MacArthur and Patton would have been fired today anyway. Using words like "Japs and Krauts" wouldn't cut it. I'm a little concerned about your use of "Tali" too btw.
Joe Biden shitshow just getting started. Now, the Taliban has started their killing spree. Next will be the Americans stranded in Kabul. Expect beheadings, rape of American women then, lives as Taliban wives. It is coming if not, already. Remember, the Taliban mentioned the August 31 deadline. Whoever is left and has not managed to evacuate, will be either killed or raped if they are women. Do not expect mercy from the Taliban. They fully know that our so called US President Joe Biden is incompetent without a clue, just making stuff up as dictated by his handlers.
I bet money Biden changes tact and all the sudden puts on a tough guy hat. He's gonna say "we'll leave when we're ready". Behind the scenes they'll slip the Tali (oops) a few more million.
An interesting story about a reporter amidst all of this Afghanistan chaos -- with photos, etc. Reuters photographer was killed after being left behind in retreat, Afghan general says https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/afghanistan-conflict-reuters-siddiqui/
The Tali have got an endless supply of $$$$ via all the opium they now control. They don't need bribes from the US gov. What are they going to do with that money anyway? They dont need weapons either, the US left them $28 Billion dollars worth.
The also have the largest arms bazar in the world. Every terrorist on the planet will be buying arms from the Taliban for a long time. Our soldiers are going to face those weapons all over the world.
And since we just banned Russian made ammo sales in this country, I'm assuming the laws of supply and demand will kick in and Russia is gonna have a blue-light special on bullets here pretty soon. +++++++++++++++++++++++++ Biden Bans Russian Ammo Amid Continuing Shortage Stephen Gutowski August 20, 2021 10:25 pm Americans, already facing an ammo shortage, will soon no longer be able to purchase Russian-made ammunition. The Biden Administration announced on Friday it would stop approving new permits to import Russian-made ammo and guns. The ban will go into effect on September 7th, 2021. It is part of a new round of sanctions against the Russian government over its poisoning and imprisoning of dissident Aleksey Navalny. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ As an aside here, this stock POWW.... I've done the DD, its a solid stock. $7.50... if you ignore the inevitable short term volatility... its a good stock to buy and hold for anyone that cares.
That is the plan I'm sure, buy some more time. The Tali will decide what happens next week. Hopefully we can appeal to the budding capitalists in their ranks and do "business" with them, otherwise this becomes a mass slaughter.
The coming collapse of the Taliban https://thehill.com/opinion/international/569078-the-coming-collapse-of-the-taliban The Taliban should savor its triumph while it can, for it is unlikely to survive much beyond this fleeting moment of victory. And those countries in the region that are similarly disposed to celebrate America’s defeat should also enjoy the moment while it lasts, for the coming collapse of the Taliban is likely to be more a curse than a blessing. That the Taliban is unlikely to outlive the now-defunct Afghan national government (ANG) by much might seem a far-fetched claim. But the history of the movement – and that of the mujahideen, which defeated the Soviets and their puppet regime in the late 1980s and early 1990s respectively – strongly suggests that this will almost certainly be the case. Since its inception, the Taliban has been more a constellation of factions and tribes, drawn from different ethnic and linguistic groups, than the unitary rational actor it is often portrayed to be. In this, it is no different than either the coalition of warlords that governed Afghanistan directly from 1992 to 1996 or the one that governed Afghanistan through the “state” created by the U.S. in the aftermath of the 2001 invasion. But it has always had two advantages over those two ruling coalitions. To begin with, the Taliban has always had a clerical command-and-control infrastructure that transcended – without displacing or effacing – the tribal, linguistic and communal identities of its constituent elements. But perhaps even more importantly, since 2001 the Taliban has been able to exploit one of the defining elements of Afghan national identity – resistance to foreign occupiers – to override factional differences and maintain a robust political coalition. These two unifying factors have always given the Taliban a clear advantage over an Afghan national government that was similarly divided but never able to tap into the religious or nationalist sentiment to anything like the same degree. They gave the Taliban a decisive advantage in 1996, when it took control of most of the country, and again after it reconstituted in the early 2000s and began challenging the newly minted ANG beginning in earnest in 2006. It was these two factors that allowed it to gain the strategic upper hand during the final years of the Bush administration and again in 2015 as President Obama began his post-surge drawdown. Now, however, one of those unifying factors has evanesced. With the withdrawal of the American “occupier” and the defeat of its Afghan client state, some of the glue holding the Taliban together will soon dissolve. To be sure, the victors are likely to bask in the afterglow of having expelled the foreign invaders for some time yet. But, if the experience of the victorious mujahideen in the early 1990s is any guide, that is not likely to last long. Nor is it likely to prove sufficient to contain the centrifugal tendencies within the Taliban coalition. Perhaps the hierarchical command-and-control structures built up over the past three decades will be sufficient to hold the movement together. But then again, maybe they too will wither now that the war has been won, further accelerating the tendency toward fragmentation. And that prospect – of division leading to dissolution – has several implications for Afghanistan’s regional neighbors. First, it raises the prospect of civil war. It should be remembered that this is precisely what happened in the aftermath of the mujahideen victory over the USSR three decades ago. In that case, once the common foe was vanquished, the various tribal, communal and linguistic factions turned on each other — and on the Afghan people. The result was a period of chaos and conflict that ultimately gave rise first to the Taliban insurrection and then to the first Taliban emirate. Absent the U.S., it is reasonable to assume that the disparate parts of the Taliban coalition – long held together precisely by the American presence – will similarly turn on each other, vying for their share of the spoils of victory even to the point of armed conflict. Second, should this happen, it raises the prospect of several disasters that are likely to spill over Afghanistan’s borders — all to the detriment of its regional neighbors. These include a number of humanitarian crises, all culminating in destabilizing refugee flows that will be most unwelcome in Pakistan, Tajikistan and Iran, among others. Third, if the Taliban splinters in the post-victory scramble for advantage, it raises the prospect of a single Afghan state being replaced by a patchwork of regional statelets overlaid with pockets of ungoverned or contested spaces. In such an arrangement, even if there is something approximating a Taliban-dominated national government, its writ is unlikely to run much beyond Kabul. Whatever promises that government might make, it simply won’t be able to keep them. This is unlikely to prove conducive to foreign investment of the type associated, for example, with China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative. And it is likely to seriously complicate the imminent scramble for Afghanistan’s vast mineral wealth. Fourth, if the Taliban fragments or if parts of the country manage to resist the current onslaught, there will be no such thing as Afghan foreign policy. Rather, there will be a variety of statelets, each with its own interests and priorities, and each conducting its own foreign policy. The result will be a situation in which Tajik militants of Jamaat Ansarullah, Uzbek groups like Katibat Imam al-Bukhari, Uighur fighters of the Turkestan Islamic Party from China’s Xinjiang region and others all become the core of new ethnic statelets, each conducting its own foreign relations and perhaps taking steps to liberate their oppressed compatriots in neighboring countries. Whatever the specific outcome, it is a mistake to assume that the future of Afghanistan’s domestic politics or foreign policy will be determined by a unified Taliban government more or less rationally pursuing its interests. Given the chaos and conflict that are likely to ensue, those who are currently celebrating the fall of Afghanistan may soon come to wish for the good old days when the Americans kept at least a partial lid on things.