. Now read that again…
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My money’s on National Clown Week (8/1 - 8-7), an appropriately terrifying observance brought to you courtesy of the appropriately awful Richard Milhouse Nixon.
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The Taliban will be in charge by Christmas.
If true, then, I guess, that is the natural order of Afghanistan? They were in charge before we came, right? If they are to remain with out the Taliban in power, change will have to come from within.
Yeah, but they allowed him to live out his days in exile, vs a bullet to the head like he did to so many of his countrymen.
I just watched The Donut King on Netflix, which follows Ted Ngoy and how he shaped the whole donut scene in California as a Cambodian refugee. While I knew some about the Khmer Rouge, I had no idea that they emptied entire cities full of millions of people and forced them to work in the fields growing rice, etc. Like literally no one were left in some of the cities.
It was a really good documentary of the ups and downs of Ted and other Cambodian refugees.
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The big ticket items left behind include thousands of civilian vehicles, many of them without keys to start them.
Woah, dick move there, eh?
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Canada and the US had better stop dragging their feet about getting their Afghan interpreters and their families out of the country.
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Not really
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I don’t think anyone had high hopes for the ongoing survival of a puppet government with its hand abruptly removed; but does the new CO failing to notice the power going out and all the Americans disappearing until two hours after it happened suggest an…other than Taliban ready…level of situational awareness to anyone else?
It obviously seems ludicrous and gratuitously insulting to not give them the heads up about the whole thing; but the fact that looters figured it out and went inside to do some shopping(successfully) faster than the local forces supposedly patrolling the airport doesn’t fill me with hope for their chances against someone looking to sneak in.
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Pretty much.
I can dig leaving the vehicles behind; that’s a LOT of extra logistics that would need to be dealt with.
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That’ll get you into the car but for most vehicles it won’t do a great job starting it, if it was manufactured this century.
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The Taliban will be in charge by Christmas.
the predictable outcome I warned my republican family member of 20 years ago when they told me with a tear in their eye how great it was we brought freedom to those people.
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I would be glad they are leaving if every single beat of this catastrophic misadventure wasn’t so tediously predictable from about 2003 onwards.
Republicans, I am sure, will reflect on this cockup of their own creation and resolve to learn nothing whatsoever. Democrat (of the politician variety) will also learn nothing, and dutifully line up to support the next time the Arms Manufacturers need a war to boost their c-suite bonuses.
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As I recall, Alexander the Great detoured around Afghanistan.
He wasn’t called The Great for nothing.
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Switch “this time” for “again,” but, yeah.
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Would be neat if that were true, but it isn’t. He went right on through the lands that are modern Afghanistan and Pakistan. The only thing that stopped Alexander was the Ganges River and a revolt from his own men, who were tired of the campaign.
Edited Indus —> Ganges (he crossed the former, not the latter)
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There’s no such thing as a “natural order” when it comes to countries, that’s just a way to excuse the blood on people’s hands. Everything is the result of decisions people make, and in this case the Taliban were in charge because America helped put them in charge.
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