Taliban offensive of 2021 and collapse of Afghan government.

Diana Moon Glampers said:
The Dehmazang area of Kabul is now ablaze with a huge fire that looks to encompass multiple city blocks. Reports of warehouses with fuel tanks being the reason for the conflagration but those are really just rumors, a fire can start anywhere in a place like Kabul, it's been hot and dry there, a cigarette butt or kitchen appliance fire is all that's needed to set it ablaze.

Here's the insane bit, though.

There are no firefighters. Kabul is looking at the capabilities of firefighting that maybe an outlying Roman province might have had 2000 years ago. In a city of 5 million people.

They will be doing whatever they can to lower the official number of casualties, but I don't see any way thousands of people aren't burning to death/trampled fleeing fires right now and through tomorrow.

The fire is now by the Kabul Zoo, which has not been emptied of animals. If it smells like barbecue over in that area, pour one out for Khanzir, a donation from China who holds the distinction of being the only pig in Afghanistan.
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20 years of nation building equals no basic services....just keeps getting better and better.
 
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Urbanmech said:
20 years of nation building equals no basic services....just keeps getting better and better.
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40% of the money went into the pockets of karzai, ghani and their cronies
another 40% were dumpd into that joke of an "army" they made
and the remaining 20% of course had to be invested in gender studies programs at kabul university

you see, sadly there's no resources available for fire brigades
 
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Tour of Italy said:
The literal worst thing the Taliban could do right now is start butchering American citizens. America has been embarrassed, but there are still a fuckton of soldiers and marines sitting at Hamid Karzai International who have been stewing for over a week now. The longer this drags on, the more dangerous it becomes, but for the moment, all the US needs is a reason to fly off the handle, orders or no.

We gave them a reason to roll the ANA up like a carpet by not sticking to the deal, now they understand that all we need is a reason to push back. The sick part is, the second the US starts fighting back, the tens of thousands of US citizens and friendly Afghanis become fair game, and we're looking at a massacre that would have people back at home breaking down the White House door after the secret service opens the gates for them.
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buttvomit said:
Jsoc should be sending the 75th ranger batt and our sf oda teams in collecting the rest of our citizens stuck in that country. We still have smart warfighters left in our military that are chomping at the bit right now ready to collect these people up and gtfo. What ive been reading it seems that their hands are basically tied and they cant do shit but sit at that airport.

I been following this shit closely since the beginning of the year because i was stuck in kandahar for a year from 2010-2011. 99% of the vets i know all agree that we should get out of that hell hole and think it should have been long ago, but our retarded state dept, pentagon command staff and polticians really screwed this shit up. I just wanted us to leave with little as fanfare and smoothly as possible and they couldn't figure it out.
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This is probably a dumb question, but what does the situation look like for US troops over there at the moment?
 
It seems like outside of Kabul and other big cities, most of Afghanistan saw none of the benefits of having the West there, whereas Kabul and it's like got all of the benefits.

Maybe if we had improved the lives of the rural areas, the Taliban wouldn't have swept through unimpeded.

Meanwhile rural U.S. is getting fucked by opioids and probably about to get double fucked by refugees, assuming they weren't working a mine or oil gig Biden shut down, making them triple fucked.
 
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DumbDude42 said:
another 40% were dumpd into that joke of an "army" they made
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Apparently next to nothing was dumped into their army given the army (except a few generals I bet) hadn't been paid for five months this year. It's shocking how many dictators ignore common sense things like "make sure the guys with the guns who hold up your regime are paid on time and treated well." Like if you ever wonder why North Korea is still around despite being a hell on earth with constant famines ruled by a psychotic manchild, it's because both Fatboy Kim and his daddy loved the military and they loved him back.
The Bovinian Derivative said:
One would think they'd play a city building game before trying the nation building game.
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They sent Afghanistan's municipal experts to Detroit, Flint, and Chicago to take lessons on how to run a city.
 
