The Conflict in Afghanistan

[Gnasher]

4 hours ago, dockers_strike said:

Big shout out of support to our boys and girls on the ground in Afghanistan, particularly 2 Para and the 16 Air Assault brigade, doing all they can to collect people for evacuation from this shit show.

Yeah man. Absolutely.

[Kepler-186]

	This is a free post. Consider signing up for a paid subscription if you haven’t yet and enjoy this.  Ashes of American flag pins: We are in the ‘golden’ era of hot take history… Facts, we've often been told, don't care about our feelings. But those are *our* feelings. Columnists' feelings are a very different thing.  Mic Wright Aug 19 There are two quotes that do the rounds far too often; one that “history is written by the victors”¹and the other Alan Barth’s observation from 1943 book review in The New Republic that “news is only the first rough draft of history. But I think there’s a third process at work: History carelessly, clumsily being rewritten by newspaper columnists and broadcast bloviators.  The idea returned to my mind when I stumbled across a tweet by former baseball player turned Fox News correspondent Adam Housey who wrote:  Imagine if in WWII we had captured Nazi/Italian/Japanese generals and leaders…held them…then released them back into their respective countries once the rebuilding began? Sounds dumb, doesn’t it? Well, we did that in Afghanistan and now he is running the slaughter.  It doesn’t require much imagination as the US and UK did that multiple times. That’s how Werner Von Braun went from architect of the V-2 bomb for Hitler to mastermind of the Saturn-V rocket programme for NASA. It was also how Kurt Waldheim went from being a Wehrmacht intelligence officer — later claiming he’d had no knowledge of prisoner executions that happened yards from his office — to being the fourth General Secretary of the United Nations.  Charlie Stross @cstross @adamhousley You’ve heard of Kurt Waldheim, yes? UN Secretary General, President of Austria, and former Nazi intel officer? Or maybe the Gehlen Organization, the West German intelligence agency, headed by a former Wehrmacht Major General? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Wald…Gehlen Organization - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org August 18th 2021 4 Retweets32 Likes But for people like Housey, raised on the black hat/white hat world of Westerns and the moral simplicity of post-war movies where Americans were always the good guys and moustache-twirling Nazis got their just desserts, the world of grubby deals, political pardons, and Operation Paperclip’s wholesale transfer of 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians onto the American payroll is unthinkably complex.  He’s far from alone. In today’s Daily Telegraph, Allister Heath — who has form for writing about America as a mythical city on the hill where the Coca Cola in glass bottles is plentiful and a Ronald Reagan sun shines beneficently from the blue sky — contributes another slab of ahistorical invective.  Beneath a headline that reads as though he’s auditioning for a side hustle as a Taliban spokesman — Decadence and hubris have finally brought down the American Empire — Heath writes:  No empire is eternal: all eventually fall amid hubris and humiliation. The heart-wrenching, humanitarian calamity that is the botched Afghan retreat is merely the latest sign that the American era is ending: Washington is no longer the world’s policeman, and an unsettling future of clashes between expansionist, authoritarian regional powers beckons. It is a far cry from the late 1980s-early 1990s, when America’s global clout peaked. The Reagan rebirth, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the termination of communism and its gulags, the rise of Silicon Valley and the invention of the internet, the liberation of Kuwait: these were the anni mirabiles of the US hegemon, the glory days of Pax Americana, bookending humanity’s most turbulent century.  His is an almost comical simplification of America’s late-20th Century. It avoids the psychological, reputational, and societal damage of Vietnam that led to the special pleading about American exceptionalism that dominated so many of the movies he clearly gobbled up at the time (“Hollywood held its head high”) and entirely ignores little things like Desert One and Iran Contra.  The Telegraph @Telegraph "The American empire at least believed in freedom and democracy; what replaces it won’t even pretend to be liberal" | Writes @AllisterHeath Decadence and hubris have finally brought down the American EmpireThe US is in retreat on all fronts, and its incompetent politicians are incapable of reversing the declinetelegraph.co.uk August 19th 2021 14 Retweets41 Likes Heath has swallowed the propaganda image of America in the 80s and 90s, the notion that its cultural dominance was matched in military and political terms. He smashes together events and inventions as if they required nothing more than the collective will of the “American empire” and were not, in fact, products of complicated interactions between many people (lots of them not Americans). With his taste for one line summaries and simple slogans, Heath often gets close to a revelation then swerves away into the thickets of his thick-headed ideology again. Of the twenty years — in fact, far longer than that — which led to the events of the past week, he writes:  Paradoxically, 9/11 itself didn’t take down the American empire: it awoke a sleeping giant and triggered a groundswell of patriotism, and a different branching history might have seen a massive but relatively short retaliation, with the prompt killing of Bin Laden. Instead, we had to wait a decade until OBL’s execution in Pakistan (his harbouring by a supposed ally itself proof of America’s waning power)…  This is the way Heath and many others at The Daily Telegraph, an increasingly ridiculous fanzine for reactionaries, see the world. It’s painted with such a broad brush it makes Rothkos look detailed; a perspective made up entirely of cliches (sleeping giants, groundswells of patriotism, the ‘baddie’ hunted down and killed) that chafes with exposure to the horrendous reality of the real world.  Inevitably, Health diagnoses the ‘death’ of the American empire (honestly, the thing has been on life support since the Fall of Saigon) as down to The Daily Telegraph’s favourite and most abiding obsession ‘wokeism’:  How can people who live in terror of “micro-aggressions” find it in themselves to defeat real evils? As to the public, it doesn’t want to know about the rest of the world: how, under such circumstances, can the US empire not be in terminal decline?  