The U.S. Empire is in freefall. Good. Afghanistan has reverted to nativist control as expected. The ‘goat-herders’ there remain unconquered. The speed of the Taliban’s takeover doesn’t surprise me because the groundwork for it has been in process for years.
Only the U.S. State Department under both Mike Pompeo and now Antony Blinken opposed this. If you’re angry this morning you can thank Russian diplomats who started this process in December 2016 by opening up the dialogue between the Taliban and the Asian powers with Pakistan leading the talks.
I can’t say I’m shedding any tears here except for all the losses on both sides. War is never righteous.
So, while I’m happy to see this end I am also sad to also see this end for what it is, a planned act of geopolitical vandalism by the Biden Obama Administration to ensure a complete collapse of the U.S. political system.
We are being liquidated by The Davos Crowd at the precise moment when their Great Reset is at its most vulnerable.
20 Years a Slave to War
For 20 years we libertarians warned this day would come and now it’s here. Is it a case of better late than never?
I think that question is irrelevant. The costs are incalculable. They always are.
You’ll hear a lot of utilitarian nonsense about $2.2 trillion etc. but that’s just the price tag you see. What you don’t see, as Harry Hazlitt reminds us, is where the real costs are — the lost opportunities, the Afghan and American lives spent, the bureaucracy empowered, the capital diverted from productive work — that come with prosecuting endless war for impossible democracy.
Before Afghanistan was there a Dept. of Homeland Security? The Patriot Act? The Military Commissions Act? A Global War on Terror?
Are those part of that $2.2 trillion? No. They aren’t. And yet we paid them anyway.
It wasn’t like America wasn’t already fighting a slew of unwinnable wars of ideology (Drugs, Poverty, Democracy, Individualism) in the pursuit of the neocon/neoliberal ideal of ‘exceptionalism’ which was sold to too many of us as a path to a world without sin. Sadly, too many believed this out of loyalty to a government which cannot do anything except lie.
Those sins are reflected in the generation of men and women who fought the wrong war for the right reasons, serving their country and their families. Everyone’s heart should ache at the enormity of everyone’s losses.
We are all poorer today in body, mind and spirit because of this war.
The late Justin Raimondo spent a lifetime warning us about this:
Raimondo taught me to understand that foreign policy is just war by other means, and it was the most important part of our national policy. The foreign policy orthodoxy can never be challenged in the public sphere.
It is verboten.
Because it is that which drives the Empire and all the perks that come with that for those in charge of it.
For a generation we’ve sent young men and women into a meat grinder for no real-world reason other than to protect the CIA’s opium trade and have troops ready to attack Iran if the right circumstances arose.
And those who did so have proven they have no right to speak on this ever again. They are the villains here.
Every time I take my shoes off and get porno-scanned at the airport I’m reminded of this abject failure, not of policy, but of basic governing philosophy. We Americans (yes even libertarians who warned everyone about this) are culpable for the failures not only in Afghanistan but every other place we use to pressure Iran and, by extension, Russia into submission.
For what? An outdated geopolitical theory about the world –Makinder Heartland Theory — which those in power cling to like Linus’ blanket to justify their naked bloodlust and avarice?
It’s time to put away these childish things and return to our own centers, our homes.
I welcome the mimetic collapse for millions in the center of the U.S. political spectrum. They are asking the right question, “What in god’s name was this all for in the end?”
The anti-interventionist crowd I’m proud to be a part of are getting their schadenfreude on right now but this is the exact wrong time for gloating.
This is their moment to prove you empathize with our losses so that no one should have to die again for such an ignoble cause as a pipeline or democracy. That the urge to fight for your family, your country is noble but that nobility ends at the shoreline. The message now is we want what you want, to rebuild the bonds of civil society these villains bombed without remorse and threw your children onto the altar of their evil, gutted and threw away.
You can start by remembering these 2 minutes from Ron Paul in 2009.
The Return of the Tribal King
This is the first lesson from this failure in Afghanistan that has everyone in a state of shock.
Humans are loyal to their tribes.
We spent 20 years building a government and military occupation through destruction, bombing and bribery with the goal of undermining Afghanistan’s tribal structure.
Not one whit of it remains. And yet, after 20 years of propaganda saying it was working, we’re shocked the moment we announce we’re leaving those same people, who never loved us, reverted to their tribal roots?
No amount of violence creates that. In fact, it only hardens that which is there. Vague notions of democracy and women’s rights are not compelling.
If what we offered Afghanistan’s people wanted, it wouldn’t have taken 20 years to build it. As always, the neocons were wrong. The proof is in the 72 hour collapse of the entire edifice.
The morons in power didn’t believe the goat herders wouldn’t read the tea leaves and pledge allegiance to the next most powerful group, the Taliban?
This is why I wasn’t surprised by the speed of the collapse of the Afghan government and its 300,000 strong army.
They took our money and used it to survive the occupation.
History is replete with examples of quickly deposed Viceroys after their rule breaks down.
I hope the Taliban are as good as their word to the Russians per the Moscow talks in July. If so, the chaotic period will be as brief as it possibly could be. The further bloodshed minimized and something close to order can emerge. We should all cheer for that.
When you push a people to the brink of extinction, when you force them back to their basic units of community, in Afghanistan’s example, their tribal identity, you find the limit to which they will retreat.
Having lost everything else they will always, and without fail, fight for their families to the death. Why would you expect anything else? Wouldn’t you? Nothing else matters if not your family.
This is why everyone who has gone into Afghanistan over the past 150 years has failed. Only hubris and the kind of solipsism that comes from unlimited perceived power sings a different tune.
The people who made up Afghanistan’s ‘army’ were faced with a real choice, fight for something they had no loyalty to or submit to the Taliban who now see this as the ultimate victory over the West.
The Road Back from Serfdom
That same choice is rapidly being put in front of us here in America, if not the entire West. We are ruled by stateless and foreign occupiers. There is a viceroy sporifying in the White House. There are looters and vandals running wild on Main Street, K Street and Wall Street.
