Savages! – Page 16

Tell ’em NO

Posted on August 21, 2021August 21, 2021 by Mike

To the planned Afghani “refugee” Immivasion.

The same people who tried to morally blackmail you into supporting a failed Forever War in Afghanistan—the ones who declared that you were either on board with the new international interventionist imperative or you were with the terrorists—are now trying to morally blackmail you into supporting open borders with Afghanistan and every other country that America’s incompetent elites thought they could turn into Stepford if only they invaded it hard enough. In truth, the entire foundation of the Washington establishment’s failed foreign policy is its members’ own feelings of guilt.

They felt guilty that Afghanistan looked like an awful place to live, so they set about rebuilding the country in their own image, complete with gender equity courses and lectures on how the predominantly Muslim citizens of the country need to be more like their secular Western counterparts.

They felt guilty about what they spent 20 years doing in Afghanistan—falsely offering hope of an eternal American safety net, constructed and maintained not with their own blood, sweat, and tears, but with those of enlisted American military men and women scoffed at and mocked by the smart set—so you must accept the risk posed by a terrorist who pretended to be a refugee to get across the nation’s increasingly non-existent southern border.

They feel guilty about their wealth and privilege (not guilty enough to give that wealth or privilege to anyone else, of course), so you must accept the lower wages that are the obvious result of inflating the labor supply while depressing demand through job-crushing progressive economic policy.

These concerns about the runaway costs of interventionism, however, are based firmly in reality. Take the story of an Afghan interpreter told in “Outlaw Platoon,” the spectacular war memoir by Sean Parnell, who served as a combat platoon leader in one of the most violent parts of Afghanistan.

In his book, Parnell details how one of the Afghan interpreters in his platoon, a man who had been thoroughly “vetted” and given access to some of the Army’s closest held secrets, helped engineer an improvised explosive attack that killed one of Parnell’s troops, Cpl. Jeremiah S. Cole, and seriously injured four others. That interpreter, who went by the name Yusef, also arranged for the murder of his counterpart Abdul so Yusef would have total access to all sensitive information, such as troop movements and attack plans, which he then passed along to America’s enemies.

“Knowing where Abdul had been going and the road he had used to get there, Yusef’s tip had allowed the insurgents to establish an ambush in time to catch Abdul on his way back to Bermel from his family’s house,” Parnell writes. “With Abdul dead, Yusef knew he would be promoted to head interpreter.”

“We’d gone through our year in country, judging these Afghans through the prism of our own value systems, never fully grasping what we were up against,” Parnell concluded.

Earlier this week, Parnell shared that story on Tucker Carlson’s primetime show on Fox News. Media Matters immediately responded by slicing and dicing the transcript of Parnell’s appearance to smear him as a racist for believing, based on his own personal experience with a vetted Afghan who murdered one of his brothers in arms, that America could not properly vet the thousands of Afghans wishing to immigrate to America.

This is but one story of literally millions from around the Western world, of course. Unfortunately, the Immivasion has already begun, thanks to the conniving US goobermint.

Pentagon: "For the previous 24 hours, sixteen C-17s and one C-130 departed Kabul. These flights contained nearly 6,000 passengers including a couple hundred American citizens." pic.twitter.com/eIJ4YhM30K

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 20, 2021

See what I meant when I mentioned priorities in the preceding post? More:

Press propagandists, government bureaucrats, and pro migrant wave activists have continued to claim that virtually all of the Afghans being imported into the United States are akin to “fully vetted” Medal of Honor recipients. These tens of thousands of Afghans are a cadre of patriotic war heroes that “helped us” in our “war on terror,” we’re told. Therefore, they are somehow immediately entitled to permanent relocation into the United States.

And this isn’t a new policy push. For several years, lawmakers have been passing massive funding in Congress to relocate Afghans to the United States on “special immigrant visas,” which entitles them to access the U.S. social welfare system immediately and in perpetuity. It also allows Afghans to avoid deportation under almost any circumstances.

While the migration wave proponents tell us that almost every Afghan is the equivalent of a “fully vetted” Captain America who remained true to the U.S. mission in the country (whatever that actually was still remains unclear), reality tells us a much more grave tale. During the 20 year war, American soldiers have been repeatedly targeted with “green-on-blue” attacks, in which supposedly vetted, trusted Afghan allies turned their US-supplied weapons against our troops.

Hundreds of American service members have been killed and wounded by Afghan army soldiers, who “helped us,” until they didn’t. After cutting a deal with the jihadists, these outwardly allied troops turned their guns on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, repeatedly and consistently.

Why is the Afghan migrant wave so U.S. centric this time around? Well, the European continent is understandably balking at the idea of taking in more Afghans. The 2014-2015 Afghan migration wave into Europe resulted in a massive uptick in criminal activity.

In Germany, which absorbed a 6-figure tally of Afghan migrants and refugees, Afghans stood out as the most frequent perpetrators of gang violence and sexual assault. Now, following the unprecedented violence committed by Afghan migrants, six EU nations are fighting to deport them back to their homeland, even despite the chaos unfolding in their home country.

The massive Afghan migration wave that is coming to the United States will represent a more grave threat to our homeland security than anything that will have occurred over the course of 20 years in the far away lands of Afghanistan.

Indeed it will.

Folks, we now stand at one of those recurring historical pivot-points, or crossroads; the fate of the nation, quite literally, hangs upon which path we choose. If that sounds as if I’m callously advocating for the Biden Bugout to be exploited for political gain…well, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing. If it seems a bit cynical and opportunistic about this…well, guilty as charged. If you’re worried that the Left will try to weaponize what they’ll decry as “heartless,” “racist,” and/or “selfish” and turn a perfectly reasonable and rational opposition to the importation of hordes of unvetted, unassimilable “refugees” against us…well, of course they will. There’s only one sane response to such moral blackmail. Back over to Davis to spell out what it is.

Like one of those old magic eye posters that contained images hidden among visual white noise, once you see the American ruling elite’s reflex to resort to moral blackmail to win an argument, you can never unsee it. Every policy, every argument, every talking point asserts that you are a racist and a bad person if you believe America’s government should first and foremost protect American citizens. This is a fun game for the failed foreign policy establishment, because they reap all the benefits of using Americans’ blood and money to pump up their self-esteem while bearing precisely none of the costs.

One of the primary reasons this cadre of credentialed incompetents loathed former president Donald Trump is because, as a secular, thrice-married New York billionaire, he was impervious to the moral blackmail that had worked like a charm on everyone else for over a decade. He didn’t much care if they called him racist for wanting to secure the border and put an end to open borders. He didn’t care if they called him heartless for wanting to shut down immigration from “sh-thole countries” to preserve the wages of American workers. And he didn’t care if they called him stupid for refusing to go along with their plans for forever wars all around the globe.

For a time, America had a president who wouldn’t be bullied into doing things that weren’t in America’s national security interests. They hated him for it, and it’s why they spent every waking moment for four years, including two impeachments, desperately trying to throw him out of office.

Moral blackmail only works when the target cares what the blackmailer thinks about him. America’s interventionist elites have publicly failed in the most spectacular way possible, with the evidence of their failures playing on repeat on television for all the world to see.

Breaking their hold on power from here on out is simple: stop caring what they think, and stop caring what they say about you. Their ideas are disastrous and their rhetoric—that anyone who disagrees with them is a racist traitor—is toxic in a society built on free expression. The architects of the nation-building policies from Afghanistan to Iraq are failures and should be treated with the same disdain reserved for flat earthers or bloodletters.

Do you want to prevent the next Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya or Syria from being foisted on the American public at the cost of who knows how many decades, lives, or trillions of dollars? Stop giving them an inch. Stop kowtowing to their moral blackmail. Start telling them no.

Precisely. But that’s only the first step. There are others we’ll have to take, much more drastic and dark ones. But as with any journey, this first step is an absolute must. Because if it isn’t taken, the nation will be irrecoverably lost, and all those other steps will be no more than what-ifs, to be looked back on with regret.

Hidin’ Biden: “I have seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world”

Posted on August 21, 2021August 21, 2021 by Mike

I’m sure that’s perfectly true, actually. He sees only what his handlers allow him to, understands very little of it, and immediately forgets the whole thing the moment somebody hands him another ice cream cone.

Biden says he’s seen no ‘questioning’ of Afghan policy by allies – despite angry scenes in UK parliament
But despite Mr Biden’s words, plenty of European politicians have objected.

In the UK, former prime minister Theresa May was among dozens who criticised Mr Biden’s decision to follow through with former president Donald Trump’s exit plan from Afghanistan.

Similarly, Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, himself a veteran of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, told The Independent earlier this week: “Blame shifting in the face of the predicted disaster that is Afghanistan today is extraordinary.”

Following Mr Biden’s speech on the situation in Afghanistan on Monday, British Conservative MP Simon Clarke posted on social media: “The more you reflect, the more you realise the speech POTUS gave last night was grotesque.

“An utter repudiation of the America so many of us have admired so deeply all our lives – the champion of liberty and democracy and the guardian of what’s right in the world.”

Not quite. In truth, it’s the repudiation of Amerika v2.0—the misbegotten, dysfunctional obscenity that replaced the America you’re talking about. And that phony “America” is deserving of all the repudiation that can be heaped upon it, and of a lot of other things besides.

And with that, the time has come for me to write something I never, ever expected to.

I understand that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division has told the commander of the British special forces at the Kabul airport to cease operations beyond the airport perimeter.

Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue has told his British Army counterpart, a high-ranking field-grade officer of the British army’s 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, that British operations were embarrassing the United States military in the absence of similar U.S. military operations. I understand that the British officer firmly rejected the request.

Emphasis mine, and nothing short of stunning, at least to me. With all the fissures, fractures, and structural weakness now being laid bare by the stresses this past week has subjected Amerika v2.0’s jerry-rigged foundation to, British soldiers are displaying some of the good old Limey mettle that saw them through the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz so long ago—the grit and balls-out courage that made Britain truly Great, that inspired the awe and admiration of the once-free world, but that afterwards appeared to have been forever lost. Good on ya, chaps, and may God bless you all.

The headline of that last piece says something very different about our own military “leadership,” alas:

US general tells British special forces: Stop rescuing people in Kabul, you’re making us look bad

Umm, no sir (spelled with a “c” and a “u,” mind), not exactly. From what I can tell, you accomplished that mission quite thoroughly on your own, with no assistance necessary from those stout SAS and 2nd Para squaddies. Further deets:

According to some reports, conflict is developing between US forces, who seem to be content to let potential evacuees make their own way through Taliban checkpoints to the airport (we are literally referring them to a web form Up to 10,000 Americans Remain Trapped in Afghanistan as We Face a Second Iran Hostage Crisis) and the British forces who are going out to bring in evacuees. This is from a freelancer inside Kabul Airport.

There are also unconfirmed reports that 2 Para has exchanged shots with the Taliban on some patrols.

Some thoughts on all of this.

The tweets from the freelancer mesh with the frustration expressed by the British commander on the scene. I don’t know anything about the journalist’s background, but bashing the American Army and puffing the British Army up as superheroes is an accepted journalism genre in Britain; keep that in mind. [I have some personal experience with 2 Para; they were the partnership battalion with my battalion in Berlin. The troops are tough…I might even say sort of thuggish. One of my friends was chatting up a German girl outside the Irish Harp in Charlottenburg. The last thing he heard before getting his ass kicked was, “F***, it’s a Yank!” He knew it was 2 Para because the people stomping him wore jump boots with their civvies.] There is no doubt that they are aggressive, and if their vision of evacuation is pulling people in while ours is waiting for them to walk through Taliban checkpoints, I have no doubt that there have been several frank and open exchanges of views. The cascading tragedy at Kabul probably hasn’t helped the working relationship, either. As with any terrific story, there are caveats. The actual veracity of the report of conflict between British paras and American airborne is being challenged.

I’ve seen and heard reports that, far from being “content to let potential evacuees make their own way…to the airport,” there is widespread and increasing anger in the US rank-and-file over having been told to sit on their hands whilst the Brits—even the French, for chrissakes—are going out and getting the job done.

Another interesting item I saw the other day said that British troops at Karzai airport charged with checking the IDs of British and Irish civvies before allowing them inside their perimeter were summarily denying entry to all Afghan nationals, regardless of any claimed status as employees, translators, and etc. In fact, the story said that the Brits were turning them down flat without even bothering to check any paperwork the Afghanis had with them at all, grounds for that being that UK subjects had first claim on the limited airlift capacity available to evacuate them.

Which seems to me to be the correct way to handle this mess. If these stories are accurate, which I hope they are, then the British military has its priorities squarely in order here, in a way that Americans can only envy. Then again, if our military and political “leadership” had their priorities similarly aligned—putting the interests of their country and its people first and foremost, as they should be—it’s doubtful any of this would be happening in the first damned place.

In any event, if the Brits are angry about all this, well, they’re right to be. ALL of us ought to be, and ought to keep that anger well-stoked, too. For my part, I intend to go right on hammering away at this story indefinitely; right now, my big fear is that the Biden Bugout will be encouraged to slink quietly out of the national Zeitgest and then fade away, just as the Benghazi blunder has done. Don’t kid yourself that it couldn’t happen, either. It most certainly could, and a lot faster than you might believe. It cannot, MUST not, be allowed to happen this time. The blaze of anger and disgust sparked in so broad and varied a portion of the population must instead be not just maintained, but intensified.

Bonfire of the inanities

Posted on August 20, 2021August 20, 2021 by Mike

Adam at PRD takes Marjorie Taylor Greene to task for a spectacularly…well, just plain stupid post:

Having any of it, Adam? No sir, Adam most certainly is not.

This was on Gab. Check out the number of likes and comments. If you have any familiarity with Gab, those sort of numbers are about the highest an individual can generate on that platform. So a lot of people are in agreement with this nonsense.

And nonsense it most certainly is. Let’s examine each sentence in turn.

The Taliban have already felt the full force of the US military for the last twenty years. And they delivered it a resounding defeat. This is so obtuse that it makes Biden look like a certified genius. What sort of nation feels the right to make demands of this sort to another government of whom it has only just run away from with its tail firmly between its legs? Perhaps the Japs could have said something similar at the end of the Second World War.

The second sentence is even better, which is hard to believe is possible. The Taliban must stand down? After they just won the war, kicked you out and captured all of your military hardware which you left behind in your undignified rush for the exits? What planet are these people on? Do the Americans even realise that they have just lost a twenty year war against tribal insurgents? Again?? Tone deaf doesn’t even begin to cover this blather.

Sentence number three is the icing on the cake. Have you heard that, you Taliban naughty persons? This is NOT a negotiation. You have been told by the great school marm herself. Why, those Taliban dudes must be shaking in their boots so hard that the movement of their beards is causing all the wind turbines in the world to actually be cost efficient.

Listen America – you’re not the biggest and the bestest and the greatest and the invinciblest anymore. Your shock and awe is just a distant memory. Now it’s more like cock and bore. Your exuberant self-belief in your own righteousness and superiority just makes you look ridiculous and weak. America is Will Farrell running down the race circuit convinced that he won the race when he actually lost. It is Ben Stiller as Zoolander making an acceptance speech for a modeling award that he also just lost.

America has become its own parody.

That’s about the size of it, yeah. Up till now, I’ve had no real problem with MTG at all, and in fact kinda liked her. After this thunderous self-beclownment, though, a reconsideration of my position might be in order. Her heart might be in the right place, but the sentiment is, ohh, about eighteen years too late.

Sorry, Marge, but we all need to get our heads firmly around the essential fact that countries which LOSE wars don’t get to go around threatening the winners. Doing so can only make the loser-nation look even more foolish and ineffectual than it already did. When your massive, hi-tech military machine has just been sent packing in humiliating disarray by a bunch of stone-age, cave-dwelling goatherds riding mules, a bit of humility and introspection might be more in order.

Not that I consider it to be the fault of grunt-level US soldiers, mind. They, too, have been abused, manipulated, and betrayed by the most hideous “leadership” class in human history. But still. Until such time as the pus-nutted filthwads who ARE reponsible have received the full dose of retributive justice that’s their due and proper, we’ll all be better off if we just eschew any more fist-waving and empty windbaggery.

A culture of faith and force

Posted on August 20, 2021August 20, 2021 by Mike

When it clashes—as it inevitably must—with a culture bereft of either and wildly, reflexively averse to both, guess who comes out the winner every time?

Here’s a story about CENTCOM Commander Gen. Frank McKenzie meeting with the heads of the bloody subhumans comprising Taliban, at Doha, in order to beg permission to scuttle out of Kabul without, at best, his people getting their asses chewed off by AAA-fire before the landing gear is in the wells.

That’s where that all is, now.

The second video clip on the page is among the most harrowing that I’ve seen in the whole catastrophe, so far. I can see everything implicit in a scene of illiterate Southwest Asian peasants running alongside and climbing, where they can, onto a C-117 heavy-lift jet airplane, cheering it along a taxiway like some uncanny burden-beast in an appearance in the village festival parade.

We’re talking about the pre-scientific mind. Their leaders have for generations suppressed and overthrown every approach to modern life, all of which is born and borne in the West. Everything they have that’s modern, came from the minds and work of people the like of which they have never raised.

Now, they have fallen to the ravages of this murderously anti-human scourge, the Taliban, among whose stated intents is to bring the whole world under their blade. It’s awful to see anyone driven to such abject mortal terror. Among the recurring attractions of my eye in watching various Kabul videos is the children, almost always holding tightly to an adult hand, illustrating the last shred of trust that someone is going to do something to make everyone stop running and screaming.

This is a very old culture of faith and force, virtually untouched by the attributes of reason which are an essential characteristic of the Western mind, except in various expedient mimicries: they can machine an AK-47 right there in front of their hut, but they’re not interested to work-up what it takes to invent something like that and everything that goes into genuine industry of anything on a national scale.

Their sketch of “government” is Victorian, at best, foggily-lensed as a sort-of cargo-cult apprehension of form and baksheesh in practice — at worst, it’s plainly medieval and it’s about to get medievaler.

For now, the world is just going to have to suffer this one. This; on top of twenty years of America doing its own suffering at just living with a constant state of war so sublime that it takes something like the past forty-eight hours of Afghanistan for even CENTCOM to finally take it seriously as it really is. The imaginable horrors awaiting that place harrow up the soul.

Just imagine the horrors awaiting US, once we’ve upped the importation of these primordials to, say, Merkelian standards.

It’s Billy Beck talking, so you know what you must do, Glasshoppa.

The enemy among us

Posted on August 20, 2021August 20, 2021 by Mike

Make America Mogadishu Again?

