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Amarullah saleh, the vice president of afg and former northern alliance member has assumed the role of afg presidency(as caretaker president). While ashraf ghani has fled afg, saleh has gone to panjshir valley and joined forces with ahmad shah massouds son.
Look, either you accept NATO is the most formidable force on the planet or you concede to China.
The Taliban withstood twenty years of what you could throw at them. They are not going to be afraid of a paper tiger with an army of little emperors who think the Paks are part of the solution.
if the Chinese are smart they will stay well clear. But the choice isn't up to them.
Everybody benefitted from the security umbrella the US provided now China will have to set that up on its own.
NATO has the most potential force on force combat power in the world. In reality's, its the US for global missions with a small sprinkling of EU member states and a few tasty chunks of UK force thrown into the mix. A lot of NATO's power is hypothetical and land locked (polish and Turkish armies). A lot is designed for regional defense like DE submarines etc. Tank armies and diesel boats are not weapons to win COIN campaigns. They are designed to make it too expensive to attack, not enforce your will on another. China being right next door has the ability to use a land locked army to impose its will. The Taliban knows what China did to the Uighurs is doable to them so they walk soft around the Asian Dragon lest they be disappeared.
How do you defense professionals view the idea of leaving a residual force of SOF troops and airbases? As a civie, I am pretty skeptical because I don't see what's protecting the outposts that will be necessarily thinly manned.
All those who are merciful with the cruel will come to be cruel to the merciful.
-Talmud Kohelet Rabbah, 7:16.
Trump and Biden are just the janitor stuck cleaning up the mess.
That sounds about right, yeah.
“He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”
Geez,you really are a dimwit.Hint ,use google maps,see where Europe ends and A-stan begins.
Fight like the taliban?You mean not being100% idiots?Yeah,was doable from day1 to at least2015.War was winnable rather easily and on the cheap.
And congrats,you just let the CHINESE the entire Central Asia,plus no American army between China and ME.
But at least it is a senile imbecile who owns this disaster.
You think you spared money and resources for China.Bloody idiocy.
Whoever planned this mess better start selling candies at Disneyland.A uniform he does not merit.
Well, dim wit, have at it. Go back over and deal with this yourself since you are so damn opinionated on it. If you are worried about your backyard then take care of it. Just another clown saying the war was winnable like those who once said Vietnam was winnable. Fine spend your money and lives then if you are so damn cock sure. In the end you will fail also.
From my US perspective we should have left within the first year of being there. Set up a unified government. What a crock. Set up a stable democracy. Another crock. Eliminate the Taliban. Guess what another crock. This damn country, and I use the term country very loosely, will never be unified, stable, or have a democracy. They never have throughout their entire history. Every province has ruled themselves over time. The King of Afghanistan was really only the Mayor of Kabul. You could have asked tribesmen in the outlaying provinces back in the 70s if they had heard of Afghanistan and many would have said no. The word Afghanistan had no meaning at all. The Taliban will now try to run this country from the center but in the end they will fail as the country has never been run from the center. Over time it will fail back to the individual provinces and their local forces.
We have no moral obligation to straighten out and unify Afghanistan because it was never possible to begin with. If you can't, then don't.
First annual Afghanistan Blame Games are about to begin, featuring US president's (or their ghosts).
President Biden, does the buck stop with you for the scenes we are seeing play out in Kabul?
Biden: No, if Trump had eaten his cornflakes then my wife would not be face palming.
Trump: Typical witch hunt, if Obama had followed through on the surge and not telegraphed that we wanted out we would have won bigly.
Obama: Uh hold on now, uh, if Bush hadn't taken his uh eyes off the ball by invading Iraq.
Bush 43: Ya'll if Clinton had treated Osama as a serious threat in the 90's 9/11 would never have happened in the first place.
Clinton: The entire federal government was in agreement, if your dad had not bailed on the Afghani's in the early 90's, Osama never would have been a factor.
Bush 41 (ghost): the Cold War was over and it was time to get a peace dividend. We had no natural interests there. All I did was wind down Reagan's support funneled through the ISI.
Reagan (ghost): I did what I had to, to combat the Evil Empire. Besides it was actually Carter's baby.
Carter: I build houses now.
We have disagreed on a few things lately, But that is spot on
How do you defense professionals view the idea of leaving a residual force of SOF troops and airbases? As a civie, I am pretty skeptical because I don't see what's protecting the outposts that will be necessarily thinly manned.
