Afghanistan: Mission Accomplished

[David Clapson]

The American public has always been told that Afghanistan is all about 'fighting terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here'. What if that lie had never been told, and the US and Nato had never unseated the Talibs in 2001? Maybe they would have lost public support and been displaced by a moderate, humane internal opposition long ago.

 

[Argonia]

Winston Churchill Tony Blair who made a thorough study of Afghan conditions like Napoleon did as he drunkenly lurched into a Russia he completely didn't understand and is fluent in Pashtun before he launched into his little neo-colonial adventure that has been an incredible success has just tweeted his 900 million Twitter followers that he is delighted with the full reality of the new kind and humane regime in Kabul.

All his Twitter followers are hanging on his every word in his new tidy little pied a terre in his prison block in the Hague with a nice shiny little urinal in the corner for him to slop out in and a copy of the Daily Mail every morning with his thin ration of a small banana from an African banana republic so he can keep up to speed with developments in his beloved Thatcheritsm as the mobile and fluid socialist forces under Jeremy Corbyn who has wisely split from muddled up Starmer and utterly confused Mandelson annex Britain at the ballot box in a Clement Attlee 1945 landslide.

Poor Tony will never ever see Cherie again but I am sure he will find ways to keep his spirits up by moving small blobs of blu tack from one part of the wall to the other as he reflects on his little military interventions and what amazing successes they all were because he really was a genius like Winston.

Poor Tony won't have his secretary Lily James to type up his Ciceronian oratory in the Churchill war rooms any more but I am sure he will be as thoroughly happy with this new life as we all were with his brilliant governance of the country after 1997 when everything really was heaven on earth.

Tony promoted talent so fast like Andrew Adonis who has a penetrating and forensic mind that should by rights land him a really good job eating garbage in a landfill but who is now in the dreadful unelected House of Lords in Tony's North Korean Britain that Alan Turing cracked Saddam Hussein's Enigma Code at Bletchley and now Iraq is a complete paradise as a new dictator capitalises on the political vaccum and emerges to be the new Saddam Hussein so as usual absoluely nothing at all was achieved by Blair whatsoever.

Absolutely nothing at all.

13,518,167 North Koreans voted for Blair in 1997 and I bet they are all rushing to the confessionals in the Catholic Church to explain to the priest that they feel terribly guilty about their transgressions.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Right, yeah.

 

[LDC]

Winston Churchill Tony Blair who made a thorough study of Afghan conditions like Napoleon did as he drunkenly lurched into a Russia he completely didn't understand and is fluent in Pashtun before he launched into his little neo-colonial adventure that has been an incredible success has just tweeted his 900 million Twitter followers that he is delighted with the full reality of the new kind and humane regime in Kabul.

All his Twitter followers are hanging on his every word in his new tidy little pied a terre in his prison block in the Hague with a nice shiny little urinal in the corner for him to slop out in and a copy of the Daily Mail every morning with his thin ration of a small banana from an African banana republic so he can keep up to speed with developments in his beloved Thatcheritsm as the mobile and fluid socialist forces under Jeremy Corbyn who has wisely split from muddled up Starmer and utterly confused Mandelson annex Britain at the ballot box in a Clement Attlee 1945 landslide.

Poor Tony will never ever see Cherie again but I am sure he will find ways to keep his spirits up by moving small blobs of blu tack from one part of the wall to the other as he reflects on his little military interventions and what amazing successes they all were because he really was a genius like Winston.

Poor Tony won't have his secretary Lily James to type up his Ciceronian oratory in the Churchill war rooms any more but I am sure he will be as thoroughly happy with this new life as we all were with his brilliant governance of the country after 1997 when everything really was heaven on earth.

Tony promoted talent so fast like Andrew Adonis who has a penetrating and forensic mind that should by rights land him a really good job eating garbage in a landfill but who is now in the dreadful unelected House of Lords in Tony's North Korean Britain that Alan Turing cracked Saddam Hussein's Enigma Code at Bletchley and now Iraq is a complete paradise as a new dictator capitalises on the political vaccum and emerges to be the new Saddam Hussein so as usual absoluely nothing at all was achieved by Blair whatsoever.

Absolutely nothing at all.

