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  • Double Edge
    replied
    Must have been a fun day for south block.

    CIA chief, Russian NSA in Delhi for talks on Afghanistan | TOI | Sept 08 2021

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  • Double Edge
    replied
    Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
    I'm using it because it's the only historic option that worked and also in our histories as well. We burned Germany and Japan to the ground with their only hope against starvation was surrender. It's not an option because we chosed it but make no mistake, it's easy. Too damned easy. The Sepoys who marched to Kabul after the 1842 retreat left no man or boy or dog alive in Kabul.
    If doing a Mongol isn't an option then you do next best.

    Isolate the battle field. No ? so then next best.

    Deny the enemy space. Couldn't do that either.

    So now we're at fourth best. Garrison fighting.

    Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
    That is blatant bullshit right off the bat. To control the LOCs, you must travel the LOCs. The number if IED hits should tell you that no one was staying behind the walls. They travelled enough on the those roads for the TB to set up IED ambushes and also for us to watch and track them back to their staging points. No NATO force stayed behind the walls. Every single one went out on patrols. With the British, Americans, and Canadians actively hunting down TB strongholds. The man don't know what he's talking about.
    yes, you went on patrols but did you hold the space or did TB just return after you left. The results don't back up what you said does it.

    You could not push the TB out and keep them out, they kept returning because you could not isolate the battle space. They had safe sanctuary and you did not go after it.

    The one time you did was at the Salala crossing in 2012 and then the Paks cut off your supplies for the next six months. No chance of hot pursuit. Not many insurgents try their tricks when you follow them back to their hideouts and blow them up.

    An exceedingly difficult predicament

    Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
    TAgain, you need control of two of the three of the money, the force, or the people. The TB could not control the flow of goods through the roads, ie no control of the money. Scaring the people makes people support probamatic and does nothing to gain you money nor military power.
    The point i'm trying to make is drive 20 miles out of any Afghan city and you're in Taliban country. This was the case for well over a decade.

    So they had a presence and only had a few miles to go to capture any city.

    When AIM visited in 2019 he found the only thing these TB were interested in was collecting road taxes. So either pay or fight. For those that could not fight, they paid.
    Last edited by Double Edge; 09 Sep 21,, 00:16.

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  • Firestorm
    replied
    “We will never give up Osama [bin Laden] at any price,” Mullah Hassan Akhund said in Oct. 1999. He was responding to a U.N. demand. See below. Today, Akhund was named the “head of state” for the Taliban’s resurrected Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

    Link

    Fantastic. Also, Sirajuddin Haqqani who has a $5 million bounty on his head has been named the Interior Minister. I tried calling up the FBI to collect on the bounty by telling them where they could find him now but they weren't amused.

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  • kato
    replied
    Right now 200 German soldiers (mostly military police) are deployed in Ramstein since last week for guard duties for the somewhere around 35,000 Afghans the US imported over here in the Kabul evacuation - of which 12,000 are still here.

    In USAF media the German soldiers are called "volunteers", although i don't really see anything voluntary in a deployment ordered through the chain of command. Apparently the word is used since the US military is unable or unwilling to shift any soldiers from other duties over onto the task and relies on a few dozen people who "volunteered" from the 786th Civil Engineer Squadron (... "volunteered" to, you know, do their job, i.e. establishing infrastructure in support of the US military presence). USAF in press releases also - presumably purposefully - regularly considerably understates the number of Afghans present by only counting those in a specific housing section or similar.

    A number of these Afghans apparently also don't want to be shipped on to the USA or wherever the US plans to "temporarily house" them (apparently Albania and Kosovo "volunteered" to a US request in the regard). So far Germany got 130 asylum requests among them.

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  • Albany Rifles
    replied
    Afghanistan is also somewhat special due to its duration, as least to those here. The commander of those last returning troops spelled it out as having soldiers returning now who had just been born when the mission started, as well as knowing one soldier among those last 264 who had been deployed with ISAF no less than 14 separate times

    Yeah, we had some in our special operations forces who definitely fit in this category as well.

