Karma

Silverfiddle Rant!

I stumbled across an archived interview with Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, first published in a French newspaper in 1998.

Below is an interesting excerpt...

Q : When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan , nobody believed them. However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war." Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime , a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B : What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Afghanistan: Weekend Reading

Silverfiddle Rant!

Below are some links for weekend reading and listening...

General Petraeus makes the case for placing a large amount of blame on President Trump's deal with the Taliban...

What do you think of Congressman Moulton and Congressman Peter Meijer's trip to Afghanistan?  Don't form an opinion until you read this:  ‘A Total F*cking Disaster’: Inside Seth Moulton’s Secret Trip to Kabul

Kurt Schlichter, COL, USA (Ret) speaks for many of us:  General Milley, Resign

Finally, a hindsight 20/20 essay, but clear-eyed and devoid of partisan point-scoring:  The Roots of American Failure in Afghanistan

Bonus: The Realignment podcast with retired General Dan Bolger.  In a flat, matter of fact delivery that is at the same time engaging and entertaining, General Bolger explains why we lost Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Graveyard of Experts"

Silverfiddle Rant!

So much for intelligence. So much for experts. So much for all those who claimed to know how things really were in Afghanistan. 

That a senior military official can admit that the US and its allies had no idea that a state they built was about to collapse is a spectacular admission.
(Afghanistan - Graveyard of Experts)

Now we have dead Marines, killed in a situation that was preventable...

How did we get here?

Elect a dunce controlled by globalist Machiavellians. 

Feed a MIIC hundreds of billions of dollars per year, and when it fails to foresee, deter or prevent a deadly attack on our soil, make sure no one gets fired, and give it more money.

Invade another nation to get the perpetrators, allow the perpetrators to escape to Pakistan, pay Pakistan billions in return, and allow do-gooders with no skin in the game to talk us into pie-in-the-sky humanitarian nation building that has nothing to do with the stated goal of the invasion.

Shun, silence and smear the experts who try to warn you off the doomed project.

Lie to the American people for 20 years.  

Hire and promote bureaucrats and generals and admirals who have no problems lying to the American people.

Hire and promote bureaucrats and generals and admirals who will toady to the stupidest and most dangerous idiocies dreamed up by elected politicians.

"A Failure of Human Intelligence"

I cheered when I woke to the news a few weeks back that we had extracted all troops from Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night without telling anyone. That was great opsec.  And then we heard, but wait!  Embassy staff, American Civilians, and friendly Afghans are still there...  We extracted our military but left our unarmed fellow countrymen and Afghan friends...  Our government has perpetrated a sickening, deadly stupidity. 

Kabul International Airport is not defensible territory like Bagram was.  Our troops are in Fort Apache, as CI said the other day.  I don't think non-military people understand the grave danger they are in. Force protection involves many concentric rings and a multi-spectral set of resources that are harder to deliver when you don't own or control the territory.

Biden needs to unceremoniously throw Milley and Austin out on their incompetent asses.  The Pentagon should see a lot of stars falling in clusters of two, three and four.

People die in military operations.  Hell, we lose people in training exercises.  We all know its part of the deal, but this tragedy did not have to happen.  Those men and women did not have to die.

This is the latest result of a chain of very bad decisions by people too stupid or too cowardly to stop it.  Worst of all, its not over, and we many not be able to dictate the ending.

Please, pray for our troops and the innocent people on the ground.

Kandahar: A Day in the Life

Silverfiddle Rant!

Please read this excellent dispatch from Kandahar just before the fall. It gives you a sense of what could have been if our nation were not led by fools and fabulists...

In the Taliban’s Birthplace, White Flags, Jailbreaks and Fears of Revenge

The approach of a halfway smart invading government would have been been tribal and centered around each of the major cities, using an approach tailored to each area. Spin Boldak would end up full of Pakistani ISI, drug dealers, border smugglers and religious fanatics, but so what?

Kabul would be a cosmopolitan city, and Jalalabad and Kandahar would be somewhere in between. Herat and Farah would have a Persian flavor, as they always have, and the cities in the north would be Northern Alliance protectorates dominated by ethnic Tajiks, etc. (pardon my slinging all this around, but I am not an expert on the Stans). The hinterlands? Ungovernable, with patches ruled by tribal warlords. So what?

