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International Events VI: Glorious Anarchy and Chaos!


TheLastWolf

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6 hours ago, Arakan said:

First point is the typical Western fallacy. We apply our understanding of socio-economic divide and make it the main focus. The national army was never more than an artificial PR product for Western media audiences. In reality it was a paycheck. True authority always lied within the clan/tribes and ethnic affiliations. The original Taliban did came from a less formal educated, rural, very conservative background. But we are not living in the 90s anymore. Things are very much in motion nowadays. The Taliban of today are globally interconnected and know what’s happening in world affairs. 

Second point is obviously true. 

That's not entirely fair to the Afghan national army either. They had something like 54k casualties over the past decade; many of them were fighting and dying in the past. The recent problems were more that:

1) For some stupid fucking reason the army was designed to function around having close US air support, so when that left it fell apart.

2) An enormous amount of corruption within the officer corps; including lying about troop numbers and equipment

3) Rock bottom morale the past month, they heard just as much as anybody else the projections that the Taliban would win in under 18 months. Why fight at all if things are doomed?

4) Potentially some higher ranking officers were traitors or bought off recently by the Taliban. There were apparently a lot of rumors going around the ranks about orders to not fight at key points. Even if those rumors were false, they certainly contributed to the morale problems.

Also, for as much as it seems the US didn't plan properly for the withdrawal, it seems that the former Afghan government did no planning either. The top officials simply waited around and then fled the country without leaving any instructions or plans in place. The president leaving without a word was apparently the last straw; everyone simply abandoned their posts at that point.

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15 minutes ago, Toth said:

And now this... I'm not opposed to pulling out of Afghanistan either and it was clear from day one that'll end in us handing the country to the Taliban on a silver platter, but the way we did it is the most cowardly, lethally incompetent way possible... I... I have no words...

Let’s be precise. The USA and Trump unilaterally decided to start negotiations with the Taliban and to pull all troops out at by May 1st. The US didn’t consult with no one of their coalition allies and ultimately let them all down. When the US decided to pull out, it left everyone else no choice but to also end the mission. 

 

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5 minutes ago, Fez said:

That's not entirely fair to the Afghan national army either. They had something like 54k casualties over the past decade; many of them were fighting and dying in the past. The recent problems were more that:

1) For some stupid fucking reason the army was designed to function around having close US air support, so when that left it fell apart.

2) An enormous amount of corruption within the officer corps; including lying about troop numbers and equipment

3) Rock bottom morale the past month, they heard just as much as anybody else the projections that the Taliban would win in under 18 months. Why fight at all if things are doomed?

4) Potentially some higher ranking officers were traitors or bought off recently by the Taliban. There were apparently a lot of rumors going around the ranks about orders to not fight at key points. Even if those rumors were false, they certainly contributed to the morale problems.

Also, for as much as it seems the US didn't plan properly for the withdrawal, it seems that the former Afghan government did no planning either. The top officials simply waited around and then fled the country without leaving any instructions or plans in place. The president leaving without a word was apparently the last straw; everyone simply abandoned their posts at that point.

All your points are correct, especially No 2 is important. Every army stands and falls with its officer and NCO corps. Another issue I see is that most of the officer corps were Pashtuns…would have been quite a different ballgame if the core of the army were made up of Tajiks and Uzbeks but that never was an option with the Pashtuns dominating almost all key positions in army, police and administration. 

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Just now, Arakan said:

Let’s be precise. The USA and Trump unilaterally decided to start negotiations with the Taliban and to pull all troops out at by May 1st. The US didn’t consult with no one of their coalition allies and ultimately let them all down. When the US decided to pull out, it left everyone else no choice but to also end the mission.

The incompetence of the USA doesn't excuse our own incompetence in getting everyone working for us out. The process of the withdrawal started three months ago. Plenty of time to draw up a plan and execute it. But as usual with our government, we prefer to just watch the truck coming onto us like a deer in the headlights. And I'm especially appalled at how every press conference seems to fall back to the question "How many refugees will this cause?". I can't help but think that we let the ones most deserving of our protection die because our wise politicians don't want to embolden the AFD with more brown people in the country. For fuck's sake, we still have embassy personnel stuck in Kabul waiting to be round up and executed!

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1 minute ago, Toth said:

The incompetence of the USA doesn't excuse our own incompetence in getting everyone working for us out. The process of the withdrawal started three months ago. Plenty of time to draw up a plan and execute it. But as usual with our government, we prefer to just watch the truck coming onto us like a deer in the headlights. And I'm especially appalled at how every press conference seems to fall back to the question "How many refugees will this cause?". I can't help but think that we let the ones most deserving of our protection die because our wise politicians don't want to embolden the AFD with more brown people in the country. For fuck's sake, we still have embassy personnel stuck in Kabul waiting to be round up and executed!

I suspect all non-US westerners will get out just fine in the end. The story today is that it's business as usual at the Russian embassy in Kabul, with the Taliban stationing fighters outside and saying they absolutely guaranteed Russian safety. Russia has been developing closer ties with the Taliban for the past several years and this is the result of that. If any westerners do get caught by the Taliban, it's the perfect chance for Russia to score some PR by orchestrating their release.

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1 minute ago, Toth said:

The incompetence of the USA doesn't excuse our own incompetence in getting everyone working for us out. The process of the withdrawal started three months ago. Plenty of time to draw up a plan and execute it. But as usual with our government, we prefer to just watch the truck coming onto us like a deer in the headlights. And I'm especially appalled at how every press conference seems to fall back to the question "How many refugees will this cause?". I can't help but think that we let the ones most deserving of our protection die because our wise politicians don't want to embolden the AFD with more brown people in the country. For fuck's sake, we still have embassy personnel stuck in Kabul waiting to be round up and executed!

I don’t disagree with you but you over-estimate Germany‘s capabilities. Our intelligence is weak and we relied almost completely on information forwarded by the US. Our politicians simply had no clue. They are all liars anyway and the Greens are no exception. If I remember correctly they were in the government 2001-05 and approved of all Afghanistan mandates. Their sanctimonious stance now is boring. The only German party to come out of this fiasco with any integrity is the Left. Go to YouTube and listen to the debates of 2001 and 2002. Gregor Gysi was 100% correct in EVERY aspect, Prophet like. Each one of his predictions came true 20 years later. The self-righteous Greens better stay silent. 

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I think all those saying this was inevitable are mitigating the US's failures. This was absolutely not inevitable. The US needed to make a decentralized government that fit conditions on the ground while investing in education, literacy and infastructure. And actually teach the US Administrators the local language. It could have been done if George Bush had laid the proper foundations Obama and Trump's efforts were paltry and face saving. The US has treated Afghanistan as a back burner side show for 20years of course this is the result.

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7 minutes ago, Arakan said:

I don’t disagree with you but you over-estimate Germany‘s capabilities. Our intelligence is weak and we relied almost completely on information forwarded by the US. Our politicians simply had no clue. They are all liars anyway and the Greens are no exception. If I remember correctly they were in the government 2001-05 and approved of all Afghanistan mandates. Their sanctimonious stance now is boring. The only German party to come out of this fiasco with any integrity is the Left. Go to YouTube and listen to the debates of 2001 and 2002. Gregor Gysi was 100% correct in EVERY aspect, Prophet like. Each one of his predictions came true 20 years later. The self-righteous Greens better stay silent. 

Is it better not to fight? To have the female  half of the population enslaved forever? this is what the left wanted 20 years ago. I totally disagree. The error was not to go there, the error was to leave now.

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1 minute ago, JoannaL said:

Is it better not to fight? To have the female  half of the population enslaved forever? this is what the left wanted 20 years ago. I totally disagree. The error was not to go there, the error was to leave now.

Yeah sure. What do you propose? Who should fight? Who?

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35 minutes ago, Arakan said:

I don’t disagree with you but you over-estimate Germany‘s capabilities. Our intelligence is weak and we relied almost completely on information forwarded by the US. Our politicians simply had no clue. They are all liars anyway and the Greens are no exception. If I remember correctly they were in the government 2001-05 and approved of all Afghanistan mandates. Their sanctimonious stance now is boring. The only German party to come out of this fiasco with any integrity is the Left. Go to YouTube and listen to the debates of 2001 and 2002. Gregor Gysi was 100% correct in EVERY aspect, Prophet like. Each one of his predictions came true 20 years later. The self-righteous Greens better stay silent. 

I'm baffled why you want to make this a party history issue now. I'm infuriated by the rampant incompetence that is happening right now in front of our eyes. Sure, the Green party of 20 years ago made themselves culpable by agreeing to the occupation with their measly 6,7% (as did 69 other whole nations...), but how does that invalidate saving our aides before shit hits the fan and the confusion of a full-fledged takeover makes a coordinated evacuation impossible? How is now trying to do the right thing all of a sudden moral grandstanding worthy of condemnation? The vote for the unbureaucratic evacuation was June 26th. You don't need a crystal ball to tell back then that things were going badly already.

That Gregor Gysi was correct in how it's going to be a shit show I'm not denying either. The guy was always a great orator and it was always frustrating to watch that his party never managed to keep up with his take on things.

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59 minutes ago, Toth said:

Is it bad that I'm trying to avoid touching any of the news directly? I was out on Sunday and came back home only to be overwhelmed the news of just how much we fucked the people who worked with us over. These scenes at the Kabul airport, the many local aids fearing for their lives that were overtaken by the Taliban advance while we callously demanded they go through the bureaucratic loops to get visas now even and our own embassy workers we left trapped after months of them warning us about how bad it's going. This is devastating and it makes me so, so, so angry. The German government doesn't give a flying fuck about their allies. Last month the Green party put to a vote to fly out all registered allies and their families to give them asylum from Tabilan retaliation. Only the Left party voted with them. CDU (conservatives), SPD (social democrats) and AFD (right-wing populists) voted against it and FDP (economic liberals) abstained. They let these people die because they didn't want it to look like another refugee crisis in the middle of an election period. The nerve... for fuck's sake even my undeniably racist mother is upset about how we fucked everyone over who put their necks on the line for us and wants to take them in. And now this... I'm not opposed to pulling out of Afghanistan either and it was clear from day one that'll end in us handing the country to the Taliban on a silver platter, but the way we did it is the most cowardly, lethally incompetent way possible... I... I have no words...

Did you read? US Dept. of State placed a join statement, co-signed by Germany and many other countries, calling the Taliban to guarantee the departure of foreigners and Afghans from the country.

https://www.state.gov/joint-statement-on-afghanistan/

I suppose they are going to follow through at speed, place planes and offer asylum to these Afghans who wish to leave the country. Or are they leave the task for Afghanistan's neighbors? Turkey who are hosting millions of refugees is conspicuously not a signatory

 

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The position of @JoannaL, albeit understandable from an emotional POV, shows the typical fallacy. 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. Nothing changes there, no matter who rules in Kabul, be it Taliban or whoever. 

Honestly, if emancipation had been our goal, the West should have never supported the mujahedin in the 80s in the first place. Their victory was the death to women empowerment. 

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46 minutes ago, Arakan said:

Let’s be precise. The USA and Trump unilaterally decided to start negotiations with the Taliban and to pull all troops out at by May 1st. The US didn’t consult with no one of their coalition allies and ultimately let them all down. When the US decided to pull out, it left everyone else no choice but to also end the mission. 

 

Let's be honest here. Regardless of how any deal would have worked through, the outcome would have been hardly different, and possibly even worse. Had Trump been in the presidency, things could have gone either way. Throwing allies under the bus or launching strikes to save face making the situation worse.

Biden is not innocent of course but he is more guilty as vice of the Obama's administration than as the current siting president. Practically the whole US political spectrum is at fault as well as most European politicians. They should all own this defeat.

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

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All in all a huge clusterfuck. Be it US, NATO or EU, the West suffered a defeat even more humiliating than the Soviets in 1989. At least their puppet President Najibullah stayed in office and held control of Kabul until 1992. Our puppet Ashraf Ghani couldn’t even politically and militarily survive 2 months without our troops and fled like a coward. 

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Seeing more and more competing rumors about what is going on in Panjshir and other former anti-Taliban strongholds. There doesn't seem to be any western media on the ground there, so anything being said has the potential to be propaganda or outright lies from either pro- or anti-Taliban online accounts.

I've both seen people saying that large numbers of former ANA forces have been gathering in Panjshir and people saying that Panjshir has outright surrendered to the Taliban. And no one seems to know where Abdul Dostum is or what his intentions are; he fled to Uzbekistan a couple days ago, but that's all that's known. The guy is almost certainly a war criminal himself, but without him it seems unlikely that any anti-Taliban coalition could muster enough fighters to be a threat.

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1 hour ago, Toth said:

I'm baffled why you want to make this a party history issue now. I'm infuriated by the rampant incompetence that is happening right now in front of our eyes. Sure, the Green party of 20 years ago made themselves culpable by agreeing to the occupation with their measly 6,7% (as did 69 other whole nations...), but how does that invalidate saving our aides before shit hits the fan and the confusion of a full-fledged takeover makes a coordinated evacuation impossible? How is now trying to do the right thing all of a sudden moral grandstanding worthy of condemnation? The vote for the unbureaucratic evacuation was June 26th. You don't need a crystal ball to tell back then that things were going badly already.

That Gregor Gysi was correct in how it's going to be a shit show I'm not denying either. The guy was always a great orator and it was always frustrating to watch that his party never managed to keep up with his take on things.

Quote

 

Vizepräsidentin Dagmar Ziegler:

Ich beende die Aussprache.

Wir kommen nun zur Abstimmung über die Beschluss-empfehlung des Ausschusses für Inneres und Heimat zud em Antrag der Fraktion Bündnis 90/Die Grünen mitd em Titel „Verantwortung anerkennen – Gruppenverfah-ren zur Aufnahme afghanischer Ortskräfte einführen“.

Der Ausschuss empfiehlt in seiner Beschlussempfehlunga uf Drucksache 19/28962, den Antrag der Fraktion Bünd-nis 90/Die Grünen auf Drucksache 19/9274 abzulehnen.

Wer stimmt für diese Beschlussempfehlung? – Fraktio-nen SPD, CDU/CSU und AfD. Wer stimmt dagegen? –Fraktionen Die Linke, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen. Wer ent-hält sich? – Fraktion der FDP. Die Beschlussempfehlung

ist damit angenommen.

Wir sind am Schluss der heutigen Tagesordnung.

Wir wünschen der deutschen Nationalmannschaft, dass sie das Spiel noch dreht.

Ich berufe die nächste Sitzung des Deutschen Bundes-

tages auf morgen, Donnerstag, 24. Juni 2021, 9 Uhr, ein.

Die Sitzung ist geschlossen.

 

Some things are more important than saving the lives of people.

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Staggering amounts of money spent in this place. What a farce.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-47391821

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According to the US Department of Defense, the total military expenditure in Afghanistan (from October 2001 until September 2019) had reached $778bn.

In addition, the US state department - along with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other government agencies - spent $44bn on reconstruction projects.

That brings the total cost - based on official data - to $822bn between 2001 and 2019, but it doesn't include any spending in Pakistan, which the US uses as a base for Afghan-related operations.

According to a Brown University study in 2019, which has looked at war spending in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the US had spent around $978bn (their estimate also includes money allocated for the 2020 fiscal year).

The study notes that it is difficult to assess the overall cost because accounting methods vary between government departments, and they also change over time, leading to different overall estimates.

 

The UK and Germany - who had the largest numbers of troops in Afghanistan after the US - spent an estimated $30bn and $19bn respectively over the course of the war.

Despite pulling out nearly all their troops, the US and Nato have promised a total of $4bn a year until 2024 to fund Afghanistan's own forces.

So far this year, Nato has sent $72m worth of supplies and equipment to Afghanistan.

 

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2 hours ago, Darzin said:

. The US needed to make a decentralized government that fit conditions on the ground while investing in education, literacy and infastructure.

If you can name a successful example of an outside force creating a peaceful decentralized government in a extremely multi-ethnic, tribally-dominated country with multiple competing factions, I'd like to know what it is. The examples of the 20th and 21st century are essentially Germany and Japan -- wildly different states of national identity and development -- and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which took only a relatively little help to establish itself securely after it declared independence, and which entailed conflict between the three ethnic groups that made up the country... versus the dozen+ that make up Afghanistan.

 

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5 minutes ago, Ran said:

If you can name a successful example of an outside force creating a peaceful decentralized government in a extremely multi-ethnic, tribally-dominated country with multiple competing factions, I'd like to know what it is. The examples of the 20th and 21st century are essentially Germany and Japan -- wildly different states of national identity and development -- and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which took only a relatively little help to establish itself securely after it declared independence, and which entailed conflict between the three ethnic groups that made up the country... versus the dozen+ that make up Afghanistan.

 

Bosnia is a failed state anyway. 

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