On the one hand, what the Chinese may fear is that NK launches an attack on SK and Japan, anti-missile missiles take out its missiles, Pyongyang is flattened, the régime collapses and millions of starving refugees cross the Chinese border, causing destabilisation. Q4 happens with Trump’s prestige enhanced and he decides to go for more military solutions, since the refugees are not affecting the US.
On the other hand, there may be a Q4 where nobody presents the results because there is nobody to hear them.
Das Firmament blaut ewig, und die Erde
Wird lange fest steh’n und aufblüh’n im Lenz.
Du aber, Mensch, wie lang lebst denn du?
Nicht hundert Jahre……
Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod! (Lied von der Erde)
The heaven is blue eternally, and the Earth will long stand fast and bloom in Spring. But you, man, how long do you live for? Not a hundred years…dark is life, is death.
I thought it was democracy he wants to destroy. He wants a US government all right. To misquote Terry Pratchett, One man one vote. And he wants to be the one man with the vote who tells the executive what to do.
Same as converting rent-controlled digs in maybe Yonkers or Golden Oaks? Wait, maybe he’ll suffer shin splints and starvation between rounds if the foie gras are staged like the active munition?
[That ‘Small v. Far Away’ train tutorial scene from a britcom here again].
O Nihilist Arby’s, where are you when we need you so? We may do a SingStrong toy instead of leafleting!
[Xi Jinping racks his brain to remember when, how or why he explained this hypothetical to 45.]
94 Insurgents killed, at latest count. The local village had been evacuated prior to the attack, no reports of civilian casualties.
It would be super if we were not in Afghanistan. Whatever we do is unlikely to change anything there. It sucks for the people who remember when the country was more like this-
But I don’t think there is much that we can do to bring that back, at least from a military standpoint. My personal suggestion would be to leave them pretty much alone. If they start opening more Osama Bin Laden™ Terrorist Training Camps, we can bomb them from orbit, just to be sure.
But, our forces are there, and someone decided that they are required to fight the insurgents in that valley. This method seems to have been chosen by General Nicholson to achieve that mission. It had the desired effect. The bomb had been in Afghanistan since before the election. It was manufactured years ago. I bet Trump never even heard of it.
Anyone in an underground ISIS-affiliated bunker/weapons storage complex is probably leaning towards terrorism anyway. On the other hand, the idea of being vaporized by an unseen enemy may dissuade some from the romantic attraction of traveling to Afghanistan to fight against the west.
Isn’t the idea that the enemy can vaporize people unseen part of the reason so many people in that part of the world see the United States as a sinister force of unchecked evil? Think “Death Star.” If anything this kind of warfare likely makes the ISIS fighters even more confident that they’re the heroic rebel fighters pushing back against the West’s Evil Empire.
A large percentage of the insurgent fighters in Afghanistan came there from other parts of the world to kill infidels. They travel from more than 60 nations to do so. Many have at least some secondary education, and the finances to support themselves and travel to the conflict.
They are not the Ewoks. I don’t think there is a Star Wars comparison for what they are. In attitude, they are closer to the aliens from “Independence Day”, in that they have no desire to negotiate with us. For them, it will not be over until we are dead, enslaved, or converted. They have been doing the same thing, for the same reasons, every time in the last 1300 years when the prevailing power dynamic has enabled them to do so.
That being said, I personally think it would be better for everyone if we were not there at all. Not for the Afghans, of course. They don’t seem to want to be ruled by any sort of foreigners, even Islamic ones. And the ISIS people seem to be worse than any group that I have ever studied, They make the Bolsheviks look like cub scouts.
I’m not saying ISIS are the good guys. I’m saying that from their point of view they’re the rebellion and we’re the evil empire, and a gigantic show of force isn’t going to change that.
From a psyops point of view the prospect of a violent death isn’t likely to scare off people who stage suicide bombings. Anyone joining ISIS probably expects to die a violent death sooner or later anyway.
It’s also worth noting that the use of high-tech stand-off weaponry generally doesn’t inspire thoughts of cowering before America’s awesome might.
Instead, the response is generally along the lines of “fucking cowards don’t even dare show themselves; we’d clobber them if we can just get them into a fair fight”.
