To pretty much nobody’s surprise, America’s retreat from Afghanistan was nothing short of a disaster. The Taliban has advanced into the big cities much faster and with far greater success than the American top brass anticipated. And, again, to anyone who has paid attention to the way that military retreats have happened historically, this is not at all surprising.
When a conquering imperial army retreats from a weak and fractured client state, where the empire’s presence was never wanted nor needed, the result is ALWAYS and everywhere the collapse of that client state.
For example, the South Vietnamese government was too corrupt, weak, and ineffective to govern without vast amounts of American military aid – and when President Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment, over a crime that was vastly less severe than what the Daemoncrats did in the 2020 Fake Election, the then-Democrat-controlled government swiftly and decisively voted to cut off all military aid to Vietnam. Inevitably, South Vietnam went into rapid and terminal decline.
So too it is with Afghanistan, the Graveyard of Empires. That is indeed a fitting epithet, because defeat and withdrawal in Afghanistan has definitely presaged the destruction of numerous empires. No less a general than Alexander the Great tried to conquer it, over 2,300 years ago – and he failed utterly, despite using tactics that would cause every civilised nation on Earth to blanch today. His inability to conquer Afghanistan sapped the morale and will of his soldiers, to the point where they eventually mutinied against him and forced him to turn back for home.
That journey home cost the Macedonians 40,000 dead – it shattered Alexander’s army, and destroyed the unity of his top commanders. By the time Alexander himself died of fever in Babylon, without ever designating a proper successor, the greatest empire that the world had ever known up to that point was doomed to fail – and it did, in spectacular fashion.
The same thing happened to the Soviets. They tried, and failed, to conquer Afghanistan, at the cost of thousands of dead Russian boys. The war there drained their treasury and destroyed the political unity of the USSR. With the benefit of hindsight, it is not difficult to see that it was only a matter of time until the Evil Empire broke apart – which is exactly what happened.
And now it is America’s turn. Instead of taking a page out of Alexander’s book and burning the earth to ensure that their opponents could find no rest, no peace, and no hope, and instead of breaking the enemy’s will to fight, the Americans tried desperately for 20 years to win hearts and minds and fight counterinsurgency wars in a place that has defied the wrath of gods and daemons alike. That didn’t work any more than the previous attempts did.
There are many on both the Left and the Right saying that withdrawing from Afghanistan was a huge mistake, and that America should have stayed there forever. Those people are totally wrong. Afghanistan could not be conquered by any less savage a force than the Mongols – who would have burned down every house and slaughtered every last man, woman, and child in the villages, and would have starved the populations of the cities until they had resorted to eating rats and even their own babies, before lobbing plague-ridden corpses over the walls to finish off the rest.
It is that kind of savagery that wins wars in places as savage as Afghanistan. And it is precisely that kind of savagery which – thank God Almighty – Americans cannot resort to and still call themselves civilised.
America should never have stayed in Afghanistan, and should never have engaged in pointless, wasteful, stupid, and mindless “Syracuse Expeditions” around the world, trying to bring the “virtues” of “democracy” (aka mob rule by idiots) to the darkest and most dangerous corners of Izzlamist “civilisation”.
Furthermore, we already know that the American Empire’s end is near. It is richly deserving of death. There is no way to stay that execution any longer. The empire will shatter and fall, and all we can do is hope that whatever comes after it will be somewhat less retarded and wilfully suicidal than what exists now.
These are heavy thoughts, brothers, and dark ones at that. But there is always hope for the future. The end of the American Empire means the rebirth of the American nation. And that is a most wonderful thing, because nations are wonderful things. They are tied together by bonds of blood, culture, faith, language, and tradition. God loves the nations, and He will preserve them – even as He hates empires, and will destroy them.
But let us set aside such weighty thoughts for a spell and concentrate on what is good in life, for it is indeed Friday, and there is much to be thankful for and celebrate. And what better way to celebrate the end of the week than by enjoying the bountiful fruits of nature in the shape of a beauteous woman?
This week’s lovely lady is Julia Zubova (Юлия Зубова), age 24 – she’s going to be 25 exactly a week from today, in fact – from St. Petersburg, Russia. Evidently she may have some Latvian heritage as well, since she speaks the language. She calls herself an “international art muse”, which apparently means that if you go looking for her, you’ll find that she is not in the least bit shy about her body, cf. exhibitions thereof. Given her looks – which are far removed from the often overly-plastic, RealDoll looks of far too many of her Instagram-based Slavic sisters from Russia and Ukraine – one can hardly fault her for her dislike of clothing. She appears to be spoken for by her photographer boyfriend/husband/whatever, so good for him (and her).
Happy Friday, lads. Stay safe out there, stay well, and be careful. Things tend to get pretty crazy when empires break – and judging by what I’m seeing out of the USA these days, and what I see in Europe and the UK as well, things will get MUCH crazier before they start to improve (hard as that might be to believe right now). Get some rest, and ready up for the battles to come.
10 Comments
We never should have stayed in Afghanistan.
We should have kicked their asses up around their ears for sheltering Bin-Laden, then left.
That was Obamas doing, The whole “Afghanistan is where the fight is at, not Iraq.”
Anyone that has read anything about the American cold feet to do what must be done since Korea should’ve seen this coming. NeoCons get us into the wars and promise shit, democrats leave these guys stranded.
The best line I’ve seen ever was Putin asking (rhetorically) if we realized what we’ve done.
That is true, but then one has to ask, why did America not make Saudi Arabia pay a terrible price for supplying most of the 9/11 hijackers, and for creating the warped creature that was bin Laden himself? And one must also ask why the US keeps funding operations that create the RIFs.
One can understand why William Casey and Ronald Reagan did it in the 1980s to shatter the Soviet Union. But those policies inevitably come back to bite the Americans in the end.