13,518,167 North Koreans voted for Blair in 1997 and I bet they are all rushing to the confessionals in the Catholic Church to explain to the priest that they feel terribly guilty about their transgressions.

Why are you ranting incoherently over a serious thread?

 

[Pickman's model]

Winston Churchill Tony Blair who made a thorough study of Afghan conditions like Napoleon did as he drunkenly lurched into a Russia he completely didn't understand and is fluent in Pashtun before he launched into his little neo-colonial adventure that has been an incredible success has just tweeted his 900 million Twitter followers that he is delighted with the full reality of the new kind and humane regime in Kabul.

All his Twitter followers are hanging on his every word in his new tidy little pied a terre in his prison block in the Hague with a nice shiny little urinal in the corner for him to slop out in and a copy of the Daily Mail every morning with his thin ration of a small banana from an African banana republic so he can keep up to speed with developments in his beloved Thatcheritsm as the mobile and fluid socialist forces under Jeremy Corbyn who has wisely split from muddled up Starmer and utterly confused Mandelson annex Britain at the ballot box in a Clement Attlee 1945 landslide.

Poor Tony will never ever see Cherie again but I am sure he will find ways to keep his spirits up by moving small blobs of blu tack from one part of the wall to the other as he reflects on his little military interventions and what amazing successes they all were because he really was a genius like Winston.

Poor Tony won't have his secretary Lily James to type up his Ciceronian oratory in the Churchill war rooms any more but I am sure he will be as thoroughly happy with this new life as we all were with his brilliant governance of the country after 1997 when everything really was heaven on earth.

Tony promoted talent so fast like Andrew Adonis who has a penetrating and forensic mind that should by rights land him a really good job eating garbage in a landfill but who is now in the dreadful unelected House of Lords in Tony's North Korean Britain that Alan Turing cracked Saddam Hussein's Enigma Code at Bletchley and now Iraq is a complete paradise as a new dictator capitalises on the political vaccum and emerges to be the new Saddam Hussein so as usual absoluely nothing at all was achieved by Blair whatsoever.

Absolutely nothing at all.

13,518,167 North Koreans voted for Blair in 1997 and I bet they are all rushing to the confessionals in the Catholic Church to explain to the priest that they feel terribly guilty about their transgressions.

You need to boil this down to a few choice lines as it's far too long for anyone to read. And this thread's about Afghanistan's current predicament

 

[kebabking]

are you ranting incoherently over a serious thread?

Crayoning cunt?

 

[cloudyday]

Good discussion on the latest PTO

 

[ska invita]

Has there been much fighting? My impression is Taliban are just walking in

 

[LDC]

Has there been much fighting? My impression is Taliban are just walking in

See kebabking's post earlier about what the reality of what 'capturing territory' often looks like in sparsely populated areas that are also sometimes defended by troops who have a flexible relationship about who they work for.

 

[kebabking]

s there been much fighting? My impression is Taliban are just walking in

There's been some, but given what the ANA is on paper, and how much territory the Taliban have taken, it's very little.

It's seems, mostly, about the ANA either leaving areas they don't have the logistics to sustain and going to places they can sustain, ANA just throwing off their uniforms and leaving it to the Taliban, or local power structures doing deals with the Taliban to change sides and either taking the ANA with them or getting the ANA to leave to limit any fighting.

There has been some fighting, and some pretty brutal stuff - a group of 20-odd Afghan SF surrendered to the Taliban in a deal to walk away, and the Taliban instead executed them all and put the video on social media.

It going to be an absolute bloodbath.

 

[A380]

War on Terror wakes up in shower

Fans of the long-running soap opera ‘International Affairs’ are divided about the latest shocking plot twist in which the last twenty years of the War on Terror were revealed to be a dream.

newsthump.com

 

[Argonia]

You need to boil this down to a few choice lines as it's far too long for anyone to read. And this thread's about Afghanistan's current predicament

Fair enough Pickman's model.

Afghanistan: Taliban in control. Lord Dannant on BBC News this morning reckoned Kabul isn't a 'done deal' but I don't concur

Poor bealeagured President Ashraf Ghani probably going the way of Muhammad Najibullah in 27th September 1996.

