Afghanistan - Yet Another US Mistake Is Now Happening!

[PeterRS]

34 minutes ago, vinapu said:

Always did. World in 1900 and in 1945 was completely different

So true. I wonder how many in 1900 could have foreseen even as a remote possiblity that seven great Empires would quickly collapse - China, Britain, Germany, Austro-Hungary, the Ottoman Turks, Japan and Tsarist Russia? Or that two World Wars would completely revolutionise the world order? Or that warfare would change from mighty armies pitched against other mighty armies largely to monstrous technological machines on the ground, in the sea, in the air and no doubt soon in space? Clearly anyone who predicts the future is as likely to be wrong as he might just be right.

[caeron]

 

Oh, I think Russia does remain a 3rd world power. Just one with an army of disinformation hackers that can hurt the rest of us. They are coming up, they're just trying to drag us down to their level.

[vinapu]

6 hours ago, caeron said:

 

Oh, I think Russia does remain a 3rd world power. Just one with an army of disinformation hackers that can hurt the rest of us. They are coming up, they're just trying to drag us down to their level.

as we learned recently whether country is 1st or 3rd world power, often can't stamp it's will long term on  backward and undeveloped country s there's hope for minnows

[vinapu]

7 hours ago, PeterRS said:

 Clearly anyone who predicts the future is as likely to be wrong as he might just be right.

sure , we can't even reliably predict when we will be able to go to Thailand again, not to mention more monumental questions about the future

[fedssocr]

I don't know if anyone is still reading this thread, but this new piece in the New Yorker is fascinating and explains a lot

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women

[PeterRS]

On 9/7/2021 at 11:38 PM, fedssocr said:

I don't know if anyone is still reading this thread, but this new piece in the New Yorker is fascinating and explains a lot

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women

I finally had time to read this fascinating yet horrifying and damning article. All the spin we have heard over the last 20 or so years is shown to be just that - spin. As the coalition PR machine kept telling us so frequently, the war was being won. As in Vietnam, in the countryside the exact opposite was true. 

Clear disagreements between the USA and its NATO allies. An Afghan translator mistakenly arrested and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba with no appeal. US forces raiding the home of a "beloved tribal elder", killing him and leaving his son a paraplegic. A coalition air strike hitting a mosque and killing all inside. At least the Taliban fighters would warn villagers where they had placed IEDs so they could be avoided. Not so, the coalition forces. Several of Shakira's cousins being killed at different times. Seven year old Muhammad mistakenly killed when coalition forces strafed the car he happened to be in. Her 16-year old cousin Amanullah was merely working in the fields when murdered by a sniper of the Afghan army. No reason given and a family too afraid to ask.

"Entire branches of Shakira’s family tree, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. I wondered if it was the same for other families in Pan Killay. I sampled a dozen households at random in the village, and made similar inquiries in other villages, to insure that Pan Killay was no outlier. For each family, I documented the names of the dead, cross-checking cases with death certificates and eyewitness testimony. On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.

"This scale of suffering was unknown in a bustling metropolis like Kabul, where citizens enjoyed relative security. But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban. By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge; the movement was more thoroughly integrated into Sangin life than it had been in the nineties. Now, when Shakira and her friends discussed the Taliban, they were discussing their own friends, neighbors, and loved ones . . .

"Some British officers on the ground grew concerned that the U.S. was killing too many civilians, and unsuccessfully lobbied to have American Special Forces removed from the area. Instead, troops from around the world poured into Helmand, including Australians, Canadians, and Danes. But villagers couldn’t tell the difference—to them, the occupiers were simply “Americans.” Pazaro, the woman from a nearby village, recalled, “There were two types of people—one with black faces and one with pink faces. When we see them, we get terrified.” The coalition portrayed locals as hungering for liberation from the Taliban, but a classified intelligence report from 2011 described community perceptions of coalition forces as “unfavorable,” with villagers warning that, if the coalition “did not leave the area, the local nationals would be forced to evacuate.”

By 2019 when the US was holding talks with the Taliban, an optimism returned to the valleys. It did not last long.

"Shortly before the Americans left, they dynamited her house, apparently in response to the Taliban’s firing a grenade nearby. With two rooms still standing, the house is half inhabitable, half destroyed, much like Afghanistan itself."

". . . the Afghan government and American forces moved jointly on Sangin one last time. That January, they launched perhaps the most devastating assault that the valley witnessed in the entire war. Shakira and other villagers fled for the desert, but not everyone could escape. Ahmed Noor Mohammad, who owned a pay-phone business, decided to wait to evacuate, because his twin sons were ill. His family went to bed to the sound of distant artillery. That night, an American bomb slammed into the room where the twin boys were sleeping, killing them. A second bomb hit an adjacent room, killing Mohammad’s father and many others, eight of them children.

"The next day, at the funeral, another air strike killed six mourners. In a nearby village, a gunship struck down three children. The following day, four more children were shot dead. Elsewhere in Sangin, an air strike hit an Islamic school, killing a child. A week later, twelve guests at a wedding were killed in an air raid.

"After the bombing, Mohammad’s brother travelled to Kandahar to report the massacres to the United Nations and to the Afghan government. When no justice was forthcoming, he joined the Taliban."

As in all wars, mistakes are made and massacres probably and sadly an inevitable result. Do we remember My Lai in Vietnam, an atrocity where up to 500 Vietnamese villagers - men, women, children and infants - were massacred but not before American troops had first gang raped women as young as 12? When this finally came to light, the platoon leader was sentenced to life in prison, surely a just sentence. But Americans look after their own. All he served was three and a half years under house arrest. How can any reasonable person consider this is justice?