There’s no greater courage than that of a 43-year-old newspaper columnist with no fear of conscription. The newspapers groan under the weight of opinions from these armchair generals whose own children would swiftly develop bone spurs if they were actually called to fight in the wars their parents so delight in.  Elsewhere in The Daily Telegraph, Tom Harris, the former Labour MP turned leftie hunter, identifies the real villains of the week. No, not the Taliban. The “hard left” — that shadowy collection of monsters he chases around in his Mystery Machine on a weekly basis — who Harris claims are delighted about what’s happening in Afghanistan. He time travels back to the anti-war marches of 2001 and writes:  Making my way through Leicester Square one Saturday evening in October 2001, I surveyed the hundreds of discarded anti-war placards that that day’s protesters had left on the pavements before heading to the pub for some self-congratulatory refreshments…  … One mud-soaked placard, in particular, caught my attention: it read: “Hands off Afghanistan’s oil”. It also had the inevitable and recognisable “Socialist Workers’ Party” (SWP) trademark at the top of the display. Did Afghanistan have oil? If so, I wasn’t aware of it… Of course, Harris focuses on the execrable SWP and boils down a march that included thousands of people to “middle-class warriors”. And inevitably he repeats the received wisdom that the only solution was war (“[They] never provided any realistic alternative to invasion in order to apprehend the mass murderer…”) President Bush’s rejection of a Taliban offer to negotiate handing over of Bin Laden in return for a cessation of US bombing is one of those historical footnotes that most people, Harris among them, choose to ignore.  JohnJ - escapee from Plague Island @johnthebrexile For those wondering why Afghanistan is so important. Oil isn't the only strategic resource. August 19th 2021 11 Retweets21 Likes Instead, Harris is engaged in a rewriting of far more recent history — the history of the last few days — by distorting an already clumsy statement from the left-wing Labour MP Richard Burgon. Burgon tweeted: The crisis in Afghanistan is the result of 20 years of disastrous military intervention. Just as in Iraq & Libya, backing US-led invasions led to a huge loss of life. There is no military solution in Afghanistan. The focus now should be on reparations and supporting refugees.  And it’s that word “reparations” that the bad faith brigade has seized upon with vigour. Harris, deliberately choosing not to directly quote Burgon, writes:  Instead, we have the likes of Richard Burgon, the Leeds MP and former deputy leadership candidate, demanding that reparations now be paid to the Taliban government to compensate them for the inconvenience to which they were put over the last 20 years… …The idea that British taxes should be spent in compensating Islamist extremists is so far beyond the pale that it beggars belief that Keir Starmer, Burgon’s nominal boss, has not yet withdrawn the whip from him. Whether the suggestion emerged out of sheer stupidity or from deliberate malice, it hardly puts the Labour Party in a good light, however much of a minority Burgon’s ravings are within the party.  Whether or not you agree with Burgon’s sentiments, the fact is that what he said and what Harris says he said are so far apart that even Evel Knievel would have doubts about leaping the gulf between them.  Harris concludes his piece by declaring he and those who supported that war, the next war, and will support the wars to come are “the grown-ups” and that those who did not, do not, and will not are “children” in “the playground of hard-Left politics.” Tantrums, cheap name-calling, and the recollection of decades-old grudges are, of course, the signs of the most grown-up of grown-ups. Nick Shepley @NickShepley In the current climate of retrospective self justification on Afghanistan, I have used cutting edge search tools to find the only blue tick worth listening to #afghanistandebate August 19th 2021 1 Retweet4 Likes A single paragraph in Richard Littlejohn’s sprawling Daily Mail piece, sums up the simplistic thinking of the columnists’ hot take history hour. He writes:  For the past 20 years, their mission was successful. There hasn’t been a comparable attack on America since 9/11. Yet now Afghanistan is again open house for Islamist terrorists. There are already reports that British jihadists are heading there, fresh from fighting with Isis in Iraq and Syria.  It seems that Littlejohn is one of the few British columnists not obsessed with The West Wing. Otherwise, he’d be familiar with the informal fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc (“After therefore because of…”), which President Bartlett has to explain to his staff, rendered ignorant for plot purposes, in the series’ second episode (conveniently titled Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc).  The idea that the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan led to terror attacks becoming less common is a fallacy. It’s a propaganda claim that doesn’t hold up when compared to the record of attacks in the 20 years following. That there has not been another attack like 9/11 illustrates merely how extraordinary that event was and how terror tactics changed and evolved in the post-Patriot Act age.  Sangita Myska @BBCSangita Every single politician or military leader who suggests that the Taliban of 2021 may be more ‘reasonable’ than the Taliban of the 1990s has one thing in common - they are all men. #Afghanistan August 19th 2021 62 Retweets284 Likes 34 years ago, Ronald Reagan made a speech in the wake of Iran Contra that contained the seeds of today’s hot take history columnists. He said:  A few months ago I told the American people I didn't trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not... Day in, day out, we are subjected to what columnists’ “hearts” tell them about foreign policy and war. The facts and evidence? Well, when they tell the columnists something different, they suddenly become awfully hard of hearing.  Subscribe now Share 1 Often attributed to Churchill but, in fact, a far older aphorism with versions in French — “L’’histoire est juste peut-être, mais qu’on ne l’oublie pas, elle a été écrite par les vainqueurs..” (the history is right, perhaps but lets us not forget it was written by the victors…”) — and Italian — “La storia di questi avvenimenti fu scritta dai vincitori” (The story of these events was written by the victors”) from the 19th century.    You’re on the free list for Conquest of the Useless . For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. Subscribe © 2021 Mic Wright Unsubscribe 12 Betts Court, Norwich, Norfolk