Thats all we have been doing for years now. Air support for the ANA and black ops. It worked, no American dead since Feb 2020. But the ANA could not stand without on call fire support and it was burning our airframes out and gobbling huge chunks of the budget. In the end the ANA couldn't stand without the USAF at thier beck and call.
Thats all we have been doing for years now. Air support for the ANA and black ops. It worked, no American dead since Feb 2020. But the ANA could not stand without on call fire support and it was burning our airframes out and gobbling huge chunks of the budget. In the end the ANA couldn't stand without the USAF at thier beck and call.
What became of the idea to use Super Tucanos to save on cost?
No amount of hardware would make the difference, because it wasn't about hardware. Taliban didn't had tanks, air support, drones, gadgets and special training and still were able to win. What they have and what is their primary weapon is the faith or a belief and the womb to back it up. Womb regenerates and perpetuates their faith and as long as the womb is there, there is no win. No super tucanos, no hogs, no lancers, no delta/seal teams will make a dent in their fight. Deal with the womb and they are done.
They lost because the enemy gained "strategic depth" across the border. The word "strategic depth" itself is a foreign concept for many CO-IN observers. If you follow the news outlets or observer blogs like longwarjournal, they don't know what it is.
We succeeded in K because we were able to seal the borders and destroyed the tunnel networks. The Paks are now forced to drop ammunition in neighbouring Punjab via drones at night and get help from local khalistani elements to collect them and deliver to sleeper networks in K.
We isolated the battlefield but we fell for the same crap idea of throwing money in to corrupt with a view to control.
Funnily enough it also took twenty years for us to realise this nonsense after zero improvements in K.
What was the common variable ? Pakistan and those that spoke for them.
So the paks managed to screw both of us. India in Kashmir and the Americans in Afghanistan.
The Americans had an away game to contend and no direct access. We were on home turf (!)
WASHINGTON — Once the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s airfield in Kandahar on Friday, it didn’t take long for photos to appear on social media showing Taliban fighters posing with military helicopters such as U.S.-made Black Hawks and Soviet-made Mi-17s.
After the group took over Mazar-i-Sharif airport this weekend, more photos followed, this time of Taliban members standing next to an A-29 attack plane and MD-530 utility helicopter.
Now, with Afghanistan under Taliban control, the question is no longer whether the organization will gain access to the Afghan air force’s inventory of U.S.-provided planes and helicopters, but what it plans to do with them — and what the U.S. military can do in response.
The Afghan air force operated a total of 211 aircraft, with about 167 planes and helicopters available for use as of June 30, according to a July report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
So far, the Defense Department has not confirmed how many of those aircraft have been captured by the Taliban, how many of that sum are still operable and how many aircraft have been safely flown by Afghan air force pilots to relative safety in neighboring countries.
During a briefing at the Pentagon on Monday, Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor, the Joint Staff deputy director for regional operations, said he had no information about whether the U.S. military would take steps to prevent aircraft or other military equipment from being captured or used by the Taliban.
Bradley Bowman, a former Black Hawk pilot who served in Afghanistan and has sharply criticized the U.S. withdrawal, told Defense News “there’s no doubt that they’ve captured hundreds of Humvees and artillery and other equipment — and aircraft.”
“This should be deeply, deeply troubling to Americans, not only because we help fund those and provide those, but because how the Taliban could benefit,” he added.
As the Biden administration considers its path forward, its biggest priority should be the safe evacuation of Americans from Afghanistan, Bowman said. Then, it should destroy the U.S. equipment remaining in Afghanistan, as well as all planes and helicopters left behind by the Afghan air force.
“If we do that now, then I could see the Taliban changing its disposition toward the evacuation operations in Kabul,” he said. “So get all the Americans out, do as best as we can getting our Afghan partners out.
“Once that’s done … then why the heck wouldn’t we destroy every rotary wing and fixed aircraft that the Taliban has captured? I think we absolutely should.”
The Afghan air force operated 23 A-29 attack planes, four C-130 cargo planes and a total of 33 militarized versions of the Cessna Caravan, some of which were configured for a light attack mission, according to the special inspector report.
It also flew about 150 helicopters, which included the American-made UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter and armed MD-530s, as well as the Soviet Mi-17, which the Afghan air force was in the process of retiring.
Of the Afghan air force’s inventory, perhaps the most advanced is the A-29 Super Tucano, a turboprop attack plane built by Brazilian aerospace manufacturer Embraer and modified by Sierra Nevada, an American defense firm that integrates the aircraft with U.S.-made sensors and weapons.
Unlike a fighter jet built for speed and maneuverability in a dogfight, the A-29 is optimized for counterinsurgency missions where an aircraft needs to fly slow and low to strike targets on the ground. The aircraft can be flown by relatively inexperienced pilots and operated in austere environments.
