Nationwrecking

There’s a case to be made that we fought the wrong war in Afghanistan; that we should have gone in, rooted out the Taliban, and installed the best awful people have given them three steps toward the door and left in 2003.

There’s an even better case to be made that nation-building, especially in a place like Afghanistan, just can’t work.

I’m all ears.

It was America’s longest war by a fair turn, and it needed to end, somehow, someday.

But the idea that burning ithrough hundreds of billions of dollars of “investment” and just plain pouring money on the ground, and the lives of 2,372 American servicepeople, and it all ends with a Saigon moment? One our administration practically begged for, and seems unable to comprehend?

That is a little hard to swallow.

It should be, shouldn’t it?

Posted

August 13, 2021

War And Peace, War On Terror

Mitch Berg

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162 responses to “Nationwrecking”

Mammuthus Primigenesis

August 15, 2021

Oh, it will come, BPCT. The taliban (to their credit as war makers) are pushing as hard as they can. They want that embassy, now. They want to parade US diplomatic personnel in blindfolds for the camera. Wonder what those folks think of Biden, now? They are mostly democrats who despised Trump.
Bill Peterson’s chin twat

August 15, 2021

The New York Times:

“Final Failure in Afghanistan Is Biden’s to Own
President Biden will go down in history, fairly or unfairly, as the president who presided over a humiliating final act in the American experiment in Afghanistan”

Nuuuuurse! A fresh Depends, STAT!!!!.
Bill Peterson’s chin twat

August 15, 2021

More NYT:

“Rarely in modern presidential history have words come back to bite an American commander in chief as swiftly as these from President Biden a little more than five weeks ago: “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States in Afghanistan.”
Bill Peterson’s chin twat

August 15, 2021

“Even many of Mr. Biden’s allies who believe he made the right decision to finally exit a war that the United States could not win and that was no longer in its national interest concede he made a series of major mistakes in executing the withdrawal.”
Bill Peterson’s chin twat

August 15, 2021

“[Pedo Joe] has often noted that he came to office with more foreign policy experience than any president in recent memory, arguably since Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHa
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Bill Peterson’s chin twat

August 15, 2021

“Mr. Biden told aides that it was crucial they avoid the kind of scene that yielded the iconic photographs of Americans and Vietnamese scrambling up a ladder to a helicopter on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon when it was frantically evacuated in 1975, as the Vietcong swept into the city.”

HahahahahahahahahaHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!
Mammuthus Primigenesis

August 15, 2021

I have worked with some really brilliant people in my time. True geniuses. I am not one of them, obviously. I had another career path, and I can’t focus like that.
Anyways, what these guys (they were mostly men) had in common was that they were intenseley interested in their failures. Not their personal failures, but they were intensely interested in why what they thought they understood, they did not understand. They publish a paper that proves their thesis, but they had also predicted that as a consequence of their thesis that a concentration of, say, hydrogen, should be found to be 3%, but instead it is 4%.
Their attention is drawn to that error like a teenage boy’s attention would be drawn to a topless jogger. It has to be explained. It cannot be dismissed in fvor of something more interesting, because there is nothing of greater interest. That is where the discovery lies.
Biden, and politicians of all parties, are not geniuses like that. But at least most of them learn from their mistakes.
But not Biden and the people who surround him.
Biden, and his supporters, can’t even do that.
Bill Peterson’s chin twat

August 15, 2021

MO. politics is not only the antithesis of science, it is science’s most deadly poison.

It wounds me that so many so called “scientists” have proved so weak.They utterly disgrace centuries of their fore bearers.
Bill Peterson’s chin twat

August 15, 2021

MO, I worked with, or at least was among, guys who were looking for Quarks at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in the 80’s. They were admittedly brilliant, even at 20 something I knew it, but they were not well socialized people.

I understand why many are kind of whacked
Mammuthus Primigenesis

August 15, 2021

BPCT- They are focused on their specialty to a degree that is hard to imagine. They outsource their political beliefs to other PhD’s, assuming that their academics are as rigorous and disciplined as their own are.
Here’s an anecdote. I was working remotely, and our observer, a famous Russian astrophysicist, was napping on a sofa. I was chatting with a coworker about dark matter. I asked my coworker how much of this “dark matter” their really was. Did we ever interact with it every day?
The Famous Russian Astronomer overheard us, and roused himself, and gave us a short lecture (suitable for undergrads) on dark matter. He concluded with an off the cuff calculation that, based on the volume of the room we were in, that there were two or three particles of dark matter in that room.
Mammuthus Primigenesis

August 15, 2021

PPCT: Hmm. I knew a master electrician, first name “Fritz,” (aka “Frederick”), originally from upstate NY, who worked with the slac guys in the 1980s. Biker guy and a lot of tats. Did search and rescue in Vietnam.
Bill Peterson’s chin twat

August 16, 2021

Working at SLAC was the most rewarding job I ever had. I’m kind of glad they laid us off though, or I may not have left Cali.