So what happens to you now in a country run by the Taliban? It’s hard to think about that. And yet tonight many Americans are thinking about it and they’re feeling distressed as they do. Americans are kind people and generous. They’re quicker and more eager to help strangers than anyone else in the world. We haven’t seen polling on it, but we bet if you asked one hundred people, should we try to help Afghans who are facing persecution for helping us, most Americans would say, of course, we should. And we should be glad that they say that you should be happy you live in a country where your neighbors love children and dogs and want to help refugees. We are generous and empathetic people and we should be proud.

Unfortunately, there are many in our ruling class who are anxious to take advantage of that, anxious, to take advantage of our best qualities. They see our decency and our weakness, and they exploit those things and they do it relentlessly. Let’s try to save our loyal Afghan interpreters, we tell them. Perfect, they think. We’ll open the borders and change the demographic balance of this country. Of course, that’s exactly what they’re doing right now on our southern border, naturally in the name of human rights and compassion. And they would like to do the very same thing with the disaster unfolding in Afghanistan, the disaster that they created. Look at what this kid on MSNBC said yesterday, and remember, as you watch, that he is regarded with total seriousness in Washington as a foreign policy expert and that his fellow foreign policy experts wholeheartedly agree with him.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: We’re talking about an evacuation of people who helped the wars, and that’s an obligation of the United States but it’s sort of a moral floor that’s functioning as a moral ceiling. The Bush administration, I’m sorry the Biden administration, pardon me, isn’t doing things necessary like increasing TPS access and letting in refugees by the millions to escape their certain fate at the hands of the Taliban.

So we must “let in refugees by the millions,” said the mustachioed foreign policy expert. The millions. Millions is not a handful of loyal Afghan interpreters. That’s not even a fleet of cargo planes full of loyal Afghan interpreters. Millions is a good chunk of the entire population of Afghanistan, brought to our country at our expense to live in your neighborhood at the very moment our national fabric is fraying, in case you haven’t noticed, and the United States is becoming unmistakably poorer.

Do we really need millions of Afghan refugees in Phoenix, you ask? Shut up. Racist. OK, go ahead and do it. That’s how the process typically works. In fact, that’s pretty much how it always works with everything now. At this point, fighting racism is the universal justification for every bad idea. Tear down our statues. OK. Stop teaching math. OK. Get rid of standardized testing. All right. Defund the police, move millions of Afghan refugees to swing states to help the Democratic Party. OK. Oppose any of it, and you’re a racist. So in the end, it always happens. And in this case, it may happen. It probably will.

But what happens then to us? How will this new wave of immigration affect America? Will America be a better country or will it be a little more like Afghanistan, which is to say not really a better country? We can’t be sure of what’s going to happen. We can’t see the future. But for a hint, a glimpse, maybe we ought to pay some attention to what has happened in Europe recently. They just went through this.

OK, so Afghan refugees have destabilized countries into which they have moved in large numbers, but we have a moral obligation to take them anyway. Really? Why is that? Why is this our unique moral burden? Isn’t the U.S. government’s first obligation to its own people? Isn’t that the only point of having a government to look out for its citizens? Why else have a government, actually?

After digesting all the other hard facts Tucker spells out in this crucial piece, the real question we need to ask ourselves is: why have THIS government?

How many of these Afghans and their family members, you have to wonder, are excited about coming to America? Huh. It’s interesting, maybe you should ask that question, maybe you should ask Ilhan Omar. Her position is the only reason that American citizens might object to being flooded with millions of new refugees from Afghanistan is that Americans, people who are born here and built this country are actually mediocre and insecure.

ILHAN OMAR: And then you’ve got these crazy people on the right doing what they always do with their fear-mongering and their hateful rhetoric, and I know what some of these people are worried about is that they’re worried that refugees like myself when they come to this country, will outshine them.

So the obvious response to that is to attack poor Ilhan Omar, but we’re not going to do that. The truth is, this is our fault. It is our fault. Ilhan Omar is living proof that we are not very good at resettling refugees. She was saved from a refugee camp in Kenya as a child by the kindness and generosity of America. And yet she has grown to hate America and the people who live here.

Where did she learn those attitudes? Well, of course, in college, our colleges, we taught her to hate our country. She became worse after she got here. We ought to pause before we do that again, to anyone, even if they’ve been translators.

Reading this article, it fairly well slaps you upside yo’ haid that the enormity of the multitudinous problems we face is simply overwhelming, almost beyond human ability to comprehend. That said, those problems all flow from a single source. We know full well what that source is, just as we also know the one and only way it can ever be shut down. That’s the long and the short of it, folks.

The Blame Game continues

Posted on August 19, 2021August 19, 2021 by Mike

Gotta admit, here’s a culprit I hadn’t really thought of before. But after reading this, I can’t really say it’s all that much of a stretch.

So who is to blame for the current Afghanistan fiasco?

There is plenty of blame to go around. President Biden, for sure. President Obama, yes. And the second President Bush, yes, for the insane mission of nation-building, trying to install a Western-style democracy in a land that was wholly unsuited for it.

But here is a name nobody is mentioning but should. That name is…Ronald Reagan.

Yeah, I know, I know. Just slow your roll a little, and hear this guy out.

I hate saying that. I supported the sainted Reagan rabidly back in the day, and I still do in many ways. But now, in retrospect, I see Reagan as the ultimate culprit for the current fiasco. History may yet look to Ronald Reagan’s decision to intervene in Afghanistan as his biggest mistake.

But, gee, Reagan’s decision sure seemed like the right decision at the time. I certainly supported it.

The Russian war in Afghanistan consisted of three phases. Phase 1: The Russians invaded with a classical WWII army — and promptly got their backsides handed to them. The USSR lost Phase 1.

But the Russians learned their lessons and for the next phase used a modern strategy of helicopters and other air assets to obliterate the Mujaheddin. It worked. The USSR won Phase 2 and, as a result, completely controlled the country. The Mujaheddin were exiled across the Khyber Pass in Pakistan, licking their wounds.

Phase 3 can be summed up in one word: Stinger, as in Stinger missiles. With Stinger missiles, which Uncle Ronnie gave them, the Mujaheddin took air control away from the Russians, drove them out, and the rest is — not only history, but now current events, too.

For a short time, the USSR had built a classical Marxist state in Afghanistan. So what are the hallmarks of such a regime?

A police state — yes. Brutal suppression of dissent — yes. Lots of suppression of human rights, lots of imprisonment, lots of executions, lots of corruption — yes, yes, yes.

But now think of what else it means.

Suppression of organized religion. In this case, this isn’t gentle, harmless Christianity we’re talking about. Rather, this is jihadist Islam. This would have been suppressed savagely, not least because, unlike Christianity, such an Islam really is a threat to a secular, atheistic state.

So, inside this classical, secular, atheist Marxist state, there’d have been no room at all for al-Qaeda or the Taliban or ISIS. Afghanistan would never have become a world base for Islamic terror. There never would have been an attack on 9/11.

Here are other hallmarks of Marxism, and these are positive, at least in the context of a medieval Islamic nation: universal health. Universal education, and for girls as well as for boys.

If Marxism had been allowed to prevail in Afghanistan, its women would have been immensely better off than what actually happened to them.

It might sound ugly and cruel, but at this stage of things I can’t honestly say I give much of a shit about what might happen to women in ANY Moslem shithole. And while we’re being brutally honest here, I also can’t say I care much more about the fate of the thousands of American State Dept personnel who are stuck there, either. Same goes for “our Afghani allies”—translators, ANA soldiers, etc.

Yes, I do agree that they’ve been stabbed in the back—betrayed and ruthlessly abandoned by a faithless, heartless “ally.” So stipulated. But see, those poor, hapless Afghanis made the same mistake a goodly number of Normal Americans here at home still make: their conception of what the USA—specifically, the US government—is and what it actually is are, shall we say, at variance. WIDE variance.

Tens of thousands will die horribly at the hands of some of the most vicious, barbaric monsters the race is capable of producing because of all this. I’m sorry for that. I wish it wasn’t happening. But there’s also not one damned thing I can do about it. For those doomed souls who acted on their misplaced faith that the wholly-evil US government would have their backs and honor its promise to protect them, the sad fact is this:

There is a silver lining to this whole clusterfuck, however tarnished. If nothing else, after Biden’s Big Afghan Adventure, there can be NO excuse for not recognizing the true nature of the US federal government—what it is; what it does; what its intentions are; what it actually gives a shit about, and what it doesn’t. The mask has been ripped away for good; there’s no longer any way to conceal the ugly truth. The more people awakened by the revelations of this past week, the more likely that corrective action will be taken, and the sooner it will happen. If so, we’ll all be better off for it.

Post-mort

Posted on August 19, 2021August 19, 2021 by Mike

Another real no-shitter, this one quite comprehensive and in-depth.

I ask that you not use my name. I am a currently serving General Officer and what I have to say is highly critical of our current military leadership. But it must be said.

I don’t blame President Biden for the catastrophe in Afghanistan. It was the right decision to leave, the proof of which is how quickly the country collapsed without US support. Twenty years of training and equipping the Afghan army and all that they were capable of was a few hours of delay in a country the size of Texas. As for his predecessor, the only blame I place on President Trump was that he didn’t withdraw sooner.

We should blame President Bush, not for the decision to attack into Afghanistan following 9-11, but for his decision to “shift the goalposts” and attempt to reform Afghanistan society. That was a fool’s errand any student of history would have recognized. And yes, we should place blame on President Obama for his decision to double down on failure when he “surged” in Afghanistan, rather than to withdraw.

