Posted on 08/16/2021 12:49:48 AM PDT by Lazamataz
What does the Afghanistan Crisis mean to YOUR LIFE?
The events of the last 72 hours have been breathtaking in their speed and their seriousness. The Taliban has seized power in Afghanistan, after America spent trillions of dollars and thousands of lives trying to install and keep a secular government in that landlocked, opium-producing country. In the rapid advance of the Taliban, ten thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilian allies have been trapped in the country, with no chance of escape.
Women will be raped; men will be beheaded or tortured....unless we pay the Taliban billions in ransom. The President and his spokesperson, Jennifer Psaki, are nowhere to be found. Biden, as addled as he is with cognitive decline, released a pathetic picture of himself at Camp David, alone and looking dejected (while, by the way, blowing the cover of several CIA Department Heads on the panel of TV sets Biden was looking at), while Psaki has decided to take a week-long vacation starting on August 15th. Calls are going unanswered. Nobody is home at the White House. We have no leadership whatsoever.
What does this mean for YOU?
In the last 72 hours, the standing of America as a force to be feared has evaporated. Every tin-horn dictator, every evil actor, now knows that America is a paper tiger and is rudderless. Our leadership is incompetent and unresponsive to any real crisis. We are much more preoccupied that transexuals and perverts be revered and that those on the political right (you know, the EFFECTIVE people) are called 'domestic terrorists'.
I expect China to move on Taiwan. I expect Islamic terrorists to swarm across our unsecured southern border. I expect great international upheaval, similar to what occurred in the early days before World War II. We may, indeed, have another World War as the powers jockey to take the place of America and the global stabilization she provided.
As international upheaval inevitably happens, you can expect instability in the prices of commodities. Food, energy, products ... all these things will fluctuate wildly in price. An overheated stock market will tumble, costing people billions and trillions of dollars in losses. As terrorist events occur with more frequency and more deadliness, our government will clamp down more and more on personal liberties, perhaps outright ignoring the Constitutional freedoms we have been guaranteed. They have been encroaching on those liberties anyways, with terrorist events occurring more often, they will consider that justification for the outright trampling of our rights.
What does this mean for YOU?
It means rampant inflation and bare store shelves. It means unavailability of products, energy, food. It means domestic police-state tactics to deal with the increase in REAL terrorism, as opposed to the imagined terrorism of 1/6/2021. It means companies will collapse and jobs will evaporate. It means wealth you have laid up will be drained of value quickly.
It means uncertainty, unavailability, and unrest.
What can you do about all of this?
Draw closer to the Lord, and appreciate all you have right now. Prepping is okay, but what will it do but extend your survival for a few more months? The answer is to continue to go on, to go to work as if all is well, to be prudent with your finances to the best of your ability, to be prepared to learn new skills and embark on new careers, to be prepared to remake our country in a sane fashion after the 'woke' are demonstrated to have been utter fools.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings, a poem by Rudyard Kipling, warns us of the way that reality always asserts itself in the face of the insane imaginings of those who deny reality. I would say that America has reached a place of such a dearth of reality (57 genders? REALLY?) that when reality hits, it will be powerful and very painful.
Doesn’t look as bad as I expected, but the direction is down.
DOW FUTURES
-137.00-0.39%
Level
35,283.00
Fair Value
35,430.52
Implied Open
-147.52
Pray, my friend. In the greatest war in human history — World War II — millions upon millions of sons made it home unscathed.
NOTE: For the purposes of this discussion, I divorce the question of whether we should have been there or not in the first place from the question of how we conducted ourselves in the withdrawal. I do that because I believe that regardless of how we got in there in the first place, how we treat the people who did put their lives on the line (both US Military and Afghans) is a separate issue.
Once committed, we owed (and still owe) better than what we gave to both of those groups.
Once we made the decision for better or worse, we should have conducted operations (including an eventual withdrawal which was inevitable, since the US was never going to annex Afghanistan) with the seriousness and realistic approach that those operations required.
That includes not only setting the scope of the mission appropriately when we went in, but also includes supporting our troops with realistic and useful ROE, political support while we were there, and mission design and when we decided to leave, protecting and supporting those who risked their lives to work directly with us in jobs that would surely doom them and their families if they fell into the hands of those who worked day and night to kill them, their families, and our military personnel.
We did none of those things, and so failed on all accounts. But this debacle, every bit as black as:
This is just one more black mark on our national soul. I have been of the opinion that we should have been out of Afghanistan a long time ago, in the same way that many people thought we should have been out of Vietnam sooner than we were (again, divorced from the question of whether we should have been there in the first place, and for the same reasons above)
But that said, there was a right way to do this (and Trump's approach was far more rational) and a wrong way (Leaving in a cowardly fashion in the middle of the night as we did at Bagram Air Base). This is every bit as black as the the fall of Saigon, and for many of the same reasons.
And I had personal experience with a man who was left behind when we abandoned South Vietnam in 1975 who spent years in a "re-education camp" in the jungle. I will tell of that in another post.
Now, now......
In the present context when the western nations and even Japan have determined that Afghanistan is irrelevant, the comparison to the Arch Duke Ferdinand is not really analogous. He was Austro-Hungarian royalty. An international personage.
No such valuable and important leader exists within the Taliban or for that mater all of Afghanistan.
Our job was to get OBL and punish those responsible for 9/11 and get the hell out. Bush couldn’t even get OBL.
Afghanistan’s irrelevance is irrelevant. More important is the loss of American prestige, internationally.
Bu chance, I happened to recently be reading about the Soviet Afghanistan fiasco. More than one historian remarked that their humiliation in that war, was in some part related to their collapse in 1993.
I think you missed my message
You fear loss of prestige internationally. The withdrawal from Afghanistan is in fact an international event. Everybody, apparently by common consensus, is also leaving.
The real message is that Afghanistan is no longer relevant and can be allowed to revert to the dark ages
I shall not be able to convince you of the magnitude of our loss. You shall not be able to convince me of the triviality of it.
I suggest we let history play out and one of us will be right.
Not that it matters who, it only matters what.
Loveit!!!
Their damage control is to blame Trump.
Like President Trump was fond to observe......We’ll see
And it will work with the sheeple.
These things we bear national responsibility for that didn’t have to happen this way do have consequences, and most of us are divorced from them. But they exist. The people we did not protect who deserved it from us who are outright tortured and shot for allying with us, or those who are imprisoned, as this man I describe below was.
I knew a Vietnamese immigrant who worked on machinery for us a few years back, and I had a difficult relationship with him. He was extremely difficult to work with and obstreperous, and grew to dislike him intensely. He was difficult to understand due to his poor English, stubborn to the point of extreme obstinacy, and refused to work with you to resolve issues.
Then, I was forced to work with him closely for several days in a row where we had to spend many long hours in waiting and observation, so in the interest of fostering conversation, I politely asked him where he was from and when he came to America.
He said he was Vietnamese, and had been a junior ARVN officer when Vietnam fell. He came to America in 1979, and when I asked what he did between the fall of Vietnam and his immigration to America, he said that he had been in a “re-education” camp in the jungle up until 1978.
I asked if they had finally released him and allowed him to emigrate, and he said no...he had escaped the camp and made his way to the coast, stolen a boat and made it out to sea.
While on that stolen boat in the South China Sea, he encountered all the privations you would expect, extreme thirst, gnawing hunger, and direct threats from pirates who preyed on people like him.
After spending many days (I recall he said two weeks) alone in that boat, he was rescued and ended up in Australia for some reason. After spending time there, he was able to immigrate to America. (This was quite a few years back, so I can’t remember his exact words)
When he told me all this, I was stunned. All the time I knew this guy, I knew nothing about him or his past, and resolved to never take for granted what a person may be or where they had come from.
But the thing that I will never forget the day I learned of this from him, was when I asked him what it had been like in the re-education camp. He didn’t form any kind of real answer. He just got a very far away look in his eyes, and said almost inaudibly “The things we had to do...” and said no more.
And I didn’t ask.
From that point, everything changed between us. We became very cordial, and every time I encountered him after that, we were both different people. He would even call me to say hello when he was onsite, and I made sure I found the time to visit with him. When we met, we exchanged sincere and warm handshakes and greetings and would converse. Sadly, I have since lost contact with him.
But his experience made me feel anew the shame of our actions in Vietnam in the fashion we let it fall in 1975, without even lifting a hand even though we were fully capable and empowered by the agreement to do just that. It was our “Guarantee” from Communists, given to a Congress who had no intention of enforcing it even though President Ford, as weak as he was, had asked for that aid.
We abandoned people like this Vietnamese immigrant that I met, to the Communist beasts. In the same way we are abandoning many Afghans (who DID work with our troops and protect them) to the Muslim beasts.
For that, we bear responsibility, and it is a black mark of shame regardless of whether we should have been there in the first place or for that long.
....and Trump ordered Psaki to go on vacation (and NOT RETURN) right in the middle of this mess.
.... And Trump went into hiding in Camp David in the middle of this fuster cluck, displaying a pathetic looking picture of him looking frail and confused, all alone, in the Camp David situation room.
.... and Trump ordered an acceleration of the withdrawal during Biden's administration.
.... and Trump ordered sophisticated US weapons to be left behind for the Taliban during Biden's administration.
Reality never impacts these people, does it?
Gosh darnitall Laz you sho’ am a good writer!!!
Right, I agree.
I have gone to pains to divorce the two things, because once our forces were in, I believe we should have conducted ourselves in a way consistent with honor where that is possible.
Deviating from that goal when not forced to (and the US was not forced to in this phase of the operation regardless of what went before) is something that stands alone.
Yuo mispeled 'ritter'!
Gosh darnitall Laz you sho’ am a gud speller!
lool
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.