Will We See the Blob Shush Up?

I'm actually not sure when the word "the blob" came to represent what was formerly known as the "deep state" and when that term took over. I'm guessing when trump and the right started using Deep state for any bureaucracy that they didn't like, even those doing good. 
Still, after the tragic deaths last week, I do want to say a few things. First, you know I'm in the fuck these warmongers camp. But shit like this does annoy tf out of me. 

Yeah, civilian deaths suck, they really do. And I'm the first to call out anyone trying to cry crocodile tears over them (did you see me even give Obama a break over his shit?), but this shit of screaming about any without more evidence is a bit much. This was, from what I can see, the hit on a carbomb, most likely set out to hit even more civilians. Here, it's likely that the bomb itself did the killing. Bad? Yeah, but there's a lot worse shit out there, and this ain't it. In fact, this is something one can understand (unless you come up with more evidence showing otherwise). 

 Second, we will probably end up working with the Taliban, assuming they show they can actually hold ground in Afghanistan. And it might be that to target ISIS that's what's needed. 
Third, I kinda hope that's enough for the crazies who want forever war. Because otherwise, the alternative is them having us fuel a civil war just so they can watch Afghanistan burn and say, well, look at that. Maybe toast their marshmallows on it. Sick fucks, certainly, but I do hope we don't go that route. Afghanistan needs to be able to feed its people (drought ongoing, poverty endemic, and frozen assets means we have the switch to turn this country into ashes) and we would be wise to help hold peace talks with them and the new northern alliance so it's not a smoldering ruin.... Yeah and get the regional fucks like Pakistan (ISI) in on that.
Remember, 2.5 M refugees from Afghanistan (read this bit how Turkey is bearing the brunt on this one... I think Iran too, yeah the latter has our sanctions over their head, yet they are helping in this respect). 
Which brings me to #4 on my shitlist (no, autocorrect, not short list, and you're about to be added in a second), in that I think so little of the EU that I sometimes want Erdogan to let loose a couple million into their lands, cause fuck these spineless fucks with all the morality of an insect. They want American soldiers to die in Afghanistan and for what? To make sure they don't have more refugees, but fuck it if they'll even try to shed some blood. Well maybe Erdogan can squeeze some 💰 out of those fucks (who have drowned 1000s in the Mediterranean Sea). [1]
And, once again, Afghanistan was little more than a money laundering operation. 
But I have to give it to their (EU) journalists, for great breakdowns like this one in Der Speigel and how the Taliban infiltrated Kabul:

The next day, I met one of the Taliban’s leading military commanders for Kabul, who received me in the middle of the city in an unremarkable office building. When asked how far the Taliban had to walk to get to the lakeshore, he responded: "Not far at all." He seemed perfectly calm, a clean-shaven emissary of fear. "They’re already there, after all. They are the security guards at the restaurants, the ride operators, the cleaning staff. When the time is right, the place will be full of Taliban."

Lol, this is some fight club shit. 

Numerous witnesses in various neighborhoods of the capital following the fall of Kabul had similar stories to tell. "It started in April," says a longtime acquaintance from the western part of the city. "More and more outsiders were suddenly in the neighborhood. Some had beards, others didn’t. Some were well dressed, others wore rags. Completely different. That made them difficult to notice. But all of the locals realized: They aren’t from here." They had silently infiltrated Kabul. The outsiders also appeared in the northern and eastern parts of the city, telling those who asked that they had come to Kabul for a new job or for business reasons.

The piece shows how this war was lost from the start (not even cause of the so called pivot to Iraq [2])

I arrived in Afghanistan in the scorching hot summer of 2002, just after the U.S. Air Force had bombed a wedding party in the countryside. At least that’s what survivors said. The U.S. military spokesmen countered that gunmen onboard the U.S. aircraft had fired in self-defense after having been targeted from the ground.

That sounded so absurd that we went there ourselves, traveling unchallenged through the provinces of Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan, the cradle of the Taliban. But they were no longer there. "You know," an Afghan man said one evening around a fire at a rural rest stop, "I was also with the Taliban! But they’re history now." His tone was laconic, and he didn’t sound particularly disappointed, since he could now plant poppies again, something that had been strictly forbidden under Taliban rule.