    Heck, I remember being in Germany in OCT-DEC 2001 and having the Bundeswehr guarding all of our facilities. I am sure some of those guys probably ended up in SOF forces and/or deployed.

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  • kato
    replied
    Originally posted by Albany Rifles View Post
    Pretty much every unit/squadron/ship would be greeted at home station by chain of command, a band if available, families, etc.
    Sure, that was done here. Also, the last flight of 264 soldiers to return from Afghanistan were greeted on touching German soil back in June by the commander of the Einsatzführungskommando, i.e. the three-star general in charge of all overseas deployments for the Bundeswehr (who himself commanded ISAF TAAC-N in 2013-2014, KFOR MTF-S in 2007-2009 and SFOR GerCon in 1999, so he can presumably relate). They did a little ceremony where they also handed out some awards for individual meritious service overseas, then handed the guys over to their relatives.

    Afghanistan is also somewhat special due to its duration, as least to those here. The commander of those last returning troops spelled it out as having soldiers returning now who had just been born when the mission started, as well as knowing one soldier among those last 264 who had been deployed with ISAF no less than 14 separate times.

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  • Albany Rifles
    replied
    Regarding the returning home ceremonies...

    In the US military there were ALWAYS welcome back ceremonies...but not a ticker tape parade.

    Pretty much every unit/squadron/ship would be greeted at home station by chain of command, a band if available, families, etc. Individual augmentees (usually HQ people) may not units down to platoon received some sort of ceremony.

    As for parades...there were some...but I have to be honest since 9/11 there has been a continuous outpouring of support for military personnel....some of it nauseatingly so from cloyingly chauvinistic country music to a free/discount meal at most chain restaurants on special days (Memorial & Veterans) to bad stock photos used in advertising.

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  • Albany Rifles
    replied
    Originally posted by TopHatter View Post

    That's because the US does not have a Colonial History when and where a Major had the authority to speak with and to honour the Queen's Voice.

    True enough. Our colonial history consisted mainly eradicating the local native American tribes, making Latin America safe for the United Fruit Company and issuing an RFQ for a handgun that could stop a charging Moro tribesman in his tracks.
    One minor point...we did do all of this in the Philippines but the US military does not have that expertise since 1946 when independence was granted to them.

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  • kato
    replied
    Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
    Were there any parades for any NATO members when they left Afghanistan?
    Germany was planning a larger ceremony for August 31st. We don't do parades anymore in the last 50 years, but it's basically at the same exposure level. The ceremony was planned to involve, in this order:
    1. official service at the central memorial for fallen Bundeswehr soldiers
    2. talks of the Federal President and Minister of Defense with soldiers, veterans and relatives of casualties
    3. formal mustering at the Ministry of Defence to conclude the Afghanistan mission, with speech by Federal President
    4. President of the Federal Parliament hosting and reviewing soldiers returning from the mission (also emphasizing role as parliamentary army)
    5. Großer Zapfenstreich formal ceremony (highest-rank ceremony) in public at the Republic Square in front of the Reichstag building (i.e. federal parliament)
    But yes, when the mission ended and soldiers returned they weren't received with any sorts of honours here either. The minister of defense herself was ouf of the country (in the US) at the time, members of the defense committee - who wanted to take part - were not informed when and where the last guys would come in. The soldiers' union and veteran groups raised a stink about that, and after lower-profile politicians in the government parties got lobbied hard the above plans (in particular points 4 and 5) were the result.

    Due to the Kabul evacuation the ceremony was cancelled and postponed and will occur later this year. The MoD is now planning October, though they're "looking for a fitting date in that month".
    Last edited by kato; 06 Sep 21,, 13:05.

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  • Officer of Engineers
    replied
    Originally posted by Firestorm View Post
    There are enough accounts by US troops of their frustration at their Taliban foes easily retreating over the border where they could not touch them.
    You're missing the bigger pciture. If the TB could retreat back into Pakistan, that means that those TB were contained at the border. However, they have other ways to escape and evade inside Afghanistan. Hiding amongst the civilians discourages active combat pursuits since our ROEs do not allow intentionally live collateral damage.

