Graveyard of Empires

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Scooter
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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by Scooter »

If they have five pilots then they effectively only have use of five aircraft (limited to those models on which they were trained to fly). The rest of them are in essence just giant paperweights.
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Big RR
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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by Big RR »

One would think those pilots could train others, or mercenaries could be recruited.

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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by Burning Petard »

The talking head that took over MSNBC at 11pm Eastern shift change began by saying that the president has been preoccupied with the withdrawal from Afghanistan for several weeks and now it has the attention of all the inside-the-beltway. . . .

That is the exact problem. It got nearly no attention from inside or outside the beltway (including my local American Legion hall) for at least the last 15 years.

snailgate

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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by rubato »

Gob wrote:
Wed Sep 01, 2021 12:49 pm
Scooter wrote:
Wed Sep 01, 2021 11:57 am
So who are they going to get to fly them willingly?

I don't know. Any Taliban pilot with the necessary skills I suppose. They are already flying some of the helicopters.



Helicopters are not as deadly to pilots as "jump jets" (which is why they are still manufactured and used and jump jets are not) but they are still pretty deadly. And as Iran learned after the Shah fell, lack of trained mechanics and spare parts render them useless very quickly. The Iranians were pretty technically sophisticated but would respond to a helicopter maintenance issue by randomly changing parts until it worked again.

Even in the short term the planes are of minimal value.

While no one had any faith in the ability or likely success of the rump afghan government or 'military' we were obliged to pretend we did and not strip them of all advanced technology which would have formed the eternal excuse for their failure. If we left the planes and they still collapsed it would be obvious that they were incompetent after 20 years of support and not worth any further investment.

The Taliban learned after 2001 that our patience is not limitless and we will intervene with force if they repeat the mistake of harboring terrorists, in fact our tolerance is much less than before and our understand of our own capacity is much greater. But they should have learned this after Bill Clinton used cruise missiles against Al Qaeda sites.

yrs,
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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by rubato »

BoSoxGal wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 2:52 am
That’s exactly what Biden said, but far more succinctly.

If he said that I am pleased. If he said that "more succinctly" I am astonished. But if you can show an example I will believe you, other wise, no.


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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by BoSoxGal »

rubato wrote:
Thu Sep 02, 2021 4:45 am
BoSoxGal wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 2:52 am
That’s exactly what Biden said, but far more succinctly.

If he said that I am pleased. If he said that "more succinctly" I am astonished. But if you can show an example I will believe you, other wise, no.


yrs,
rubato
Go dial up his speech from Friday the 27th - you are tech savvy enough to find it on your own.
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Gob
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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by Gob »

240894059_10158957114714300_1926715146220106131_n.jpg
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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by MajGenl.Meade »

Having that!
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts

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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by BoSoxGal »

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan

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Guinevere
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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by Guinevere »

Great piece earlier this week from WBUR (NPR radio in Boston) about an Afghan-American interpreter, and how he finally got his family out of Afghanistan -- with the help of NOT his US Senator Ted "who's your daddy" Cruz, but Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts.

https://www.wbur.org/npr/1034719307/afg ... nterpreter
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rubato
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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by rubato »

BoSoxGal wrote:
Thu Sep 02, 2021 5:07 am
rubato wrote:
Thu Sep 02, 2021 4:45 am
BoSoxGal wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 2:52 am
That’s exactly what Biden said, but far more succinctly.

If he said that I am pleased. If he said that "more succinctly" I am astonished. But if you can show an example I will believe you, other wise, no.


yrs,
rubato
Go dial up his speech from Friday the 27th - you are tech savvy enough to find it on your own.
You really are a tiresome toad. That is not an example of "succinct" it is an example of excess wordyness. Your desperate need to make some' sort of snippy comment even to the extent of lacking reason reflects poorly on you.

Continue on with your bitchy nasty little life.

yrs,
rubato

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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by Bicycle Bill »

Image
Image
-"BB"-
Yes, I suppose I could agree with you ... but then we'd both be wrong, wouldn't we?