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Thomas Talus said:
Didn't they play a bit of Hokey-Pokey on their border with India recently?
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They did, but that was to try to fuck with Everest tourism dollars. It was general saber rattling where China wanted to demonstrate how quickly they could build a mountain road and send troops into the Himalayas.
I was actually pretty sure some MadLad was going to make that shit go hot.

Gimmick Account said:
It's a long walk requiring China to be as dumb as the US at every turn for about 10 steps for that fanfic saga prophecy to come to pass.

If anyone ITT wants to become a world superpower here is my protip: don't actually be retarded
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I'm not going to say you're wrong here, but I am going to point out that every single external power toeing into the region made the exact same dumb 10 steps, despite being wholly aware of what the guys before had tried.

Alexander is the only who gets a pass here; sort of, there are stories that he was basically warned about dumb of an idea it was try.

Exterminatus said:
Very true and there is, from what I've heard, a new small resistance movement that's sprung up in the Panjshir Valley with several anti-Taliban warlords banding together with remnants of the ANA that still wanted to fight and resist the Taliban forces. One of them includes the son of legendary anti-Taliban resistance leader Ahmad Massoud who also originally resisted the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Not sure what their odds on survival are but I know the Russians think they're destined to fail but a former chief of staff in India thinks the Indian military should provide them support.
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If the rebels are able to secure a supply corridor to eastern Pakistan - they don't need to hold the territory, just secure it enough to move supply convoys back to their bases - I would put money on them be able to break out next year as it warms up.
But they only have a few more weeks to pull it off, and its a question of if they can.

If they can't, I'd give them about even odds given everyone will trying to supply them to take on the Taliban anyway.

Russian analysis is a mixture of cope, seeth, and trying to ingratiate themselves with the Taliban vs. any serious analysis.


Cool Dog said:
Nah the chink deals are waaaaay worse than the IMF's, fucking usury

The BIG difference is that the chinks dont give a fuck what you do with the money, while the IMF wants you to use it for infrastructure and schools and gendershit the chinks dont care if the benevolent leader of the regime outright steals the money as long as they pay the insane interests and meet all demands like letting chink corporations rape the fuck out of the country

But if you're a corrupt fuck what do you care if the chinks give cancer to children in your country? they let you take the money straight to your swiss bank account
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Its really a question if you want be frozen or burned to death.

IMF wants to ensure you are fully integrated into the new globalhomogeny and are unable to resist any business or social initiatives. Its sort of like rainbow logos for pride month. They don't really care about gays, they just want to make sure your culture has been de-xenoed enough that it won't be anti-foreign corporations and making sure fags and queers can prance about is the litmus test. This is half the reason Russia gets a pass on its anti-faggotry stance - they have already demonstrated the ability to be a productive corporate host. But when they open your markets, you also get access to the rest of the collective. Indonesia saw infant mortality drop by two thirds once they gave in and took the money.

China doesn't care if you are tossing gays off of roof tops (except to send observers to gather data to find out the ideal height and launch velocity for the most efficient fag killing) but they want to make sure they have a stranglehold on the country and have legitimate cause to later force you to capitulate to their demands.

The IMF legitimately does have economic growth in mind for the country subjected to globalhomo. China gives no fucks and once they have what they want, they are gone.

But I guess the real thing is.... Belt and Road hasn't had a very serious test. China has only fucked around in countries who were suckling the IMF teat obediently and so knew that soft power would be enough to keep them in line. There hasn't been anyone who had gold China to suck their dick yet. and that will be were the rubber meets the Belt and Road.

to summarize this: China currently has no force projection capabilities (no heavy lift transports, no out-of-country logistics network, no blue-water navy). China also doesn't have a very good spook-type service. Their secret police are vigiliant, and their intelligence apartatus is good at gathering intel, but they don't have any real experience in CIA type 'destabilization' ops other than giving money to insurgents a la Nepal. If you could eat the economic consequences, you can take your B&R money and tell them to go fuck themselves - for the moment.

