You kill them. As many as you can, as quick as you can, with extreme prejudice. Then you salt the earth, smear bacon grease on the corpses, and leave.
Nothing illustrates the folly of our 18-year-long nation-building mission in Afghanistan better than the partial peace bought by a months-long negotiation breaking down after just 72 hours.
AFP also reports, “three killed, 11 injured in blast in east Afghanistan,” so you know the Taliban wasn’t kidding around. The “operation,” as the Taliban likes to call it, or “savage terror attack,” as any honest person would call it, was in response to confusion between the Trump White House and the Afghan central government over the release of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners.
“Release” them? That’s another thing you never, ever do with Mooselimb terrorists. Then again, the first mistake there was taking live prisoners at all rather than going full Black Flag on their primitive asses. At this late date, the esteemed Miz Kelly has the right of it:
With few exceptions, America’s longest war is largely ignored by our political class while the costs and casualties mount. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held a hearing last month on the Washington Post’s explosive and infuriating series on the war in Afghanistan: Only three of his colleagues bothered to attend. The sole Democrat in attendance was the committee’s ranking member, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.).
“Doing nothing is no longer an option for any senator or member of Congress with a conscience,” Paul said, perhaps during a moment of wishful thinking.
The long-time proponent of ending the Afghanistan war ticked off the stats: Nearly 2,400 dead U.S. servicemen and women with more than 20,000 wounded. Soldiers who have faced numerous deployments since the war began in 2001. And nearly $1 trillion in U.S. tax dollars—an average of $50 billion per year for almost 20 years, as Paul pointed out—spent in a backward nation that still ranks near the bottom of the list of the world’s most economically and politically free countries.
“What has that $1 trillion bought us? What do we have to show for it?” Paul asked. “Did a trillion dollars make Afghanistan more stable…[or] move us one step closer to victory?”
The answer, of course, is no. Barack Obama’s 2009 troop surge didn’t work; as his vice president now campaigns for president, it’s important to remember that three-quarters of the total troop fatalities in Afghanistan occurred during the Obama presidency.
The war in Afghanistan is a catastrophic failure by every measure. It should cast a permanent shadow of shame over those who continued to promote it despite clear evidence for years that it was a disaster with no hope of a positive outcome.
Afghanistan is not worth one more life, one more grievous injury, or one more tax dollar to maintain our military’s presence there. Those who insist we remain only do so out of vanity and self-interest; to concur with Trump at this point would concede that their planning and execution have been wrong all along.
Even the peace plan’s detractors cannot come up with a compelling reason to stay other than hollow warnings about national security threats to the homeland. That claim, according to Jordan Schachtel, a D.C-based foreign policy analyst and journalist, is bunk.
“There is no threat to America from Afghanistan, a land of desolate poverty, which is occupied by subsistence farmers and families living in mud huts,” Schachtel told me by email. He thinks the peace deal is a “stall tactic” designed to fail and should have no bearing on whether the U.S. stays or leaves Afghanistan. “The best path forward does not include a deal. Just leave the country.”
A. Friggin. MEN.
“Nation-bulding” is the bunk. If you’re going to fight a war, you fight the ever-loving hell out of the damned thing. You use absolutely every weapon available to you, employing their destructive capabilities to the verymost maximum. You throw everything at the enemy you can get your hands on, without reference to the folly of gentlemanly niceties, sentimentality, or misguided “code of honor” that your enemy will never comply with himself or, in this case, even comprehend. You kill people and break things—savagely, ruthlessly, and mercilessly—until your enemy’s will to resist is irrepairably broken. You rain almighty Hell-fire and brimstone down on his head with neither pity nor surcease, until sheer terror at the merest fleeting thought of doing battle with you reduces him to a state of gibbering catatonia.
If you lack the will or the cold practicality to do all those things, you stay the fucking fuck home.
Sherman said it best: “War is cruelty, there is no use trying to reform it; the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” He later added: “War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.” Yesirreebob. All they want, plus a stiff measure more, so as to discourage future misbehavior.
- Entries
They will never understand. I’ve been saying it for years. As soon as you hear “Rules of Engagement” or “sink to their level”, you should hear “I don’t have the will to wage war.”
That goes double for Muslims. The Pershing story may be apochryphal, but THAT’s how you deal with ’em. Islam is NOT a religion, it’s a culture… a culture bent on subjugating your children. Forever.
Do note that those “leaders” who insist that we must “win their hearts and minds” have no problems with Sherman…
Sherman will never be welcomed in most of the South, but By God he won!!
So did the FBI at Waco and Ruby Ridge. By the same means…
Touche. If only that inclination to total war be limited to those who are not American citizens!
Instead, it seems to be limited to only those who ARE American citizens!!! Ever since the end of WWII…