The ones who were able to leave have already gone to Europe. The young men, that is. Women , children and the elderly were left behind to face the Taliban.
Quoting Yarvin from 2007 on Pakistan “The Islamists are the natural winners because, as today’s events proved, they are the baddest motherfuckers between the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean. These neighbors make the Russian mob look like the Catholic Church. They are to the Crips as the Crips are to the Salvation Army. To MS-13 as MS-13 is to the Moose Lodge. We’re talking about some stone cold thug killaz, and the smart money has to be on them.”
"Indeed President Biden is far more in charge of it than President Trump—which is not much at all—and personally (I think) overrode the decision points that would have kept US forces in Afghanistan. Credit to the old man—credit where credit is due. But it’s the exception that proves the rule."
Fun Fact tho: the old man in question was actually Trump. He forged an agreement to get out in a way that would have been less calamatous. It involved a May withdrawal and an interim government (which wouldn't have lasted necessarily but big deal).
The current regime - which controls Biden, not the other way around (Trump never got control of it) tore up that agreement, shifted the US withdrawal to September, but then seems to have expected the Taliban to uphold an agreement it, itself, had violated. Credit where credit is due.
I'm not here to sing Trump's praises. Most of what you've said about him in previous posts are not things I would disagree with. But fanning Biden's balls here (when just weeks ago he and his entourage were singing a quite different tune than they did last night, btw. Glenn Greenwald covered this well if you don't independently know) is just off.
It is true that there were people in the military, intelligence and State who didn’t like the agreement and hoped it would be scrapped altogether. The Ghani government did, too. That the US forces withdrew in the manner that they did looks to me like Biden’s punishment for insisting on the withdrawal taking place. It is their last hope that he would see how badly it’s gone and change his mind.
You would think then they would have had an evacuation plan, contingency plans for this outcome. They did not. There also doesn't appear to be any planning for this type of outcome at all at any level. That's the real disgrace. Not the withdrawal itself. Biden (or his regime in any case) is responsible for that. Pointing fingers at the likes of Ghani when he's nothing but a corrupt US puppet is no excuse, though Biden did that too. Yarvin knows better. He's written on corrupt puppet/muppets in the past.
Evacuation plans make it easier to leave, which is precisely why such plans were never drawn up. None of the people who would be responsible for making such plans in detail had any incentive to.
Sure, so that's another reason why Biden cannot crow that he successfully withdrew. They didn't bother drawing up any contingency plans (one wonders what people do at the Pentagon or at Foggy Bottom, then - but, well, we know what they do. Draw up CYA plans).
Biden "withdrew" but without evacuating. He left without planning for leaving. He scrapped such plans that were made, such as they were (the agreement he inherited) and left a vacuum and a PR speech in its place. My point exactly.
That's true but not really the point of this site. The point here is that claiming Biden and his administration did it and did it as well as could be done is simply false. It was the predecessor that had a plan. And it is also the case that there was a withdrawal from Afghanistan in living memory, also performed by a rather decrepit regime (as ours is), a regime that actually was on its last legs. And that was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Which shows that, contrary to what some people are claiming both here and out in the normie world, it can be done in an orderly fashion, a withdrawal can be planned, it can be negotiated (whether the puppet government wants it or not) and it can be undertaken in a less haphazard way.
And, frankly, despite his many, many, many flaws, it was Trump who had negotiated an agreement for something along those lines and it was Biden who is not responsible for the withdrawal (that was already negotiated by his predecessor, who ordered it), but instead for tearing it up and leaving nothing in its place leading to chaos. The chaos progressives create. This site's author is supposed to have his eye on order. Not on fanning the balls of the incompetent establishment's figurehead, himself (Biden) a life-long dues-paying (and dues-paid, in the form of corrupt rake-offs) member in good standing of "Team Bozo."
What I've seen is suggestions that some people in the Ghani government wanted to depose him, and other rumors that the direction not to fight the Taliban came "from the top". That's what I mean, not that Ghani should have prepared (which he should have, but then again, he was probably really hoping, and maybe even getting reassurances from the various players in the US, that the withdrawal would not go through as planned).
I'm of the opinion that the sudden and seemingly unplanned withdrawal was in reaction to Biden's overruling of these bozos (as Curtis says - I completely agree). My guess is, they said to themselves: fine, we'll leave NOW, drop everything, and he'll see how everything begins to crumble. THEN, he'll change his mind, and, inevitably, we'll be back in Afghanistan by 9/11.
That, to me, is the only way the whole situation makes any sense. The lack of preparation is beyond incompetence. I believe it was intentional and not a blunder.