Yeah, fuck me, and that's when it was still considered a good war. Because we were the Greek Gods at the start and what else could we be used for but local spats:

In the bombed village in Uruzgan, it quickly became apparent that the story behind the wedding bombing had unfolded rather differently. The Americans hadn’t just attacked from the air, but had rolled in with a convoy of heavily armed infantrymen. It hadn’t been self-defense at all, but a planned attack. Members of a Kandahar tribe had accused allies of President Hamid Karzai of being members of the Taliban.

If you couldn’t defeat the Americans, you could apparently use them for your own purposes. It was a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, and which would contribute to the abject failure of the intervention. The great tribal council meeting in Kabul in June 2002 "was the moment when it failed," recalls Thomas Ruttig, who was a UN official from Germany at the time, but who later co-founded the Afghanistan Analysts Network. "The moment when U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad brought back the warlords." They were the men who had destroyed the country in the earlier civil war, but who had helped the U.S. government of President George W. Bush in the fight against the Taliban.

And we set up the worst kinds of people to run that country. Couldn't have expected anything else, with or without Iraq. 

Khalilzad and others forced the tribal council to include 50 additional men on top of the elected representatives – militia leaders who had ruled with fear and aggression before the arrival of the Taliban. They were men like Mohammed "Marshal" Fahim, a Tajik leader who stood accused of perpetrating massacres and kidnappings. And Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek leader who murdered several hundred imprisoned Taliban and later had his opponents raped with bottles. Both of them would go on to serve as vice president of the country. The new holders of power remained uncompromising. They immediately set about exacting revenge on their former enemies and plundering the new government.

And man was the logic of the coalition ever fucked up. 

In the north, the German military rhapsodized at the time about the quiet in the provinces under their watch. When a new police chief was then appointed and he established a regime of horror in Kunduz, beating farmers and destroying their market stands when they didn’t pay sufficient protection money, the German troops stood by and watched from their hill overlooking the city. They were, they pointed out, only there as the "International Security Assistance Force" for the Afghanistan government. That presaged the return of the Taliban in Kunduz, with the Islamists taking control of village after village, until the Germans didn’t even dare to make forays six kilometers from their base. In September 2009, the German military called in U.S. airstrikes in Kunduz that killed 91 people who were looting fuel from two hijacked tanker trucks. The German commander thought they were insurgents.

You think that was ever going to end well? Btw, remember how Karzai stayed in Kabul though the Taliban was rolling in? Well, that corrupt fuck maybe worse than I thought. Never heard of this story before:

In the search for a solution, Washington overrode Karzai’s objections and pushed through a second vote, one that would be monitored by UN election observers. What then took place is among the darkest examples of the opportunism exhibited by the U.S. government and the UN.

At daybreak of Oct. 28, three attackers launched an assault on the UN guesthouse in Kabul, shot the guards to death, pushed their way into the courtyard and set about slaughtering the almost 30 UN employees inside. But they unexpectedly met resistance. Louis Maxwell, a former U.S. soldier and security officer, was able to hold back the attackers from a rooftop for one-and-a-half hours. No help came from the Afghan police or the army – right in the heart of Kabul. Once the three attackers set off their suicide belts, Maxwell staggered out, while four other UN employees were calling others on the outside telling them they would also emerge from hiding.

Just minutes later, they were all dead, the four shot from the front. Maxwell was hit as he was standing on the street between two Afghan soldiers. Neither of them batted an eyelash. They then dragged his body into the courtyard. Months later, internal UN investigators only managed to make progress with their inquiry thanks to a chance video of Maxwell’s murder made by a German security officer from a rooftop several buildings away. But it was all supposed to remain confidential.

In summer 2010, an FBI investigator asked to meet with me in Kabul. When I asked what would happen next, he just shook his head. There would be no further investigations. Washington, he said, didn’t want to expose Karzai. Following the attack, half of the UN staff was pulled out of the country and the second election was cancelled. Hamid Karzai got the victory he wanted.