They have the courts running scared, destroying the rule of law, while Congress has run out of money to bribe us with.
And yet it feels like we have precious few friends or even temporary allies. But we have also seen a massive wave of counter moves by those that still believe in such quaint notions as family, community and, yes, tribe.
In my last article I said it was time to strike at the root of confidence. Not the confidence of the values of our institutions but our confidence in those that operate those institutions.
The collapse of our Afghanistan adventure is supposed to deeply shame us and humiliate us. The vandals in D.C. are chuckling in their version of Collapsitarian.
It has done that.
The media that has been their stenographers and our enemies have been stunned into a rare silence, some even imploring us to self-censor images of their failures.
The anger over this collapse is just settling in for millions of people now.
But, we have to move past that shame quickly. Now we must take that humility, which used to be the ethos of pre-empire America, and realize who the architects of this were and remove them from the public discourse. They no longer get to speak in hallowed halls and drone incantations of death and destruction, dressing it up as a righteous cause.
The no longer get to bamboozle with prepared talking points which are as pathetic as they are deceitful.
Because if we do that then those who enforce the viceroy’s chaos will also face a stark choice. I ask them openly, “Is this order?”
Is this what you are willing to die to protect?
Change is coming. You can be a part of it or run for the airports with your mask on and your vaccine QR code at the ready. Davos has tried to break our spirit by breaking our families and our tribes.
They have us fighting among ourselves while they try to run the table over the flu shot. We think ourselves superior to those Afghan goat-herders. But they still have their identities.
And now they have their country back.
I’ve herded goats, it’s a tough job. Far tougher than the work most Americans do today. So, stow the exceptionalism, back away from the shadows projected on the cave wall and reconnect with the light of reality.
Two weeks ago I implored law enforcement to see things as they were and remind themselves who it is they protect and serve.
Now is your opportunity to prove to us, in our time of need, that you are our friends and not the enemies of civil society. You have the opportunity to help restore real order. Don’t make the mistakes our soldiers and their families made, sacrificing your lives for people who despise you.
Wars of all forms are rackets.
Because the big reveal in Afghanistan is that what happened there can happen here, quickly. Those goat-herders just showed us how to defeat an Empire abroad. Now it’s time to defeat the empire within.
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I ahve ahd this dream for many years of Bush, Obama, Biden and the Neocons dancing in the street of Kabul singing, “We shall overcome someday.” That nightmare is over and ours is about to begin.
Well said Tom. It high time America faced reality. It comes down to fight for your freedom or lose your soul, your future and probably your life.
“To some a dream. To others a NIGHTMARE!”. It has been said, that in an age of lies, that telling the truth is a revolutionary act. So shall it be in our age of distraction and delusion. Tom is indeed one such teller of truth.
There are those who would like nothing better, than to see the Empire fall into real civil war. Or lacking that, for it and China to cripple themselves in a pointless war.
Either would serve their purpose. What purpose? To inflict their twisted, evil ideals on the entire world.
The hour is late, but there is still hope. But only, if we remain focused on our families, traditions and our tribe.
I got chills and also a flush of optimism coming to the end of your article. I don’t see why the restoration we so desperately need in the US can’t be swift and severe. I don’t understand all the negativity and the incessant, finger-wagging I-told-you-so’s coming from patriots. We are fundamentally an optimistic polity in a way the Europeans are not. For crying out loud, we just need to stop pouting and get on the board.
Loved your recent geopolitical analysis with Alex Mercouris! You’re right–the Eurogarchs are always hatching evil plans, but the story of history is that they DON’T WORK. And yet, they keep pushing the same ideas even after they’re proven idiotic. Unreal.
Matt,
Thank you, I’m glad that the article had that effect… it was intended. Be well, stay strong.
The most likely thing – probably the only possible explanation – is that the Democrats decided that it was no longer worth the resources to occupy Afghanistan. That almost certainly means that they’re going to start some other war – Russia or China. But it might mean they’re just planning on invading America.
Afghanistan finally liberated from a regime that imposes mandatory face coverings, destroys statues, and promotes the genital mutilation of children
Looks like my reply was cut!
it was not… I have to approve them… and just woke up. :)
What I find amazing is how the “NARRATIVE” is the only thing that seems to matter to our oligarchy. Or is it that they have swallowed their own propaganda to the point where they think it is real? Or is there simply no one in Washington DC that can offer a different opinion and tell them no?
This Afghanistan intelligence “failure” (ignoring intel. you don’t want to hear) was EXACLY what General Michael Flynn was destroyed for:
“In response to a question about ISIS’s resurgence in Iraq, Obama stated on 7 January 2014: ‘…I think the analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a JV team put on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.’ Less than six months later, ISIS controlled swathes of territory across Syria and Iraq, had announced the establishment of its Caliphate and, by the end of 2014, had established transnational wilayats across the Middle East, Africa and the Subcontinent.”
Michael Flynn, former DIA chief: Obama ignored ISIS intel to fit election narrative
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/dec/2/michael-flynn-former-dia-chief-obama-ignored-isis-/
How many times does this have to happen? And now we have Afghan civilians falling from military airplanes! This is right up there with deciding to invade Russia without winter uniforms. IMHO
The swift collapse of Afghanistan shows how quickly things can change.
Seemingly rock solid institutions can turn to dust overnight in tumultuous times. These corrupt authoritarian clowns and their nonsense included.
It’s wise to be psychologically and emotionally prepared for anything.
You are very right Tom…
Change Is Coming!
Would somebody please email a copy of this article to Mr.Scott Morrison and the Liberal Party of Australia, and explain the workings of the ‘Davos Crowd and the planned destruction of our way of life. We desperately need a voice to wake them out of their stupor, before it’s too late.
Unfortunately, Mr. Morrison is one of the deepest members of Davos…. they don’t care… don’t look to your politicians for solutions, they don’t work for you anymore.
