En Garde in the bunker…

Many many moons ago, a person with whom I would still be in contact were it not for the fact that he hopefully made it to Heaven intact, educated me on the fact that Foreign Relations are not a marriage, nor are they individual suicide. The threat of deterrence by overwhelming force and reprisal goes way back to the American Founders who, remember, ultimately defeated the greatest force on the planet at the time. That doesn’t make it nice, nor repetitive, but it often makes it less odious than the alternative; ie, losing!

If you can bend it a wee little bit, Foreign Relations and Marriage are also alike in that they both operate under a contract, of which one side beating up the other, for whatever reason, isn’t usually applied. In the overall scheme of things, occupying Afghanistan was never really necessary.  An honest president, not one afraid of his Saudi ‘friends’ would have held them to account after 9/11 and taken their oil hostage until Osama Bin Laden was delivered to us and reparations for the twin towers were made. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When the whole world needs peace…

Part of school history in my native Britain way, way, back believe or not, was the historic fact that the Afghans kicked British butts a grand total of once, in the disastrous expedition of 1839. Remarkable certainly but hardly a fair one. Not many people have been educated enough to actually talk about the decades afterward, including the British “revenge tour” of 1879 that cemented Afghanistan as being 1) part of the British sphere for more than half a century afterwards; 2) the gradual annexation of parts of the “Northwest Territories” (which are parts of Greater/historic Afghanistan in Pakistan where they are now a ticking time bomb); and 3) the defeat of the Afghan attempt to shake off hegemony in 1919.

In general the Afghans didn’t use British weapons so much as homemade variants of them, the so called “Khyber Pass weapons of cruel intent.” The British NEVER really conquered Afghanistan, but are part of the Graveyard of Empires that lost more than they won. While the Brits didn’t have troops on every spot of Afghan soil, they did occupy almost every major city and much of the tribal districts, eventually forcing the Afghan government and major clans to make peace. When the whole world needs peace…

Robert Spencer, FrontPageMag: ‘Afghanistan: What Went Wrong?’ …

Kabul has fallen, and the Taliban have declared the restoration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Many people are likening what has been happening in Kabul over the last few days to Saigon in 1975, but there is a fundamental and all-important difference: the Communist invaders from North Vietnam were for the most part not beloved among the people of South Vietnam. In stark contrast, the German-language publication Exxpress noted Friday that “the fact that the Taliban conquered large areas of the country so quickly is not only due to the lack of belligerence or the intimidation of the Afghan police and military, whose apparatus has been rendered almost incapable of action by corruption and bad decisions by the government. Also, large parts of the rural population do not necessarily see the Taliban as enemies; in some provinces, they are even greeted with jubilation. Video shows how Afghan security forces surrender to the Taliban without a fight and hand over their equipment. They greet each other as friends with ‘Salam Alaikum.’”

This should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the history of the two-decade-long American debacle in Afghanistan. In our early years in the country, once the Taliban was toppled, we set about to engage in a massive project of nation-building, initially with an eye toward establishing a Western-style Constitutional republic in Afghanistan. But State Department foreign policy experts drastically underestimated the Afghan people’s attachment to Islamic law (Sharia), and disastrously discounted Sharia’s political aspects. They did this in the naïve belief, fueled by Islamic apologists in the US, that Islam was a religion of peace that was perfectly compatible with Western secular models of governance. [-]

[+] … This is not to say that offering equality of rights to Afghan women and non-Muslims would have been a winning proposition, either. If the Americans had offered an alternative to Sharia, they would have alienated many Afghans who might otherwise have been willing to cooperate with them. However, Afghanistan was not the closed Sharia society it is now even as recently as the 1970s. The U.S. offered nothing to the Afghans who might recall those days fondly. Perhaps an effort to win them over would have been foredoomed, and could even conceivably have widened the conflict. Without any attempt to offer any genuine alternative to the society the Taliban envisioned, however, the American efforts were pointless and, after so many lives lost and trillions spent, tragically futile. [end]

Full link below…

When the whole world needs peace. Bidin’ time and makin’ haste slowly…

Speaking with a wee English soy boy many moons ago under the same history lesson as described above, we logged on to the fact that the overarching Muslim plan has always been to conquer the entire planet by implementing Sharia as the Law of the Land for everybody – Muslim and non Muslim alike – wherein he was labeling all these Jihadi nutters as liars, basically because that’s exactly what they’ve been telling us on an almost daily basis for years. One just has to listen to what in fact they’re saying. Crickets; crickets; crickets.

As author Robert Spencer infers throughout his essay, it is the height of ignorant stupidity and foolishness to attempt to impose western, secular democratic government upon an Islamic state. Doing so is akin to attempting to grow crops in salted and scorched earth. There’s a reason why there’s no such thing as an “Islamic democracy” in any Muslim-majority country (Turkey having long ago fallen far from this ideal) — and it’s because the glaring, immutable and intrinsic pathologies of the ideology of “Submission” — ie., supremacism, totalitarianism, belligerence towards and hatred of, non-Muslims — are inherently incompatible with secular, democratic ideals and the values of the Enlightenment.

“Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

When the whole world needs peace…

And on that note, time for today’s MAGA Pill – President Donald John Trump – MAGA! KAG!

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• Robert Spencer, FrontPageMag: Afghanistan: What Went Wrong?