It's a good piece, check it out and share it. 
Then this one, is from people who got in with the Taliban. Extremely highly recommended to all, for sure. Check out this origin story:

Its founder Mullah Mohammed Omar is shrouded in myth, a man who lost an eye fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. Only one photograph existed of him until his death in 2013. Omar taught in a mosque near Kandahar after the collapse of the communist regime in 1992. The country had fallen into the hands of hundreds of warlords and their fighters, the mujahedeen, who were organized into dozens of different alliances that fought against each other. Those were the bloodiest years of the country’s civil war, and Afghanistan sank into anarchy. In early 1994, a local warlord kidnapped two girls, shaved their hair, and held them at his base, where they were raped. Omar called together the 30 students at his madrassa, his “Taliban” – the word Talib simply means “student.” They armed themselves with 16 rifles and went to the warlord’s house, where they freed the girls. They then hanged the warlord from the barrel of a tank’s gun.

A similar theme pops up: the corruption and outright theft of those who are with the coalition:

“In the first years after the fall of the Taliban government, no one thought war would return. We were optimistic. Everyone was tired, even our local Taliban were tired. They had returned to their families and became farmers again. They weren’t fighting against the government. At first, the Taliban also weren’t opposed to the international aid organizations that built bridges and irrigation canals in our valley. But today, almost everyone is against the government. The government brought violence to us again. They came to our valley and hunted down former Taliban. Then the foreigners came. They arrived at night with helicopters and arrested people in their homes. They arrested a lot of innocent people.

The government and the foreigners only listened to Commander Chalil. He held power here as a warlord in the 1990s and had to flee from the Taliban. Then he came back with the Americans. Chalil is not a good man – he wasn’t before and he isn’t now. He stole a lot of land. All he had to do was accuse someone of being with the Taliban and they would have to flee with their family, and Chalil got the land. In one village, he wanted to steal so much land that the residents took up arms. They wanted to defend themselves against the thief. Fifteen people died. But the government didn’t arrest the actual thief, but those who tried to protect themselves. That’s why most here are pro-Taliban. The government may have sent us aid organizations, but with Chalil they took away our land.”

Interesting breakdown of the 3 wings of the Taliban:

The Taliban tried to reorganize as early as 2002, but failed. Most Afghans rejected them, hoping for a better future with Karzai, and reported their identities to the Americans and government forces. In exile, in the vast refugee camps in Pakistan, the Taliban broke into three different factions called shura. One shura was formed in the city of Quetta, led by parts of the old Taliban elite. A second one formed in Peshawar. A third one, the most radical, emerged in Miran Shah. It was under the firm control of a clan, the Haqqani, a name that would soon be widely feared because the Haqqani family maintained the largest training camps for suicide bombers in Afghanistan. By 2015, the Haqqanis had reportedly deployed 1,160 suicide bombers, 843 of whom had “successfully” completed their missions.

Oh, and another reason why shit was doomed from the start:

The most important weapon in the Taliban’s battle against the government alliance is the Sharia courts. They also don’t always get it right, but they do pronounce law, they issue verdicts and enforce them. In contrast to government-controlled areas, where judges often take large sums of money from both parties, leaving them with the feeling that they are stuck in a morass of bribery and threats. Judges change their rulings based on favoritism, delay rulings for long periods of time and are then unable to enforce them.

Really good article here worth the complete read. And, yeah, I don't care for the Taliban, but the corruption before it cannot be ignored. And that can be a violation of human rights that we (and some peaceniks) don't take into account. Mainly cause it's not written in our international laws. 
Meanwhile, here in the states, we're getting to around 1300-1400 deaths per day. Yeah, a 9/11 every 2 days or so and our people on the right are going all out with horse dewormer, well what the fuck people? I mean, I get some of it, and I"m thinking afghan and how someone in the ANA said of the Taliban: they're wrong, but they are willing to die for it" and I wonder if these fucks are at least willing to die for the rich to say fuck you to the medical establishment etc? Will they win? Fuck, I hope not. Seriously, get vaxxed. 

[1] So even though I hate this piece, mainly cause it doesn't look at the context of the war etc etc, and I can hate on a fellow vet writer because this blaming part sounds like he's a little too into the forever wars and a little too into the blob's mindset, if you know what I mean, 😉, I still respeck him more cause that's heart causing him to try and get someone they knew out and he does not lack for bravery or skin in the game (but the "Biden's mess" part and the insinuation that we should stay forever get a resounding fuck off from me). 
[2] Though, damn the liberal types love posting that one without any analysis. Yeah I hate Bush too, but you need more evidence for that. All fingers point to this war being lost from the get go. Bad protoplasm and all (our trajectory and our allies there). 
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