Reminder since both you and Curtis seems to have forgotten that Biden has been "one of the bozos" for a rather long time. For him to give the speech he gave yesterday, which was a rather Trumpian speech, is at best incongruous. Where was he the last 20 years? Is he a new arrival on the public stage? Again, playing him up as the guy bucking all this when he had made no such noises during the campaign, and when he campaigned he was all behind surging into Afghanistan ("the right war" as opposed to Iraq) and the entire nation-building enterprise, the entire neo-liberal enterprise, and mere weeks before was sounding a completely different note on this whole thing (as I said, that the Afghan government and army were strong and we were remaining engaged) is simply absurd. I myself refuse to be gaslighted by him.
Yes, he’s a bozo, but he has a personal reason for Afghanistan: he believes it’s what caused his good son’s brain cancer and untimely death. He just doesn’t give a crap about the other issues.
I did not mean that Ghani should have prepared I meant that we did not prepare for this contingency. If you are going to "punish" your puppet (instead of twisting his arm or even making a public statement - see that video - that he is the one obstructing), then you should at least prepare for the utter collapse of the proxy army that just a few weeks ago you were saying was strong, had 300K men, and was ready to take the fight on. None of this was done by Biden ("the man of the hour, the hero of the withdrawal"). That is the context. He is either in charge and effectuated a withdrawal or the bozos are. Pick one - not both.
He directed them to do it, and they directed the execution. Maybe he should have been personally involved in the planning details, but we know he can’t do that. He’s old and tired.
Is there any truth to the statements, at least from the perspective of the USG/Military - which doesn't mean at all that either is justified - that Afghanistan was a 20-year sandbox for the military to play in to prevent them from getting too stale, and/or that increased destabilization in the region is not necessarily a bad thing?
Also, is there any real prestige loss for the US here? i.e. What is true about the "outcome" of the Afghanistan campaign now as a 20-year blunder that wasn't also true back when it was a 10-year blunder (or even before it was even launched), and that everyone didn't predict? Maybe the one surprising thing is that we didn't stretch it into a 30-year blunder (TBD there)?
Very true - there is nothing to prevent anyone from seizing the opportunity to score points on the missteps. I was speculating maybe that, from a standpoint of there being anything resembling a "market" for military prestige, does anything really change for the US military? To the extent maybe that this whole "fool's errand" results in increased hesitation on the part of our allies to lend support in various ways to future ventures, that may or may not be a good thing, but if at the end of the day the US gov/military will do what it wants to do regardless, does it matter?
The original German of homeland security would rather be 'Heimatschutz' (I never heard the term 'Heimatsicherheit' as a german native).
The problem I see with your isolationism strategy is your old realization that "Souvereigny is conserved". This is true within a nation when the old regime collapses and it's true in international relationships. If the US would give up their claim on world domination, the weak states would not really become independent, but other powers would fill in the blank of souvereigny - most likely China and Russia. And then?
America can continue to provide protection for countries that pay tribute. Trump sort of ran on this platform with his arguments about making other countries pay for NATO.
And if they aren't paying tribute then literally what is the point?
Geopolitics is not Curtis' strongest suit. Let me start by saying that neither Russia nor China can dominate the seas the way the US does - and that is in fact likely the main reason why they haven't made a major move against the US yet, so I disagree with you on that point. If the US withdraws there'll be no clear hegemon for a while.
However, he's wrong about isolationism, because it's irrational to seek less power. Power is fundamentally a way to hedge against risk. All of the current major powers achieved their dominance by pursuing essentially defensive strategies. The US by dominating the seas in order to secure their homeland from European or Japanese invasion; Russia by expanding eastward to defend itself against the Central Asian khanates and westward to defend against the European powers; China by dominating the multitude of ethnic homelands surrounding its own Han Chinese core.
We'll see how uppity the Taliban get when 50th US President, and CFO of the United Space Federation Malia Ann Obama uses her solar dampening array to reduce the daylight hours and solar intensity in Afghanistan by 90%.
Carlyle with his excruciatingly difficult language was right about everything, now what? Where do we go from here? Oh yes, to the next book chapter to the next blog post. Fing Great! There are some companies that are no longer functional even with great CEOs. There is no hocus pocus only loneliness and sadness.
Cities and towns in Texas and Florida are forcibly devil-masking schoolchildren despite state-governors' half-hearted resistance. Government notices about vax-paper requirements are now posted on NYC restaurant doors. Masks are again required for entering banks; fat masked female customers aggressively assist enforcement by masked security-guards. Afghanistan is trivial. There is no America, no West. Everything is gone.