    Originally posted by Firestorm View Post
    Anyway, it is pointless to argue about this now. We are looking at a Taliban ruled Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. 20 years of blood, sweat and money spent there by the US has been utterly pointless and the weary American public is in no mood to ask tough questions of those who presided over this fiasco.
    This was lost the day Afghanistan was off the 6 o'clock news. Were there any parades for any NATO members when they left Afghanistan? I certainly don't remember Trudeau reviewing any returning troops. You're probably too youig to remember but the Vietnam War was lost the day Americans started saying no to Vietnam. Americans have been saying no to Afganistan a lot earlier than Biden becoming President.

    Originally posted by Firestorm View Post
    There is a famous video of Hamid Gul the former ISI Director General (1987-89), wherein he brags that Pakistan defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan using American money. The interesting part is what he says after -- Pakistan will now defeat America in Afghanistan using American money. They were straight up telling you guys what they were going to do and your leaders sat back and watched it happen. Incompetence and stupidity are both very mild words to describe this. Even in that final phone call between Ghani and Biden which has now become famous, Ghani makes it a point to mention that they are facing a Pakistani supported invasion which Biden of course does not even acknowledge.
    There's only one blame. We couldn't stomache the mountain of skulls needed to make Afghanistan the Afghanistan we wanted.

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  • Firestorm
    replied
    Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
    Pakistan is a strawman argument. At no time did Pakistani actions or inactions affected our combat tempo (Canada, UK, and US were the only ones conducting offensive combat actions). We were conducting combat operations deep into Khandahar and Helmand and this was at aTaliban best road logistics but mostly foot. This means there were safe depots throughout Afghanistan. While Pakistan teritories certainly helped, by no means were the Taliban was going to be hampered by it. Keep in mind that these were mostly company level actions, at best reduced battalion. Two thousand Canadians held Khandahar. That is laughable by WWII standards.

    Pakistan is another example of placing blame on everything else except accepting responsibility. We gave the Afghans a Afghanistan they didn't want, one this at best, mired in Civil War while being robbed/denied monies by Kabul.
    They did not affect you because they were holding back. The Taliban are vulnerable when they fight NATO inside Afghanistan and they know it. They also know they are completely safe from your troops as long as they hide inside Pakistan where they can also retrain and resupply (and recruit), so that's what they did and reemerged as you started drawing down your troops over the years. There are enough accounts by US troops of their frustration at their Taliban foes easily retreating over the border where they could not touch them. Anyway, it is pointless to argue about this now. We are looking at a Taliban ruled Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. 20 years of blood, sweat and money spent there by the US has been utterly pointless and the weary American public is in no mood to ask tough questions of those who presided over this fiasco.

    There is a famous video of Hamid Gul the former ISI Director General (1987-89), wherein he brags that Pakistan defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan using American money. The interesting part is what he says after -- Pakistan will now defeat America in Afghanistan using American money. They were straight up telling you guys what they were going to do and your leaders sat back and watched it happen. Incompetence and stupidity are both very mild words to describe this. Even in that final phone call between Ghani and Biden which has now become famous, Ghani makes it a point to mention that they are facing a Pakistani supported invasion which Biden of course does not even acknowledge.
    Last edited by Firestorm; 06 Sep 21,, 00:16.

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  • Firestorm
    replied
    Panjshir never had a chance of holding out beyond a point. They are heavily outnumbered and surrounded with no link to the Tajikistan border and no way for them to be resupplied. And they have no Russian support this time around. The Russians seem to be toeing the Chinese line about supporting the Taliban now.

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  • Tronic
    replied
    Remnants of the Afghan Defence Forces, alongside the Panjshiri militia have put up a valiant fight against the Taliban. They are simply being outmanned and outgunned by the Taliban and the list of their dead has started mounting since last night. Next time Biden or his supporters say the Afghans did not put up a fight against the Taliban, remind them of Panjshir. They fought and died till the bitter end..