However, most of the blame belongs to the leadership of the US military, and the Army in particular. The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” detailed years of US officials failing to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” That report was two years ago, and the stories within it began more than a decade before that. Afghanistan was, and always will be, “unwinnable”.

Of course, I blame President Biden for the disastrous retrograde operation still unfolding. But let us not allow that to deflect us from heaping even more blame on military leaders. They stonewalled President Trump rather than beginning deliberate preparations to exit the country when he told them to. They thought that they could outlast him and then talk sense to his successor. Then after the inauguration, they pressed the new president to reverse course. He wisely chose withdrawal. Then and only then did the generals begin their preparations in earnest. But it was too late to do it well.

The war in Afghanistan lasted more than twice as long as the Vietnam War. Although the cost in terms of American blood was thankfully far smaller, the mistakes are the same: America got involved in a long land war in Asia, in a peripheral region, in order to prop up a floundering and unreliable government, and at a time when there was a much bigger looming threat. In fact, Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in that at least the Vietnam War was tangentially related to the effort to stop the global spread of communism during the Cold War. Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in another respect: the military’s leaders of the Vietnam era had no precedent to dissuade them from a disastrous path. Today’s military leadership has the precedent of not just Vietnam, but also Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. That much obtuseness must be punished and removed from the system.

It SHOULD be, sure. It won’t.

General Milley must resign. Not only is he the Chairman of the Joint Staff, prior to that he was the Chief of Staff of the Army. While all services share the blame, the Army is the land domain proponent. The 20 years of failure in Afghanistan is an Army failure. Scores of other generals also deserve a thorough evaluation; many of them are complicit in the lies to protect a decades-long failed strategy.

Won’t happen, and we all know it won’t. I suspect the only people who seriously think it might are the self-same purblind Pollyannas who blibber on and on about the vitally vital importance of “taking back Congress in 2022.”

Secretary of Defense Austin also must be fired. The recently retired Army general and former CENTCOM commander was, and still is, part of the culture that is impervious to the fact that 20 years of trying it their way did not work.

Won’t happen.

Just as it did after Vietnam, the military, and especially the Army, must conduct a comprehensive review of why it exists.

Won’t happen.

The purpose of the Army is to visit profound violence on our nation’s enemies; it is not to rebuild failed states. We have decades of experience: counter-insurgencies and nation-building does not work for America. We do not have the stomach for long wars of occupation—and that is a good thing. We are a nation of commerce, not conflict. A constellation of retired stars will tell you that the two can coexist. They are wrong. Retired Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane said only two months ago that because Afghanistan consumes just a small portion of the force, America “can afford the cost of fighting” there. What he does not see is that for 20 years, that “small portion” was the most important portion of the military. Everything else necessarily is subservient to the portion of the force in conflict. It has altered who the Army is and how it thinks. There exists only a handful of officers below the general officer ranks who served during the Cold War and who have lived through an era of great power conflict. From private through brigade commander, virtually every Army Soldier serving today has experienced little other than counterinsurgencies or nation-building while operating out of secure FOBs.

Hey, what better way to exhaust said military; demoralize the warriors at the pointy end; erode the support for said military among its natural base of same; reinforce the paramount urgency of the fundamentally anti-American idea that participation in multinational forces (as no more than “one among equals,” even though the contribution demanded of the US will always and forever exceed that of all other “coalition partners” combined, by orders of magnitude) and submission to the authority of globalist organizations—in short, to invalidate and demolish the very concept of national sovereignty and independence, thereby achieving the eternal Leftist dream of One World Government: omnipotent, unchallengeable, eternal. Why, one might almost imagine the whole thing had been planned in advance or something.

Large scale combat operations and insurgencies require different cultures and mindsets. In a resource constrained environment, the same service cannot do both well. The Army today could not win a major war.

Clearly, it couldn’t even win a minor one.

Yet, winning a major war, is the number one reason why an Army exists. It will take a generation to break bad habits, to think in terms of closing with and destroying the enemy versus winning hearts and minds.

More importantly, it will take a clear-eyed, stout-hearted populace whose will to victory hasn’t been broken by seeing the lives of friends, family members, and neighbors who are in the military squandered for no discernible purpose or gain by an entirely loathsome and corrupt political/military complex, in pointless conflicts half-heartedly fought in farflung shitholes all over the world—places in which there there is no national interest to be found.

Keane sees raw numbers (and ignores the stark evidence that there was no progress over 20 years) and thinks that America’s Army can sustain that level of commitment. It cannot, and the opportunity cost to the culture of the force is much too great. Ignore him. Ignore Petraeus, McMaster, Stavridis, and the rest of their ilk.

Done.

Let us not forget the intelligence agencies. They reported that Kabul was at risk of falling in as little as 90 days. That report was from last Thursday! The capital fell in less than 90 hours. Failure must be punished. And punishment in a bureaucracy means mass firings and a smaller budget—not more money so that they might be better the next time. Congress must consolidate and collapse our intelligence agencies. And when its reorganization is done, if the overall size of the nation’s intelligence apparatus is a quarter of what it is now, that still is too large.

Agreed, wholeheartedly. Won’t happen.

And while we are on the topic of “too large,” DoD must be halved. There are too many flag officers, too many agencies, departments, and directorates. It is the only secretariat with independent but supposedly subordinate secretaries. There are too many Geographic Component Commands—each led by a 4-star virtual proconsul whose budget dwarfs what the Department of State spends in their regions. The result is a foreign policy that is overly military and underly diplomatic, informational, and economic. Congress must revisit the 1947 National Security Act and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. Both were good for their times, but after decades of experience, there clearly are new reforms necessary.

Unreformed, DoD is an inscrutable labyrinth which invites fraud, waste, and abuse. The excess attracts unscrupulous camp followers. Amazon did not choose Crystal City to locate its new headquarters because of low rents and ease of transportation access for its 25,000 employees. It chose the Arlington, Virginia neighborhood because it is two blocks from the Pentagon. That building controls the distribution of three-quarters of a trillion dollars every year. Most of it is wasted. The excess is apparent in the scores of class-A high rises housing defense contractors just blocks from the Pentagon. To end that waste, nothing so concentrates the senses as austerity.

Okay, I’m gonna just lay off the “won’t happen” schtick—do I really even need to say it again? No, I do not—so we can get to the last crucial bit.

Let me conclude with one last thought: the generals, the intelligence analysts, the defense contractors, and the pundits all leveraged America’s rarest resource: the American serviceman and woman. They are the ones who fought, and sweat, and bled, and died for what is now clearly a failed strategy and a doomed mission. Even after its failure was apparent to their leaders, they continued to enlist and reenlist, largely because their superiors—the experts—assured them that success was possible. It was not. It never was. Absent American support, Afghanistan collapsed over the length of a long weekend. That is proof enough that the last 20 years were in vain, and proof enough that the system is broken from within.

Actually, we’ll never know for sure whether “success was possible” or not…because it was never actively, vigorously pursued. In reality, it was barely ever even discussed—certainly, it was never defined, after the original goal of “find and kill bin Laden” shifted to “remove the Taliban, destroy their ability to provide a base for the projection of jihadi power a la 9/11,” morphing from there into “Make Afghanistan Georgetown Again.”

Once again, The Power and its Grand Scheme has been undone by its own arrogance, incompetence, and witless disregard for the harsher realities. If it weren’t for the way the horrific consequences of their folly always crash down onto the heads of the hapless wretches so uncaringly used and manipulated by them, watching the serial pratfalls of our grotesquely-misnomered “Elite” would be funny as all hell to watch.

A real no-shitter of an AAR

Posted on August 18, 2021August 18, 2021 by Mike

STRONG message follows.

Some of you Afghan Veterans out there are hurting, trying to make sense of what this all means. Including some of my peers, who are not immune to the feel bads coming out of this clusterfuck. So allow me to give you a different perspective, one that will perhaps sooth the pain a bit. I shoot straight, and this isn’t all sunshine and roses. There is going to be some Grim Dark up front. But it does have a silver lining, hear me out.

Was this a foolish mission to start with? Yes. The only way to decisively win in Afghanistan was full scale genocide, which we knew from about 2003 forward. We don’t have the stomach for that, and that is probably a good thing.

Nah, not so much. All’s we ever had to do—ever SHOULD have done—is hew closely to LeMay’s Maxim, a man who very much knew whereof he spoke when it came to waging war: If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.

Did we lose? Yeah, goddamn right we lost. Let’s just get that out of the way now, like ripping off a band aid. Do not get out the “ We were winning when I left” hats and slap a Ghan flag on them. Face the facts, and then act. If the goal 20 years ago was to remove the Taliban, and now the Taliban is back 100% in control without even requiring a name change, then the objective was not met.

Is it your fault? No. The failure here, while stunning, rests on the political class and the Generals. So like I said, the political class. Who, exactly, do you think lost this war? You, out slogging the mountains, and mowing down Taliban fighters with a machine gun, and surviving on fish sticks and MRE crackers at the firebase, and winning EVERY tactical level engagement for 20 years? Or the spineless General who didn’t hear a gun shot despite 9 tours, who was the architect of the grand strategy, and spent his time quite literally getting his dick sucked by his biographer in his office at Bagram instead of trying to win?

