Assange on Afghanistan

This is another clip I think people should see (perhaps a few times over) so that it sinks into our heads what we have done and what we are doing.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=830DlDQXFgA[/youtube]

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Yeah, It’s a shame. Assange was given the opportunity to be released if he told the authorities who his source was and Trump offered to pardon him if he got involved in the Russia/Putin conspiracy theory so Trump would look good but he refused both and people think he’s some sort of bad guy.

Yeah, copy and paste all you like – just fix up any spelling or punctuation. :slight_smile:

Thanks. Appreciated.

American army is overrated. They won one war in the 20th century, and only after other nations did 90 percent of the work.

Afghanistan warrior culture goes back several millennia and these dudes have basically not ever been defeated.

In recent history, the country was free and democratic but the Soviets tried to subdue them, the Americans created this current force by giving them rocket launchers and the rest is history.

Americans are mostly very great at arming people that become their enemies. Except for Trump really.

I agree that there are bigger goals at play than just laundering money but I also think there are bigger goals than the devolvement of national borders into a one-world, totalitarian state run by unelected UN technocrats.

The piece de resistance in the warped minds of these psychopaths is to eventually transform the human race. This is where all this infotech, IoT, 5G/6G, quantum computing, biotech, nanotech, genetics (eugenics), augmented reality, AI, machine learning etc is going. I’m not sure the current experimental mRNA shots are as dangerous as some believe (I may be completely wrong about this) but I do see it as a presage of things to come even if they’re perfectly safe. Technologies like ‘quantum dot’ injections which hold all our health records ostensibly to show medical staff who has had what vaccine and when it was taken but there’s no doubt that this technology will increasingly carry more and more personal information. In the very near future, we will be coerced into accepting what amounts to human barcodes.

Transhumanism, posthumanism, Human 2.0 – call it what you like – but I can’t help but see this all links back to the billions of dollars being siphoned off from the never-ending wars.

A day before 9/11, Rumsfeld disclosed 2.3 trillion dollars had gone missing. Since then, there have been 20 years of non-stop wars where billions of dollars more have been siphoned off. Again, where is it going? Well, it’s not all going on luxury homes, cars and strippers. It can only mean that this enormous amount of money is being funnelled into secret ops. It wouldn’t be the first time. Remember the CIA has been busted for smuggling cocaine into the US to fund their surreptitious wars in Central America and selling weapons to ‘terrorists’ to fund clandestine operations in the middle east.

So yes, I agree that these wars are much more than a racket to increase their personal wealth or boost stock prices.
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So how does the view that the goal is to have an endless war stack up against the fact that US just left? Was Trump just a really genuinely good person with no interest in profit who wanted to see the war end?

It might not have been Trump, so the alternative is that Biden is just a really genuinely good person with no interest in profit who wanted to see the war end.

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I’ll reply to you tomorrow, FJ, I just thought we needed a little perspective on the sadness and horror of the situation
#PrayForAfghanistan

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Yes, the larger wars in the Middle East may be over for now but drone attacks on Yemen and bombing Somalia has started up again so the wars, ‘counter-terrorism operations’ or ‘conflicts’ continue. The main focus, now that the Middle East has largely been decimated, is to refocus and redeploy to the Asia/Oceania theatre.

LOL. Trump was a businessman. He thinks in terms of transactions, deals and profits and there were no reasons (profits) to stay in Afghanistan.

The career politicians, defense ‘experts’ and deep state operatives have different agendas. It’s not about profits for them; it’s about global strategies (NWO, WorldBank, IMF etc.) and for the Wall Street people and the economists, it’s about keeping the war machine running because the military industrial complex is about the only part of the U.S. economy that’s actually producing stuff. It’s the MIC that’s keeping the US dollar strong and propping up the U.S. economy.

Trump was also a builder. He got his kicks from building great things (often monuments to himself) but he never seemed interested in blowing stuff up. I guess it’s because it’s hard to put the Trump brand name on a piece of dirt.

Finally, Trump was a nationalist. In a world where we’re told to hand over our factories, technology, jobs, money, sovereignty, and even our way of life to accommodate foreigners, Trump wanted to take it all back and make America like it was in his heyday. This is why he wanted to end the useless wars and this is why he was hated by the internationalist and the ‘progressives’ and had to be removed.
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That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that before. It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump wanted to keep counter-terrorism forces in Afghanistan. If true, then it’s the best strategy I’ve seen to date. I’m sure his supporters would have accepted it if it was explained to them.

I don’t think Biden’s a ‘genuinely good person’. During all of the decades he spent in public office, he never once opposed a single war – not one – so wanting to close down a 20 year war after his predecessor started the process, after deals with the Taliban had been made and after Trump handed back Taliban prisoners was more out of pragmatism than morals. It’s just a pity that Biden didn’t steal Trumps plan to kept a counter-terrorism force there until everyone was out. Had he have done that, he would have deserved some praise.

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I think it’s interesting that you managed to spin a situation in which Trump deliberately lied to gain political points into a story in which Trump is the good guy, and the guy who followed through on his lie (the lie that you apparently liked two seconds ago) is the bad guy lmao.

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Oh, I get what you’re saying. I was perplexed at what Trump’s lie was.

If Trump said he was going to withdraw all troops and then left some troops behind without telling the public, I’d agree with you, that would be a lie but I didn’t read it like that.