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  • TopHatter
    replied
    Biden Flipped His Underpromise/Overdeliver Script On Afghanistan, With Disastrous Results

    WASHINGTON — Having underpromised and overdelivered his way to a solid start to his presidency, President Joe Biden inexplicably flipped the script on his Afghanistan withdrawal — to disastrous effect.

    The departure from Afghanistan would be done “deliberately,” he promised, not at all like the humiliating exit from Saigon a half-century earlier in Vietnam, and U.S. troops would stay until every American citizen who wanted out had been flown to safety.

    In the end, none of those assurances was fulfilled. Even worse, the chaotic exit left 13 American service members and some 200 Afghans dead from a terrorist bombing — precisely the dire consequence Biden was determined to avoid by getting out of the country quickly.

    “They raised expectations and then didn’t do the nuts-and-bolts planning. They were hoping for the best and didn’t prepare for these worst-case scenarios,” said Brian Katulis, an alumnus of former President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council and now a fellow at the Center for American Progress. “And they ended up with the worst case.”

    From his COVID-19 vaccine drive to his stimulus plan to bipartisan progress on his infrastructure proposal, Biden had set modest goals and earned both strong job approval ratings and the air of competence. Much of that success has been undone, new polling shows, as Americans, while still supporting his objective of leaving Afghanistan, are unhappy with how he managed it.

    And advocates for the tens of thousands of Afghans who helped the United States’ efforts there over the past two decades are beside themselves with anger and frustration. The majority of those Afghan allies and their families — a pool of some 88,000 earlier this year — remain in Afghanistan, with the new Taliban rulers searching them out and killing them.

    “This is chaos of their own creation,” said Matt Zeller, an Afghanistan veteran and co-founder of the group No One Left Behind that works to extract Afghan interpreters and others who helped the U.S. war effort.
    They were hoping for the best and didn’t prepare for these worst-case scenarios. And they ended up with the worst case. Brian Katulis, fellow, Center for American Progress

    Exactly why Biden chose the Afghanistan withdrawal — a task over which outside actors like the former government of Ashraf Ghani, the Taliban and rival terror groups like ISIS-K had enormous influence — to make such sweeping promises is unclear. One major factor is that the administration truly believed it had considerably more time to stage an orderly exit than it did, based on what turned out to be a wildly optimistic assessment regarding the stability and strength of Ghani’s government.

    Biden himself laid that out in his remarks on Tuesday when he explicitly blamed Ghani for much of the tumult. “The people of Afghanistan watched their own government collapse and the president flee amid the corruption and malfeasance, handing over the country to their enemy, the Taliban, and significantly increasing the risk to U.S. personnel and our allies,” he said.

    To the Afghan advocates — most of whom generally support Biden, particularly compared to his predecessor Donald Trump and his anti-refugee policies — the idea that the U.S.-backed government could hang on after the U.S. departure when it had been steadily losing territory to the Taliban for years, and especially after Trump’s February 2020 peace agreement with the Taliban, was magical thinking.

    “They should have challenged that assumption. They should have been asking: ‘What if, in the end, it all goes to hell?’” said Mark Jacobson, an Afghanistan war veteran who runs Syracuse University’s Maxwell School programs in Washington. “I think the collapse was quite possibly inevitable as soon as Trump signed his surrender.”


    Inheriting Trump’s Taliban Deal
    Biden and his White House have been keenly aware of the criticism surrounding the U.S. departure, particularly after Kabul fell to the Taliban. The evacuation suddenly took on life-and-death urgency, and the United States was forced to work with Taliban leaders who, not too long ago, it had been trying to kill.

    Biden has pointed out several times that he was not the one who negotiated the agreement that essentially gave the Taliban control of Afghanistan upon the United States’ departure. It was Trump who agreed to lift sanctions and effect the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison, all without the involvement of the U.S.-allied Afghan government.

    “This is not a preferred relationship or a situation that we would have designed if we had started from scratch,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Aug. 27.

    One administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that, while not optimal, American diplomats and armed forces still got 120,000 at-risk people out of the country in a matter of a few weeks — an accomplishment that would not have been possible without the groundwork that began soon after Biden took office.