Not a commentary-dense post, but really, what more is there to say?
Still, rightists celebrating this loss may be projecting their own hopes about the weakness of the GAE onto a completely foreign organization which provokes a different response. America abroad and America at home, I fear, are clean different things.
Did you know that when Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister of Great Britain in the late 19th century he acted as his own Foreign Secretary and completely bypassed the actual Foreign Office? What a concept!
But then his son-in-law became Prime Minister and created the Entente Cordiale with France which isolated Germany and...
Oh well, why not have a World War. Just for the fun of it.
One possibly illuminating trend to come from what is, otherwise an abysmally predictable outcome, is the manner in which the Taliban "supposedly" is consolidating power. Having the great pleasure of reading Froude's "Caesar: A Sketch" - courtesy of course to our venerable Semitic prophet - the Taliban comes remarkably close, in rhetoric and theory of course, to embodying the sorts of values which Julius consolidated his regime upon: extending clemency to the deposed regime's sycophants, showing the utter desacralisation of the prior regime's symbols and narrative, and overcoming (at least for the time being,) the deeply embedded tribal nature of Afghan politics. While I always found Yarvin's usage of Caesar to be well-articulated and instructive, it had that manner of distance which makes implementation to-day extremely unlikely. If there is one thing to take away from this whole situation, beyond the fact that Joseph R. Brezhnev was incapable of even exerting the most paltry of authority over the oligarchy, it ought to be that the Taliban is providing a latter-day troubleshooting of how Mister Yarvin's regime change might be inaugurated in a 21st century paradigm. Pay extra attention to how it develops, or the lack thereof gentlemen.
The gang rapes
will continue
until the gender studies
funding improves.
One million "afghan" "refugees" coming to a red state near you!
The ones who were able to leave have already gone to Europe. The young men, that is. Women , children and the elderly were left behind to face the Taliban.
Quoting Yarvin from 2007 on Pakistan “The Islamists are the natural winners because, as today’s events proved, they are the baddest motherfuckers between the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean. These neighbors make the Russian mob look like the Catholic Church. They are to the Crips as the Crips are to the Salvation Army. To MS-13 as MS-13 is to the Moose Lodge. We’re talking about some stone cold thug killaz, and the smart money has to be on them.”
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/benazir-bhutto-mob-hit-in-pakistan/
"Indeed President Biden is far more in charge of it than President Trump—which is not much at all—and personally (I think) overrode the decision points that would have kept US forces in Afghanistan. Credit to the old man—credit where credit is due. But it’s the exception that proves the rule."
Fun Fact tho: the old man in question was actually Trump. He forged an agreement to get out in a way that would have been less calamatous. It involved a May withdrawal and an interim government (which wouldn't have lasted necessarily but big deal).
The current regime - which controls Biden, not the other way around (Trump never got control of it) tore up that agreement, shifted the US withdrawal to September, but then seems to have expected the Taliban to uphold an agreement it, itself, had violated. Credit where credit is due.
I'm not here to sing Trump's praises. Most of what you've said about him in previous posts are not things I would disagree with. But fanning Biden's balls here (when just weeks ago he and his entourage were singing a quite different tune than they did last night, btw. Glenn Greenwald covered this well if you don't independently know) is just off.
It is true that there were people in the military, intelligence and State who didn’t like the agreement and hoped it would be scrapped altogether. The Ghani government did, too. That the US forces withdrew in the manner that they did looks to me like Biden’s punishment for insisting on the withdrawal taking place. It is their last hope that he would see how badly it’s gone and change his mind.
I hope he doesn’t. He should fire them all.
You would think then they would have had an evacuation plan, contingency plans for this outcome. They did not. There also doesn't appear to be any planning for this type of outcome at all at any level. That's the real disgrace. Not the withdrawal itself. Biden (or his regime in any case) is responsible for that. Pointing fingers at the likes of Ghani when he's nothing but a corrupt US puppet is no excuse, though Biden did that too. Yarvin knows better. He's written on corrupt puppet/muppets in the past.
I recommend checking this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dve_Nqa3bNk
These guys are spot on.
Evacuation plans make it easier to leave, which is precisely why such plans were never drawn up. None of the people who would be responsible for making such plans in detail had any incentive to.
Sure, so that's another reason why Biden cannot crow that he successfully withdrew. They didn't bother drawing up any contingency plans (one wonders what people do at the Pentagon or at Foggy Bottom, then - but, well, we know what they do. Draw up CYA plans).