I agree. This is a very American habit – blunder into wars where their presence is not wanted and not needed, overstay their welcome, and create a gigantic mess in the process that they will then have to come back and sort out later on.
Yeah. He was right. The Russians are far from perfect, but they have studied America’s mistakes assiduously over the past 20 years and have stayed the hell out of foreign entanglements as a result. They have only intervened when directly asked to do so (Syria, Nagorno-Kabarakh), or when their own national interests are under direct assault (Crimea, Georgia).
America will have to learn how to do the same – one way or another. And the Fall of Kabul, which evidently happened today, is one more hammer-blow that will shatter the American Empire.
One of your finest.
Thank you, sir.
At least they could have burned the poppy fields while they were there and before leaving. How much money are the terrorists making from selling heroin every year?
It ain’t just the RIFs. The CIA makes a mint on top of production of that shit too. The reality is that the massive military-industrial complex that created this gigantic mess, has absolutely no incentive to sort any of it out.
Many moons ago, as in about October, 2001, I opined on Baen’s Bar, amidst all the hurrahs and well dones, that what we were seeing in Afghanistan was not military victory, or even much of the military in substance, but a whole bunch of tribal elders wetting their fingers and holding them up to see which was the wind was blowing…for now.
What we are seeing now is essentially the same thing in reverse. The Taliban is no more advancing and conquering than we were. It is merely the same tribal elders or their successors wetting their fingers and holding them up to see which way the wind is blowing. For now.
I agree, sir. The original American victory came about because America convinced the tribal leaders to side with them. Now those same tribal leaders are siding with the Taliban. But this tribal mindset has been the case in Afghanistan for literal centuries. It’s nothing new or surprising. What IS surprising, is that the American military seems almost incapable of learning from past mistakes, either of their own or of others.
More unwilling than incapable. And the unwillingness tends to spring from an inability to admit a mistake, itself driven by a combination of democracy, where things are not allowed to appear to have been a mistake, and sheer moral cowardice. Couple of examples: Once upon a time some colonel told Reagan that the Army didn’t do resistance (as in resistance to interrogation training, not weights) training. It was untrue insofar as Ranger School has a very miserable and painful form of it. But because the president had been told this, it had to be made true; resistance training was eliminated from Ranger School for something over a decade. The SR-71? Yeah, that was the slip of a tongue from an Air Force colonel to Johnson. So USAF changed the nomenclature of the fucking plane rather than admit to a mistake. The M561, aka the Gama Goat or, more accurately, the Goddamma Goat? Horrible piece of equipment, blighting the lives and careers of battalion motor officers for decades. Could not get rid of it because could not admit to a mistake. Finally, we had to adopt the Hummer as a replacement for both the Jeep and the Goat, in the guise of an improvement (which, over the Jeep, it was not, yes, yet another lie). Even the never sufficiently to be damned Pentomic Division could not be admitted to have been a mistake – and note here that we have STILL never recovered from the damage it did and never will – so, instead of going back to single branch regiments when we dumped it – and we dumped it in less than two years; that’s how bad it was – we went to brigades, which have their own moral and practical problems. And then there’s the littoral combat ship…
I wrote this on quora earlier today:
Politicians and very senior officers – to the limited extent these differ – must be told what they want to hear, lest careers suffer. And so they are. This has been going on since at least 1941, when MacArthur, playing god, decreed that the Filipinos, without training, without adequate equipment, led, if that’s quite the term, largely by untrained officers, could stand up to the Imperial Japanese Army and stop them on the beaches of Lingayen Gulf. They failed, of course, miserably. But not one officer, not ONE, tasked with training the Filipinos had the moral courage to tell MacArthur he was full of shit, that his godlike decrees were nonsense. Similarly, George Marshall, at Roosevelt’s behest, declared equipment we actually needed to train our own as excess to needs so it could be sent to the British in 1941. American boys died for that lie. And yes, it was a lie and Marshall knew it was.
But it’s not just the military. Put the blame where it belongs. How do you suppose politicians get elected; by telling the people the truth? My ass. The people, to quote a character played by Jack Nicholson, “aren’t ready for the truth.” Democracy DEMANDS that the people be lied to. And so they are. And they want to be.
Add here the neocons, where the “con” does not, in fact, stand for “conservative,” but for con men…oh, and con women, too, of course. This crew is, on very scanty evidence, convinced of the efficacy for all purposes of military power, of the certain ease of nation building, and of their own inherent wonderfulness. Again, the evidence is vanishingly thin for all three notions.
We could have gone into Afghanistan and done the one thing that was really possible, to punish them viciously for allowing their territory to be used as a base against us, shot a million of the men, destroyed the crops, killed the food animals, then left and let the Yakuza come in and grab large numbers of the women and girls to be sold as sex slaves, and that would have worked. No one would have been willing to let their territory be used against us in sheer terror of the frightful revenge we’d take if anyone did. But noooo, fucking noooo. We had to listen to the goddamned neocons and try to drag Afghanistan into the modern world. Because it was a palatable lie the people – see above – demanded to hear.
Bah.
he neocons, where the “con” does not, in fact, stand for “conservative,” but for con men
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no, anyone can be a con man. almost 100% of “neo-conservatives” are Trotskyite Communist Jews who bought their way into power in the Republican Party.
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just look at ((( Bill Kristol ))), a man who openly derides white Americans as a “spent race” and advocates that more “vital” and “energetic” immigrants OF COLOR ( why would that be so important, i wonder? ) be imported to replace us in our own nation. he’s a neo-con, par excellence.
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ps – i agree with Bardelys, DM. oftimes your choices are rather more plastic and absurd in their dimensions than i like. while her waistline doesn’t seem possible, i’m not really seeing anything i could critique on Julia.
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more study may be necessary.