    “The Trump administration had not made any plans to evacuate Afghans at all,” the official said. “Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. It is apparent now that Afghan morale was very shaky. But the operating assumption was that the government of Kabul was not going to fall as quickly as it did.”

    Biden pushed that assumption hard, both in his April 14 speech laying out his goal to leave by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as well as his July 8 speech providing a more detailed timeline to leave by the end of August.

    “Together, with our NATO allies and partners, we have trained and equipped over 300,000 current serving members of the military — of the Afghan National Security Force,” he said in the later speech.

    Indeed, it was following that July speech that Biden complicated matters for himself by promising that the departure from Afghanistan would look nothing like the exit from Saigon 46 years earlier. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” he said.

    And on Aug. 18, three days after the fall of Kabul, Biden promised in an ABC interview that, notwithstanding his Aug. 31 deadline, American troops would remain as long as there were American citizens who wanted to leave.

    In the end, U.S. diplomats were evacuated from the embassy using helicopters after the Taliban seized Kabul, and as many as 200 American citizens were left behind when the last U.S. military flight left the city’s airport on Aug. 31.

    Both were off-the-cuff comments by Biden personally, not part of workshopped remarks, and wound up creating problems for him and his staff.

    One longtime former aide said such freelance excursions are simply one of Biden’s traits. “That is just the nature of working for Joe Biden,” he said on condition of anonymity.

    He added, though, that Biden has opposed the Afghanistan War since 2009 when he was Barack Obama’s vice president, and even more so after the death of his son, Beau, following his diagnosis of brain cancer, which Biden believes was linked to the toxins he was exposed to during his deployment in Iraq.

    More than anything else, Biden wanted to bring American troops back and never again have to comfort parents grieving the loss of a child there, the former aide said, which was apparent in the latter half of the speech Biden delivered on Tuesday.

    “Which is clearly the speech he has wanted to give for a decade,” the former aide added.

    Saving Too Few Afghans, Too Late
    To supporters of the United States’ Afghan allies, the roots of today’s problems go back not just one decade, but two, from the moment the United States decided to remain in Afghanistan after removing the Taliban from power for providing a safe haven to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorists to plan and train for the Sept. 11 attacks.

    Staying and standing up a new government and security force meant enlisting the help of locals as interpreters, translators, logistical staff for the military occupation, clerical and custodial staff at the embassy, and countless others. That should have led, way back then, to planning for the day U.S. forces left, when some or all of those local allies would need evacuating to protect them from reprisals, advocates said.

    No such planning, however, happened then. It wasn’t until 2009 that Congress passed a law providing for “special immigrant visas” for such Afghans, and it wasn’t until a tweaking of the language in Obama’s second term that the State Department implemented a system that began to work passably well.

    All that ground to a halt during Trump’s administration, as his anti-immigrant, anti-refugee views set the tone throughout his executive branch, including the State Department. Trump and his top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had no interest in bringing Afghan allies into the United States at all — a sentiment they continue to express today — even after Trump announced publicly he was negotiating with the Taliban to withdraw all American forces.

    “That marks another time that plans not just should have been drawn up, but taken off the shelves and operationalized,” said Sunil Varghese, policy director with the International Refugee Assistance Project.

    Which meant that when Biden took office in January with a goal of leaving Afghanistan, he needed to have come up with a plan to immediately ramp up SIV processing, create a new visa for those ineligible for the SIV but whose lives would still be at risk, and start moving those people out as soon as possible, Varghese and other Afghan advocates said.

    Biden administration officials point out that they did increase staffing in the Kabul embassy to process visas not long after taking office, and that flights out of the country for SIV-holders and their families began at the end of July, with more than 2,000 flown out of the country by the time Kabul fell to the Taliban two weeks later.

    To advocates, though, those numbers are laughably inadequate when the total number of Afghans who needed evacuation was well over 100,000.

    No One Left Behind’s Zeller said that his group and others began pushing the Biden administration in early February to start moving vulnerable Afghans out of the provinces that winter, while the mountain passes into the Taliban winter camps in Pakistan were still snowbound.

