International Events VI: Glorious Anarchy and Chaos!

[IheartIheartTesla]

16 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I should say the Chinese Government.  The Chinese media is fairly closely regulated by the Chinese Government, is it not?

I'm sure that's true and the government has its hand in crafting that article; but its all statements by proxy and 'testing the waters' so to speak. I'd be more worried if Jingpeng came out and said 'Taiwan, we are coming for you'. Or if a senior official in the administration (some sacrificial lamb close to retirement) did. Right now its at the level of worrisome but not full blown global conflict.

[TheLastWolf]

12 hours ago, Toth said:

I have no words

No more you mean

[Varysblackfyre321]

12 hours ago, Arakan said:

We didn’t go into Afghanistan to fight for human rights or women‘s rights or LGBT rights. If that were the case then the conflict would have looked completely different. I repeat myself, over 70% of the Afghan population is rural. All those rural areas are hardcore conservative anyway, ruled by local clans and tribes.

If the Taliban was US friendly the violations of human rights violations would generally be overlooked as a tragic but worthwhile sacrifice for the US to hold power in the region.

Such cries about human rights I think often are meant to bludgeon critics of imperialism into being silent. If you don’t want dead children  you should shut up about x foreign intervention. 

[Relic]

14 hours ago, rotting sea cow said:

But the blame should fall squarely on those who started this whole thing: The neo-cons, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton and their ilk.

No, the blame falls on the shoulders of every single sitting member of Congress in late 2001, aside from one Barbara Lee. 

[Arakan]

1 hour ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

If the Taliban was US friendly the violations of human rights violations would generally be overlooked as a tragic but worthwhile sacrifice for the US to hold power in the region.

Such cries about human rights I think often are meant to bludgeon critics of imperialism into being silent. If you don’t want dead children  you should shut up about x foreign intervention. 

Of course. That’s not even a hypothetical in Afghanistan. Just look ab chai boys. Absolutely disgusting. 

[Fragile Bird]

Have you seen the pictures of the US transport flight with 640 people packed into it, sitting jammed in together on the flight to Qatar?

eta: I see the photo was posted in the US Politics thread instead of here.

[Ran]

8 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Err...not sure about 'the Chinese', but I'm sure a media outlet is in no position to follow through with any threats it makes. To paraphrase Stalin, "how many divisions does the Global Times newspaper have?"

Well said.

The editorials from Global Times are so much sabre-rattling BS, if you go and review a sampling of them over the years. They've been talking about the imminent invasion of Taiwan for years at this point.

[Ser Reptitious]

8 hours ago, Gorn said:

Come and visit when you're in the area, most tourists have a good time

I can personally confirm that. Been to Bosnia twice and definitely want to go back for more. Such a beautiful country, with very friendly people. The sad history is heart-breaking! 

[The Marquis de Leech]

New Zealand back in Level 4 Lockdown, after a community case in Auckland (potentially the delta variant).

[Arakan]

Watching CNN International wrt Afghanistan coverage and it really is something else. It’s sad how emotionalized, self-righteous and sanctimonious this channel has become compared to its golden era, the 90s. 

Now they are constantly banging on about „but what about the women and girls, what about human rights“. In itself valuable questions but please stop painting some rosy progressive Afghanistan picture which never existed. It’s utter bullshit. In the countryside where over 70% of Afghans live, girls and women were always living in a extremely conservative, patriarchal setting, with very limited freedoms if at all. And maybe CNN International should be reminded about the hundreds of thousands of raped and often murdered teenage boys, held as sex slaves by Afghan army and police personell, by rich businessmen etc. 

Much more could be said but nah, it’s all black and white. Evil terrorist Taliban conquer rosy, progressive Afghanistan. 20 years later and still nothing learned about the country and its people, absolutely nothing. CNN is almost as bad as Foxnews, I smell the same selfrighteous „truth on our side“ bullcrap. Of course FN is too stupid which makes them at least funny. 

[Ran]

A point made by a journalist is that a lot of the US media reaction is because suddenly the issue is personalized: many of the foreign correspondents who covered Afghanistan have fixers, translators, and sources there who are afraid and are asking for help.

It has clouded their judgment and so they editorialize and catastrophize.

ETA: Also, Matthew Yglesias writes a good piece on Afghanistan in his Substack, Slow Boring. This piece, and an interview he conducted on The Weeds with Spencer Ackerman, both highlight the fact that in December 2001 the Taliban was already trying to surrender, and again in mid-2002 when the country was fully out of their control and Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups had been driven out, and both times the Bush administration gave in to hubris and pressed on. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. 

Will quote a bit toward the end on his reasoning for why, in fact, this will likely encourage our allies under threat from China and North Korea to actually try a bit harder to merit our support:

Quote

I think the very worst argument made by hawks is that withdrawing from Afghanistan is bad because it hurts our credibility with allies in Asia and Europe.