The women under Taliban control including the 12 year old girls captured and raped by Taliban soldiers will be unable to leave the house and the new Malalas will get shot in the head

The only tiny little sliver of hope is that the Taliban are slightly more benign this time round but I am not getting my hopes up

Not a very pretty picture at all.

 

[elbows]

Here's one thing I haven't really seen acknowledged in the mass media - the Taliban of the '90s were a creation of the Pakistan security organs. Does Pakistan still have any control over, or even influence over, the current crop of Bearded Ones? If so, has any attempt been made to square them?

I am guilty of only observing our media propaganda and framing about this part of the world rather casually in recent years, so I cant do proper analysis.

But I still find it rather tempting to declare that Pakistan 'went down the memory hole' quite some years ago, and so far this continues despite how obviously absurd it is in the current context. I wish I had properly charted their removal from the narrative, but I did not. I'm thinking it probably happened at least a decade ago, because when bin Laden was killed there were some obvious angles in regards his location that would have built on previous suspicions, but our media mostly looked the other way and the silence in that regard was deafening.

The other really obvious thing when watching BBC etc output at the moment is that the UK does not approve of the approach the USA have taken. Or at the very least they want to demonstrate this nations supposed values via lots of useless hand-wringing.

 

[N_igma]

I'm not convinced by this. A section, or certain versions/factions, of the Ra have always been socialist sure, but there have always been other factions that were in no way socialist as far as I'm aware. I mean Martin McGuinness was a nationalist not a socialist. And I don't think Tom Barry's and Dan Breen's collaboration with the Nazis was in any way socialist. Then theres the fact that O'Duffy was an IRA leader at one point - are you saying he was a socialist?

So was socialism an aim of the IRA? Not in the entirety of the IRA.

Socialism was an aim of both the PIRA and the OIRA. The OIRA were certainly more politically minded and had an analysis whereas it was more of a lofty aspiration for the Provos who certainly had their fair share of culturally conservative Catholics in their ranks. But it was always an aim of the movement. Here’s a link to the Green Book which is essentially the manual for IRA members and it mentions the goal of a socialist alternative to western individualist capitalism.

CAIN: Events: Text of Irish Republican Army (IRA) 'Green Book' (Book I and II)

 

[David Clapson]

I am guilty of only observing our media propaganda and framing about this part of the world rather casually in recent years, so I cant do proper analysis.

But I still find it rather tempting to declare that Pakistan 'went down the memory hole' quite some years ago, and so far this continues despite how obviously absurd it is in the current context. I wish I had properly charted their removal from the narrative, but I did not. I'm thinking it probably happened at least a decade ago, because when bin Laden was killed there were some obvious angles in regards his location that would have built on previous suspicions, but our media mostly looked the other way and the silence in that regard was deafening.

The other really obvious thing when watching BBC etc output at the moment is that the UK does not approve of the approach the USA have taken. Or at the very least they want to demonstrate this nations supposed values via lots of useless hand-wringing.

The narrative is that the UK went there 'for the right reasons'. Ex-servicemen keep saying that. But we only went because the US went for the wrong reasons. I think the UK should be honest and ask itself 'what if we'd never been?' We still seem to have a bit of the Blair mindset...we can Do Good by invading.

 

[Pickman's model]

The narrative is that the UK went there 'for the right reasons'. Ex-servicemen keep saying that. But we only went because the US went for the wrong reasons. I think the UK should be honest and ask itself 'what if we'd never been?' We still seem to have a bit of the Blair mindset...we can Do Good by invading.

the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 

[klang]

we can Do Good by invading

i reckon that now that our troops are not tied up in Afghanistan anymore we should invade the EU.

 

[teqniq]

I have supported two Afghani guys in the past. both lost parents/relatives to the Taliban. Both said they could never return through fear of being killed themselves. We will definitely be seeing more Afghani refugees, but compassion under the current UK government? Sadly i suspect not.

 

[klang]

I have supported two Afghani guys in the past. both lost parents/relatives to the Taliban. Both said they could never return through fear of being killed themselves. We will definitely be seeing more Afghani refugees, but compassion under the current UK government? Sadly i suspect not.

Germany is sending a lot of Afghanis home as their country is now considered safe.