Thank you Tom, the thought had crossed my mind about Morrison. Now tell me that Gladys Berijeklian (?) premier of New South Wales, is one too???
Is anyone straight in the government of Australia ?
Of course she is. That’s the fundamental problem.
I just discovered you this afternoon. The politicians haven’t worked for the people they allegedly represent for a long time. They only represent party members. How do you become a party member? Get elected to political office. The political parties in America are merely the mass of people rooting for one or the other party, the way people root for the Yankees or the Dodgers. There’s more difference than that, but once those elected by the smaller government team find out what a great gig it is, they are happy to be the minority team so long as they get to be re-elected.
So you admit that the Davosians and their Manchurian Barack Obama have holed America below the waterline, and installed a senile old puppet at the apex of its government?
And they have crippled the world economy with their plandemic, while preparing to launch a global cryptocurrency to enslave us?
And they have divided us by race, and gender, and sexuality, and religion – we are now fighting amongst ourselves on multiple fronts. It’s a complete victory for the Frankfurt School……..
The 11 Point Plan of the Frankfurt School:
1. The creation of racism offenses.
2. Continual change to create confusion.
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children.
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority.
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity.
6. The promotion of excessive drinking.
7. Emptying of churches.
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime.
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits.
10. Control and dumbing down of media.
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family.
Surely there is no data anywhere that supports your projection of impending Davosian failure – it’s entirely a product of your motivated reasoning. You are living in a dream Tom.
A good general recognises when a battle is lost and retreats in order to gather his forces for the next one. In our case, the last one.
I think of it as Brownshirts vs Browncoats.
and the reaction to this historically is that the people get angry, get hard, resist this and ultimately make a mess of their plans… What part of ‘It’s a cycle’ do you refuse to understand?
Oh, that’s right… all of it.
Yes that’s exactly right.
HISTORICALLY people get angry and hard and resist. We’ve seen it repeatedly. Perhaps the Davosians noticed?
Perhaps that’s why the Frankfurt School made a handy list of the things that would need to be undermined or destroyed to prevent that reaction.
Newsflash Tom.
Davosians LEARN.
Did you imagine that they would keep trying the same methods over and over again, despite failing each time?
They refine their methods Tom. They learned to divide and conquer. They created the Welfare State. Promoted identity politics. Pushed MMT. UBI. They own the mainstream media. They own social media. They have marched through our institutions.
You crow about the impending Davosian failure, while unwittingly writing about their successes.
You insist the Davosians have failed, while sat in the rubble of your culture.
Learn about their methods Tom:
Cloward-Piven
Coudenhove-Kalergi.
Or, you know, be gobsmacked when they get their technocommunist Great Reset and 80% of people joyously celebrate enslavement.
Brownshirts vs Browncoats.
15 days.
It’s still going to fail Ivor because you refuse to accept the Information Problem as a basic tenet of human behavior. Write all the screeds you want … this is your shadow. This is your problem and no matter how much you try to convince me, my readers, god and the Universe itself, it’s all just shadows dancing in your head in Socrates’ cave.
You think you have turned around and looked at the light, but you haven’t. You keep running back in because your faith in people is nil.
Honestly, I’m not responding to your TL;DR’s anymore. It’s a waste of my time and I have people who want to effect change to help.
Yes I’ve done my research. The Fourth Turning. Kondratieff Waves. S-curves, the business cycle, the credit cycle. And on and on.
Orwell foresaw a time when all that would end.
By the end, Winston Smith loved the Party.
And so will 80% of the people you know.
And they are being taught that they must get angry, and hard, and must resist.
And they will.
They are the Brownshirts.
People are ALREADY angry, and hard, and will resist.
Orwell called it the Two Minutes Hate.
Humanity’s basic tenets have been harnessed Tom. The Woken SS now despise the tyranny of liberty.
So the Davosians have a proxy army, and it’s comprised of those we love and are trying to save.
““The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy.”
Brownshirts. Browncoats.
IVORDEACON: I think what Tom understands is the “long game”. For example, if you removed all of the ideology behind World War II and just looked at the number of steel mills around the world that could produce rolled steel, the numbers were something like: Germany (3), USSR (5), United States (28), Japan (2). (don’t quote me on those, as that is what I remember).
So, once the United States and the USSR entered the war, Churchill knew the war was over (absent some Black Swan event like Germany developing the atomic bomb first). Of course, this also meant the end of the British Empire, not to Churchill’s way of thinking, but to others taking the “long view”.
And even the “good guys” get things wrong. In 1939, Stalin approached Neville Chamberlain and said that he was willing to join a British-French alliance against Germany if the British would cede all interest in the Baltic States and Bessarabia to the USSR. Chamberlain turned him down because he could not “in good conscience” cede the freedom of the Baltic and Bessarabian peoples. Stalin was actually DUMBFOUNDED by this, because Britain had repressive colonial control over about 25% of the globe (Raj in India, eg). Stalin could not comprehend Chamberlain’s “cognitive dissonance” state of mind and thought it was completely dishonest (or that Chamberlain was completely deluded). So, when Hitler came along and offered the Baltics and Bessarabia to the USSR, he took the deal and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. However, when the war ended, one that Britain engaged in initially to “ensure the freedom of peoples of Eastern Europe”, all of Eastern Europe was in Bolshevik totalitarian hands and the British Empire was no more.
A lot of what Tom publishes here is what the German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz described as “friction”:
https://braddelong.substack.com/p/carl-von-clausewitz-on-war-friction
And having listened to many others, Tom has a unique voice. I was thinking similarly to you, before I happened on Tom’s podcasts (#75, #76, #77) and then it clicked, I have to use my knowledge of history and Clausewitz as a lens to interpret current events.
I agree with you, that we can’t go back to the way things were (the world is too broken) however, I have to agree with Tom that the world the Davos Crowd envisages is far from a done deal. So, the question is: what does one do, as a “little person”, in the meantime while all of this plays out?
