Afghanistan

[Nature Boy 2.0 8,370]

I was flipping thru the channels and stoped to watch John Rambo blow Hinds out of the air with a bow and arrow,  but I digress. 

 

All thru the 80s we continously heard about the Evil empire and how wrong they were to be in Afghanistan. I believed we provided Aid the guerrillas fighting them and called them freedom fighters. The Soviet Union gave up after 9 years.

We have been there 19. Let that sink in. 

[Voice of Reason 10,298]

What are your thoughts on the Gallagher debacle?  Have you watched "The Gallagher Effect"?

[Burnt Reynolds 5,058]

We are quite stubborn, not to see when its no longer worth it to be there. It's not the same.

 

I still remember Niall Ferguson aptly describing the region's historical significance around a decade ago:

 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20699848?seq=1

Quote

“Defeat in the mountains of the Hindu Kush or on the plains of Mesopotamia has long been a harbinger of imperial fall. It is no coincidence that the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in the annus mirabilis of 1989. What happened 20 years ago, like the events of the distant fifth century, is a reminder that empires do not in fact appear, rise, reign, decline and fall according to some recurrent and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting, with multiple overdetermining causes. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse. To return to the terminology of Thomas Cole, the painter of The Course of Empire, the shift from consummation to destruction and then to desolation is not cyclical. It is sudden.”

 

The people insisting on lengthy stay are not concerned with the long term damage, the long term costs, they are there to extract a short term return, and leave dealing with the long term consequences to future generations.

Edited December 30, 2019 by Burnt Reynolds

[Nature Boy 2.0 8,370]

1 hour ago, ALFKAD said:

What are your thoughts on the Gallagher debacle?  Have you watched "The Gallagher Effect"?

I think its significant. Ok joking aside. Got to watch it it. I had to google 

Edited December 30, 2019 by Nature Boy 2.0

[Cyberfx1024 7,980]

I came here to see if this was about the Afghanistan papers and sadly it isn't......

[Boiler 45,519]

Being from the UK we have a much longer connection: