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by Kowani » Sun Sep 26, 2021 8:04 am
by Saiwania » Sun Sep 26, 2021 8:31 am
by Paddy O Fernature » Sun Sep 26, 2021 9:22 am
by Kowani » Sun Sep 26, 2021 9:41 am
by Evil Wolf » Sun Sep 26, 2021 9:47 am
Paddy O Fernature wrote:
Going to need a more reliable source then Twitter... But if true, seriously, what the actual fuck?
From The Actual Article wrote:According to reports, the US Treasury Department on Friday said it issued two general licences, one allowing the US government, NGOs and certain international organisations, including the United Nations, to engage in transactions with the Taliban or Haqqani Network – both under sanctions – that are necessary to provide humanitarian assistance.
Kryozerkia wrote:In the good old days raiding was illegal
Crazy Girl wrote:Invading was never illegal
[violet] wrote:There is supposed to be an invasion game.
by Fahran » Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:28 am
Mostrov wrote:The Taliban took more casualties in fighting than the ANA did (supposedly). The military strength of the Taliban was largely irrelevant, as almost all of the provinces were taken without need of force at all: they were surrendered.
Mostrov wrote:The NRF has promptly vanished, all acclamation on social media aside: so much for their cohesion!
Mostrov wrote:Afghanistan has well been capable of producing a military in the past, when conditions were even more primitive than today, such as during the Third Anglo-Afghan War: this army was capable of action in a fashion that would have completely eluded the modern army!
Mostrov wrote:So, we cannot say the Afghan culture to be fundamentally incapable of the conditions for armies. Likewise, the Vietnamese had a literacy rate of 10% in 1945, the Chinese had 20% in 1949. Both countries either had just waged a large scale war that in an apocalyptically devastated country or were soon to. Yet they were capable of fielding professional armies which were capable of acting with sophistication. India, a nation that is hopeless divided in its regional, religious and ethnic identities was capable of fielding an army that beat Pakistan in 1965. There are enough counterexamples that disprove such an attempt at parsimony.
Mostrov wrote:All that aside, none of which I think cuts to the core: then what is the very heart of the matter?
Did the Taliban's popularity enable their military success?
Firstly, popularity itself is an unhelpful term—why is it that when a democratically elected government in the west pass below a certain threshold the people do not rebel? And why was the last large scale popular unrest in the west, the gilets juanes, largely unsuccessful?—so, instead I shall use legitimacy, as it conveys the topic better. To a western observer, it would appear obvious that the Taliban are unpopular, but the people to which they speak will chiefly be those who live in Kabul, who enjoyed the fruits of the western occupation and were engaged with the international world to the extent that they will speak with the press. From my own qualitative judgement of two decades of news on Afghanistan, much of these stories concern atrocities committed by the Taliban and so on, barely have we heard any other accounts. Of course there were many, many stories which condemn western atrocities and the western presence, but they do not represent a popular account. What must be considered is that Kabul only accounts for around 1/6th of the population. The vast majority, ~75%, of people live in the countryside. If I were the provide a singular example of the loss of legitimacy of the Afghan government and its de facto replacement by the Taliban it would be this: there existed several court systems in a parallel in the provinces: a government westernized legal system, the traditional Pashtun and appeal to warlords, and the Taliban themselves. The government's courts wer epoorly staffed & hopeless corrupt, requiring large payments to provide aid; the traditional system was prone to violence and the worst sort of extortion; while the Taliban's was seen as simple justice, quicker, fairer and less corrupt. All this can be attested by a search for "Taliban Courts". The point of highlighting this is that when you think of a government, the rule of law is probably the most essential fact of it: as the power of the law ends so does the government's. And if large swathes of government territory is already de facto ruled by the Taliban by the popular participation in this system of law, then the Taliban must have a greater legitimacy than the government if it is able to do this in the very territory the government controls!
by Northern Socialist Council Republics » Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:36 am
by Lady Victory » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:16 pm
Northern Socialist Council Republics wrote:Off-topic, but let us take a moment to show our appreciation for Kowani, the Keeper of the News.
As I said before with regards the United Nations seat: we should accept reality. Whether or not we want the Taliban around doesn’t change the fact that right now, right there, they are in charge and nobody seems to have both the power and motivation to kick them out.
Humanitarian assistance is a stickier point than just diplomatic recognition, but I can see the reasoning in it.
by Washington Resistance Army » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:21 pm
Lady Victory wrote:What happened to waging wars to, y'know, actually fucking win them and attain desirable results?
by Tarsonis » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:23 pm
Lady Victory wrote:Northern Socialist Council Republics wrote:Off-topic, but let us take a moment to show our appreciation for Kowani, the Keeper of the News.
As I said before with regards the United Nations seat: we should accept reality. Whether or not we want the Taliban around doesn’t change the fact that right now, right there, they are in charge and nobody seems to have both the power and motivation to kick them out.
Humanitarian assistance is a stickier point than just diplomatic recognition, but I can see the reasoning in it.
Yeah, that's a hard "no" from me dawg.
I'm tired of this notion that we should tolerate brutal and oppressive regimes because of some arbitrary measure of diplomatic conduct or whatever the fuck other excuse is made. The Taliban deserve nothing short of annihilation. They are slavers, drug traffickers, and terrorists. They use human shields, suicide bombers, and throw acid on people. They rape, loot, and murder with reckless abandon. They are not and should not be recognized as a lawful government; they should be utterly destroyed and I'm getting tired of absolutely no one willing to actually pursue this objective being in a position to make this happen. For 20 fucking years we've been pussyfooting around the idea of actually fighting the Taliban and it's gotten us absolutely jack all. We did not give the Nazis an inch and didn't stop until they were mercilessly crushed; no entertainment of peace, no conditions, no negotiations - we outright destroyed them. We didn't stop until unconditional surrender.
May comparison we've been entertaining talks with the Taliban for two decades, we've let them hide behind Pakistan's borders and the protection of the ISI, we've let them roam the countryside unchecked, we've let them muck about on social media and recruit foreigners to their cause, and so many other fucking stupid decisions that have allowed the Taliban to continue their evil existence. This war should've been over 20 fucking years ago but the MIC had to stick it's dick in ruin everything to the point of making us repeat all the same fucking mistakes we made in Vietnam like we learned absolutely fuck-all. Christ in a hand-basket. What happened to waging wars to, y'know, actually fucking win them and attain desirable results? Good God. I feel like I'm living in clown world.
by Chess Reloaded » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:31 pm
Washington Resistance Army wrote:Lady Victory wrote:What happened to waging wars to, y'know, actually fucking win them and attain desirable results?
Modern progressive liberal morality really. Wars are bloody endeavors and especially when the lines between civilian and combatant are blurred like in the case of the Taliban and other asymmetric groups you have to make lots of very questionable calls and decisions to win. A nation like China could do it, but we just really can't anymore, we're too stuck on the idea of warfare being an honorable thing with strict rules to be followed and the idea that we can simply nation build and make everyone be like us.
by Washington Resistance Army » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:33 pm
Chess Reloaded wrote:Washington Resistance Army wrote:
Modern progressive liberal morality really. Wars are bloody endeavors and especially when the lines between civilian and combatant are blurred like in the case of the Taliban and other asymmetric groups you have to make lots of very questionable calls and decisions to win. A nation like China could do it, but we just really can't anymore, we're too stuck on the idea of warfare being an honorable thing with strict rules to be followed and the idea that we can simply nation build and make everyone be like us.
If you're criticizing America for not using terrorism, they absolutely did, so did their puppet. If you're saying it wasn't enough terrorism, the USSR employed much more and had more combat experience than China which doesn't have a military with wartime expertise
by Kubra » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:35 pm
While it is true that "political defeat is military defeat", intimately true, that's a more clausewitzian statement than our friend here has made, it is nonetheless important to make a distinction between victory by arms and by policy, both for the sake of pedantry (no hate there yo pedantry rules) and to highlight simply how exactly a military/political state of affairs comes to be. If the taliban had committed instead to an all out attack instead of its clever working of local kin affiliations, we'd be talking of the afghan situation very differently.Fahran wrote:Mostrov wrote:In what sense were the Taliban schooled in 'modern warfare'?
Milita forces do not actually need an abundance of schooling on modern warfare when their opponents lack morale and cohesion. Brett Devereaux, whose article I cited above, goes to great lengths to unpack the misconceptions many westerners have regarding comparisons between militia forces and professional forces - nerdily enough by examining the contrast presented by the fighting Uruk-hai of Saruman and the feudal militia of Rohan.
A professional military is heavily dependent upon building cohesion, group identity, and parallel hierarchies to remain effective. It also performs best when the broader culture of a society is accustomed to industry and complex equipment. There's a reason the Taliban probably aren't going to make much use of the massive air force we left them. They do not have the technical know-how or productive capacities to keep it operational, and it's effectiveness is limited enough as is in mountainous terrain.
But I digress. Going back to militia forces, they do have several advantages over professional forces. They come with pre-built social hierarchies that can be transplanted from civilian settings - which can be seen in the mullahs, qadis, and local tribal allies holding a good amount of sway, often over localized, independent forces. They have naturally high morale and cohesion since many of these men will have been drawn from similar backgrounds, possibly from the same villages or madrassas. This means that, in the absence of adequate drilling and morale by a professional force, the militia will win exceedingly often. As happened in Iraq initially, as happened in Lebanon in 2006, and as happened during the Punic War.
That's right. The army that defeated Hannibal at Zama was technically an upjumped militia fighting against a combined force of professional mercenaries and local Carthiginian and Libyan militias.Mostrov wrote:They were essentially an unmechanized militia sans artillery, air support or a sophisticated command structure: if they had any of this, the Americans would have targetted it. I doubt there was any sophisticated plan of attack at all. The actual events suggest a complete collapse of the Afghani army once the underpinning support, the Americans, was removed. If it were a military triumph, then there would have been no mass surrenders. The ANA were defeated politically to paraphrase Clausewitz, not militarily. There are innumerable reasons for this, from the poor quality of troops, corruption, tribalism, over reliance on American forces to accomplish anything &c.
A political defeat is essentially the same as a military defeat. You don't have to kill your enemy, as Devereaux points out in several of his articles, you simply have to lower their morale and cohesion enough that they fall to pieces and run away. The ANA, on the whole, did not have high levels of morale and cohesion. The portions of it that did joined the Resistance and are presently hiding in the hills and mountains.
The Iraqi army fell apart in the face of ISIL too, and I doubt most people would assert that the largely Shia military was welcoming Sunni hardliners who had a penchant for sexual violence and murder. I think this largely reveals the conceit we have about how military forces function. We pay too little attention to pecularities of culture, and, frankly, we played next to no role in ensuring adequate morale and cohesion in the ANA.Mostrov wrote:The blog of a historian of Rome and a book concerning the standing armies of Arab counties aren't particularly relevant. The latter, aside from the point that Pashtuns aren't Arab, mainly deals with conventional conflicts and has little to say regarding politics.
As I said... you have to read into them a bit and extrapolate ideals. I find it exceedingly relevant given what happened in Iraq and Lebanon seems to have happened in Afghanistan.
by Chess Reloaded » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:35 pm
Washington Resistance Army wrote:Chess Reloaded wrote:If you're criticizing America for not using terrorism, they absolutely did, so did their puppet. If you're saying it wasn't enough terrorism, the USSR employed much more and had more combat experience than China which doesn't have a military with wartime expertise
And it's little surprise that the USSR was absolutley slaughtering the Mujahedeen en masse before the US, through Pakistan, started running them the equipment they needed to fight back.
by Washington Resistance Army » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:39 pm
Chess Reloaded wrote:Washington Resistance Army wrote:
And it's little surprise that the USSR was absolutley slaughtering the Mujahedeen en masse before the US, through Pakistan, started running them the equipment they needed to fight back.
The USSR was slaughtering them but it was their miscalculation that that's all victory took. Their rate of slaughter didn't slow,the terrorism you admire killed millions in Afghanistan. But it was bankrupting the USSR and that's what ended it
by Chess Reloaded » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:42 pm
by Kubra » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:46 pm
Yo I was about to post this. For real, nothing about afghanistan bankrupted the soviets more than they were already doing. A drop of piss in a piss-bucket.Washington Resistance Army wrote:Chess Reloaded wrote:The USSR was slaughtering them but it was their miscalculation that that's all victory took. Their rate of slaughter didn't slow,the terrorism you admire killed millions in Afghanistan. But it was bankrupting the USSR and that's what ended it
The USSR imploding from decades of economic mismanagement and a slavishly cult like dedication to heavy industry at the expense of standards of living and consumer goods is what ended it. The Soviets had more than enough men and material to continue the war ad infinitum, but it's kinda hard to do that when your constituent republics are starting to declare independence and things are generally on fire.
by Chess Reloaded » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:51 pm
Kubra wrote:Yo I was about to post this. For real, nothing about afghanistan bankrupted the soviets more than they were already doing. A drop of piss in a piss-bucket.Washington Resistance Army wrote:
The USSR imploding from decades of economic mismanagement and a slavishly cult like dedication to heavy industry at the expense of standards of living and consumer goods is what ended it. The Soviets had more than enough men and material to continue the war ad infinitum, but it's kinda hard to do that when your constituent republics are starting to declare independence and things are generally on fire.
The effect of the afghan war was really just making a generation of straight up embittered vets, caught between their afghan opponents, their cruel superiors, and a logistics apparatus that figured if you just scrape off the rotten bits it's perfectly edible. If there's one silver lining, the US experience in afghanistan is nowhere near as depressing.
by Washington Resistance Army » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:55 pm
Chess Reloaded wrote:Kubra wrote: Yo I was about to post this. For real, nothing about afghanistan bankrupted the soviets more than they were already doing. A drop of piss in a piss-bucket.
The effect of the afghan war was really just making a generation of straight up embittered vets, caught between their afghan opponents, their cruel superiors, and a logistics apparatus that figured if you just scrape off the rotten bits it's perfectly edible. If there's one silver lining, the US experience in afghanistan is nowhere near as depressing.
I don't think you realize how much it was costing for every bomb dropped to get rid of some hovels and kids. Especially when the Afghans starred building massive networks of dummy trenches to draw air strikes in order to bankrupt the USSR--the idea of Ibn Laden who calculated the amount of explosives and its cost uses by the USSR versus each combatant killed and determined the USSR could win on the ground but not financially. He ultimately gave a speech saying the same thing would happen with America, which could dominate the ground but would not be able to sustain it out if economic considerations
by Kubra » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:57 pm
No more than the bombs and other subsidies it offered particular clients at cut-rates elsewhere.Chess Reloaded wrote:Kubra wrote: Yo I was about to post this. For real, nothing about afghanistan bankrupted the soviets more than they were already doing. A drop of piss in a piss-bucket.
The effect of the afghan war was really just making a generation of straight up embittered vets, caught between their afghan opponents, their cruel superiors, and a logistics apparatus that figured if you just scrape off the rotten bits it's perfectly edible. If there's one silver lining, the US experience in afghanistan is nowhere near as depressing.
I don't think you realize how much it was costing for every bomb dropped to get rid of some hovels and kids. Especially when the Afghans starred building massive networks of funny trenches to draw air strikes in order to bankrupt the USSR--the idea of Ibn Laden who calculated the amount of explosives and its cost uses by the USSR versus each combatant killed and determined the USSR could win on the ground but not financially. He ultimately gave a speech saying the same thing would happen with America, which could dominate the ground but would not be able to sustain it out if economic considerations
by Kubra » Sun Sep 26, 2021 1:59 pm
People (including serious marxist economists) always gripe about the cost of soviet defense spending, but really their arms industry was one of the few well run enough to actually produce products that could be exported at a profit, especially with the soviets, well, less-than-palatable sales strategies. Motherfuckers were the payday loan's of the arms industry.Washington Resistance Army wrote:Chess Reloaded wrote:I don't think you realize how much it was costing for every bomb dropped to get rid of some hovels and kids. Especially when the Afghans starred building massive networks of dummy trenches to draw air strikes in order to bankrupt the USSR--the idea of Ibn Laden who calculated the amount of explosives and its cost uses by the USSR versus each combatant killed and determined the USSR could win on the ground but not financially. He ultimately gave a speech saying the same thing would happen with America, which could dominate the ground but would not be able to sustain it out if economic considerations
I think you drastically overestimate the cost of Soviet warfare. There's a lot to be said about Soviet economics but one thing it did very well was produce war fighting equipment at almost no real cost, even advanced things like MBT's cost the Soviet government barely anything. Dumb fired bombs probably cost them no more than a few dollars each.
by Insaanistan » Sun Sep 26, 2021 2:38 pm
by Senkaku » Sun Sep 26, 2021 2:39 pm
Washington Resistance Army wrote:Lady Victory wrote:What happened to waging wars to, y'know, actually fucking win them and attain desirable results?
Modern progressive liberal morality really. Wars are bloody endeavors and especially when the lines between civilian and combatant are blurred like in the case of the Taliban and other asymmetric groups you have to make lots of very questionable calls and decisions to win. A nation like China could do it, but we just really can't anymore, we're too stuck on the idea of warfare being an honorable thing with strict rules to be followed and the idea that we can simply nation build and make everyone be like us.
by Kubra » Sun Sep 26, 2021 2:46 pm
Yeah uh actually the afghans liked us more than the iraqi's did until, er, a slight preliminary bombing campaign.Senkaku wrote:Washington Resistance Army wrote:
Modern progressive liberal morality really. Wars are bloody endeavors and especially when the lines between civilian and combatant are blurred like in the case of the Taliban and other asymmetric groups you have to make lots of very questionable calls and decisions to win. A nation like China could do it, but we just really can't anymore, we're too stuck on the idea of warfare being an honorable thing with strict rules to be followed and the idea that we can simply nation build and make everyone be like us.
yes, the problem with the war in Afghanistan was that we did not make enough questionable decisions about the lines between civilian and combatant
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