 

[ska invita]

The narrative is that the UK went there 'for the right reasons'. Ex-servicemen keep saying that. But we only went because the US went for the wrong reasons. I think the UK should be honest and ask itself 'what if we'd never been?' We still seem to have a bit of the Blair mindset...we can Do Good by invading.

its the usual disgraceful bullshit righteous storytelling the british army has been telling itself and the public for centuries.
Take this

Rift with US grows as UK minister voices fears over Afghanistan exit

Ben Wallace says he is ‘absolutely concerned’ about terrorism threat, contradicting Biden analysis

www.theguardian.com

“I am absolutely worried that failed states are breeding grounds for those types of people. “Of course I am worried, it is why I said I felt this was not the right time or decision to make because, of course, al-Qaida will probably come back – certainly would like that type of breeding ground. That is what we see: failed states around the world lead to instability, lead to a security threat to us and our interests.”

hang on - which bunch of cunts invaded iraq, invaded afghanistan, blew libya into bits, narrowly were held back from attacking sirya, fund saudi into bombing of its neighbours, generally support + prop up terrorist regimes etc etc. and now concern about failed states? The british have played a key murderous role in fucking up states from the Atlantic African coast up to the Chinese border.
Creating instability is the point of it all.
"The right reasons", straight out of the Empire Annual Book for Boys - bedtime stories for guilty consciences.

 

[David Clapson]

The only honest bit in that quote is about the threat to 'our interests', i.e. over overseas investments...mining, shipping and so on. We are never told about the economic case for an invasion: the arms sales, the rebuilding and security and banking contracts. I think that's mostly why Americans invade these days. Bush and Cheney's mates did very well out of Iraq. And I'm sure there are similar discussions in Westminster. If I was in the Forces I wouldn't want to be dodging IEDs for the sake of share prices, but that's what happens. The humanitarian argument and the 'fight them over there' argument just don't hold water.

 

[gosub]

The only honest bit in that quote is about the threat to 'our interests', i.e. over overseas investments...mining, shipping and so on. We are never told about the economic case for an invasion: the arms sales, the rebuilding and security and banking contracts. I think that's mostly why Americans invade these days. Bush and Cheney's mates did very well out of Iraq. And I'm sure there are similar discussions in Westminster. If I was in the Forces I wouldn't want to be dodging IEDs for the sake of share prices, but that's what happens. The humanitarian argument and the 'fight them over there' argument just don't hold water.

The problem with Iraq is that everything is looked at through the kaleidoscopic clusterfuck that was Iraq. Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is a clusterfuck, but it is not Iraq

 

[TopCat]

Seven miles from Kabul now.

 

[kebabking]

Well, that escalated quickly....

The NEO is in full swing, there's a line of planes so concentrated between Europe, Cyprus and Afghanistan that you could walk there at 30,000ft.

Kabul is now expected to fall by Tuesday.

 

[Argonia]

Well, that escalated quickly....

The NEO is in full swing, there's a line of planes so concentrated between Europe, Cyprus and Afghanistan that you could walk there at 30,000ft.

Kabul is now expected to fall by Tuesday.

BBC were chatting about a month this morning but I had no confidence in the analysis.

 

[kebabking]

US reckoned October up until thursday.

Amusingly the US State Department are advertising for a Social Media manager for the Kabul Embassy - at the same time as asking for volunteers for the protection detail for the embassy, with the job to last no longer than 14 days...

 

[Yossarian]

Amusingly the US State Department are advertising for a Social Media manager for the Kabul Embassy - at the same time as asking for volunteers for the protection detail for the embassy, with the job to last no longer than 14 days...

"Social media expert wanted for challenging, fast-paced job in exotic location."

 

[IC3D]

The Turkish were getting huge sums to keep Syrian refugees out of Europe with the justification at home they were helping their neighbours. I believe that agreement has been torn up as they expect a huge wave of Afghans which will pass straight through them now and Stoke up European/UK nationalism.

 

[TopCat]

"Social media expert wanted for challenging, fast-paced job in exotic location."

Intern only.

 

[TopCat]

Well, that escalated quickly....

The NEO is in full swing, there's a line of planes so concentrated between Europe, Cyprus and Afghanistan that you could walk there at 30,000ft.

Kabul is now expected to fall by Tuesday.

Imagine the panic as they shred and burn everything.