Afghanistan by THG

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Afghanistan

POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 12, 2023 08:21
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Thursday, September 23, 2021 7:27 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck Afghanistan.
The US Military lost recent wars because of exactly that attitude. The American troops kill civilians at random, causing problems for America. Remember how WWII ended? America killing civilians? What problem did that cause? Caused a nuclear arms race. America made a clear statement at the end of WWII that it would proudly kill civilians with nukes and the rest of the world made a statement that it would nuke America if America tried again.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

I don't agree with it. Never did.

Dirty towel-head, sandpeople worms aren't our business and until recently under the Biden* administration weren't our problem.

Glad I live in a state with conceal and carry and live so close to the brothers who aren't getting the vax either.

Come try blowing anything up around here for your diseased God.

See where that gets you.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Thursday, September 23, 2021 9:18 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck Afghanistan.
The US Military lost recent wars because of exactly that attitude. The American troops kill civilians at random, causing problems for America. Remember how WWII ended? America killing civilians? What problem did that cause? Caused a nuclear arms race. America made a clear statement at the end of WWII that it would proudly kill civilians with nukes and the rest of the world made a statement that it would nuke America if America tried again.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

I don't agree with it. Never did.

Dirty towel-head, sandpeople worms aren't our business and until recently under the Biden* administration weren't our problem.

Glad I live in a state with conceal and carry and live so close to the brothers who aren't getting the vax either.

Come try blowing anything up around here for your diseased God.

See where that gets you.

I can see there are things you, and Americans who vote for Trump, did not understand about nuking Japan and losing Afghanistan. The whole world was favorably impressed that some Americans could build an atom bomb. The whole world, but not Americans who vote for Trump, are aware that the geniuses who designed the bomb and would later get Nobel Prizes in physics for peaceful achievements, were immigrants or second and third generation immigrants.

The other thing that people who vote for Trump don't know? That the Nobel Prize winners who worked on the atom bomb knew what the terrible consequences would be for America if America nuked civilians rather than nuking Adolf Hitler, for whom the bomb was actually built at the suggestion of Einstein, another immigrant to America.

The third thing that people who vote for Trump don't know? I'm writing about hostile people who would say "Dirty towel-head" and "Glad I live in a state with conceal and carry". Those people, when they are in the US Military or the White House, kill civilians and are proud of doing it. Those less than excellent troops and generals and Presidents who kill civilians are responsible for losing the war in Afghanistan . . . and the war in Vietnam.

Trump voters are not Nobel prizewinners and they get resentful that they cannot win the big prizes. It seems unfair to Trump voters, but it is not because they don't have what it takes to win. They can't understand what they are doing wrong. They don't even know what wrong is. So sad for them.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 23, 2021 4:13 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Von Braun was another immigrant. As a card-carrying German Nazi and SS member, he created the V-2 rockets used to attack England. Later he helped the US put a man on the moon with his Saturn V rocket.

Tom Lehrer said it best about US immigrants who were fickle in their embrace of this country and its ideals:
"'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department.' says Wernher von Braun"

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Thursday, September 23, 2021 5:11 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Von Braun was another immigrant. As a card-carrying German Nazi and SS member, he created the V-2 rockets used to attack England. Later he helped the US put a man on the moon with his Saturn V rocket.

Tom Lehrer said it best about US immigrants who were fickle in their embrace of this country and its ideals:
"'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department.' says Wernher von Braun"

Edward Teller was an immigrant from Hungary. He never got near a Nobel Prize because everybody knew he was an asshole who wanted to H-bomb the world. On the hand, Andrei Sakharov got a Nobel Peace Prize for opposing H-bombing the world. If Sakharov hadn't designed Russia's bombs, America would have bombed Russia out of existence just because Americans are strongly inclined to murder civilians then, in a fit of pique, blame the civilians for getting in America's way. The American Way: It would be so unfair to blame America for collateral damage to millions of dead Russian civilians when America was simply trying to kill Stalin and bring peace to the world.

Judging Edward Teller
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/31/judging-edward-teller

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, September 24, 2021 8:10 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

At least several hundred thousand noncombatants have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the number is probably far higher. What happened in Kabul last month is a case study of all the pathologies of denial poured into one tragedy.