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

https://mobile.twitter.com/RichardBurgon/status/1428114684368936962

 

Reparations to the Afghan people delivered by the UK and the US working alongside the UN will still equal "he wants to give bags of money to the Taliban" to the bad faith biffs. 

 

Such a reparations scheme would likely be difficult to get off the ground. But, that's a secondary issue. I think we can all agree now, beyond any doubt, that Burgon wasn't advocating paying reparations to the Taliban and it's only idiots who'll still insist that that's what he wanted the UK to do. 

[Strontium]

Burgon is so dense, it's only a 4 minute video and I don't have time to properly address all the guff he's said there. It's honestly incredible how someone can have such a superficial understanding of the situation.

[Rico1304]

22 minutes ago, Nelly-Torres said:

https://mobile.twitter.com/RichardBurgon/status/1428114684368936962

 

Reparations to the Afghan people delivered by the UK and the US working alongside the UN will still equal "he wants to give bags of money to the Taliban" to the bad faith biffs. 

 

Such a reparations scheme would likely be difficult to get off the ground. But, that's a secondary issue. I think we can all agree now, beyond any doubt, that Burgon wasn't advocating paying reparations to the Taliban and it's only idiots who'll still insist that that's what he wanted the UK to do. 

Maybe he wasn’t selected because he’s a fucking idiot.  

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

6 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

Maybe he wasn’t selected because he’s a fucking idiot.  

At least he's not dishonest. 

[Bruce Spanner]

1 minute ago, Nelly-Torres said:

At least he's not dishonest. 

If you can’t remember it, it didn’t happen, right?