If you look at the history of the USSR, despite what happened to them (the communists tried to eradicate them as a class), the small holding peasants (Kulacs) were the class that ALWAYS bailed the USSR out. It happened time and time again.
And what did the Russian peasants have? Just the basics: Gold, Goats & Guns.
I hope that helps, for what it is worth.
Yes thanks that was good.
And although Tom gets annoyed with me for going after him, he knows that I agree with most of his analyses – he’s one of the best I’ve found (Brandon Smith at alt-market is also good and I’ve asked Tom to get him on a podcast)
I’m just concerned that Tom is not factoring in a disruptor – an event that changes the context of the game. He imagines that Davosians have learned little and will be defeated by nothing more than………the standard human reactions to impending tyranny. My concern is that they HAVE learned, and intend not to force tyranny upon us, but create the conditions under which we will beg for it.
And looking around, who would argue that the Davosians have created a formidable army of indoctrinated Brownshirts, ready to demand or accede to global tyranny in order to “solve” COVID, climate change, tranny rights, gay rights, inequality, racism and on and on?
My version is of GGG is Ag, Sn, Pb.
Sorry but would you define shirts and coats. It’s a compelling argument at this point and I may reply
Sure.
Brownshirts – those indoctrinated or duped into demanding that global governance replace national governance, in the belief that once empowered, the Davosians will use their powers to pursue the pet causes of the Brownshirts (tackling climate change, COVID, inequality, reparations, tranny rights etc) The original Brownshirts brought the National Socialists to power in Germany around 1930.
Browncoats – those who see clearly that the solution to too much government is not even more government, but much less. Unwilling to trade their essential rights for the promise of a little security. Appropriated from the aborted TV series Firefly.
They can be resisted. In the nation of Chile they produced a great hero.His name was Augutin Pinochet. He solved the problem for two generations and struck fear into the Communists masquerading as liberals democrats from which they feel chills today. That,me amigo, is the only solution for the USA. Let’s call it the Pinochet Solution.
In addition to eradicating marxists / commies by whatever label, Pinochet also privatized and funded the Chilean pension system.
Like social security in the USA, Chile’s public pensions had been used as a giant slush fund by corrupt politicians. Don’t kid yourself, both parties in the USA take social security funds.
FDR started social security as a Ponzi scheme, and lied so much that dimwits think social security is funded by their contributions. Dimwits who are too lazy to look at the actual social security law which says otherwise. Of course, FDR was a communist himself.
Unlike the bankrupt USA system, Chilean pensions are actually funded thanks to Pinochet.
Hollywood communists were very upset that Pinochet wouldn’t tolerate their failed ideas. But the fact is, most Chileans supported Pinochet even if Hollywood didn’t.
Please do not fall back into the Left/Right trap. Davos has used that on us for decades Pinochet ended Chile’s function democracy and was a mass murderer.
What you are suggesting is we need a Mussolini or a Hitler to fight the communists for us. Like that’s going to be an improvement?
This is a fight for every westerner. It’s a fight to save our democratic and free society. It’s not about killing people.
The Davos crowd can take their ill gotten gains and bug out to New Zealand for all I care. The important thing is to get them out of our society before they destroy it.
If Afghanistan shows us anything it is that these Nazis are bullies and cowards. Just stop obeying all their stupid covid rules. The moment they feel threatened they will run.
I find the neocon/MSM/“Inside the Beltway” kvetching about the waste of American blood and treasure a bit galling. Was it supposed to never end? How many lives a year were acceptable to pretend we were building a nation while we were actually literally strip-mining a de facto colony of its rare earths as “repayment” for the “assistance” we were giving them (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-afghanistan-minerals-idUSKCN1BX06G).
We passed the limit of the ‘sunk cost fallacy’ at the time of the first major battle at Tora Bora. Bush should have declared “Mission Accomplished” then and there, but the neocon security state realised this was a goldmine for extracting untold wealth from the American middle class.
Now that the American Middle class is being wiped out by the Pharmokinetic Reign of Terror, the claim they have on America’s declining Middle Class means that the MIC and their camp-followers have to give up their claim on some of the lucre. The money launderette known as Afghanistan is easier to part with than Iraq, where the laundering 100 times bigger.
Let’s hand it to Creepy Joe: Whether by accident or evil 4-D chess, he found a way to get out, though the vow to send 6,000 troops suggests the MIC aren’t willing to go without a fight. Let’s hope those troops aren’t vaxxed, because this might turn into the Mother of all Mogadishu moments if they aren’t up to the fight.
As for Europeans, they might want to learn Hazaragi, because Mutti’s swansong is likely to be to invite another million.
Great piece as usual.
It seems to me that what we are witnessing overall are the final stages of a plan to deliberately dismantle the US as a functioning concept. There is just no other way to explain it. (I started listing all the ways they are doing this, but the list quickly became too long for a mere comment post.)
Bread crumbs are visible on the trail going back a number of years, but I think the most dramatic actions were left till the very end (now?), since they are too blatantly obvious to have been done sooner. The people engineering this now believe the “win” is within their grasp and are no longer afraid of being obvious. I view the installation of Slow Joe as a big middle finger to the American public from the PTB. They did the Roman emperor Caligula (who made his horse a senator to humiliate the Senate) one better.
As you say, I think this obvious and dramatic implosion of the Afghanistan pullout was actually considered desirable by the PTB, since it will further contribute to the overall narrative that is designed to undermine the faith of Americans in their institutions.
A minor quibble. Trump had also tried to pull the Afghan troops out completely late in his term (I won’t try to comment on HIS motivations, but I don’t think they were the same). In his case, he was too inept to overcome being stymied by a hostile bureaucracy.
If we were loyal to our tribes we wouldn’t be there, we’d be here protecting overrun borders.. Ruled by traitors, criminals and physcopaths, the goat herders taught us a lesson, they can be beaten. The war is here now, injections instead of drones. Time to think like the men in the caves.