The best we could have done was to bribe the top warlords, use what sway we had, and let each city state take care of itself, and thus balance one region against another, which is how that land has functioned since before the Mongols invaded.

Security, water, electricity.  That is what the people demand.  The sergeants and the captains could have fixed this...

Trillion Dollar Bitter End

Silverfiddle Rant!

When I joined the military, I signed up for whatever they threw at me and I gave it my all.  Millions of my fellow veterans (most of whom gave much more than I did) will tell you the same.  The military on the ground is tactically brilliant.  The uniformed politicians with stars on their shoulders and the bureaucrats and politicians they serve are tragically, terminally, strategically stupid.

America's overseas failures belong to our politicians, the bureaucratic blob, and the "experts" and corporations who feed them a neverending line of bullshit.

Joe Biden's failure--which includes DOD, State and Intel Alphabet Panopticon--is a failure to clear out of Kabul in a timely, orderly and dignified fashion. 

"Sh*tshow:"  Biden administration embroiled in internal blame-shifting amid Afghanistan chaos

Washington (CNN) - Factions within the Biden administration are embroiled in a blame game over why the US government didn't act sooner to withdraw American citizens and Afghans who helped the US over two decades of war, leading to a rushed and dangerous evacuation.

I pray Biden's bumbling incompetence doesn't result in American casualties.  I won't bore you with the complex logistics (and frightening list of what can go wrong) of extracting the last US troops from Kabul Airport. Gen Milley--who along with many other bureaucrats has repeatedly lied to us about Afghanistan--should be fired immediately, along with the Secretary of State, whoever he or she is.  

Bremmer said the United States failed in four major ways in drawing down its military presence in Afghanistan: intelligence, coordination, planning and communication. He said the Biden administration overestimated the Afghan military's capabilities, failed to work with American allies to formulate an exit strategy, did not seem to have contingency plans in place for a rapid collapse of the Afghan government and failed to communicate effectively with the American people. (Ian Bremmer, Houston Chronical)

We can also blame Trump for brokering the deal with the Taliban, we can blame Obama for eight years of dithering. We can even throw some blame at the Dems for being too cowardly to act on their supposed anti-war convictions, and anyway, Democrats were the ones insisting on nation building and humanitarian projects there, that ended up handing corrupt Afghan politicians and the taliban tens of billions.

Ultimate blame lies with the idiot firebug who started this:  George W. Bush.  

Damn him and his puppet masters Cheney and Rumsfeld.  If there was any justice in this world, they would be put in stocks in the public square and every veteran, friend or family of a vet would line up and take turns kicking those bastards square in the ass.  How tragically and historically stupid they all are. The Russians carpet bombed and horribly brutalized Afghanistan, but they could not conquer it.  Instead, they escaped into Uzbekistan, buttoned down and bleeding, dragging their dead and wounded.  To this day, the Pashtuns remain undefeated.

We need a better government that employs a higher level of thinking.  A few billion in bribes annually and some small-footprint covert ops--dressed up as foreign assistance--would have saved the trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed.  

Our federal government is an amoral, intellectually bankrupt House of Lies:  

Gulf of Tonkin, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the CIA isn't spying on Congress, the US Government doesn't conduct domestic spying on US citizens, the situation in Afghanistan is improving...

Lies, Lies Lies!

We need a commission to investigate why so many lies were told and so much blood and treasure expended.  We need to hold accountable the liars, the criminals, and even the simply incompetent.  They all must be expelled from the government blob.

We also need a better class of generals.  Ones who will stand up to their political masters and call bullshit on outlandish schemes instead of twisting themselves in knots to justify the unjustifiable and dress it all up in squared-off military speak. 

Ultimately, this is our fault:  We The People continue to elect the venal, the cowardly, the corrupt, the stupid, and we don't pay attention to what they are doing with our money and our military.  We've had bigger freak-outs over avocado shortages than anything that has happened in Afghanistan in the last 10 years.

I'll close with a few quotes from an essay by Andrew A. Michta of the George C. Marshall Center...

As Afghanistan implodes, such flawed assumptions need to be fully owned by those who constructed and sustained this ideologically laden strategic framework.  We will be paying for their hubris for years to come, for going forward both our allies and partners will factor into their decision-making and their policy choices the lessons of the past twenty years.