    “This could have been done quietly. Methodically. When we still controlled all these air bases with 2,500 troops. When the Taliban couldn’t have fielded an army. In the middle of winter, they’re all sitting at home freezing their asses off,” he said. “No one was listening. I can’t begin to explain why.”

    What’s more, a detailed plan for the evacuation should have been drawn up and implemented right then, not created at the last minute with the Taliban bearing down on Kabul.

    “We should not be trying to build the aircraft while we’re flying it over the Pacific,” he said.

    A Much More Difficult Mission
    Biden and his team have publicly moved on from Afghanistan. He has not spoken of it since his speech marking the end of the war last week, and on Friday, he resumed the official and personal travel he had put on hold during the Kabul airlift, with a trip to see hurricane damage in New Orleans followed by a holiday weekend at home in Delaware.

    For those pushing the case of America’s Afghan allies, though, the work is far from over.

    At most risk are those who worked directly with the United States or NATO, those eligible for SIVs — the majority of whom could not make it safely to the airport after Kabul fell, Varghese said.

    “It was complete confusion as to if you go to the airport, how do you get inside. As far as I can tell, there was no organized plan, at least for Afghans,” he said.

    Now, those people will need diplomatic help to get them out of the country.

    “People are in hiding. The Taliban are going door to door looking for collaborators. Women who are out are being told to stay home,” he said. “The United States was able to evacuate thousands of people, and we’re grateful for that. ... As to the remaining people, I just have to trust that the administration has a plan.”

    The Center for American Progress’ Katulis said he still cannot understand what happened and why. “We haven’t had a complete accounting of what went wrong here,” he said, adding that it seemed that the process was more reflective of a domestic policy debate than one centered around national security. “There didn’t seem to be an action plan there.”

    Zeller said he will continue trying to get Afghan allies out, but understands full well that the United States is now limited to diplomatic and humanitarian efforts. “That will all have to be at the Taliban’s discretion,” he said. “They’re not a reformed group. They’re just as evil as they were in the ’90s. They’re just better armed this time.”

    He said that he also doesn’t understand why the departure was not better-planned but assumes that coming congressional inquiries could help answer that question. “Congress is going to formally ask in a couple of weeks,” he said. “And I can’t wait to testify.”
    ________

    It's one thing to be handed a complete shit sandwich by an obvious skid mark like Donald Trump. It's another thing entirely to make things worse through your own failure to plan.

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  • Officer of Engineers
    replied
    Originally posted by Double Edge View Post
    Rank and file might be Afghan. What about the commanders ?
    AFAIK, still Afghans.

    Originally posted by Double Edge View Post
    You've been using that Mongol term for over ten years. It was not an option for you neither was it for India.
    I'm using it because it's the only historic option that worked and also in our histories as well. We burned Germany and Japan to the ground with their only hope against starvation was surrender. It's not an option because we chosed it but make no mistake, it's easy. Too damned easy. The Sepoys who marched to Kabul after the 1842 retreat left no man or boy or dog alive in Kabul.

    Originally posted by Double Edge View Post
    The critique is you remained a garrison force and didn't push further.
    That is blatant bullshit right off the bat. To control the LOCs, you must travel the LOCs. The number if IED hits should tell you that no one was staying behind the walls. They travelled enough on the those roads for the TB to set up IED ambushes and also for us to watch and track them back to their staging points. No NATO force stayed behind the walls. Every single one went out on patrols. With the British, Americans, and Canadians actively hunting down TB strongholds. The man don't know what he's talking about.

    Originally posted by Double Edge View Post
    Yes if you had the force they could not stop you but what about the public ? They don't have the option of arguing with armed militants.

    Your loss is mine as well. The people that wanted you to win the most are having a hard time accepting reality these days.
    Again, you need control of two of the three of the money, the force, or the people. The TB could not control the flow of goods through the roads, ie no control of the money. Scaring the people makes people support probamatic and does nothing to gain you money nor military power.
    Last edited by Officer of Engineers; 05 Sep 21,, 23:06.

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