Miscellaneous News
- Thread starter bd popeye
- Start date
solarz
Brigadier
I read somewhere in either this thread or the "China's Afghanistan Strategy", that China has been in contact with the Taliban for quite a while, just not disclosing it to the public until the Tianjin meeting.
I wouldn't be surprised if Taliban commanders studied Mao's strategies during their sojourn in Afghanistan caves.
Surely the CIA would have interjected ànd warned Biden admin?!?
To be fair to Biden, around 75-80% of the American public wanted the war in Afghanistan done with no matter what. Everyone opposing Biden by crying crocodile tears about Afghan women, collaborators, and gays (read: begging for the taxpayer money grift to continue) is going to get annihilated in the polls.
For the average American voter, the message they are seeing from Biden's critics is "let us continue to grift your money away on random foreign adventures while millions of Americans struggle to get food and housing" and that is an easy way to get dumpstered in elections.
It could actually be pretty good for Biden if he can find some way to dump the blame on Kamala or someone else or just call all his critics "America Last" grifters lol.
For the average American voter, the message they are seeing from Biden's critics is "let us continue to grift your money away on random foreign adventures while millions of Americans struggle to get food and housing" and that is an easy way to get dumpstered in elections.
It could actually be pretty good for Biden if he can find some way to dump the blame on Kamala or someone else or just call all his critics "America Last" grifters lol.
solarz
Brigadier
Biden was warned many times about this eventuality, but apparently he simply brushed them off.
solarz
Brigadier
So I was perusing wikipedia pages on the Soviet-Afghan War and the current US-Afghan War:
Out of curiosity, I checked the casualty numbers for both wars:
This shows us that when the Soviets were fighting in Afghanistan, it was mostly the Soviets who were doing the fighting.
When the Americans were fighting in Afghanistan, it was the Afghans who were doing most of the fighting.
Also, the US managed to cut their casualty figures by half by "outsourcing" much of the fighting to PMC. Actually, if we assume most PMC are American-based, and we only look at American casualties, the true figure is 2.67 times higher than the official figure!
Out of curiosity, I checked the casualty numbers for both wars:
This shows us that when the Soviets were fighting in Afghanistan, it was mostly the Soviets who were doing the fighting.
When the Americans were fighting in Afghanistan, it was the Afghans who were doing most of the fighting.
Also, the US managed to cut their casualty figures by half by "outsourcing" much of the fighting to PMC. Actually, if we assume most PMC are American-based, and we only look at American casualties, the true figure is 2.67 times higher than the official figure!
Technically true but the timing of it just rubs people the wrong way. American decline is on everyone's mind and people are really self-conscious about that. So, the rapid collapse happening at the time like this really demoralizes people. If it happened a few years earlier, or a few years later, people wouldn't really care that. It is just bad timing so the optics are far worse than it is. They should have just waited.
Do you have info info on Turkmenistan joins CSTO? When the joining happened?
I can not find any piece showing that country has been joining CSTO. The latest piece on Turkmenistan in Dec 2020 showing that country still opted to be neutral: ""
Instead I found this piece through Yandex after trying Google & Bing with no avail:
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan Rashid Meredov met with Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the US to Turkmenistan Matthew S. Klimow
It seems this country is not in good state economically, a weak one esp. after Covid-19, so it could be easy to be bought up by Washington's magical $$$. If Kremlin don't be watchful and stern with threat, this country can be the backdoor to create problem in Afghanistan. But I know just little about the Central Asia states.
That's a pretty unrealistic assertion IMO. Foreign affairs basically ranks somewhere between 15-20 on the list of American voter priorities. I grew up poor in the US and literally no one gave two fucks about what was happening in the rest of the world for more than a week at most if at all or if one of the boys came back from the latest war in a coffin.
Basically speaking, for the American working class, we could give two shits if all Afghan collaborators were hung from trees or if all the women's universities were burned to the ground. Tens of millions are homeless, out of work, in debt, or going hungry because of the pandemic and resultant economic crisis and the slow decline after 2008 and crime/rioting is spiking back to 1980s levels. Those will be 100x more poignant symbol of American decline for American voters than memes about Saigon '75.