As the subject of the New Yorker article, Shakira, says of the future under the new regime -

“I have to believe,” she said. “Otherwise, what was it all for?”

If we cannot get things right in our own countries, what right do we have to try and sort out problems in others? None!

[reader]

From Channel News Asia

Security agencies concerned Taliban takeover in Afghanistan could increase terrorism in Southeast Asia

SINGAPORE: Many security agencies are concerned that the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan could lead to more terrorism in the region, Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam said on Friday (Sep 10).

This is because Afghanistan had, under the previous Taliban regime, provided a safe haven for potential terrorists from Southeast Asia, including from Singapore, he said.

"If you ask what do would-be terrorists need or what helps would-be terrorists go out and do bad things: A safe haven, a place where they can train, a place where their minds can be hardened and radicalised even more," Mr Shanmugam told reporters ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Sep 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

"And previously, what happened with ISIS and Al-Qaeda was that there were such safe havens. Afghanistan provided a safe haven for training persons from Southeast Asia, including from Singapore; and it provided a safe haven for training, access to weapons, people become hardened because there's training on fighting, and that makes it very dangerous."

He added: "Will that happen again? A lot of people fear that. I fear that that might happen again. So yes, I think the prospect of increased terrorism in the region, I think many security agencies and serious people are concerned about it."

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/afghanistan-taliban-terrorism-shanmugam-2168406

[PeterRS]

In another article in yesteday's issue of The Guardian, Afghanistan's reincarnation of Vietnam's Lt. William Calley has once again been revealed. Some of the article refers to incidents already itemised in the New Yorker article posted earlier by @fedssocr. But this is new, at least in this forum as far as I am aware. It speaks for itself.

"The men of Zangabad village, Panjwai district lined up on the eve of 11 September to count and remember their dead, the dozens of relatives who they say were killed at the hands of the foreign forces that first appeared in their midst nearly 20 years ago.

"Their cluster of mud houses, fields and pomegranate orchards was the site of perhaps the most notorious massacre of the war, when US SSgt Robert Bales walked out of a nearby base to slaughter local families in cold blood. He killed 16 people, nine of them children.

"America’s tragedy, thousands of families’ terrible losses on that September morning in 2001, would indirectly unravel into similar grief for thousands of other families half a world away.

"Afghans who knew little or nothing about the planes flying into towers in New York, and certainly had no link at all to al-Qaida, were caught up in the war that followed, and that claimed their loved ones year after year.

"Haji Muhammad Wazir lost almost all his immediate family, apart from his four-year-old son in the early hours of 11 March 2012. It was more than a decade after the twin towers came down, but they were the reason the US military was on his doorstep.

"Bales killed his wife, four sons, four daughters and two other relatives. He shot the children in the head then tried to burn their bodies.

“It is very hard for me, I still feel like these things are happening right now,” Wazir told the Guardian, nearly a decade after the almost unimaginable slaughter ripped apart his life. “I am very happy the American forces have finally left Afghanistan, and very grateful to Allah for making this happen. At last I feel safe.”

The article later points out that the Taliban, too, was responsible for the deaths of Afghanis. But it was the actions of some of the US servicemen and their NATO partners in the war that drove many Afghanis directly to the Taliban, either as fighters or as financial supporters. 

At least Bales was arrested for his crimes in what is now known as the Kandahar massacre. In a plea deal he pleaded guilty to murder, assault and attempted murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The US Supreme Court refused to hear his case and his lawyer is now trying to get a new trial in a civilian court.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/10/how-mass-killings-by-us-forces-after-911-boosted-support-for-the-taliban

[PeterRS]

I've been called anti-American more than once. Now the Brits will have me in their sights for a whistleblower has blown the lid of the British reaction to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. A former civil servant desk officer at the foreign officer has heaped criticism at the British government and its lies after the evacuation.

Among his allegations - 

1. The government falsely claimed that every request for evacuation had been logged. Thousands of emails, even those sent to Members of Parliament, had not even been read.

2. Up to 150,000 Afghans applied for evacuation. Fewer than 5% got any assistance. Some who were left behind have been murdered.

3. Even for those whose pleas were actually read, there were no regulations for deciding the criteria re who should be eligible. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab had approved a list that included judges and intelligence officers, but final decisions were left to individual officers. 

4. Guards who had protected the British Embassy were not prioritised.

5. Telephone calls were only to be in English. The Dari text of emails inviting Afghans for evacuation was inaccurate because it said a printed version of the email was necessary to enter Kabul airport when a digital copy was sufficient.

6. Despite the gravity of the situation, there were insufficient civil servants to undertake processing and overtime was only very reluctantly agreed. 

7. Civil servants from the former Department for International Development who had volunteered to help were "appalled by our chaotic system."

8. Despite the huge numbers trying to leave, the Prime minister instructed the Foreign office to use "considerable capacity" to help animals to leave the country. So animals are given an aircraft at the expense of British nationals and those at risk of imminent murder.

What a disgrace!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/07/whistleblower-on-uks-afghan-evacuation-main-accusations

[msclelovr]

3 hours ago, PeterRS said:

the Brits will have me in their sights for a whistleblower has blown the lid of the British reaction to the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

No, it was a chaotic shambles. Personally I didn’t agree with British troops being sent there in the first place. The best description IMHO came months earlier from a Conservative politician who was sharply rebuked for saying in Parliament that Afghanistan “was a medieval and barbaric country when we went in, and it will remain a medieval and barbaric country when we leave”.