Big RR
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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by Big RR »

Of course the vast majority of weapons and equipment were not abandoned by US forces, but by the Afghan forces we trained and equipped so they could defend themselves sadly, they did not even try).

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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by Econoline »

Bicycle Bill wrote:
Sun Sep 12, 2021 4:01 am
Image
Image
-"BB"-
I also don't remember destroying all my stuff just to make sure the other side couldn't take it.
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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by Burning Petard »

"Loaded" by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (who is an unabashed revisionist historian), says the whole kids game of Cowboys and Indians is deeply ingrained in the military culture of USofA. The history of Manifest Destiny and the hero Ranger is (according to Loaded) essential to understanding why we got our asses handed to us in Afghanistan.

Don't be fooled by the subtitle. Loaded is informative about much more than just consideration of the Second Amendment.

snailgate

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BoSoxGal
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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by BoSoxGal »

98E1F49A-33CB-4447-8193-1B663C770DF8.jpeg
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan

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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

From Salon.com . Usually I don't post a whole article because (a) I don't want TL/DR as a response (b) it seems only courteous to the originator - in this case Salon - to guide people to the original if they want to read it so they (Salon.com) get the ad revenue etc they count on and (c) often the meat of a piece is in one paragraph which can be safely excerpted. Not (c) this time.
Empire of chickenhawks: Why America's chaotic departure from Afghanistan was actually perfect
We screwed up 20 years of pointless war. We didn’t win. We lost. Why wouldn’t we screw up the final exit?
By Lucian K. Truscott IV

The biggest fallacy about our exit from Afghanistan is that there was a "good" way for us to get out. There is no good way to lose a war. With defeat comes humiliation. We were humiliated in the way we pulled out of Kabul — and we should have been, because we believed the lies we had been told right up to the last moment.

The lies we heard at the end of our war in Afghanistan wereas the same ones we were told, and were only too happy to believe, for 20 long years: that everything was going swimmingly. Remember earlier in the summer when the headlines were about how the Taliban controlled a large percentage of the territory in Afghanistan, but the Afghan government and its supposed army still controlled the provincial capitals and Kabul, and that was where the power was.

What a total crock of shit. Everyone was shocked — shocked — when the headlines started to come. Aug. 9, from the AP: "Taliban press on, take two more provincial capitals." That story was a doozie. "On Monday they [the Taliban] controlled five of the country's 34 provincial capitals." It didn't really matter which two capitals the Taliban had taken. You had to read way down in the story to discover they were Aybak, capital of Samangan province, and Sar-e-Pul, capital of Sar-e-Pul province. Where the hell were they? Who had even heard of them?

That was Monday. By Wednesday, Aug. 11, here was the headline in Al Jazeera: "Timeline: Afghanistan provincial capitals captured by the Taliban." How many, you might ask? In two days, the count had ballooned from five capitals to 18. Eighteen. Later that day, both Al Jazeera and Reuters were reporting that U.S. intelligence sources were saying that Kabul could "fall to Taliban within 90 days."

Surprise! Three days later, the evacuation of Kabul began. On Sept. 1, two weeks later, CBS News headlined: "This is the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan" with an eerie night-vision video capture of Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division, XVIII Airborne Corps, headed up the ramp of a C-17 cargo jet wearing full combat gear including bulletproof vest and helmet with night-vision goggles attached, carrying his M-4 automatic rifle.

How did Afghanistan collapse so quickly to Taliban control? Because "we" — the U.S. military and its NATO allies — never controlled it to begin with. Nor did our puppets in the so-called Afghan government. The idea that we ever did, that we ever "controlled" or even had our finger on the pulse of the "graveyard of empires" was a lie.

You know who told us that lie? Every government from George W. Bush on, and every general ever put in charge of that doomed mission. Every single one of them reported that all was well, that the Afghan army was 300,000 strong, that the Taliban was on the run, that the Afghan air force was taking over from the missions flown by American warplanes, that the Afghans had their own helicopters now. And that the Afghan president, whether it was Ashraf Ghani or Hamid Karzai, was firmly in charge back in Kabul.