OK, so we went into Afghanistan to kill al-qeada leadership. They attacked the USA on 9/11, and we couldn’t realistically let that slide. We got most of them pretty quickly, and for face saving reasons we had to stick it out until we got Bin Laden.
What the %*^) were we doing there after that? Who voted for all the mission creep, and how many decades were they hoping voters and veterans would tolerate a never ending war?
But then this inept dementia patient that hollywood shoved up our backside decided to extend the mission a few more months (beyond may) so he could drag up another 9/11 anniversary.
Even after taking several extra months, not one incompetent screw up in Washington had any plan to extract BILLIONS in military equipment. Don’t F’ing lie again. Biden is a clueless jackass and had no plan at all. If the Taliban had taken a little longer to take back the country (as the incompetent “intel” community suggested) — what was the plan to extract all the taxpayer’s equipment? Hello?
The entire Kandahar base, filled to the brim with equipment, was abandoned in the middle of the night. All manner of weapons — guns, RPGs, armored vehicles, humvees — just abandoned for the Taliban to take.
In Kabul, the sh!t for brains pentagon brass even left behind black hawk helicopters, in case the Taliban want to stage a Zero Dark Thirty raid on a neighboring country.
The decision to stop wasting lives and money was long over due. But these traitors (including the dementia cleptocrat himself) had MONTHS to prepare an orderly withdrawal. MONTHS to make sure they didn’t leave behind valuable equipment that taxpayers worked **REALLY F-ING HARD TO PAY FOR**.
No general and no bureaucrat involved in this treason should get a pension. We the taxpayers deserve to seize their pensions as compensation for all OUR equipment that these jackasses left behind.
Impeach Biden and Harris and Pelosi and McConnel… oh just get rid of everyone. Unless Biden and his drug addict imp have stashed aside billions in bribe money to repay us, Biden needs to have his next dementia episode behind bars
So far China, Russia, Tajikstan, and Pakistan have already pointed out, all the weapons that Biden and his crack administration left behind — are now in the hands of extremists.
Many (most?) of the advanced weapons are in the hands of the Taliban. All the expensive armored vehicles that the US military could not supply to US troops — have been dutifully supplied by Biden & Co to the Taliban. Ready for use in repressing and subduing the Afghan populace.
All the atrocities the Taliban commits in the future will be done with the assistance and aid of weapons provided by Biden & Co.
That isn’t being too harsh. How many college educated federal bureaucrats does it take to figure out who was going to take the weapons left behind?
The Taliban even have black hawk helicopters. Many state military reserves don’t have black hawks. Every time a hurricane hits the US, or every time there is a forest fire — and the state reserves wish they had more helicopters… know that the Taliban has them instead, and Biden provided them.
There are also a number of smaller, more extreme, groups in Afghanistan. We don’t know how many of them now have advanced US weapons. The Taliban don’t know either. And most certainly, the US intelligence community has absolutely no clue at all.
In the future, these weapons are going to be used to kill Afghan citizens. Biden should be considered an accomplice to whatever acts. He knowingly supplied the weapons.
In the future, the Taliban or worse extremist groups will use Biden supplied weapons to commit acts of terror. Biden knowingly left the weapons behind for the Taliban (or worse) to take. How is Biden & Co not responsible for the deaths?
This isn’t an accidental transfer of weapons like the Obama / Fast and Furious debacle, where federal officials provided automatic machine guns to Mexican drug gangs. Supposedly Obama and his team were tracking the guns and supposedly they had a plan to recover them, but the plan failed and the gangs got the weapons. Some were later used to kill federal agents.
No, in this case: Biden & Co transferred weapons to the Taliban and they had no plan – not even a bad plan – to recover the weapons. Biden just handed BILLIONS in advanced weapons to extremists.
The Taliban leader was a “guest” at GITMO for eight years: What makes you think he wasn’t programmed at that time to be an American asset.
Things in geopolitics are rarely as they appear.
Oh, the people who said WMD are a slam dunk programmed him at GITMO? Or was it the people who spent decades monitoring the Soviet economy, but didn’t see a collapse coming? Or the ones that didn’t see 9/11 coming? The ones who installed the shah into Iran, and didn’t even get their own people out before the Iranian revolution? The ones who are outsmarted each and every day by South American drug runners? Is it the same intelligence community that trained bin laden to fight the Soviets, and then figured he would spend the rest of his life making friendship bracelets? Or is it the intelligence community where the CIA station chief in Kabul was killed by an informant who was double agent for bin laden?
Yeah buddy, sometimes federal bureaucrats are just as dumb and incompetent as they seem.
This latest fubar – transferring billions in advanced weapons to the taliban and or China – is a new level of stupid even by low government employee standards.
You seem quite shaken and stirred, Mr. Bond.
Take your meds and trust the plan … the Cabal is never quite as dumb as they look.
Cato, I assume the intelligence community has this planned out like the bay of pigs operation.
Except that the dementia patient picked Obama foreign policy leftovers to run his foreign policy… so it will go as smoothly as Obama putting the Muslim brotherhood into power in Egypt, or deposing Qaddafi in Libya (kill the US Embassador, ship Qaddafi weapons to “moderate” terrorists in Syria, leave both Libya and Syria in chaos), or perhaps they are using their Ukrainian template this time? Get a bunch of neo-nazis to overthrow the elected government and impose a bunch of davos/EU puppets that will allow Soros to control pipelines (with kickbacks to Hunter Biden of course).
Federal bureaucrats have always been the B team of the USA, but with Obama’s foreign policy team it’s more like the tonya Harding on ice
So what? Would you rather see all that equipment brought home to be used against America’s “domestic terrorists”? Or maybe the government could get a refund from the MIC? Naturally they’d only do wonderful things with that extra money.
BTW people in their own country, fighting for their own country are not extremists. Stop projecting your fears, and media propaganda, on the Taliban – which has never commited a single violent act outside of Afghanistan.
I’d be more concerned about the largest terrorist organisation in the world(which you fund): the US military.