We can safely say at this point that the real goal in Afghanistan was a transfer of wealth from the tax payers to the MIC ( Military Industrial Complex) and the politicians they bought with the profits. $88 billion dollars ( for the ANA alone) is a staggering figure. For that much money, you could have paid half of Afghanistan to kill the other half. You could have paid China or India or even Pakistan to do it for you. That money was wasted, and we all knew that well over a decade ago.

Afghanistan should never have been anything except a punitive expedition. We should have left in 2004, 2006, 2007, or ten minutes after Osama Bin Laden died. Any one of those would have been a leave with honor type situation. Instead, we opted to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and look like incompetent boobs to the entire planet. I should say, our Generals and Politicians opted for that. Almost like that was the goal………

The idea of spending 2.2 trillion dollars to “export our way of life” to cavemen is retarded, and anyone with an ounce of sense knows that. I often said that giving the Ghans a Jeffersonian Democracy was a fool’s errand, since we could barely keep one functioning ourselves. Post Nov 4th, 2020, we know that “barely functioning” wasn’t true either. The idea of the US Government fighting corruption is laughable in our own country. So no shit we laundered 2.2 trillion into bribes and fake projects, what did you think was going to happen?

How many Company Grade Officers were relieved of command or run up on charges over 20 years? A lot. Hundreds, if not thousands. How many Generals faced the same fate, or resigned in disgrace over their incompetence? None. Stan McCrystal resigned for saying not nice things about Obumer to a Rolling Stone reporter, but that doesn’t count. In fact, perhaps it is telling that General JSOC himself was played in such a manner. If ole Stanley is too much of a fucking idiot not to effectively give his enemy kryptonite and ask him nice not to use it, what does that say about the rest of the Officer Caste? For that matter, how many children did the CEO of Ratheyon or Boeing or Lockheed Martin lose to the meat grinder?

Yeah, it hurts. I feel you. We all lost friends. Had our brothers return home mangled and broken. Was it worth it? No. But those are sunk costs, so we might as well look at what we gained from the experience.

He goes on to list a few of those silver-lining items before laying down some 24-karat-gold, capital-t Truth:

We lost this war the minute Code Pink was taken seriously. The minute Bradly Manning and Bo Berghdale weren’t hung. The first time we charged one of our warfighters with murder or using excessive force. The first time we denied a element in contact air support. Our people, 49% of them at least, are weak and stupid. The great sifting has just begun, and it will get worse. That is the price you pay for allowing weakness to take root in your society.

All of us, I promise, will be needed once again. And soon. And not in some Bureaucrat, Blue Blood , Skull and Bones created debacle on the edge of the Empire. I mean needed as in needed like the Spartans at Thermopylae. The weakness on display right now by the Government of the United States will not go unnoticed by the world at large. We can expect now to be poked in the chest, because we have shown that we will take it.

Seems to me it ain’t really the rest of the world that we need to be concerning ourselves with now. As I keep saying, the war has been brought home to us, right to our very doorsteps. The primary threat to American liberty, American prosperity and security, and Americans themselves, no longer comes from enemies abroad. As in the classic old horror-movie line: The calls are coming from inside the house.

(Via WRSA)

“America’s Elites are trash”

Posted on August 18, 2021August 18, 2021 by Mike

NAILED. IT.

Former US intelligence colleagues are angry and deeply worried at what has happened in Afghanistan. Here’s what I’m hearing, and why there’s nearly universal belief that America and the world are in for one of the most dangerous, unpredictable times in modern history.

Afghanistan has shown the world — enemies & allies alike — that our military & intel assets are largely irrelevant because we can’t deploy them successfully. The blame lays at the feet of multiple Presidents. The Generals. The Spies. The Congress.

America’s Elites are trash. China knows it. They will become emboldened, covertly & overtly. War over Taiwan and contested islands in the S. China Sea and E. China Sea is now more likely. Russia will consider similar covert & overt moves, focused on Crimea, & former Soviet satellites. The fear is that China & Russia will act in concert.

Why? America was whipped by a tiny rebel force and couldn’t even retreat properly. Meanwhile, the American people are angry, COVID weary, & divided. If there were ever a time to push American hegemony aside, this is it. If Cold War III grows hot, America will need to quickly build up & work with foreign counterparts. But who will trust America after Afghanistan? Who believes we have the leadership to use our military might well? Who will trust us when we say “We Will Stand With You”?

Nobody with half a lick of sense, on every one of those questions. Including me.

Beyond China/Russia, others will take gambles too. Terror orgs like al-Qa’ida & ISIS are degraded but not dead. Their ideology is very much alive. Iran’s Hizballah — with terror cells throughout the US — may see an opening to create chaos too.

Meanwhile, the disaster inside Afghanistan is only just beginning. The Taliban will launch a terror campaign against American collaborators. The pictures will shock the conscience of the world, further degrading American moral authority. Biden & Co will struggle to respond.

There’s also the nightmare of tactical weaponry now awash in Afghanistan, in the hands of the Taliban and — soon — on the global black market. These arms will fuel chaos around the world for decades. The Pentagon has no idea where this stuff is and no plans to destroy it.

Finally, if Afghani refugees pour into the US, there are profound implications for security, culture, the economy, & politics. Are they properly vetted? Do they hold Western/tolerant values re: women, gays? Do they bring skills/education? Which party will they support?

More questions for which sentient beings already have the answers: no, RUFKM, HELL no, and three guesses, DUH. Expect to see much more splodeydopery, head-choppery, and sidewalk-murder-trucks driven into crowds up close and personal-like all across the too-feckless-to-bother-saving-itself Woke West, as the victorious Taliban expands its power and reach to put all those new war-toys abandoned by the fleeing Uncle Sam to best use.

The existential problem is that America needs good leadership to right its ship but there is none. Our federal bench is weak. Biden is a corrupt old man. Impeachment is a long shot; VP Harris is an unpopular paperweight. The Legislature is a feckless cabal of empty suits. Leadership could come from a state Governor, it’s true, but not soon enough. The above threats by China, Russia, & Co will metastasize well before the 2024 elections, and even a heroic new President will need years to clean things up.

Hate to be the one to hip ya, buddy, but the problem is even more existential than you may realize. NO President—however heroic, over whatever span of time he’s given—can or will clean this up. The mess is simply too big, the rot too deep, the national fabric too tattered and torn. This Augean stable is beyond hope of restoration; even the mighty Hercules himself would only throw up his hands in despair and just walk away from the job, shaking his head and muttering under his breath about what a total dick that damned King Eurystheus was for assigning it to him in the first place. Which, as it turned out in the end, he really was a dick. Anyhoo.

Again, our enemies and allies know this. Upshot: There is fear and outrage streaming through former intel officers over the Afghanistan debacle. America is rudderless. And the world now knows it. Grave dangers lie ahead, some predictable, others unimaginable.

‘Fraid so. The closing plea to “vote for change” is risible and pathetic, of course, in enforced accord with Beck’s First Law of TINVOWOOT™. But the rest is pretty much spot on, I’d say. Makes one wonder, since Wright is identified as a “former CIA ops officer,” whether there might not actually be a few white hats in the US spook community after all. Or might have been in the past, shall we say.

The weakness of Wokeness

Posted on August 17, 2021August 17, 2021 by Mike

He’s dead, Jim, and doesn’t even seem to realize it.

The War on Terror began with men plunging to their deaths from the highest floors of skyscrapers hit by airplanes; it ended with men plunging to their deaths from the undercarriage of a US airplane taking off from what’s left of “Hamid Karzai International Airport” (the signs will be coming down even as you read this).

America is a global laughingstock right now, but that’s no reason not to give Chairman Xi and Putin and every up-country village headman in Helmand a few more yuks. Step forward, State Department spokeswanker Ned Price:

State Department calls for Taliban to include women in its government

The United States is dead as a global power because of this kind of indestructible stupidity. You’ve lost, you blew it, it’s over: The goatherds just decapitated you; could you at least have the self-respect not to run around like a headless chicken too stupid to know it’s nogginless? Or like a broken doll lying on its back with its mechanism jammed on the same simpleton phrases: “Diversity is our strength… diversity is our strength…”

Contrast the Washington presser with that in Kabul:

Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid says ‘We have defeated a great power.’

Wrong, asshole. If Amerika v2.0 was a “great power,” you goat-humping, dress-clad lower primates would never have defeated it. America That Was, on the other hand, would have exterminated every last Muzzrat in the Hindu Kush and reduced the flatter areas of your cesspool “nation” to so much steaming glass in the first fucking month. Then Our Boys would have loaded up the gear and headed on home with, as Billy Beck once put it, the last US soldier pausing his trot up the troop-transport ramp to nail up a sign warning DON’T MAKE US COME BACK HERE AGAIN.

And know what? I bet you wouldn’t have, either. You mouthbreathers would have been very, very careful to make sure it didn’t happen, your bowels instantly going gooey at the mere thought of giving us a reason to, what with the unpleasant memory of your asses having been kicked up between your shoulder blades fresh in mind and all. No, don’t y’all be breaking any arms patting yourselves on the back for “defeating America.” You weren’t fighting America; America no longer exists, not as anything other than a fond memory. It hasn’t for many years.

Hmm. Ned Price vs Zabiullah Mujahid: tough call. The mountain of non-existent dollar bills that the bloated husk of federal government blows through every minute surely should buy sufficient self-awareness to know that, whatever else it may be, this is not a day for wankery as usual. Even CNN has a more proximate relationship to reality.