And you know who went along with that fiction? The United States Congress, which voted for 20 years to spend the $2 trillion we pissed away over there, and each of the presidents — yes, including Barack Obama and Donald Trump — who approved every increase of troops, every troop withdrawal, every "surge" that was advertised as the solution to end all solutions, the thing that would finally put the Taliban on the run. Remember all the Taliban commanders we were told were killed? A drone strike took out this one! Another drone strike took out that one! Wow! We had to be winning if the Taliban was losing so many important leaders!

And then there were the keyboard commandos back in Washington and New York, and the neocons from the Council on Foreign Relations, and the growing chorus of retired generals — among them all of the commanders of our Afghanistan mission — who were all over the op-ed pages and cable news assuring us that All Was Well, as they racked up the megabucks sitting on the boards of defense contractors selling all the military shit that was winning the war for us. "The eight generals who commanded American forces in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2018 have gone on to serve on more than 20 corporate boards," the Washington Post reported on Sept. 4, three days after we exited from Kabul with our tail between our legs. 

There was Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who oversaw the big "surge" of 2009 that was the answer-to-end-all-answers to every problem we were having over there. He has been "a board member or adviser for at least 10 companies since 2010, according to corporate filings and news releases," the Post reported. There was Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., who commanded allied forces in 2013 and 2014, who went on to serve on the board of Lockheed Martin, the gigantic defense contractor. There was Gen. John R. Allen, commander in Afghanistan before Dunford, who is the president of the Brookings Institution, which has received $1.5 million over three years from Northrop Grumman, according to the Post. And Gen. David Petraeus, who preceded Allen and now sits on the board of KKR, a private equity firm in New York with many investments in the defense industry.

All of these gentlemen — and let's take a moment to note they are all men, not a female commander among them — reported back to us from their command posts in Afghanistan how well things were going over there, how we were all over the Taliban, how the Afghan government was successfully "standing up" its well-equipped, well-trained army to defend the country from the Taliban. And then they went on cable TV and continued their lies when they got back to the U.S. and retired from the Army, because that's what generals today do. They sit on corporate boards, they give incredibly well-paid speeches, they go on TV and they rake in the Big Bucks because they were so successful in Afghanistan … and in Iraq, too. Remember Petraeus and his "surge" in 2007? Boy, were we ever surging, huh? I remember Newsweek published a cover image of Petraeus in 2004 wearing in his combat fatigues, standing on a tarmac with a Blackhawk helicopter behind him, with the headline: "Can this man save Iraq?" The story, believe it or not, was about how Petraeus was taking over the training of the Iraqi army, and that was what was going to "save Iraq." Don't you think we should have concluded, when the "surge" became necessary in 2007, that Petraeus had utterly failed in his mission to train the Iraqi army and "save Iraq" back in 2004?

The words "crock of shit" again come to mind, but they are far, far from adequate. These presidents, and these members of Congress, and these generals, and these war-happy pundits, ran a great big gigantic con on the citizens of this country who were paying the taxes which — someday, perhaps — will pay for the $2 trillion we pissed away over in Afghanistan, and the trillions we pissed away in Iraq, too. They lied over and over and over again that with just another troop surge, or another troop withdrawal (because suddenly everything was hunky-dory) and of course just another infusion of billions and billions of dollars and the lost of a couple thousand more American lives we could "win" in Afghanistan and "win" in Iraq. 
Over there, they laughed at us. The Afghans and the Iraqis who took the money, took all the equipment we gave them, took 20 years of our politics and our "prestige" as a nation, and the whole time they were laughing their heads off, because they knew what we didn't know. None of it was working. None of it would ever work. And one day we would be headed out of both countries with our tails between our legs, because that's what you do when you lose. 