Maxxicus Callahan said:
China wants to play friendly trade partner and big lender to the Taliban in order to build the Belt and Road initiative through Afghanistan. It’s kind of hypocritical on both sides given the way China treats its Uighur Muslims but that’s business between countries. I bet the Chinese will loan the Taliban a shit load of money and then they’ll ask for some rare earth mineral mines to pay back the loan. The Taliban will then fuck up China’s shit in Afghanistan and then China will get involved. Just a theory right now.
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Not mines. Pipeline to Iran & eventualy road way. Otherwise spot on.
 
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Ghostse said:
I'm not going to say you're wrong here, but I am going to point out that every single external power toeing into the region made the exact same dumb 10 steps, despite being wholly aware of what the guys before had tried.

Alexander is the only who gets a pass here; sort of, there are stories that he was basically warned about dumb of an idea it was try.
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Yeah, we know.
The initial spinal exertion of this collective self-suck is the projection that China would ever try.

I know some people find this inconceivable because they buy into the "pepetual war is just human nature, if we weren't doing it someone else would" excuse for acting like a hulk tard kid on the geopolitical playground, but not everyone wants to be America 2.0. Right here it's just sad wishful thinking to mitigate this embarrassment though the make-believe exercise that your imaginary friend also screwed up. Sad, gay, dumb.
 
Ethan Ralphs Micro Peen said:
It seems like outside of Kabul and other big cities, most of Afghanistan saw none of the benefits of having the West there, whereas Kabul and it's like got all of the benefits.

Maybe if we had improved the lives of the rural areas, the Taliban wouldn't have swept through unimpeded.

Meanwhile rural U.S. is getting fucked by opioids and probably about to get double fucked by refugees, assuming they weren't working a mine or oil gig Biden shut down, making them triple fucked.
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This is the fundamental problem of the 21st century.

We have seen such a concentration of population in our urban areas vs. our rural ones because agricultural advancements give us a larger calorie surplus per farmer. There's also mineral/oil/etc extraction out in the middle of nowhere, but that also requires fewer and fewer people per ton of production. Anything else that needs doing, there are logistical reasons to do it near a city. Food production's what the rural areas always had going for them, but for a long time, that's almost all of what human civilization was.

Democracy was created in an era when the divide between urban and rural was far less stark, and when rural people were a much more important voting bloc.

We've ended up in a situation in the United States, and then by proxy in places like Afghanistan, where we think we can have "democracy" that pleases urbanites who enjoy living on top of one another, while completely disenfranchising the people who are still responsible for producing their calories and raw materials.

We actually know from a foreign policy perspective what this ends up looking like, because it's a model that's been done before in history.
Ever heard of a little country called Sudan? Now it's two countries, but once upon a time, it was one. The northern part of it was semi-civilized, with a lot of oil sheik types controlling the various bits of it that were worth sticking a city on. That northern part had the kinds of amenities you'd expect in a lot of the Middle East or North Africa generally.

But the southern part of Sudan was a different story. Countries like Ethiopia and Eritrea looked pretty good from the POV of an average South Sudanese. Not that they'd know about other countries, or that there'd be much point in knowing about them. South Sudan is about the size of Texas (or France for our Euros) and had a few dozen miles of paved roads. It had a single airstrip. But what South Sudan did have, was all the oil. The resources that were being used to drive construction in Khartoum until it looked like this:

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Were all being extracted by people living in conditions like this:

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With 21st century urbanization levels, you no longer need an authoritarian state to create a disenfranchised agricultural and resource production class entirely bound by complex debts to continue producing raw materials to further enrich a rich, urban elite responsible for processing and adding value to produced goods.

You can do it with a democracy. What people call "globohomo" is just a dawning recognition that the resource imbalance toward the cities and refiners of goods, and comparative poverty of raw material producers, now means that city-dweller priorities (consume to differentiate from the human masses, do anything sexual other than reproduce because it's already too crowded here in the city) will now be forced on everyone.
 