Wokeness is weakness, and diversity is where nations go to die. Contrast our spokesmen with theirs: in the White House, Jen Psaki picked the weekend to take a vacation, possibly to film her scenes in another hilariously viral Mr Non-Binary Goes To Washington video; at Foggy Bottom, Buffoon McStriped Pants III issued a stern warning on the need for the firebreathing mullahs to include more female deputy-assistant-undersecretaries; and, at the Potemtagon, Kabul Kirby stood there doing his usual anguished-eyebrows Saddy Sadcakes routine.

All these images project global impotence: none of these people would be a serious and prudent power’s projection of itself to the world.

Meanwhile, back at the palace in Kabul, the Taliban commander giving a victory speech is Gholam Ruhani, released from Gitmo (under Bush) because he said his “only wish” was to return to Afghanistan to (per the Department of Defense documents published, natch, in a London newspaper) “assist his father, who is sick, in operating the family appliance store in Kabul”.

I don’t know what appliances they sell at Ruhani & Son over at 237b Sword of the Infidel Slayer Street, but evidently they’re enough to take out the global superpower. On social media, the wags are having great sport with Joe Biden’s recent taunt that no American needs an AR-15, because, if you want to defeat the mighty US government, you’re gonna need fighter jets and nukes.

Well, the Taliban just took out Joe as Leader of the Free World with no nukes, no F-15s, just a big bunch of AR-15s.

That could actually be taken as an encouraging thing, were it not for the sure and certain knowledge that The Power in Mordor on the Potomac would be FAR less hesitant about waging full-on, no-holds-barred warfare against Real Americans than against anybody else. Balancing that, though, is the equally sorry truth that America’s military might has atrophied so badly by now that really, the only army in the world that the FUSA stands any chance at all of defeating would have to be the “largely disintegrated” Afghan National Army that just downed weapons and surrendered to the Taliban. So we got that going for us, at least.

Steyn uncorks a painful-but-funny at the close:

If you saw my long-form interview by Tucker Carlson yesterday, you’ll know he asked me about writing obituaries. And I replied that it was very difficult to do obits for people for whom you had total contempt; you had to have some basic human sympathy even for the most unlovely types. And yet, as the world dances on the grave of Washington’s “elites”, I cannot muster a jot or tittle of human connection with the likes of Milley and Austin, Kirby and Psaki and Biden: They will all die richer than you, and with half the citizenry convinced of their virtue.

Steyn Clubber Eric Dale from Iowa appended this somewhat mordant comment to my Sunday column:

Do you think there’s any chance of getting Taliban commanders to teach at West Point? It might be a nice change of pace for cadets to learn from someone who actually won a war.

We all laugh…but it’s actually a very fair point: Would you rather hear first-hand from a mullah about how they took out the hyperpower in a week? Or from a corrupt toad like Milley who can only express bewilderment at how showering billions on other corrupt toads from Herat to Jalalabad didn’t pan out?

Myself, I wonder how many more shiny additions to his chestful of fruit-salad Milley will award himself for Heroic Leadership Above And Beyond The Call etc in the Afghanistan fiasco. Oh, and in case you aren’t angry enough to explode a ventricle quite yet:

Taliban Leader Obama/Biden Released from GITMO in Swap for Deserter Bergdahl Just Resurfaced
It was one of the worst trades in history, even worse than Nolan Ryan for Jim Fregosi or Kobe Bryant for Vlade Divac: Back in 2014, Barack Obama traded five Taliban commanders for one American who, we were led to believe, had been captured by the Taliban. Obama did all he could to make the swap seem noble: He said at the time that the recovery of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was “a reminder of America’s unwavering commitment to leave no man or woman in uniform behind on the battlefield,” and the five Taliban jihadis were sent to Qatar, where they would ostensibly be kept out of trouble. Seven years later, Bergdahl is known as a deserter, not a hero: In 2017, he pleaded guilty to desertion and was given a dishonorable discharge. And now Khairullah Khairkhwa, one of the jihadis Obama traded for Bergdahl, is among the Taliban leadership that just took Kabul.

Obama’s deal was fishy from the start. Bergdahl was known as a deserter even at the time the deal was made. Former infantry officer Nathan Bradley Bethea, who served with Bergdahl in Afghanistan, wrote in the Daily Beast that Bergdahl was “a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.” Refuting reports that Bergdahl got separated from his unit while on patrol, Bethea declared: “Make no mistake: Bergdahl did not ‘lag behind on a patrol,’ as was cited in news reports at the time. There was no patrol that night. Bergdahl was relieved from guard duty, and instead of going to sleep, he fled the outpost on foot. He deserted. I’ve talked to members of Bergdahl’s platoon—including the last Americans to see him before his capture. I’ve reviewed the relevant documents. That’s what happened.”

Three days before he deserted, Bergdahl wrote to his parents: “I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.”

The Obama/Biden administration ignored all this, made the lopsided deal, and treated Bergdahl as a returning hero at a Rose Garden ceremony featuring the deserter’s parents.

Meanwhile, Obama’s own intelligence team warned him that four of the five jihadis he traded for Bergdahl were almost certain to return to the jihad. He ignored this. And so Khairullah Khairkhwa was free to join other Taliban representatives in Qatar in 2019, negotiating the terms of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. During those protracted, fruitless, and foredoomed negotiations, Khairkhwa declared in March 2021: “I started jihad to remove foreign forces from my country and establish an Islamic government, and jihad will continue until we reach that goal through a political agreement.” Or, as things turned out, until Old Joe Biden leaves Afghanistan without bothering to have his military, which was too preoccupied with making sure to enforce woke orthodoxy anyway, prepare a coherent exit strategy that would protect our personnel and get them and our weaponry out of the country safely.

“The horror that is America is disgusting.” I must confess that I’m finding it awfully tough to disagree with Berghdahl’s assessment at the moment.

Living in interesting times

Posted on August 16, 2021August 16, 2021 by Mike

Could there possibly be a more perfect day to run something from a fellow blog-site yclept Clusterfuck Nation?

I guess we had to find out the hard way that Afghanistan is not like Nebraska. Let others be cruel about it (and there’s plenty of that right now, elsewhere). The last ostensible hegemon who tried occupying the place before us was the Soviet Union, which discovered painfully that Afghanistan was not much like its Kemerovo Oblast, either, and shortly after it withdrew its troops in 1989, the Soviet Union commenced to collapse — which prompts one to wonder: How much is the USA of 2021 like the Soviet Union of those years?

Well, we’ve become an ossified, administrative nomenklatura of Deep State flunkies as the Soviets were, and lately we’re just as lawless as they used to be, constitution-wise — e.g., the abolition of property rights via the CDC’s rent moratorium… the prolonged jailing in solitary confinement of January 6 political prisoners… the introduction of internal “passports.” The USA is running on fumes economically as the Soviets were. Our dominant party leadership has aged into an embarrassing gerontocracy. Is it our turn to collapse?

Kind of looks like it. The days ahead are liable to be a rough ride. Surely China has taken the measure of our Woke military and is weighing the seizure of Taiwan in our moment of signal weakness. No more computer chips for you, Uncle Sam! Do we come to Taiwan’s defense with guns blazing, or perhaps nukes? And what if that doesn’t work out so well? I’ll tell you what: a major geopolitical reordering of things, leaving us… where? Unable to enforce our will around the world as has been the case for eighty years. Floundering. Friendless. Broke. Broken!

Of course, the domestic situation in our land has not been so fraught and overwrought since 1861. Everything is politicized, which is to say: used as a truncheon to beat-up adversaries and, let’s face it, mostly in the sense of Left against Right. This is especially true for the Covid-19 soap opera, which more and more pits the sanctimoniously vaccinated “progressives” against the recalcitrant conservative no-vax free-choicers — that is, coercive government trying to force supposedly free citizens to accept a pretty dubious experimental medical treatment.

Since when did the American Left become so pro-tyranny, and how’d that even happen? I have friends and relatives — I’m sure you do, too — who knocked themselves out in the 1960s protesting against the war, the government, the FBI, and the CIA… who fought in the streets for free speech and raged against official propaganda — and today they can’t get enough of coercing, punishing, brain-washing, and cancelling their fellow citizens. They’re going so far now as to engineer their vicious narrative to brand their opponents as “domestic terrorists.” Think that’s going to work?

I doubt it. And the fall of Afghanistan is sure to spark a resentful reaction among the many ex-soldiers who paid a heavy price pulling tours of duty in that hapless venture over twenty years. There’s a lot of them out there in Red America, and they were already pissed-off about the pernicious nonsense being jammed down their throats by the minions of Wokesterism: the race-and-gender hustles, the off-the-charts rise of violent crime, the wide-open border, the off-shoring of jobs, the Covid lockdowns and wrecking of small business, the MMT experiment launching inflation, and the new pussification of the armed forces they served and suffered in. They’ve laid rather low through years of this, just watching the scene in wonder and nausea, but you may see them turn more active now. And consider: they’ve been well-trained in weaponry and tactics.

Sometimes, Vlad Lenin observed, events take decades, and sometimes years happen in weeks. This looks like one of those times for the USA. Heads will soon be spinning like the little girl’s in The Exorcist, releasing a pea-soup spewage of shocking revelation. The old narratives will fall apart before our eyes. Minds will have to get right. Prepare for a whole lot of strange days rolling out.

Kinda like the well-known Hemingway line about going broke: Gradually at first, then all at once. Yes, I know that’s actually a misquote. But I like that version better, so I’m sticking with it.

“Is America Still Our Country?”

Posted on July 21, 2021July 21, 2021 by Mike

Ask a silly question.