The truth is just the opposite. Alliances are good, but alliances between a very big country and a smaller country naturally generate free-rider problems. If the smaller country believes to absolute certainty that the bigger country will come to its defense, then the smaller country has no incentive to invest in its own defense. And we see this in the real world. Our European allies spend a much smaller share of GDP on defense than we do. That arguably reflects a sensible assessment on their part that the security environment is fairly benign. But Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan all spend a smaller share of GDP on national defense than we do, and the threat environment there is not at all benign.

....

I think it would be excellent for Secretary of State Blinken to send a memo to Tokyo and Taipei and Seoul and Berlin and say “look you’re right, this Afghanistan thing shows there are limits — the United States can do a lot for an ally but if the ally seems really unimpressive and helpless, we can’t do everything.” Don’t be the next Afghanistan! And the good news is all these countries we’re talking about are a hundred times more functional than the state Karzai created, and there is every reason to think they could be impressive partners.

So, all those pieces about allies allegedly worrying... they're worrying more about whether they're up to snuff more than they are that the US is. The US spent a trillion dollars, 20 years, and the lives of nearly 3,000 service members on Afghanistan. That's a pretty big show of support, however you look at it. But, "Don't be the next Afghanistan!" is a great reminder to countries like South Korea and Taiwan that they need to think about the US being a finite resource instead of an infinite one.

[Toth]

4 hours ago, L'oiseau français said:

Have you seen the pictures of the US transport flight with 640 people packed into it, sitting jammed in together on the flight to Qatar?

eta: I see the photo was posted in the US Politics thread instead of here.

At the same time the German plane lifted off with just 7 people rescued because the crowd at the airport weren't the ones we wanted to rescue and the 400 aides we actually need to evacuate couldn't reach the airport because the Taliban surrounded their safe houses after we told them that we can't help them anyway.

[SeanF]

Biden's approach towards non-Taliban Afghans seems to be "They're cowards, so f*ck them."

[Loge]

25 minutes ago, Toth said:

At the same time the German plane lifted off with just 7 people rescued because the crowd at the airport weren't the ones we wanted to rescue and the 400 aides we actually need to evacuate couldn't reach the airport because the Taliban surrounded their safe houses after we told them that we can't help them anyway.

Well, they probably did the right thing. That American C17 went to Qatar, where the US has an air base. But the German planes go to Tashkent, and you can't bring hundreds of strangers without documents into another country without that country's permission.

[Toth]

3 minutes ago, Loge said:

Well, they probably did the right thing. That American C17 went to Qatar, where the US has an air base. But the German planes go to Tashkent, and you can't bring hundreds of strangers without documents into another country without that country's permission.

... damn, that's an absolutely understandable reason and I'm now baffled why they didn't say that instead. The official excuse so far seems to be "The situation was too chaotic to even ask people for their papers and 'partners at the airport' didn't allow anyone through without proper procedures.". Apparently the timetable was so fucked up that they only very briefly touched the ground and immediately left.

[Corvinus85]

26 minutes ago, Loge said:

Well, they probably did the right thing. That American C17 went to Qatar, where the US has an air base. But the German planes go to Tashkent, and you can't bring hundreds of strangers without documents into another country without that country's permission.

That does make sense. However, hundreds of Afghan soldiers crossed in Uzbekistan with planes and helicopters, so the Uzbeks don't seem to have that big of a problem, or maybe it's just that all that materiel is going to end up in their hands now.

[Relic]

40 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Biden's approach towards non-Taliban Afghans seems to be "They're cowards, so f*ck them."

Uniting America by appealing to the MAGA crowd. Biden = Littlefinger?

[Relic]

I can't wait for the brainwashed FoxNews addicts to attend the next Trump rally with "Liberate Afghanistan" signs. The irony...

[Ran]

55 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Biden's approach towards non-Taliban Afghans seems to be "They're cowards, so f*ck them."

You literally cannot do anything to protect people who won’t lift a finger to protect themselves. Not can’t — we gave them the tools and the support to be able to fight — but literally won’t, because the risks involved in fighting were worse than just accepting the Taliban according to their own calculus.

And maybe the situation in Afghanistan will be better now than it was in 1999. Loath though I am to read anything by him, someone linked to a piece where Thomas C. Friedman notes that the Taliban originally operated in a country with practically no means of internal communication besides word-of-mouth and partisan radio, and so abuses and atrocities they committed in one place were unknown in another place. But now 70% of Afghanis have cell phones and many of them have Internet connections through them.

 

Maybe a higher-information Afghani society will be able to force the Taliban to be a bit less brutal, a bit more focused on providing infrastructure and order, and maybe just a wee bit more open to cultural progress.

It’s a hope, anyways.

[IheartIheartTesla]

Some Taliban guy allowed himself to be interviewed by a female newscaster, so thats some sort of progress, I guess. They have also made some statements about women being in government (in a limited role, no doubt). Small stuff we have to take at this point, I guess.