Those characteristics made it a great fit for the Afghan air force, which was being built from the ground up, but it’s not technology that can threaten the U.S. military in future engagements with the Taliban, according to Gen. Mark Kelly, who leads Air Combat Command.
“It’s understandable for people to be concerned about any capability falling into the hands of folks where we don’t know exactly how they’re going to use it, who are going to use it against, whether that’s an M16 [rifle] or whether that’s an A-29,” Kelly told Defense News in an Aug. 16 interview.
“But suffice to say that the technology that’s in the A-29 is not cutting-edge technology,” he added. “When you look at the airplane’s range and speed and computer power and lifting capability … it’s not something that, frankly, concerns us.”
While the Taliban could seek to sell captured aircraft, none of the planes or helicopters operated by the Afghan air force contain sensitive technologies that would be useful to nations like China or Russia, said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group.
“Truth be told, if the Russians or Chinese wanted to get their hands on a Super Tucano or early model Black Hawk it wouldn’t be that hard,” he said. “They were equipped in a pretty low-tech way.”
The Taliban would face a long list of obstacles if it sought to operate the equipment itself, using the remaining airplanes and helicopters to form the basis of an ad-hoc air force.
First, the Taliban aren’t trained pilots capable of safely flying the aircraft, using its sensors and loading and deploying weapons, Kelly said.
“”They may actually be able to get it airborne,” he said, “but they’d probably be more dangerous to their own wellbeing than they would [be] to people on the ground.”
Eventually, the Taliban could find qualified pilots, “but as far as a threat to the region, I don’t think it’s something that’s a credible threat that we are that overly concerned about,” Kelly added.
An even larger hurdle for the Taliban would be the cost, expertise and logistics associated with maintaining the aircraft, an expensive proposition that involves servicing aircraft before and after flight, conducting repairs and buying spare parts.
However, it’s not an impossible problem to solve, Bowman said.
“I’m not naďve enough to not be able to envision a scenario where maybe — maybe — they could find pilots, that maybe the former Afghan air force pilots would be coerced to come over to their side,” Bowman said. “And it’s not inconceivable that foreign powers who aren’t aligned with the United States could help.”
But Aboulafia noted use of the aircraft’s weapons — either on the citizens of Afghanistan or against other nations in the region — could ultimately undermine the Taliban’s goal of maintaining control of the country.
“The more they use conventional military equipment, the more they make themselves a target. If they were to make trouble, it would be doing what they did before 9/11: harboring terror groups,” he said. “There’s obviously not a lot of organized internal resistance in the country. They don’t seem eager to pick a fight with countries near them, and it wouldn’t go well if they did.”
The ones that got away
Not all military aircraft were left in Afghanistan for the Taliban to recover.
On Sunday night, three Afghan air force aircraft and two helicopters — which were transporting 143 troops — landed safely in Tajikistan after receiving permission from the country’s authorities, reported The New York Times.
The Afghan air force has also sought safe haven in Uzbekistan, although it is unclear how many aircraft and personnel have flown into the country over the past several days.
On Monday, Uzbekistan’s Prosecutor General’s Office confirmed that 22 unspecified military aircraft and 24 helicopters — collectively carrying 585 soldiers and airmen — flew into the country on Aug. 14 and 15, Uzbekistan’s Podrobno news agency reported.
The office also stated that three more A-29 attack aircraft requested permission to land on Aug. 15 and were given MiG-29 escorts by the Uzbek military, but one MiG-29 and A-29 collided during flight. The pilots of both aircraft ejected safely.
On Aug. 16, the office rescinded its statement in full, providing no elaboration on how many Afghan aircraft had landed in the country.
_________
“He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”
America bashing
Biden bashing
Trump bashing
Afghan bashing
Here is the line that comes up most often. US allies are screwed. They cannot trust the US because US will throw them under the bus when necessary.
If you want America Bashing, it's fairly simple to just look at Kabul right now.
The German government is publicly accusing the US of actively obstructing the German evacuation effort right now. There's 60 paratroopers on the ground now who forced open a second access gate manned by German troops in order to actually be able to evacuate people because the Americans are holding anyone without a Green Card back at gunpoint. We already have the press pulling little kids out of the evacuees to get statements how they were "so scared when 'they' opened fire".
By hearsay the relationship between British forces on the ground (2 Para) and the US forces is a whole lot worse though. Shouting matches over comms by commanders, British observation posts checking whether the Americans are about to flee the country and so on.
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