Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Afghanistan: Mission Accomplished

planetgeli said:
Watch Under the Wire. It's available on Iplayer for about another 2 weeks. It's about Marie Colvin, journalist with a ridiculous amount of balls. Except now she's got none coz she's dead. Embedded herself in Homs. Watch it, it's very good.
Click to expand...
She of the eye patch?
 
kebabking said:
She didn't arrive in Afghanistan till after the Talebans absolute victory became the only bet in town - that's what she was sent to report on, and no one with her experience could claim that they didn't know of the Talebans policies.

The BBC were warned, as was everyone else, that travel to Afghanistan could be extremely dangerous, and that it was by no means guaranteed that the UK government could assist in any attempt to leave should that become necessary. Some Journalists and staff were evacuated, others chose not to - thats not about courage, that's about mitigating danger and reducing exposure.

I like decent journalists, and she is one - I think their work is important, and that sometimes it's dangerous - and sometimes, that danger is deliberate - but people who do dangerous jobs accept that, and do it anyway.

Play dangerous games, win dangerous prizes.
Click to expand...
I am afraid Doucet is just another whining BBC warmonger. If that is decency pass me the sick bag. While sycophantic towards US/UK decision makers, takes a different tone when dealing with others. If you doubt that, seek out her recent interview with Pakistani Ambassador to Afghanistan. Bristling with hostility and interruption. Or maybe we just have a different notion of decent: my gold standard was Robert Fisk. There’s decent..
 
Larry O'Hara said:
I am afraid Doucet is just another whining BBC warmonger. If that is decency pass me the sick bag. While sycophantic towards US/UK decision makers, takes a different tone when dealing with others. If you doubt that, seek out her recent interview with Pakistani Ambassador to Afghanistan. Bristling with hostility and interruption. Or maybe we just have a different notion of decent: my gold standard was Robert Fisk. There’s decent..
Click to expand...
Fisk was a real hero.
 
Larry O'Hara said:
I am afraid Doucet is just another whining BBC warmonger. If that is decency pass me the sick bag. While sycophantic towards US/UK decision makers, takes a different tone when dealing with others. If you doubt that, seek out her recent interview with Pakistani Ambassador to Afghanistan. Bristling with hostility and interruption. Or maybe we just have a different notion of decent: my gold standard was Robert Fisk. There’s decent..
Click to expand...

Decent until all the unfortunate Assad business.
 
Read this by an Afghan. Written before the debacle of US leaving.

Article says that when first Taliban were ousted the "State building" led to growth of NGO economy. These NGOs weren't grass roots organisations. They were supposed to be building a civic society to as part of democratisation. Instead they became job creation scheme.

So the so called civil society was not organically linked to those sections of Afghan society that really needed help.

The US/ Western funded NGOs came with strings attached. So no funding for Afghans who neither liked Taliban or Western occupation.

Meanwhile the so called democratisation was to say the least partial. Last government was starting to clamp down on any form of protest against it. Making demos more difficult.

So the Western State building did not over twenty years bring to being a thriving democratic culture.

Another reason why Mission Accomplished failed.

How Liberal Values Became a Business in Afghanistan

Given this I can understand why Biden went for leave now.

The invasion and so called State building was leading to either US staying for ever to prop up a dysfunctional state that they had created over twenty years or just leave. And end US citizens coming back in body bags or maimed for life. Which was becoming increasingly unpopular in US.
 
Women, the Hazara minority and all political opposition have been excluded from the Taliban’s new administration.
aje.io

What to make of the Taliban’s ‘exclusive’ caretaker government

Women, the Hazara minority and all political opposition have been excluded from the Taliban’s new administration.
aje.io aje.io

Analysis of the Taliban government appointments.

No Shia, no women, die hards from previous Taliban government back in leading positions.

