Horror! The Taliban is reported to have taken back a half-dozen Afghan towns around Kandahar. It’s an inevitable development of course, the catastrophic consequences of which will be equally unavoidable if America sticks to its guns on the matter. Refugees are already pouring out of the areas. Are they fleeing the Taliban fighters? From the reports of our jingoist embed press, how will we ever know? I’m pretty sure the Afghan refugees are fleeing our retaliatory air strikes, which are certain as rain to blanket every living occupant now determined by US precision weapons to be dark skinned combatants. It will be like Waco without the interminable siege. Who are we kidding? Our unmanned drones are named “Predators” and “Reapers.” They’re armed with missiles of “Hellfire.”
Not My Tribe
The Myth of Middle Ground
One suspects that refuguees are fleeing because they foresee armed combat in their neighborhoods and have mutual fear that if stuck in the cross-fire they may be hit be either side.
One seeks cover in a storm without worrying overmuch if it is the lightning, the hail, the tornados, or the flash floods that will do you in, if you stand your ground.
Oh Willeke your analogy cracked me up.
Where you hide from tornadoes is the opposite of where you are safe in a flash flood. Ducking under a tree to escape hail is not where you avoid lightning. Afghan civilians are caught between AK-47 bullets vs Hellfire.
The Soviets expended some heavy duty munitions in the direction of the Taliban, their country doesn’t Exactly border on Afghanistan, but it’s a lot closer than ours is. Translated, that means supposedly less expensive.
Their economy was fairly trashed at the time… kind of like ours is now, in fact.
Afghanistan is where empires go to be humiliated. That’s a really old saying. and really true.
just in the lifetime of our nation, since 1776, several Tsars, the British of course, the Japanese and the Russians of the Soviet Variety have ‘conquered’ the place.
Always and forever, the Afghanis have been outgunned, outnumbered, out-organized, at a severe technological disadvantage…
Have you noticed (I noticed) Bush and his merry band of pirates seem to believe that they know a whole lot more about history than anybody else.
They quote Caligula for their foreign policy, they claim to know the Original Intent of every member of the Constitutional Committee…
They say really retarded shit like “The reason the Other Empires failed was they didn’t put enough military might into the battle”
Strangely, every other Emperor in his turn said exactly the same thing about his predecessors.
The difference is that Bushco aren’t bent on conquering Afghanistan. They’ve conquered the US treasury in the guise of the GWOT.
They could have been content with the slow bleed, but no… they had to go for the main line.
Real vampires, as in, the bats, don’t bleed their food sources to death. just enough to fill their bellies and then move on.
Of course that might be changing, 500 years since the Spanish introduced large herds of large animals (hogs, cattle, horses, sheep and goats) into Central America.
But I once again digress.
parasites killing their hosts outright is a recipe for extinction.