White advocates have long worried about demographic change, mass immigration, and race differences. Of course, these remain very important, but for many, the realities of life itself have become a more immediate burden. Politicians give tax dollars directly to blacks. Monuments and statues of the white founders are vandalized or come down. Students of all races are taught contempt for whites. A 100-year-old race riot is now called a massacre of blacks even though the violence was a two-way street and may have been started by blacks. A spate of black-on-Asian attacks is called “white supremacy.” These examples are just from late May to early June 2021.

Coca-Cola tells employees to “Be Less White.” College officials claim that “all whites are racist.” Critical race theory (CRT), which teaches that whites are inherently evil and responsible for black people’s failings, is now taught in the military. Christian churches confess that they are “racist” and “too white.” Even conservative denominations support BLM.

All four of the major American sports leagues: National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), National Hockey League (NHL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) fund and spread BLM propaganda. All the big tech companies promote it.

President Biden claims that “terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today,” while BLM and antifa continue to riot and attack people. Mr. Biden proclaimed that the government would give precedence to reopening small businesses hurt by COVID-19 that are owned by blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Indians. Whites can wait and suffer.

Kristen Clarke, a black woman who heads the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, claimed blacks have “superior physical and mental abilities” compared to whites. Utah governor Spencer Cox, a conservative Republican, claims it is not racist for whites to be excluded from college scholarships.

The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association recently wrote:

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has — a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility…Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples…There is not yet a permanent cure.”

Whites — even while they are still a majority — have been dispossessed in the nation their ancestors built. And, as a look at Zimbabwe or South Africa tells us, things could get a lot worse. Should whites feel anything but contempt for the United States?

Wellll, I can’t speak for anybody but myself, unnerstand, but I can tell you which way I’m leaning more and more these days.

It is a shock to many Americans to realize that their country may have become their enemy. This must be harrowing for older whites who fought for the flag and who were taught to love their country. But it isn’t their country anymore.

Patriotism has been falling steadily over the last two decades. Whites still show higher levels than non-whites, who tend to identify instead with their race or a foreign country. But white levels are also declining, particularly among younger whites. Some of this is certainly due to being told their country is racist. But whites are also beginning to realize that the new America is anti-white. What should they feel for such a nation?

The aforementioned contempt works, for openers. But if whypeepo want to at the very least survive the escalating, eventually genocidal onslaught currently being openly promised them, implacable fury might end up being the best and most useful choice.

Whistling past the graveyard

Posted on July 21, 2021July 21, 2021 by Mike

Wherein I must take issue with something ZMan says, which I’ll put in bold.

One of the underappreciated qualities of liberal democracy is its ability to grow and develop its own opposition. In the Cold War this was not obvious as communism in the form of the Soviet Empire filled the role. Domestically, the inner party had the outer party as a fixed partner. Democrats controlled domestic policy, with some mild opposition from the Republicans. On the other hand, the Republicans controlled foreign policy with some mild dissent from the Democrats.

This partnership collapsed when the Soviet Union collapsed. A year after the voters overwhelmingly approved the appointment of former C.I.A. man George H. W. Bush as the successor to Ronald Reagan, the logic of having spooks run the country no longer made much sense. The system quickly pivoted to Saddam Hussein as a temporary fill in for the evil empire, but he was a poor replacement. In the next election the Cold War generation was replaced with the Woodstock generation.

The Clinton years were really just an interregnum. The system needed to learn how to create new enemies. We got the beginnings of the great Islamic enemy and an effort to recreate the holocaust in the Balkans. It was not until the son of the former C.I.A. man that we got the threat of international Islam as the new enemy. Fear of men on flying carpets carried the system into the Obama years. Toward the end of his second term, the search for a new enemy had started.

The crusade against the Mohammedans was the first full attempt to recreate that old magic and provide the regime with legitimacy and authority. It is why 9/11 became a solemn holiday celebrated by both sides of the regime. Even though the left-liberals opposed the right-liberals in the prosecution of the crusade, they completely accepted the origin of it and the centrality of it. Note that the last anniversary of 9/11 came and went without much ceremony. It no longer matters.

Actually, umm, no. Not just no—HELL NO.

After thousands of dead and dozens of serious terrorist acts in the US alone since 9/11; tens of thousands of jihadist attacks around the world in what you might call the modern era, ongoing since the 1970s; and the ceaseless campaign of conquest and domination Muslims have waged since their twisted pseudo-religion’s inception in the 7th Century AD, the notion of any unwarranted “crusade” against Muzzrats contrived for purposes of subterfuge by the goobermint is laughably absurd. Nobody, but nobody, needs to make up a goddamned thing about the threat posed to Western Civ by jihadis; they’ve made that abundantly clear all by themselves, thanksveddymuch.

Not that the goobermint WOULDN’T do such a thing, mind. It’s just that in this particular case, they don’t have to. Steyn offers just one example that proves the point.

Kurt Westergaard and I were successive winners of the Danish Free Press Society’s Sappho Award. I was very flattered to find myself in his company, but couldn’t honestly say I deserved to be. Kurt was one of the bravest men of our time – not because he was inclined to bravery, but simply because, when it was required, he met the challenge and never backed down.

Sixteen years ago Flemming Rose of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten decided to conduct a thought experiment in public after an author casually revealed that he couldn’t find any Danish artist willing to illustrate his book about “the Prophet Mohammed” (as the BBC now routinely styles him). So Flemming called twelve cartoonists and invited them to depict the late Prophet. Kurt Westergaard’s cartoon was the memorable one, and the one you recall as the years roll by. It was a pithy visual jest: Mohammed’s turban as a bomb with a lit fuse. See picture at top right.

“I attempted to show that terrorists get their spiritual ammunition from parts of Islam, and with this spiritual ammunition, and with dynamite and other explosives, they kill people,” Kurt told my old newspaper The National Post a few years back. “I showed this in a cartoon and what happened? They want to kill me, so I think I was right.”

Like most of the men and women I have shared a stage with in Europe this century, he was an old Sixties radical sufficiently principled to think the same kind of jokes he’d applied to church, monarchy, parliament and every other societal institution should also be applied to Islam. He never wanted to be a “free speech hero”, but gamely bore the burthen once it had been dropped on him. He certainly never wanted to be world-famous, albeit more so in Mogadishu than Manhattan and Lahore than Los Angeles. It cost him a comfortable retirement, weakened his health, and an ever more craven culture denied him the consolations of monetary exploitation. When I expressed sympathy, he laughed and said he’d do the same cartoon all over again even knowing what he was in for.

The blood lust began with a trio of imams on the make shopping the twelve cartoons (plus three cruder fakes) round the Muslim world, and leaving it to the usual Islamonutters to take it from there: In nothing flat, over two hundred people were dead – which meant that CNN & Co were obliged to cover the story. They did so by modifying Westergaard’s cartoon, with Mohammed’s face pixilated, as if he’d entered the witness protection programme. If only. In reality, it was that dwindling band of people who believe in free speech – and, indeed, free speech itself – that found itself in the witness protection programme.

And so it went on. On the fifth anniversary of the cartoons, I was being interviewed in Copenhagen by Flemming Rose and his colleagues when we were alerted that a one-legged Chechen had accidentally self-detonated in his hotel room en route to blow them up. Whenever I tell this story, the phrase “one-legged Chechen” always gets a laugh, although it is in fact no laughing matter hopping across an hotel room with a homemade bomb. But these guys are always a laughingstock, aren’t they? Until, as at Charlie Hebdo, they finally pull it off.

To the end of his life, al-Qa’eda and its affiliates had a combined eight-figure bounty on Kurt Westergaard’s head. His death, a day after his eighty-sixth birthday, prompted a few Scandinavian chums to assure me that he’d had the last laugh – that now no jihadist would ever collect those multi-millions.

Maybe. But the excitable Mohammedans aren’t really the issue; the unexcitable west is. On the home front we are remorselessly trading core liberties for a supposed quiet life and congratulating ourselves for doing so. The most lauded cartoonist in America, Garry Trudeau, took it upon himself – in prepared remarks delivered on stage – to blame the dead of Charlie Hebdo for getting themselves murdered. Trudeau’s rationale is that in mocking Islam these cartoonists are “punching down” at a disadvantaged minority – as opposed to doing what Trudeau has been doing for half-a-century and having the guts to “punch up” by attacking the, er, GOP. Only in the crapped out monodailies of the dying American media could this talentless twerp become wealthy and important.

For my own part, I would have liked Kurt Westergaard to have outlived the far inferior draughtsman Trudeau. In my initial reaction to the Motoon crisis, I channeled Nelson Eddy:

The minute there were multimillion-dollar bounties on those cartoonists’ heads, The Times of London and Le Monde and The Washington Post and all the rest should have said ‘This Thursday we’re all publishing all the cartoons. If you want to put bounties on all our heads, you better have a great credit line at the Bank of Jihad. If you want to kill us, you’ll have to kill us all. You can kill ten who are stout-hearted men but you’ll have to kill ten thousand more. We’re standing shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder.’

But they didn’t do that. And as the years passed, in the leading cities of the west, even the rote pro forma defenses of free speech grew fainter and faded away. Kurt Westergaard bore a decade-and-a-half of continuous murder threats – coupled with indifference and condescension from Trudeau and other pampered eminences of his own profession – with good humor, steely determination, and no doubts about the justice of his cause. We need more like him. Rest in peace.