EowiN — I would like to see billions in taxpayer equipment returned to the USA.
Your point about the terrorists in Washington being as tyrannical as the taliban is a good one. The taliban also pointed out (between mocking the dementia patient with photos of taliban eating ice cream)… the taliban pointed to the political censorship that is Silicon Valley. And Clinton, cuomo, and Biden all treat women poorly — well Biden sniffs little girl’s hair not just grown women.
But part of the military budget should be decommissioning weapons. We do that with all naval ships and many aircraft. There are hundreds of pounds of rare earth metals in each of those armored vehicles that Biden & co left behind. Hundreds of pounds of titanium. Metals that the USA has to import. Why can’t those vehicles be recycled— at least enough to extract valuable metals and to render the vehicles unusable?
Instead of killing afghani dissidents or killing domestic political dissidents, maybe the USA should properly decommission the equipment like we do with many other platforms.
But leaving the weapons behind for taliban extremists is just adding irresponsible stupidity on top of the nation building stupidity. It’s Biden doubling down on stupid.
The man is supposed to have dementia and be really corrupt (taking bribes his whole life). Why is he addding stupid to the mix?
And while we are on the subject of decommissioning military “stuff”, Congress already gave their solemn full faith and credit of the USA to “decommission” soldiers coming back from war. The PTSD and other issues soldiers are exhibiting are the responsibility of the pentagon and VA. No excuses. Before one penny goes to illegal immigrants or bank bailouts, Congress needs to properly finish war — properly decommission equipment and personnel.
In a sense, the thousands of vehicles that dementia shithead left in Afghanistan just symbolizes the thousands of soldiers he (and Trump and Obama and bush and Clinton and…) left to fend for themselves.
Just a humiliating display of incompetence from the selfish assholes of Washington DC.
Now, we have a dementia patient hiding in his basement then hiding at camp David — failing to do anything constructive. No, dividing the country against itself its race baiting nonsense is not presidential. Neglecting the border is not presidential. Encouraging lawlessness, as Biden does whenever it suits him, is not presidential.
Biden is a disaster. The VP couldn’t get elected in a democrat primary, and is guilty of dividing California against itself. And the wicked witch pelosi? Bring back jimmy carter. He was less feeble and less embarrassing.
You have to stop and ask yourself how many billions more would it cost to haul that equipment back to the US?
Take a look at a map of that region and hone in on the Afghanistan/Pakistan and look at how many functioning highways that country has and how far away the major ports in Pakistan are. How many mountains through the Afghan/Pakistan border would need to be crossed? And, how many Taliban held territories need to be crossed to haul all the freight to the ports in Pakistan.
Afghanistan doesn’t have an interstate system or freight train system like the US does. It took years to bring that equipment over and you’re not going to haul it out in just a few short months. Even with all the jumbo transport aircraft the USAF has its still a daunting task.
I contend that since the US lost the ability some time ago to haul much needed supplies from the three ‘Stans, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan it became untenable to provide supplies overland to the Afghanistan theater of operations from the ports located in Pakistan. That in and of itself might just be a major reason the US is pulling out. The costs are exceeding the benefit of garrisoning the country.
Just take a look at the map and ask yourself how you would consistently provide supplies to a land lock backward third world nation such as Afghanistan? A nation without the infrastructure needed to haul around billions of dollars worth of military material. Much less get everything back out in 6 months or even a year while operations are still ongoing. Remember it took years to get that stuff over there.
My only question is whether a palace coup is being fomented to remove Biden using the chaos from the fall of Afghanistan and the 25th Amendment?
Shall we all hail Queen Camel Toe now or wait until after her coronation?
Corn pop — they had all sorts of logistics to get that equipment into Afghanistan… without all the highways or trains or other excuses you give.
The entire Obama foreign policy team is guilty of treason, not just the dementia patient. Harris might claim she was busy ignoring the mexican border, but she was in on this Afghan weapons transfer too.
She couldn’t get herself elected in the democrat primaries, and that was before she F’d up on illegal immigration.
Please stop making really stupid excuses. If the military could get the equipment in, they could also get it out. They had MONTHS of time to plan an orderly extraction. Even if we ignore the months during Trump when competent military weenies should have been planning, Dementia Man and the Obama left-overs had at least seven months.
We don’t know that the Taliban will use 100% of the weapons to repress the Afghan population or to support terrorism.
The Taliban need all sorts of equipment, including Huwai cell phones that the NSA can’t easily listen in on. They no doubt have a very very long shopping list.
They seem quite competent running the country with Toyota pickup trucks. They know how to repair them, they evidently can get parts, etc.
All that expensive US military equipment could be sold to China in exchange for “store credit”. China would be excited to remove the weapons from muslim extremist hands, and the Uigers.
China can reverse engineer the US equipment. Either figure out its vulnerabilities / weak spots for use in possible future conflicts, or to use the technology to improve Chinese weapons. They could mass produce small arms, duplicating legitimate serial numbers, and wreak havoc all over the world that would be blamed on US weapons transfers.
Its not an all or nothing choice. The Taliban could keep some weapons for their own use, and sell some to China and/or Russia.
Imagine a Chinese spy risking their life to steal US military equipment secrets, only to have Biden and Obama’s foreign policy team deliver working vehicles right into Beijing’s hands!!!!
Afghanistan is a stalemate, like Vietnam, not an outright loss. America was there too long, was getting tired, and had empty hands to show for its presence. In return for guarding the secular Afghans, the Americans got their faces spat on and IED shit placed in their way. The best Afghans were always neutral about U.S. presence, anyway. We should view the retreat as a strategic step back, not as an out-and-out loss.
SecDef Lloyd Austin had all the time in the world to lecture military personnel about white privilege, but evidently had no time to extract billions in US weaponry from Afghanistan – even with months of advanced notice.
Imagine being Taiwan, and knowing all the planning that would be required to defend Taiwan if China decides to take the island by force. Will SecDef Austin have a few free moments to plan for that, in between his wokeness lectures?
