What in God's Green Goodness Are We Up To In Afghanistan?

I hope one day you find the mental and spiritual wherewithal to move out of your own arsehole you fucking bullshit Canadian troll cunt

peace and love

No I really want you to ignore me, I might be a shitty poster but I am not a middle aged man insulting someone on a messageboard on Friday night and that is a truly pathetic sight.

I believe Left, depsite our disagreements, comes from a good place and it does seems to me that living in the UK has some very negative effects on their wellbeing.

And yes maybe I have more ‘centrist’ and ‘nuanced’ views on politics and society. Big whoop, there is a world outside your bubble, I am allowed to expresses those views. It’s going to be a very long life if you can’t manage yourself face à diverse understanding of politics, and considering how you are wasting your middle age years insulting people on the web, it seems to already be the case.

can we cool it on the ageism

"but I am not a middle aged man"

ageist as well, someone tell Aimless his most vociferous supporter.

Dude who's hounding a poster, calling him 'cunt' and calling out his nationality is going to give decency lessons. Leave me alone, move on, I have been asking you for months now.

yeah but you are still a cunt

loving these vibes

xps quasi-response to VHS -

there are much worse places to live than britain from a material resources point of view (which is fucked up and inexcusable and needs to be changed urgently) but there are useable things that could be made to do things to sabotage parts of this international death machine and maybe save something i don't know

i don't come from a good place whatsoever by the way. my dead grandfathers were a british captain and possible spy in india, and a fucking nazi in fucking russia whose reappearance after stalingrad is some kind of horrific anti-miracle, instead of dying in the war along with everything they stood for they both got to live and their kids made me and always told me how great they were

so guilt and self-loathing has always been baked into whatever politics i would end up developing, and if it's productive i am using it

By saying 'coming from a good place' I meant that I believe you don't mean any ill and I respect the dedication to your values and ideology. I'm sorry your family background is causing you this amount of self-loathing and guilt.

I also lived in the UK and in France at two separate occasions in my late teens/early twenties and I came to the conclusion that Western Europe as a society is very good at sapping joy out of one's life, for reasons not too far from you generally describe.

csb

How does Western Europe differ from North America in this respect?

different cast of rich white brats?

I probably derailed the thread enough so if there is another thread about the differences between EU and NA (i’m sure there is) I’ll be glad to discuss that elsewhere.

xps I know what you meant but it's not really relevant and neither is my neurosis which I don't want to fix rn sorry I started

I have little hope for europe in general which is currently going through genocide from its border regimes (cops, militias, camps, etc) among other things seems happy to continue to help facilitate the mass murder of millions or hundreds of millions of refugees in the coming years or decades, the situation is already beyond dire and hardly anyone around me seems to give more than a rhetorical shit at best because this culture is fucking evil. stopping this from happening more than it already has is the most important thing ever right now

of course so many people are doing amazing work but they're stretched so thin & having to make awful decisions they should never have been forced to make because fuck europe

Tough night on ilx.

I really dislike how this -- otherwise generally informative piece in a trainspotter historian sorta way -- talks of Kabul as a disaster.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/04/afghanistan-britain-worst-failure-since-suez-uk-foreign-policy

The withdrawal is generally fine. It's the refugee situation that is fucked.

Tough night on ilx.

lol. it really was!

just a bit of jovial horseplay at last orders time!

fuck you, you worthless motherfucker!! I says to the barkeep

Let me take you to the place
Where membership's a smiling face
Brush shoulders with the arseholes
Where wankers take you by the hand
And welcome you to a wonderful ilx thread
And they spit in your face and call you a melt-cunt

The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.”

In this week's @NewYorker I write about the Afghan women who wanted US troops to leave https://t.co/nQGzqKPFZu

— Anand Gopal (@Anand_Gopal_) September 6, 2021

pretty sure I’m taliban after reading that

Here's the Times-published op-ed from the general whose atrocities are detailed near the end
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/opinion/afghanistan-taliban-army.html

This was a good light-ish critique of that piece

Some of this is a bit too novelistic in presentation to inspire complete confidence imho, but the core claim that the occupation of Afghanistan was a parade of crimes and horrors is very clearly going to be completely correct. https://t.co/ziiyZCv9Tp

— Lafargue (@Lafargue) September 7, 2021

NYT: The drone strike that the military said took out a potential ISIS car bomber right before we departed Afghanistan likely hit a a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group who was bringing people to and from work. https://t.co/eh5C18FTAg

— Sam Stein (@samstein) September 10, 2021

ah! nevertheless

BREAKING: Gen. McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, to announce no ISIS-K fighters killed in U.S. drone strike in Kabul Aug 29. 10 civilians killed, including 7 children in Toyota. No disciplinary action expected, officials say. US military stands by intel leading to strike.

— Lucas Tomlinson (@LucasFoxNews) September 17, 2021

No disciplinary action expected, officials say. US military stands by intel leading to strike.

I can only think of a few possibilities of how this went down, but none of them fit with both of these sentences. Either the intel was inaccurate. Or it was inadequate. Or it was accurate and actionable, and the operator made a grievous error and struck the wrong target. Or the operator was ordered by a superior to strike although the target was incorrect.

Asked by a reporter to explain how the "complete and utter failure" could have occurred, McKenzie said, "While I agree that this strike certainly did not come up to our standards and I profoundly regret it, I would not qualify the entire operation in those terms."

Fucking piece of shit

The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.”

In this week's @NewYorker I write about the Afghan women who wanted US troops to leave https://t.co/nQGzqKPFZu
— Anand Gopal (@Anand_Gopal_) September 6, 2021
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 6 September 2021 17:25 (one week ago) link

*strokes chin thoughtfully*

I've been listening to like 6 different podcasts with Spencer Ackerman bc of his new book being out and I am finding all of them incredibly informative & sensible. His description of how the war wasn't really happening *in* Kabul and it was safe to be a drunk Westerner walking through the streets to your hotel, there was no security, etc, versus how heavily rural areas were droned, mined, and so on...was something I hadn't realized at all.

I put a hold on his book at the library, but I'm 11th in line for a shot at one of the 4 copies in the system.

No disciplinary action expected, officials say. US military stands by intel leading to strike.

I can only think of a few possibilities of how this went down, but none of them fit with both of these sentences. Either the intel was inaccurate. Or it was inadequate. Or it was accurate and actionable, and the operator made a grievous error and struck the wrong target. Or the operator was ordered by a superior to strike although the target was incorrect.

― it is to laugh, like so, ha! (Aimless), Friday, September 17, 2021 5:31 PM (two hours ago)

I read this anand gopal essay essay earlier this week and I think it illuminates the perverted ethics of this sort of thing

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/21/americas-war-on-syrian-civilians/amp

The Ackerman book is great

incredible pic.twitter.com/8bFf5vVLH5

— rice🌐 (@412ricefarmer) October 25, 2021

otm

they tried so hard to manufacture consent

extremely grim report: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/08/afghanistan-winter-crisis/

The country’s new rulers, cut off from most international aid as well as Afghan government assets held in U.S. accounts, have scant resources to protect millions of vulnerable people against another harsh winter. Aid groups estimate that nearly 23 million Afghans, out of a total population of 39 million, already do not have enough to eat. Many also lack solid shelter and money to heat their homes at night, forcing them to choose between food and fuel, and creating additional potential for a full-fledged humanitarian disaster, aid officials said.