Seconded, most heartily. As Steyn said, we need more like him—as many as we can possibly get. If you truly think we’ve all been misled into unjustly considering Mooselimbs a deadly, and deadly-serious, enemy, you got some more thinking to do, I’m afraid.

South Africa intel

Posted on July 14, 2021July 14, 2021 by Mike

If you’re looking for a sitrep on the festivities taking place now on the southern end of the Dark Continent, only not written in Afrikaans, DuToit would be the obvious place to find such.

What I witnessed over the last 48 hours tells us a lot, so let me distill the essence. In the beginning the mob was in control. Yes they were clearly in control as they marched relentlessly forward like an army ant formation advancing through the jungle. They devoured all before them and they were unstoppable. But importantly, they were controlled and focused. There was a clearly defined plan, so command and control is alive and well, but invisible. They knew when to hit designated targets. They knew where the police were absent. They knew where shopping mall security was most vulnerable. They were collectively acting as part of a plan.

Who are those central but invisible command and control people? Will our intelligence services possibly start to figure this out?

But the other thing that was clearly visible was the rapid way that civil society responded to the communal threat. Groups of citizens rapidly formed into militia, and mostly acted with restraint and to great effect. I don’t know the final numbers, but my gut feel is that more arrests were made by citizens acting in well-organized groups, than by the police.

I also note that some of the militia went beyond the act of arrest, and meted out instantaneous justice. Its unclear what the body count it, but certainly there were many. Some shot, some beaten and some even hacked to pieces by machete. I have seen credible video evidence across this entire range.

But the core lesson is that civil society responded by organizing themselves, rapidly and effectively. We will now see the dawn of a new era, where those civil groups become better organized than the government, which has clearly failed. In effect we had no government over the last 48 hours, because while this mayhem was playing out, Jesse Duarte gave a press briefing about an NEC meeting pretending to still be in control.

The Ruling Party has simply lost control. The civil service is so dysfunctional as to be a liability now easily bypassed by an increasingly confident and effective civil society.

Clearly attempts by government to disarm civilians will fail. Of this I am certain. Just as certain as I am about the emergence of self-organized militia centered on credible leadership and existing networks of security force personnel that have been sidelined by government purges.

This is the real New Dawn. Not the feeble message spewed out by the now embattled and increasingly illegitimate Ruling Party. Their days are numbered.

That’s not actually Kim talking there, but a former military intelligence guy he excerpted. As for Kim his own self, he sees things the same way I do.

Anyone who thinks this can’t or won’t happen here is deluding himself. The only reason that this hasn’t happened in the U.S. so far is that unlike South Africa, Blacks are in the minority; but it means that where they are a significant proportion of the population, this will happen — think Minneapolis and Ferguson, times ten.

I see burned-out city centers, and rampant poverty and lawlessness therein. After that, I’d really rather not speculate.

No point in it anyway. Historically, once balls of this type have dropped, there’s simply no way to know which way they’re going to roll or where they’ll end up coming to rest. Predictions are no more than a way for idle hands to pass the time until the tsunami of violence and anarchy washes over their own personal doorsteps.

More useful analysis from DuToit here.

See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya

Posted on July 14, 2021July 14, 2021 by Mike

Unexpectedly, inadvertently, and for the first and only time in his entire useless existence, senile alleged “President” Grampy Fingerbang has done the right thing.

Good Riddance, Afghanistan
merican forces are finally departing Afghanistan. While Donald Trump had promised to end the inconclusive war there, he eventually gave in to the pleas of the defense and intelligence community and continued the war. Other than a few dozen more dead Americans, and a few more hundreds of billions of dollars up in smoke, it’s not clear what these additional years of effort achieved. Now Joe Biden has finally acknowledged the political and military reality: if we haven’t lost, we certainly are not winning or making any progress.

One of the most remarkable things about the last few weeks is how utterly brittle the Afghan security forces and government have turned out to be. After billions of dollars spent on training, equipment, and support, the Afghan National Army is abandoning large bases, along with state-of-the-art guns, optics, and military equipment. These are now in the hands of the Taliban. For all the talk of our Afghan partners and their heroic national commitment to democracy, none of it turned out to be worth much when the training wheels were taken away.

It is not even clear if the American-supported Afghan government will last as long as the Soviet supported regime, which held on for three years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

While it is clearly time to leave, it is worth thinking for a moment about why the entire Afghanistan mission, particularly after 2002, was a fool’s errand.

The mission became distorted over time. After 9/11, Americans wanted revenge. That mission was a simple one: punish the Taliban, destroy al-Qaeda, and capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Within a month of the attacks, our troops were in the field.

The campaign featured a novel operational approach. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to show the military that it needed to learn to do more with less. His concept of “transformation” limited troop numbers, a feature of what was called the “Revolution in Military Affairs.” This theory proposed that the combined effects of high-speed communications, sophisticated sensors, and precision air power, would succeed where the traditional military’s risk-averse, heavy footprint would fail.

At first it seemed Rumsfeld and the revolutionaries were right. Very quickly, the Taliban melted away under pressure from American special forces, the Afghan Northern Alliance, and a fusillade of precision guided bombs in the months after 9/11.

But the first hint of trouble appeared soon thereafter. In the Battle of Tora Bora and later in Operation Anaconda, the Army’s lack of artillery (on Rusmfeld’s order) and the lack of sufficient blocking troops allowed the lion’s share of al-Qaeda, including Bin Laden, to slip away and obtain refuge in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas. He wouldn’t be killed for another decade.

Unable to use our forces in our nominal ally’s territory, the United States and NATO emphasized the secondary aspects of the mission. They got to work on “nation building.” Political and military leaders defended this approach as enlightened realism, because al-Qaeda flourished at the extremes, in either weak states or politically repressive ones. Developing governing institutions and security forces, while expanding human rights to women and minorities, would create enduring stability and reverse the conditions in which al-Qaeda previously thrived.

This was an ambitious strategy, made twice as hard by the artificially low levels of troops. It became even more challenging after the start of the Iraq venture, which put Afghanistan on the backburner until the 2009 surge. Afghanistan is a famously violent and tribal place, where disparate tribes only unite under the banner of Islam to expel foreign invaders. The American concepts of democracy and liberalism were a message that worked at cross purposes to our efforts to obtain legitimacy and security. After all, these changes slowed down the decision-making of the Afghan government, while also alienating many Afghans, Taliban or not.

The biggest mistake we made in Afghanistan was presuming we had to turn the Middle East into an American-style democracy in order to have peace. We presumed we had to rectify the root causes in order to maintain national security. The same scenario played out in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. In all of these cases, our efforts did not increase our security or enhance stability, and sometimes made things worse.

More limited and realistic options were available, including the old fashioned punitive raid. Wrecking a place sends a message too, a message of deterrence. Because we viewed it as our duty to lift up the Afghans—strange people with whom we have no historical or other connections—and because no one wanted to admit the flawed foundations of the war, we ended up there for 20 years, long after most of al-Qaeda had decamped for Pakistan.

Even accepting the strategic premise, it’s not clear that anything we did enhanced stability or reduced international terrorism. Afghanistan has been in a state of civil war since our arrival. ISIS also materialized in the meantime. Al-Qaeda is still around. And attacks within the United States by immigrants and home-grown Islamic terrorists have continued the entire time.

By trying to do too much, we accomplished too little. The U.S. military is perfectly capable of bombing, killing, and capturing people. But, even with the help of its second army of contractors and do-gooder NGOs, the United States is not particularly good at nation building. We are no longer the America of the Marshall Plan, and the people of Afghanistan are not the same as Germans, Japanese, or even Iraqis for that matter.

To turn disorder into order is a difficult thing. Democracy is probably not the best tool for doing it. Historically, liberal democracy is normally an end stage form of government, not a foundational one. Moreover, our entire approach does little to account for the strict Islam of the Afghan people and their pre-Islamic tribalism. This comprehensive religion, coupled with this cultural inheritance, is not fertile soil for a democracy, let alone a liberal one.

Leaving Afghanistan does not diminish the bravery of our soldiers, the magnitude of the 9/11 attacks, or the need to avenge those deaths and remain vigilant against terror threats.

But we are neither avenging nor remaining vigilant in Afghanistan today. Since 2002 or so, we have been going in circles against a local resistance to our presence. Any temporary gains soon evaporate, as we lack sufficient troops to hold what we have cleared, and the Afghan security forces are woefully inadequate to consolidate the gains. The overall connection of any of this activity to U.S. security is minimal.

Our feckless, thoroughly politicized general-officer corps turned the Graveyard of Empires into the Playground of the Ruling Class, their own private test-bed for weapons systems, surveillance technology, and tactical doctrine. The experiments and aimless fiddle-fucking around cost too many good soldiers their lives, shattering morale and unit cohesion without producing anything of notable use. American troops trained to kick ass and take names were forced to bleed and die under preposterous ROEs that put them at severe hazard while granting every advantage to a savage and deadly foe.

From early on, it became all too clear that Afghanistan was to be an open-ended campaign in which victory would remain undefined, unpursued, and beyond reach, the ultimate outcome a foregone conclusion. The Playground should have been shut down years ago. The hapless Biden deserves no credit for it whatsoever, but I’m glad to see this unholy mess finally grinding to a halt, however ignoble and humiliating a one it might be. The FUSA—its “leaders,” its subjects, and its military—bears a moral obligation to not even dream of launching another war of any kind or magnitude until the multifarious issues raised by its Afghanistan dumpster fire have been properly addressed.

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