The article is saying that recent Taliban rhetoric on having changed isn't seen in the composition of new government.
 
teqniq said:
They seem to have relied on appallingly bad intelligence regarding who to put their support behind.
Click to expand...
when people rely so frequently on warlords etc after a while it looks deliberate. i think there were people in the us military who were trying to make things better, to work within the afghan cultural system rather than imposing their own - but the way the americans organised the war, with people spending x amount of time on deployment before rotating out, defeat was pretty much certain, even before you factor in things like isi support for the taliban. there was never the strategic vision to aim for, the americans were running to stand still.

but it's not just about whether individuals tried to win support through changing things for the better. the whole american way of war on the battlefield seems to 'get there firstest with the mostest' and to bomb the fuck out of anything they face. and you can be absolutely excellent in meetings and give people the infrastructure they want but if you're mates with the local krays and if you're bombing wedding parties and so on as the result of poor intel you're going to lose the war even if you win every battle.

there's an excellent book by thomas johnson about taliban information operations - propaganda - 'taliban narratives' Taliban Narratives | Hurst Publishers which goes in detail into the ways in which the american leaflets and propaganda were shit and the taliban's far superior. and here's a 2007 article he wrote about the taliban's night letters https://calhoun.nps.edu/bitstream/h...an_insurgency_2007.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
 
From today's Times. ‘My family is starving, I have to sell my daughter’

among the shouts of dealers hustling to bang down the prices asked by desperate Afghans who had come to sell everything they owned, I was surprised to learn a four-year-old girl was being bartered too.

The value of the afghani has tumbled since the Taliban seized Kabul on August 15 but, according to yesterday’s near-record low exchange rates, a pawnbroker was offering about £170 for the child. Her father, a broken police officer trying to ward starvation away from a family of seven, was holding out to pawn his daughter to a shop owner for about £420.

“I would prefer to die than be reduced to selling my daughter,” the policeman, a 38-year-old whose name was Mir Nazir, told me. “But my own death wouldn’t save anyone in my family. Who would feed my other children? This isn’t about choice. It’s about desperation.”

Close to tears, he explained the bitter mechanics of his family’s economy as crowds jostled to sell and buy the possessions of each other’s lives at prices so low that several dealers I spoke to said they daily saw people cry.

Mir Nazir had lost his job with the police in the city of Ghazni and fled to Kabul with his wife and five children days before the Taliban seized the capital. Now he was a bazaar porter with a barrow. His rent outstripped his wages. The family were hungry, and there was no relief in sight.

“I received an offer from a shop owner, a man I knew who had no children,” he continued. “He offered 20,000 afghanis for my daughter Safia to live with him and start working in his shop. If I ever get the 20,000 afghanis to buy her back, he said I could. But I can’t sell my daughter for that low a price, so I asked for 50,000. We are still discussing. She may have a better future working in a shop than staying with me, and the price may save my family.”

“Don’t think I am any different to you. Don’t think I didn’t love the baby child I brought into the world and have loved her ever since, don’t think I am not distraught at the thought of selling my daughter — I just can’t see what else I can do.”
Click to expand...
 
According to a "specialist" on The World At One on Radio 4: Al Qaeda had a base in Afghanistan, in which it planned sophsiticated attacks on Britain. For instance, a plot involving airliners in 2006.
Err. . . I thought that "our boys" and their allies had expelled Al Qaeda from Afghanistan in 2001?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

trashpony
Afghanistan ends all women’s education
Replies
17
Views
434
MickiQ
MickiQ
PTK
Afghanistan: UK special forces 'killed 9 people in their beds'
Replies
24
Views
1K
Silas Loom
Silas Loom
weltweit
Afghanistan Earthquake, Taliban ask for help ..
Replies
6
Views
604
blossie33
blossie33
StoneRoad
Taliban [Afghanistan] destroy music
2
Replies
53
Views
2K
Pickman's model
Pickman's model
crossthebreeze
US drops 'mother of all bombs' (not nuclear) on Afghanistan
2 3 4 5 6
Replies
169
Views
8K
JimW
JimW
Back
Top Bottom