 

Got me through a lot of me yoof.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/inews.co.uk/news/uk/richard-burgon-i-didnt-lie-i-just-couldnt-remember-making-zionist-enemy-of-the-peace-comment-289831/amp

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

3 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

If you can’t remember it, it didn’t happen, right?

 

Got me through a lot of me yoof.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/inews.co.uk/news/uk/richard-burgon-i-didnt-lie-i-just-couldnt-remember-making-zionist-enemy-of-the-peace-comment-289831/amp

Accurate statement. 

[Jairzinho]

Shame he felt the need to row back on it.

[Bruce Spanner]

7 minutes ago, Jairzinho said:

Shame he felt the need to row back on it.

Ah, fuck it.

 

Life’s too short to argue over that imbecile.

 

Have a good evening.

[Mudface]

What a cunt of a country we are.

[YorkshireRed]

What’s this I’ve just seen on the news about a five year old Afghan refugee falling to his death from a Sheffield Hotel window!

 

Now we don’t yet know exactly what happened but it seems other refugees were recently moved out of the hotel, due to concerns about the safety of the building including the windows. 
 

Home Office officials, in their wisdom, still decided to place newly arrived refugees in the hotel.

 

This may yet prove to have been just an awful accident but if it wasn’t… 

[Curly]

On 18/08/2021 at 13:45, Nelly-Torres said:

As several people have pointed out today, it's quite interesting to see that Johnson's announcement today of a doubling of international aid to Afghanistan hasn't been met with the same calls of "he wants to give bags of money to the Taliban!" that were quite prevalent yesterday. 

 

As I said, bad faith... 

Same grandstanding from the opposite side of the argument. He’s a cunt

[Bjornebye]

19 minutes ago, Mudface said:

What a cunt of a country we are.

Taken their body armour and radios. Cunts 

[Jairzinho]

36 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

Ah, fuck it.

 

Life’s too short to argue over that imbecile.

 

Have a good evening.

Furious here. 

[Bruce Spanner]

1 minute ago, Jairzinho said:

Furious here. 

Fuck you, nice bloke!

[VladimirIlyich]

30 minutes ago, Mudface said:

What a cunt of a country we are.

Outsourcing strikes again. I wonder who their board of directors are? Probably an ex US Senator or former British MP involved in some way.

[Bruce Spanner]

8 minutes ago, VladimirIlyich said:

Outsourcing strikes again. I wonder who their board of directors are? Probably an ex US Senator or former British MP involved in some way.

Which one?

 

 

The second one is most worthy of investigation as the vast majority of it board resigned only to be replaced by a small number of people.

 

They have also changed their name in the not too recent past..

[Mudface]

5 minutes ago, VladimirIlyich said:

Outsourcing strikes again. I wonder who their board of directors are? Probably an ex US Senator or former British MP involved in some way.

Even so, the Yanks took their outsourced guards. Still, good to see we're winning hearts and minds even in the midst of the chaos. I'm sure 100-odd well-trained men will just take this on the chin and not feel betrayed.

[Jairzinho]

Fucking shit sounding theme park. 

[Bjornebye]

23 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

Which one?

 

 

The second one is most worthy of investigation as the vast majority of it board resigned only to be replaced by a small number of people.

 

They have also changed their name in the not too recent past..

Black door there seems a legit address in Levenshulme 

 

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.450241,-2.1903238,3a,75y,211.9h,91.24t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s_IWZw0CTHsezpe-gToVNpA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en-GB

 

 

[Bruce Spanner]

15 minutes ago, Jairzinho said:

Fucking shit sounding theme park. 

What’s wrong with ‘Police World’?

 

Oh…

[Bruce Spanner]

Just now, Bjornebye said:

Black door there seems a legit address in Levenshulme 

 

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.450241,-2.1903238,3a,75y,211.9h,91.24t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s_IWZw0CTHsezpe-gToVNpA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en-GB

 

 

Directors…

 

 

Lee-jit bizeness.

[Bjornebye]

1 minute ago, Bruce Spanner said:

Directors…

 

 

Lee-jit bizeness.

I only showed the address on Google Maps mate now you're sharing their names on here and only live up the road from them... nice knowing your forum handle mate 

[VladimirIlyich]

1 minute ago, Bruce Spanner said:

Directors…

 

 

Lee-jit bizeness.

Defo the kind of lads who hang around the mean streets of Levenshulme.