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Diana Moon Glampers said:
This is the fundamental problem of the 21st century.

We have seen such a concentration of population in our urban areas vs. our rural ones because agricultural advancements give us a larger calorie surplus per farmer. There's also mineral/oil/etc extraction out in the middle of nowhere, but that also requires fewer and fewer people per ton of production. Anything else that needs doing, there are logistical reasons to do it near a city. Food production's what the rural areas always had going for them, but for a long time, that's almost all of what human civilization was.

Democracy was created in an era when the divide between urban and rural was far less stark, and when rural people were a much more important voting bloc.

We've ended up in a situation in the United States, and then by proxy in places like Afghanistan, where we think we can have "democracy" that pleases urbanites who enjoy living on top of one another, while completely disenfranchising the people who are still responsible for producing their calories and raw materials.

We actually know from a foreign policy perspective what this ends up looking like, because it's a model that's been done before in history.
Ever heard of a little country called Sudan? Now it's two countries, but once upon a time, it was one. The northern part of it was semi-civilized, with a lot of oil sheik types controlling the various bits of it that were worth sticking a city on. That northern part had the kinds of amenities you'd expect in a lot of the Middle East or North Africa generally.

But the southern part of Sudan was a different story. Countries like Ethiopia and Eritrea looked pretty good from the POV of an average South Sudanese. Not that they'd know about other countries, or that there'd be much point in knowing about them. South Sudan is about the size of Texas (or France for our Euros) and had a few dozen miles of paved roads. It had a single airstrip. But what South Sudan did have, was all the oil. The resources that were being used to drive construction in Khartoum until it looked like this:

View attachment 2467814

Were all being extracted by people living in conditions like this:

View attachment 2467815

With 21st century urbanization levels, you no longer need an authoritarian state to create a disenfranchised agricultural and resource production class entirely bound by complex debts to continue producing raw materials to further enrich a rich, urban elite responsible for processing and adding value to produced goods.

You can do it with a democracy. What people call "globohomo" is just a dawning recognition that the resource imbalance toward the cities and refiners of goods, and comparative poverty of raw material producers, now means that city-dweller priorities (consume to differentiate from the human masses, do anything sexual other than reproduce because it's already too crowded here in the city) will now be forced on everyone.
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A.k.a. the "core-periphery" theory, replicated on the intra-national scale as well as the inter-national. Your post's analysis nailed it.
 
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attractive_pneumonia said:
View attachment 2467748
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Looks like Portland.
SCSI said:
A.k.a. the "core-periphery" theory, replicated on the intra-national scale as well as the inter-national. Your post's analysis nailed it.
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It's always been that way more or less, like that's what Athens and Sparta and every other decent-sized city did in Ancient Greece or the Roman Empire and what they did in places like Britain or northern France.
 
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Save the Loli said:
Looks like Portland.

It's always been that way more or less, like that's what Athens and Sparta and every other decent-sized city did in Ancient Greece or the Roman Empire and what they did in places like Britain or northern France.
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Yup. It gets really blatant in ancient Mesoamerica as well, with the intricate web of tribute all funneling into Tenochtitlan, which styled itself as the literal center of the universe. This same weird-ass, quasi-religious self-glorifying of the city by its inhabitants as a utopia that floats above the mire of all those dirty hicks outside always seems to eventually develop in a given core once it's rich and old enough. There's a poem about I think Venice that has to be one of the most breathlessly prideful examples of this proto-globohomo concept I've ever seen but I can't for the life of me seem to find it in my library at the moment.

EDIT to add a more firmly on-topic loopback -- I think this seemingly-inevitable hubris of the core is a big factor in why the USA, Soviets, and Brits all have taken their turn suicidally throwing themselves into Afghanistan to remake it, and why I fully expect China will take a turn at it soon enough, if their demographic and economic house of cards doesn't come down first.
 
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