You might think that the Pentagon would be scrambling to find a general to take the fall for what can no longer be denied: that the U.S. military killed 10 innocent Afghans on August 29, called it a “righteous strike” against terrorists, and then had to admit the truth after journalists found out what happened. But don’t bet your bitcoin on it. The military is already saying that standard targeting protocols were followed for the Kabul attack; the problem was a faulty assumption or two, we meant well, next time we’ll do better.

The generals are in a corner. If they admit that the Kabul massacre is resignation-worthy — and in a healthy society, a massacre would be — they would have to admit that resignations should have occurred after the multitude of U.S. bombings and attacks in the past 20 years that killed large numbers of civilians doing nothing more sinister than attending a wedding party, seeking care at a hospital, or picking pine nuts. The Kabul bombing was an outlier only in the amount of attention it received; the killing of civilians has proven to be an extremely common event of the 9/11 wars.

The generals who have overseen two decades of carnage in Afghanistan and Iraq are inept at winning wars, but they possess one skill in abundance: a knack for avoiding career consequences for their too-many-to-count errors. The generals, as well as the politicians who approve ever-rising military budgets, have managed to lull the country to sleep with a euphemistic lullaby about what they want us to limply understand as an infrequent phenomenon of “collateral damage.”

Andrew Bacevich is a retired Army colonel who is one of the most prominent intellectual critics of American foreign and military policy. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, he published a lightly noticed article proposing a wholesale clearance of the nation’s military leadership due to their losing streak. Its winking title was “A Modest Proposal: Fire All of the Post 9/11 Generals” — but Bacevich stressed that his piece was not a Swiftian satire.

“Allow me to suggest … a purge,” he wrote. “Oblige all active duty three- and four-star generals (and admirals) to retire forthwith. Rebuild the ranks of the senior officer corps with members of a younger generation willing and able to acknowledge the shortcomings of recent American military leadership at the top.”

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210923215009/https://theintercept.com/20
21/09/23/military-generals-fire-kabul/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, September 29, 2021 5:04 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

In Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the withdrawal from Afghanistan it was clear why President Joe Biden pulled the troops out as quickly as possible.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained why he and the other chiefs—the top officers of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines—all agreed that we needed to pull out by Aug. 31. The Doha agreement, which President Donald Trump had signed with the Taliban in early 2020 (with no participation by the Afghan government), required a total withdrawal of foreign forces. If U.S. troops had stayed beyond August, Milley said, the Taliban would have resumed the fighting, and, in order to stave off the attacks, “we would have needed 30,000 troops” and would have suffered “many casualties.”

And yet, as Milley also testified on Tuesday, he, the chiefs, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and other military officers advised Biden to keep 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond the Aug. 31 deadline. The difference is that those troops wouldn’t be attached to any “military mission.” Instead, they would “transition” to a “diplomatic mission.”

However, it is extremely unlikely that the Taliban would have observed the semantic distinction. In their eyes, 2,500 U.S. troops would be seen as 2,500 U.S. troops, regardless of whether their mission was officially said to be “military” or “diplomatic.” Therefore, the Taliban would resume fighting, as Milley said they would, and Biden would then have been faced with a horrendous choice—to pull out while under attack or send in another 30,000 troops.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/09/biden-afghanistan-exit-tro
ops-milley.html

Some historical perspective is worth noting. In the first nine months of Barack Obama’s presidency, the generals were pushing for a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan—an increase of 40,000 troops—and a shift to a counterinsurgency (aka “nation-building”) strategy. Biden, who was then vice president, was alone in suggesting an increase of just 10,000 troops, to be used solely for training the Afghan army and for fighting terrorists along the Afghan-Pakistani border. As Obama recalls in his memoir, Biden urged the new and relatively inexperienced president not to be “boxed in” by the generals. Give them 40,000 troops now, and in 18 months, they’ll say they need another 40,000 to win the war. As Obama later acknowledged, Biden was right.

And so, as Milley was advising Biden to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, even while acknowledging that another 30,000 might be needed if the Taliban resumed fighting, the Pentagon was boxing Biden in, just like they did to Obama, just like they’ve always done since the Vietnam War.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, October 4, 2021 4:47 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The public is tired of war at the moment — a common occurrence in American history — but mostly because there's no particular war they want to fight right now. But if something happens, all it will take is the usual marketing campaign from the war hawks to gin up another round of war fever among the public. This is also a common occurrence in American history. War is always over until it's not.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, October 4, 2021 5:21 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Biden* only pulled them out so he could disperse the 100,000 terrorist sand people in every city in America.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Monday, October 4, 2021 6:09 PM