If nothing else, all this argee-bargee after the fact, is falling into the hands of the Davos crowd as another distraction to add to the covid hype.Despite the fact that the gene-vaccines are already doing irreparable damage in every nation in the world, no one peoples have had the guts to make a world publicised stand against them.
The general population have not the faintest knowledge about the future that has been planned for them and frankly they will never learn by reading blogs and comments filled with words most of us (yes, me too) don’t understand and referring to historical events long before their field of knowledge.
In the prohibition era, everyone agreed that alcohol is the devils work and we told the newspapers so. Then we stepped out and visited a speak easy.
Biden officials have been “caught” walking around the White House and old executive building without masks. They put the masks on just before they go on stage for the tv cameras, and make a big show on camera taking off their mask just to make a speech. Then they put their mask on for the 10-15 foot journey off camera, when the charade ends and the masks come off.
Obama and his birthday crowd didn’t even bother with the charade.
My state has a mask mandate. Neither my neighbors nor the police are wearing masks. Of course, I’m wearing my mask — at least while blogging. No comment the rest of the time.
It’s obvious that Fauci is a clueless moron who became a bureaucrat because he is inept at biology but pretty good at taking kickbacks… oh, not kickbacks. Stock options in recognition of his valuable leadership. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Definitely not bribes or kickbacks, that would be illegal. Call it a speech honorarium, not a bribe.
The lockdown is a political movement, not health care. Everyone from Obama to White House staffers to the cops in my neighborhood are saying so — just not on tv.
The taliban posted photos on Twitter, with a half dozen taliban senior leaders all eating ice cream cones, mocking Hollywood’s feeble dementia patient.
They also pointed out how screwed up America is that jack dorsey allows taliban to tweet, but won’t allow fellow Americans whom Dorsey disagrees with. Censorship is alive and well in Marxist Kalifornia.
Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter must be elated … the most corrupt and the most humiliating titles are now owned by Biden. It’s scary this asshole has only been president for (less than) seven months.
“Wars of all forms are rackets.”
So says the far-right haters, who just love their guns, guns and more guns!
War is a racket, is the title of a book by Major General Smedley D Butler (USMC). https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
Guns are simply tools. Just like a hammer or axe they can be used for good or ill.
But they are vital in dealing with those who would use pretense, intimidation and delusion to advance their corrupt agendas. That is why the 2nd Amendment exists. It protects a right that pre exists the Constitution.
Those who hate guns are either ignorant of the realities of power, or are all too aware of them.
@BJ…
It always strikes me, that you Americans, who love your guns so much, can never mount a cogent and intelligent argument, instead, just use fear porn and crazy theories. Your second amendment is an anachronism, and the facts bear that out.
“Guns are simply tools. Just like a hammer or axe they can be used for good or ill.”
😆😂🤣😂🤣
Peter Harris… it always strikes me how 245 years later you Brits are still terrified that the USA kicked your wicked empire out by force, even when your king explicitly banned us from owning guns.
You had a great deal going, exploiting colonies all over the world, and we went and kicked you out, starting two long centuries of England being kicked out of colony after colony after colony. Things would have been so much better for England if colonists couldn’t stick up for themselves!
Well now the Afghans, with their strange love of guns, have kicked out the British, the Soviets and now the USA…. And oppressors everywhere are still trying to figure out ways to prevent the masses from owning guns.
I mean, being a tyrant is so much easier if the little people don’t have guns, right?
Internet allows even children to post. Disliking guns is natural. They’re tools of death. At the same time they are the protectors of life. Grown ups understand this.
Some coward who posts under anonymous, tells me to grow up… hahaha
this is a remark to ivordeacon
davos WILL fail because to make their efforts work they MUST control the entire planet not just the west and the global south. they MUST force russia and china to submit their sovereignty.
this will never happen which will force them to start of war against either or both in which case they and most of the world will be annihilated OR they recognize their own deaths coming if they try… and back down.
your future as something other than a serf or slave is because russia and china WILL NOT back down to davos and have the means to make it stick.
Exactly. And there is still a remnant of civility left in the West which will oppose this root and branch. Signs are everywhere
i agree tom about civility in the west. nevertheless if you want to avoid the maximum amount of bloodshed it will take russian weaponry, chinese economic power to instill in the davos crowd they have no chance and if they try now only will the west be turned to ash but they ”personally” will be hunted down wherever they hide and be killed.
ugly to say but when you deal with sociopaths only certain death will motivate a pause to their behavior.
additionally without american military power as a smedley butler muscleman enforcer davos is shooting from an empty magazine and now with the world watching americas clown show withdrawal from kabul even fewer take the pentagon seriously.
in early spring russia mustered 2 divisions with artillery to the ukraine border FASTER than the pentagon got 7000 men to kabul airport.
who is kidding whom?
Chinese and Russian weaponry will help. But ultimately it wlll be the knowledge that they will have to go fight alone.
Remember when Obama drew his red lines all over Syria? And we the people told him to go fight by himself. Obama was really brave sending other people, but he wasn’t going to go himself.
Biden can barely find the White House ice cream machine.
The rest of them are incompetent. But they want to fight, let them go fight themselves. Send us a postcard and let us know how it goes.
In the meantime, if you want to keep this hypochondrai going, we are going to lock you in a hospital ward with Fauci and you can all drive each other crazy. If you hypochondriacs attempt to escape the hospital, you will be shot.
The rest of us are going to go on with our lives. The two week lockdown is over whether you like it or not.
Quite a few of us in the west have stopped arguing.
Its not capitulation. We are ignoring their edicts and just going about things the way we want to. Fuck ’em.
They simply aren’t worth the bother of debating. If it comes to it, we will all stay home and let the $*() hit the fan. When they beg for help, we’re busy. Sooner or later they will get the message that people hate them so much that we can’t be bothered.
When someone argues with you, its because they care about the outcome and think (right or wrong) that you can do better. When they don’t bother to correct your stupidity, it means they don’t think you can do better and/or they don’t care.
Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell, Fauci, Comey for example (US government is infested with examples). The whole German, French, Italian, Japanese and UK governments. They are incompetent. They are corrupt. And they aren’t worth the cost of repair.
enjoy these 20 seconds from the bluest state in the country. even here the clown show is now widely mocked. the entire covid political/medical legitimacy among those whose brains still work has imploded.
https://twitter.com/turtleboyphone/status/1425682966018236419
agreed
They “must force Russia and China…”
Why MUST they?
I agree that forcing Russia and China to the table wouldn’t work. So they won’t try that.
If you want to think outside that very small and limited box, try reading Brandon Smith on the subject – open your mind to other possibilities:
http://www.kenniemann.com/brandon-smith-false-eastwest-paradigm-putin-is-a-globalist/
Note that this was written seven years ago. If he’s right, you need to go back seven years and re-examine all geopolitical events since then. Which is why most people resist re-examining their premises…
Ivor,
I have real issues with Brandon Smith because he imagines things that are simply not true. I broke with him years ago when he posited that the Fed and the Central Bankers understand Austrian economics and use it to manipulate the markets to their liking.
That’s nonsense. They are Keynesians and that’s that. There is no there there. That kind of thinking, IMO, is a cope and a cop out because your pet theory didn’t work out and you refuse to update your premises. This leads you down a never ending spiral of conspiracy-style thinking which you never get out of.
this is where I think you are thanks to people like Brandon (and others) who have convinced themselves that their ‘enemies’ are just that much smarter and ahead of you… and if you just tease out the last bit of data you will prove yourself and your faulty hypothesis correct.
This is purely left-brain purity spiraling. BTW, Davos is guilty of the same type of behavior…. convincing themselves of their conclusions by begging their hypothesis rather than admitting it’s error.
That’s the essence of what we disagree on and that’s why I find your walls of text so infuriating… because it is literally talking to a wall that refuses to consider their hypothesis wrong.
I do not think that Davos doesn’t, in hockey terms, ‘read and react.’ In fact, I know they do… but they do so in the context of an intellectual paradigm which is fundamentally faulty.
In short, they aren’t closet Austrians. If they were they would know the futility of their endeavors and cease them immediately.
People aren’t baseballs, predictable in their responses to stimuli. They are electrons, existing in a probability field of decisions both rational and irrational that become less predictable not more predictable the more pressure and stress you place on them.
This is why they will fail and this is why many well-meaning analysts in this field are of limited value no matter how well they ‘connect the dots.’
Last point… I do think Davos is trying to ‘flip the table’ and create a new environment…. and that is not something they can control, only have the illusion of controlling.
Chaos is like that, because, well… it’s FUCKING chaos.
I think there are two types of Keynesians – those dumb enough and self-interested enough to actually believe it (most politicians) and those that pretend to believe it just to provide the intellectual cover for the pursuit of their agendas (most central bankers and their Krugmanite pet economists)
I’m not sure what’s behind your determination to characterise our foes as imbeciles, but I think that’s just generally unwise. These people may be demonic narcissists, but they are not stupid. Nor are they unaware of history. And compared to even their recent predecessors, their legal, technological, social, fiscal, monetary, economic and media toolkits are extremely comprehensive now. You think they cannot control the masses in chaotic times? I would argue that periods of chaos is when the indoctrinated mob is most easily controlled! Point to a door marked “Fire Exit” during a fire and see how many people pour through it. Now the Davosians have painted those words above the door to their technocommunist dungeon, and their global arson is imminent.
And yes it’s frustrating to engage with someone incapable of questioning their premises – I understand completely. All we can do is keep trying and hope that at some point the scales will fall from their eyes.
P.S – As for my “walls of text” – I don’t believe my comments are much longer than many of those here?
ZH is showing images of the taliban flying our Blackhawk helicopters. Kinda reminds me of ISIS cruising around in our M1 tanks with the high maintenance gas turbine engines and sophisticated electronics. We have Obama 2.0 in the white house, maybe we are seeing ISIS 2.0 in Afghanistan.
Afghan army personnel were trained by the USA to fly black hawks. Those guys now work for the taliban… actually they work for whomever is winning at the moment. That’s why they loved the USA a few weeks ago, now they love the taliban, next week they will love whomever is winning then.
The taliban don’t have many parts, so the helicopters have limited value beyond public relations. Next week the taliban will sell the working black hawks to China for copying and vulnerability analysis. China can improve their own helicopters using working examples of black hawks.
Taliban might keep some armored vehicles to go along with their pickup trucks (which conquered afghan twice). They’ll sell the rest to China.
Biden and the Obama leftovers might as well have sent china the blue prints and full tech specs (china might have stolen those already?). Now they have working examples to study.
The taliban will keep the machine guns and grenade launchers and such. China doesn’t want those, and takiban soldiers do.
I know a lot of Afghans look like Western Caucasians, but some of the “Taliban” look like Operators with Operator skills and training. They do not look much like some of the other Taliban, and certainly not like the ragdolls who were until recently the Afghan National Army.
Cato still trying to convince himself that the dementia patient screwed up a retreat on purpose. It’s all part of an impossibly complex, top secret, double bluff pincer movement that Biden dreamt up in his basement while eating a rocky road ice cream cone!!!
Or maybe having fucked up in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Venezuela, Brazil and Poland — maybe the Obama foreign policy leftovers fucked up in Afghanistan AGAIN.
The only difference this time, no one could stop Biden from eating White House ice cream while the incompetence unfolded.
A couple of good stories on this subject.
https://asiatimes.com/2021/08/forever-war-benefiting-afghans-follow-the-money/
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/08/23/strategic-apocalypse-afghanistan-seismic-shift-years-in-making/
Enjoy
Brutal analysis of Afghanistan/US relationship and fascinating forecast for the US in the future……
https://thesaker.is/will-afghanistan-turn-out-to-be-us-imperialisms-last-gleaming/