Biden "withdrew" but without evacuating. He left without planning for leaving. He scrapped such plans that were made, such as they were (the agreement he inherited) and left a vacuum and a PR speech in its place. My point exactly.
It’ll normalize eventually, one way or another. The Americans will be evacuated, and that’s all we really should care about at this point.
That's true but not really the point of this site. The point here is that claiming Biden and his administration did it and did it as well as could be done is simply false. It was the predecessor that had a plan. And it is also the case that there was a withdrawal from Afghanistan in living memory, also performed by a rather decrepit regime (as ours is), a regime that actually was on its last legs. And that was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Which shows that, contrary to what some people are claiming both here and out in the normie world, it can be done in an orderly fashion, a withdrawal can be planned, it can be negotiated (whether the puppet government wants it or not) and it can be undertaken in a less haphazard way.
And, frankly, despite his many, many, many flaws, it was Trump who had negotiated an agreement for something along those lines and it was Biden who is not responsible for the withdrawal (that was already negotiated by his predecessor, who ordered it), but instead for tearing it up and leaving nothing in its place leading to chaos. The chaos progressives create. This site's author is supposed to have his eye on order. Not on fanning the balls of the incompetent establishment's figurehead, himself (Biden) a life-long dues-paying (and dues-paid, in the form of corrupt rake-offs) member in good standing of "Team Bozo."
What I've seen is suggestions that some people in the Ghani government wanted to depose him, and other rumors that the direction not to fight the Taliban came "from the top". That's what I mean, not that Ghani should have prepared (which he should have, but then again, he was probably really hoping, and maybe even getting reassurances from the various players in the US, that the withdrawal would not go through as planned).
I'm of the opinion that the sudden and seemingly unplanned withdrawal was in reaction to Biden's overruling of these bozos (as Curtis says - I completely agree). My guess is, they said to themselves: fine, we'll leave NOW, drop everything, and he'll see how everything begins to crumble. THEN, he'll change his mind, and, inevitably, we'll be back in Afghanistan by 9/11.
That, to me, is the only way the whole situation makes any sense. The lack of preparation is beyond incompetence. I believe it was intentional and not a blunder.
Reminder since both you and Curtis seems to have forgotten that Biden has been "one of the bozos" for a rather long time. For him to give the speech he gave yesterday, which was a rather Trumpian speech, is at best incongruous. Where was he the last 20 years? Is he a new arrival on the public stage? Again, playing him up as the guy bucking all this when he had made no such noises during the campaign, and when he campaigned he was all behind surging into Afghanistan ("the right war" as opposed to Iraq) and the entire nation-building enterprise, the entire neo-liberal enterprise, and mere weeks before was sounding a completely different note on this whole thing (as I said, that the Afghan government and army were strong and we were remaining engaged) is simply absurd. I myself refuse to be gaslighted by him.
Yes, he’s a bozo, but he has a personal reason for Afghanistan: he believes it’s what caused his good son’s brain cancer and untimely death. He just doesn’t give a crap about the other issues.
I did not mean that Ghani should have prepared I meant that we did not prepare for this contingency. If you are going to "punish" your puppet (instead of twisting his arm or even making a public statement - see that video - that he is the one obstructing), then you should at least prepare for the utter collapse of the proxy army that just a few weeks ago you were saying was strong, had 300K men, and was ready to take the fight on. None of this was done by Biden ("the man of the hour, the hero of the withdrawal"). That is the context. He is either in charge and effectuated a withdrawal or the bozos are. Pick one - not both.
He directed them to do it, and they directed the execution. Maybe he should have been personally involved in the planning details, but we know he can’t do that. He’s old and tired.
You're talking about Trump again.
Is there any truth to the statements, at least from the perspective of the USG/Military - which doesn't mean at all that either is justified - that Afghanistan was a 20-year sandbox for the military to play in to prevent them from getting too stale, and/or that increased destabilization in the region is not necessarily a bad thing?
Also, is there any real prestige loss for the US here? i.e. What is true about the "outcome" of the Afghanistan campaign now as a 20-year blunder that wasn't also true back when it was a 10-year blunder (or even before it was even launched), and that everyone didn't predict? Maybe the one surprising thing is that we didn't stretch it into a 30-year blunder (TBD there)?
Afghanistan was a 20-year money laundering operation, hardly anything more.
The Chinese wasted no time capitalizing on the perceived loss of U.S. prestige by threatening Taiwan.
Who is puppeting Biden? Perhaps Chairman Pooh-bear called in a favor.
