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War on Terrorism (Politics)
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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All his post-morteming stuff about what should have been done and how big was this army and which president announced what timescale is entirely irrelevant. Superstructure, Uncle Karl called it.

Rule One: if you don't leave well alone, you'll come unstuck.
Rule Two: if you leave well alone, someone else won't.
Rule Three: there are an infinite number of Rule Threes.

Nobody ever gets these things right. Except sometimes they do.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Thank God Mick had the wisdom to see this man's leadership, at this time, would have been a disaster.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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And he had four years to do it.
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Mick Harper
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My God, they're still at it. Whether bobbing up and down in Parliament, popping in and out of the news studios, speaking for the US or the UK government, for Nato, for the UN or just civilised values in general, everyone is making lists of what the Taliban must do. I'm telling you all, for the last time, the Taliban will be telling you what they are going to do.

The only bit of leverage anyone's come up with is the fact that Afghanistan's eight billion in hard currency reserves are held in New York and the Americans have frozen it. That's just great. Let's start the whole new ball game in Afghanistan by illegally withholding a country's assets in order to get them to do what they may not want to do and may very well refuse to do but meanwhile a) the people of Afghanistan starve to death because international trade has been stymied b) the new government gives up on the west and turns to Russia and China but c) has a ready made excuse whenever anything goes awry. Just like the Cubans, the (north) Koreans and the (ex-north) Vietnamese have been doing for so many years.

Give 'em the money, Mabel. Or you could keep it, like we have with the Iranians' tank money ever since 1979, and put up with forty years of an even worse relationship than you deserve including constant imprisonment of your citizens on trumped up charges. And all the time listening to some numpty from the Foreign Office saying it will be returned once they start to behave the way we think they should behave. Any signs of the policy bearing fruit yet? No, but we're going to give it another forty years just in case.
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Mick Harper
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Remember the good old AE adage: "If they're saying that, they're not saying this." Everyone's desperate for the Taliban to live up to their billing, otherwise why were all those trillions spent? And more in the pipeline. So listen carefully to every Taliban atrocity with AE ears

Item: the Taliban have been murdering religious minorities
Actual: Amnesty reported six Hazara men were murdered in Ghazni province last month
AE says: if they are running this it means the Taliban are doing OK (for the moment)

Item: the Taliban are preventing Afghanis getting on to airplanes
Actual: they could close the airport anytime they like
AE says: much better to allow opponents of the regime a golden bridge to leave of their own accord. The problems are all of American making (not that it's their fault).

Item: Diplomats/generals/analysts predicted the Taliban would win and with great suddenness
Actual: all possible outcomes are covered in briefing papers so particular people will always get it right on particular occasions. It's their overall prediction rate that counts.
AEL: M J Harper said it in public statements. He was right on this particular occasion but his overall prediction rate is patchy.
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Mick Harper
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The world -- and more especially the left -- will always find something to worry about. Here's the latest, courtesy of academia.edu

Political Medievalism in the age of the internet: a Global Phenomena pt. II Luiz Felipe Anchieta Guerra

As these always feature a bogus list, here's the one from the preface. I give you first the first

In 2017, with white supremacists sporting shields and standards containing medieval-like heraldry, Charlottesville shocked the mainstream world.

It certainly did. We barely survived. Number two's

Not long after, in 2019, Christchurch in New Zealand followed the same footsteps, when Christian terrorist Brenton Tarrant attacked two mosques and murdered 51 people, using (amongst other weapons) an assault rifle riddled with inscriptions alluding to medieval themes, characters and events.

If you thought you heard the sound of barrel bottoms being scraped, you were quite right. That's it. We reel. Hold it! He's come up with a third example.

Despite not being a new phenomenon (let us not forget that painting of Adolf Hitler as a medieval knight)

We almost had. But let's all draw the strings together for a final summation

21st Century political (neo)medievalism seems to be finally showing its more brutal facade - once confined to the ends of the internet and other restricted underworlds it is now crawling its way into the public scene and even gaining relevance in places and countries where it was previously unknown.

I wonder what Part I was like.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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The free market is in now operating .

Taliban militants are now charging people for passage to the airport. The price is currently said to range from $1,000 to $3,000, per person.

This Taliban charge is only going to go up.

It follows on from the fact that the State department is now not going to charge Americans $2,000 for flying them out.

Why does one charge appear the other disappear?

Presumably this is happening because the Taliban are guaranteeing safe passage and the Americans are not?
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Mick Harper
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This features, sort of, in the reporting of the latest Taliban enormity

Ten people have died in a week of chaos at the airport. Just getting through Taliban checkpoints is a minefield.

I was trying to work out the kind of numbers I would expect when insurgents have suddenly arrived and the ancien regime is trying desperately to leave. A thousand? Ten thousand? Ten?
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Am I the only one to notice that the Taliban Leadership are all CIA assets?
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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No. Mrs Clara Arbuthnot of Station Road, Cheadle spotted it as well.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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So I am. Thanks for confirming.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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The point I was trying to make, and I said the same to Mrs A so I'm not singling you out, is that spotting it is of no value unless you tell us who, what, how, when, why and boring old stuff like that. But never mind, we here at the office know your funny little ways, so to signal your remarkable discovery we're sending you a large cheque.

Am I the only one to notice that there are no Bank of Toytown branches in Tanzania?
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Ishmael wrote:
Am I the only one to notice that the Taliban Leadership are all CIA assets?


I think you are. You might have also noticed that unlike Joe Biden they are employing a professional PR company.

You are however mistaken, I have previously posted that the Taliban are "ISI assets" as are the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Haqqani network.

The New York Times kindly published an op-ed for the Taliban in Feb 2020 it was written by Sirajuddin Haqqani, the deputy leader of the Taliban. It was a reassuring roadmap https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/taliban-afghanistan-war-haqqani.html

He missed this bit of his beliefs out which is featured in his wiki bio

In 2010 he released a 144-page Pashto-language book, a training manual entitled Military Lessons for the Benefit of the Mujahedeen, where he appears more radical than the Talibans as it shows influences from al-Qaida, supporting beheading and suicide bombings while legitimizing targeting the West, asking Muslims there to "blend in, shave, wear Western dress, be patient."[26

THe NY Times also did not mention this.

The U.S. government's Rewards for Justice Program is offering up to US$10 million in reward for information leading to Sirajuddin Haqqani's capture.[18]
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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where he appears more radical than the Talibans as it shows influences from al-Qaida, supporting beheading and suicide bombings while legitimizing targeting the West

This is where everyone goes wrong. Just because people do things that you happen to find repellent does not make them a) bad people b) unsuited to govern faraway countries or even, or especially, c) being CIA assets. Let's have a bit of relativism here, folks:

Which is the better foreign policy: targeting a country with suicide bombings or targeting a country by occupying it for twenty years and bombing the shit out of it? Which is the better form of capital punishment: beheading or drone strike?
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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What makes them CIA assets is the fact that the entire top echelon of the current Taliban incarnation was released from Guantanamo.

So what is the CIA up to?

The same thing they've been up to since the late 1960s: Dismantling American hegemony.
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