I didn’t think the person being interviewed was saying Trump was lying because he was secretly going to keep troops there but rather he was describing what would happen. Would Trump have told the public that some troops would stay behind? I guess so. He did that with Syria. America has always left troops on the ground even after the fighting has stopped. Look at Iraq. Look at Syria. Look at Germany and Japan :smiley:

I’m not trying to support Trump. I’m not a Trumper and the longer he was in office, the less I liked him but I do support withdrawing troops and I do support a slow withdrawal (preferably without artificial deadlines) so in that regard, I support Trump’s policy.

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I must apologize, I think I misread the implications of my own link. I didn’t understand what it was saying, and I’m not sure I still do

Not a problem. I think there are better things we can disagree on. :smiley:

An update:

A leaked British diplomatic memo sent in June to America’s allies states that the U.S. would maintain enough security to ensure the allies could get their troops, people and equipment out and continue to operate safety.

Boris Johnson couldn’t get hold of Biden for 18 hours, Germany and France couldn’t get anyone to talk to, and Canada’s Trudeau eventually got on to Hillary Clinton to see if she knew what was happening. LOL.

The British brought in 300 extra troops to help with the evacuation, Germany has brought in 2 special forces helicopters and soldiers, France has brought in 200 troops and Australia is probably unable to do much since we have our army checking to see if the covid-positive people remain home during the lockdown.

Finally, the Taliban have refuse to let educated Afghani’s leave and said that after the deadline just days away, the agreement ends…

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They want to keep their educated in their country, of course.

Yeah, but when 40% of the doctors, for instance, were women and the Taliban ban women from work/careers, where are they going to get their educated people from? It’s just another example of running a country by ideology.

The communist Afghan government did some good things (like supporting the emancipation women) but they did lots of impractical ideological nonsense, too. They cancelled debt to the landlords so the landlords stopped lending money and the lives of country people started to fall apart. The communists put decrees on land ownership which changed who controlled the water and ended up causing massive crop failures. This set desperate regional groups against each other and disaster after disaster followed.

The communist government came down hard on the rural protesters and the protesters retaliated by killing several Soviet advisors. The communist government retaliated by raining down bombs flattening Herat and killing up to 25,000 people and from that, the Mujaheddin were born.

Originally, the Mujaheddin were anti-communist rather than pro-Islamic. They sent their children to Islamic schools in Pakistan and fought the Afghan army (and later the Soviet army) from the hills. A couple of decades later these kids returned to Afghanistan as the Taliban (Taliban means ‘student’) and they came to take back Afghanistan with the aim of turning it into a religious state under Sharia Law.

Now the Taliban want to inflict THEIR impractical ideology on the land without thinking through how it’s going to work and ironically, it is the Taliban who are coming down harder than the communists on anyone who dissents. The same old ideological nonsense creating new problems as they attempt to solve old ones and on and on and on it goes.

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Because militaries exist to defeat military opponents in warfare. Militaries are ineffective at working fundamental cultural transformations, remaking foreign people into little copies of the people that sent the armies.

Maybe that’s why Afghans have flocked to such hard-core extremist versions of Islam. Because they feel themselves under constant threat by outsiders who want to remake them in somebody else’s image. So they grasp tighter and tighter to things that they perceive as theirs. Backsliding and compromise become tantamount to treason. Extremism flourishes.

If the rest of the world adopts a hands-off policy in Afghanistan, the result won’t be pretty. Certainly not for women, gays or religious minorities. But if they finally stop feeling threatened, there may be local voices of moderation and toleration appearing. The whole crazy culture might start to normalize.

A century from now Afghanistan would still be Islamic, even fundamentalist Islamic, but I expect that it might be far more easy-going than today. At least if they stop feeling constantly backed into a corner and forced to fight.

One could make the same kind of quasi-Marxist observation about public schools, public health care, green energy schemes and social spending of all sorts. All of them are attempts to milk money out of the system by people who have financial interests in the results. They are driven in the popular imagination by idealism without an exit-strategy since this world will never be a heavenly paradise and there will always be somebody suffering… somewhere.

I’m much more inclined to think that the Western world’s failure in Afghanistan wasn’t the result of evil capitalism so much as it was the result of well-intentioned evangelical idealism and the unrealistic nation-building schemes that our missionary impulse gave rise to. We wanted to help those poor Afghans, even if most of them didn’t want that help. We wanted to pull them kicking-and-screaming into the 21’st century, even if our vision of secular progress was something that few of them wanted to embrace.

I agree in part with this. We wanted to “help” them even if most didn’t want our help. We had unrealistic nation-building schemes that our missionary impulses gave rise to. Our vision of secular progress was something that few of them wanted to embrace, though that, I think, is mainly true in the majority agrarian countryside, and among the ethnic Pasthuns, of whom the Taliban are representative. I doubt it’s true of most women in Kabul and other cities.

However, I think the main goals of the U.S. in Afghanistan were threefold, and among them was not to help the people there.

First, we wanted to convert Afghanistan into a Western client state as a counterforce against China, Iran, and to a lesser extent, Pakistan.

Second, we wanted to make sure Afghanistan could no longer serve as haven for Qaeda and other terror groups.

Third, we wanted to open Afghan markets to Western exploitative capitalism.

Helping the people there was last on our list. That is why I put “help” in scare quotes up top. For us, helping them really just meant helping oursaelves.

I do think, though, that certain individuals, among them Dubya, sincerely wanted to see our Afghan intervention actually help people. I believe Bush when he said recently that he grieved for the plight of Afghan women under the newly reinstalled Taliban.

It happened big time with Libya …

Even mr Kim over there in North Korea says Libya is the reason he doesn’t trust the US ‘project’ (half scare quotes)