Very true - there is nothing to prevent anyone from seizing the opportunity to score points on the missteps. I was speculating maybe that, from a standpoint of there being anything resembling a "market" for military prestige, does anything really change for the US military? To the extent maybe that this whole "fool's errand" results in increased hesitation on the part of our allies to lend support in various ways to future ventures, that may or may not be a good thing, but if at the end of the day the US gov/military will do what it wants to do regardless, does it matter?
The original German of homeland security would rather be 'Heimatschutz' (I never heard the term 'Heimatsicherheit' as a german native).
The problem I see with your isolationism strategy is your old realization that "Souvereigny is conserved". This is true within a nation when the old regime collapses and it's true in international relationships. If the US would give up their claim on world domination, the weak states would not really become independent, but other powers would fill in the blank of souvereigny - most likely China and Russia. And then?
America can continue to provide protection for countries that pay tribute. Trump sort of ran on this platform with his arguments about making other countries pay for NATO.
And if they aren't paying tribute then literally what is the point?
Geopolitics is not Curtis' strongest suit. Let me start by saying that neither Russia nor China can dominate the seas the way the US does - and that is in fact likely the main reason why they haven't made a major move against the US yet, so I disagree with you on that point. If the US withdraws there'll be no clear hegemon for a while.
However, he's wrong about isolationism, because it's irrational to seek less power. Power is fundamentally a way to hedge against risk. All of the current major powers achieved their dominance by pursuing essentially defensive strategies. The US by dominating the seas in order to secure their homeland from European or Japanese invasion; Russia by expanding eastward to defend itself against the Central Asian khanates and westward to defend against the European powers; China by dominating the multitude of ethnic homelands surrounding its own Han Chinese core.
We'll see how uppity the Taliban get when 50th US President, and CFO of the United Space Federation Malia Ann Obama uses her solar dampening array to reduce the daylight hours and solar intensity in Afghanistan by 90%.
Carlyle with his excruciatingly difficult language was right about everything, now what? Where do we go from here? Oh yes, to the next book chapter to the next blog post. Fing Great! There are some companies that are no longer functional even with great CEOs. There is no hocus pocus only loneliness and sadness.
Cities and towns in Texas and Florida are forcibly devil-masking schoolchildren despite state-governors' half-hearted resistance. Government notices about vax-paper requirements are now posted on NYC restaurant doors. Masks are again required for entering banks; fat masked female customers aggressively assist enforcement by masked security-guards. Afghanistan is trivial. There is no America, no West. Everything is gone.
I'm not Ezra Klein. I hope you like him, since you think I'm him. The name rings a bell, but I don't know what he does.
Not a commentary-dense post, but really, what more is there to say?
Still, rightists celebrating this loss may be projecting their own hopes about the weakness of the GAE onto a completely foreign organization which provokes a different response. America abroad and America at home, I fear, are clean different things.
Did you know that when Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister of Great Britain in the late 19th century he acted as his own Foreign Secretary and completely bypassed the actual Foreign Office? What a concept!
But then his son-in-law became Prime Minister and created the Entente Cordiale with France which isolated Germany and...
Oh well, why not have a World War. Just for the fun of it.
How does this man get elected?
Took the words right out of my mouth.
narrated for you https://youtu.be/sp6uEhOptX4
One possibly illuminating trend to come from what is, otherwise an abysmally predictable outcome, is the manner in which the Taliban "supposedly" is consolidating power. Having the great pleasure of reading Froude's "Caesar: A Sketch" - courtesy of course to our venerable Semitic prophet - the Taliban comes remarkably close, in rhetoric and theory of course, to embodying the sorts of values which Julius consolidated his regime upon: extending clemency to the deposed regime's sycophants, showing the utter desacralisation of the prior regime's symbols and narrative, and overcoming (at least for the time being,) the deeply embedded tribal nature of Afghan politics. While I always found Yarvin's usage of Caesar to be well-articulated and instructive, it had that manner of distance which makes implementation to-day extremely unlikely. If there is one thing to take away from this whole situation, beyond the fact that Joseph R. Brezhnev was incapable of even exerting the most paltry of authority over the oligarchy, it ought to be that the Taliban is providing a latter-day troubleshooting of how Mister Yarvin's regime change might be inaugurated in a 21st century paradigm. Pay extra attention to how it develops, or the lack thereof gentlemen.
I'm just going to leave this right here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dve_Nqa3bNk
A President who was really the nation’s chief executive: Nixon tried, Trump tried.
And we don't do elections anymore, it's 2020 forever...or till the end.
How pray tell would this magical Anti-FDR get elected?