As we watch authoritarianism surge worldwide, alongside a growing skepticism about American leadership, what happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria should bring us back to the fundamentals of realist foreign and security policy. We need to re-learn the art of power-balancing, of building coalitions not around high-minded ideals but around shared interests and threat perceptions, all the while remembering that America’s military is a precious resource and that it must be the means of last resort, not the first tool in our foreign policy toolbox.

Twilight of the gods

Silverfiddle Rant!

Imagine fighting a war in a foreign land.  The good guys are there to save the people from the bad men.

The good guys fight the bad men, allow little girls to go to school, build roads, school houses, and basic infrastructure like wells, electrical systems and sanitary facilities.

Here's the crappy thing: The good guys are bunkered in fortified camps to protect themselves from the people, while the bad men live securely in the villages and neighborhoods among the people the good guys are trying to save.

KABUL, Afghanistan - The United States and the Taliban are closing in on a deal to end America's longest war after six days of some of the most serious Afghan peace negotiations to date wrapped up on Saturday. (MSN - NY Times)

As the article states, the devil is in the details. 

The "Experts" in the foreign policy establishment excoriate President Trump as "rushing for the exits" and "surrendering" in Afghanistan. These are the same people who created a flaming arc of tragic conflagrations from Africa to the border of China. These are the people who have gotten absolutely nothing right since the wall fell.

American negotiators want the Taliban to swear they will respect the western-style government and human rights regime we imposed on them.

The US is also extracting a promise from the Taliban that they will not allow foreign terrorists to plot, train and launch attacks from their territory.

It is naïve to believe peace talks will arrive at any agreement that respects anything other than brute force.  This is a managed sham to keep from spooking a massive humanitarian stampede.

We did a horrible thing, and we started it by holding out a promise of hope we had no ability or cultural understanding to fulfil. Until we confront the tragic facts as they stand on the ground, admit we were wrong, catalog and study our manifold mistakes, and blow up the foreign policy wings that supported such hubristic stupidity, we are doomed to create more trillion dollar tragedies that kill people by the tens of thousands.

No Justice For Staff Sgt. Mark Allen?

In the search for Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl, who walked away without a weapon from the field of battle, Staff Sgt. Mark Allen suffered a grievous head wound and was left unable to speak and is paralyzed over much of his body.

Read more HERE.

Those wounded in searching for deserter Bowe Bergdahl got this lame apology from said deserter as the defense opened their case in court.

Staff Sgt. Mark Allen before he was wounded

Staff Sgt. Mark Allen with one of his therapists

The Allen Family

What might some form of justice be for Staff Sgt. Mark Allen?  My opinion below the fold.

The Bergdahl Trade

Excerpt from Georgia family wants Berghdahl held accountable:

...Soldiers from Georgia, from the National Guard's 48th Infantry Brigade, risked their lives searching for Bergdahl when they thought he was an unwilling captive of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Master Sgt. Mark Allen of Loganville was among them; he risked his life during the search and he will never be the same.

He cannot speak for himself now. He is paralyzed and needs constant care because he was shot in the head by an enemy sniper in Afghanistan.

Allen was wounded while he and his fellow Georgia National Guard soldiers were trying to find and rescue Bergdahl soon after he disappeared in 2009....

Read the rest and watch the video HERE.

A little less than a year ago, Marie Harf, Deputy Spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, dismissed with a brushing back of her hair, a smirk, and the words “I don’t think that that’s the case” the possibility that Bowe Bergdahl's platoon members had important information regarding Bowe Bergdahl:


As of last week, Bowe Bergdahl has been charged with "desertion with intent to shirk important or hazardous duty" and, more seriously, "misbehavior before the enemy, endangering the safety of a command, unit or place."  Apparently, the circumstances of Bergdahl's abandoning his post have been known — to some extent, anyway — since 2010.

Did Barack Hussein Obama know of those circumstances? Can't imagine that he did not!  Nevertheless, he bypassed Congress and released five Taliban commanders in a trade for Bowe Bergdahl:

The May 31, 2014, dog-and-pony show at the White House — aka "optics":

And there is also the matter of this Tweet, posted by Bowe Bergdahl's father and later deleted:

Also see Twitter Never Forgets: These 8 Public Figures Are Probably Regretting Cheering Bergdahl’s Release.