That's why our frantic, chaotic exit from Kabul was perfect, because it perfectly capped off 20 years of lies about what was really going on over there, 20 years of frantic, chaotic thrashing around and throwing money and the bodies of young American men and women at a problem that could never be solved. It was an enormous delusion that we, the United States of America, could march into those countries thousands of miles away from our shores and — if we spent enough money and invented and fielded enough "mine resistant vehicles" and fired enough missiles from enough drones at enough "Taliban commanders" — could somehow emerge from those quagmires victorious. 

We couldn't, and we didn't, and when that American major general, all kitted-out in the combat gear we spent 20 years dressing our soldiers in, scampered up the ramp of that cargo jet to steal away from the Kabul airport in the middle of the night, it was the absolute perfect ending to the perfect disaster the war in Afghanistan had always been. We were humiliated in front of the entire world, as we should have been. The way we left Afghanistan "did damage to our credibility and to our reputation," the famous Gen. Petraeus told CBS when it was all over. 

Yeah, it did, Dave, and it should have. Maybe now the geniuses who got us into those godforsaken disastrous wars and kept us there will think twice before they do it again. 

Except, wait. That was supposed to have been the great "lesson of Vietnam." Never mind.

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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by liberty »

I don't believe that Trump would have continued to pull out from Afghanistan. He can't stand losing. I think he would reengage in sent more troops back in so the women of Afghanistan would have at least four more years of freedom. You know, I believe Afghans never had a 180,000 man army. I'm beginning to think maybe that army never existed. It was a paper army, just a fraction of that size. And, all the paychecks that were going non-existent soldiers were going into some general's Swiss bank accounts. Whose fault was that; the state department should have been investigating things like that. They should've been investigating Afghan corruption. The reason we lost in Afghanistan other than that, Biden is a coward, is that we just could not overcome the corruption. But corruption is a significant problem in most third-world countries.

It is Colin Powell's fault that Iraq and Afghanistan turned out the way they did. President Bush had two sets of advice on the wars in Afghanistan in Iraq, one from Colin Powell and one from Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney said, go in, destroy everything and achieve your goal and leave. Powell said if you break it, you own it meaning you should fix and leave it better than you found it. Bush took Powel's advice. Colin Powell was wrong, and Dick Cheney was right.

Afghanistan's lesson is not to listen to fools like Colin Powell but realistic men dick Cheney. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war and make a desert and call it peace.
I expected to be placed in an air force combat position such as security police, forward air control, pararescue or E.O.D. I would have liked dog handler. I had heard about the dog Nemo and was highly impressed. “SFB” is sad I didn’t end up in E.O.D.

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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by liberty »

liberty wrote:
Tue Sep 28, 2021 4:56 pm
I don't believe that Trump would have continued to pull out from Afghanistan. He can't stand losing. I think he would reengage in sent more troops back in so the women of Afghanistan would have at least four more years of freedom. You know, I believe Afghans never had a 180,000 man army. I'm beginning to think maybe that army never existed. It was a paper army, just a fraction of that size. And, all the paychecks that were going non-existent soldiers were going into some general's Swiss bank accounts. Whose fault was that; the state department should have been investigating things like that. They should've been investigating Afghan corruption. The reason we lost in Afghanistan other than that, Biden is a coward, is that we just could not overcome the corruption. But corruption is a significant problem in most third-world countries.

It is Colin Powell's fault that Iraq and Afghanistan turned out the way they did. President Bush had two sets of advice on the wars in Afghanistan in Iraq, one from Colin Powell and one from Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney said, go in, destroy everything and achieve your goal and leave. Powell said if you break it, you own it meaning you should fix and leave it better than you found it. Bush took Powel's advice. Colin Powell was wrong, and Dick Cheney was right.

Afghanistan's lesson is not to listen to fools like Colin Powell but realistic men dick Cheney. Cry havoc and let slip the of dogs of war and make a desert and call it peace.
I expected to be placed in an air force combat position such as security police, forward air control, pararescue or E.O.D. I would have liked dog handler. I had heard about the dog Nemo and was highly impressed. “SFB” is sad I didn’t end up in E.O.D.

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Re: Graveyard of Empires

Post by Crackpot »

He was more than happy to throw the Kurds under the bus and they were allies
Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.

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