Feature image – Where does Afghanistan go from here?
…from Politico
[ Editor’s note: The Taliban is moving quickly, as that is to its advantage. A lot of high level Afghanis will be headed toward the airport with suitcases full of cash that long fighting Taliban troops would love to have.
There should be no reason for an intensive battle to pursue for the city. If it is cut off and cannot be resupplied, the Taliban can negotiate slowly if it wants.
That said, if it does want control of the city, that means it will be responsible for provisions and keeping it running, which means paying for things. The Taliban typically would claim all government accounts, but you can be assured that all hard currency holdings are not sitting in Kabul banks waiting for the Taliban to grab them.
The poker game for Kabul now begins, and interest will shift to learning where the Taliban’s material support comes from, money and military supplies. It is all captured, or does it have established supply lines?
Biden needs this problem right now like a hole in the head. Trump will be jumping for joy claiming that Biden ruined his “purrrfect deal with Afghanistan,” which actually was a disaster, as we are seeing… Jim W. Dean ]
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First published … August 14, 2021
Staff at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul are being swiftly evacuated to the international airport as the Taliban close in on the capital city, one person familiar with the situation told POLITICO.
Some of the staff members have already arrived at the airport, this person said, protected by U.S. troops ahead of a likely onslaught by the militants who have swept across the country in recent days.
Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus. He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews. He now writes and posts periodically for VT.
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rare earth elements ?
Mines are tremendous endeavors to Start-Up.. there is not infrastructure in that part of the woods.. yes the elements are there but there is very little drill for inferred.. that will never B developed w private canadian capitol.. thats some’thing the chinese do w state dollars; here in the north americas – most of mine finance is Canadian Private Equity or Lines of Credit w Wheaton Precious Metals – aka London Metals Exchange..
as far as rare earth ! thats been a bad gimmie for some time…
Kennicott in Salt Lake City is Due to Mine-Out sometime in 2030; its a copper mine essentially.. the heap is sulfuric acid and many of them trace elements are simply sitting there – unrecovered…
Rio – who own the mine –is– building as new mill and is ‘tender to re-enter what has traditionaly been called BrownFields,, RIO is setting up mills and process (new tek – ion ecxchane – hi temp refinery plants; list oges on; rare earths are rare due the difficulty in recovery..) most of the metals mining is 5 tons crush – 1 ton to the mill/process; really very old school methods..
We hav the metals in all of the mines here in nevada.. but no mines that simply extract say Gallium..
Dec 14, 2006 — Analysis of holes drilled by mining firm Gold Canyon has shown that there are more high-grade gallium deposits in Humboldt County, Nevada, .
Sure, bring in the big dogs. But do not do it on the cheap. Keep reclimation a targeted goal. Those Canadians like to change names and walk away. Just saying.
“There is not infrastructure in that part of the woods” Amen!…and hence tons of money to be made in providing all of that, but those who sell it. And if it all just gets blown up by insurgents, well then they can just sell more replacements. Crank this up to a full war level and all other forms of making money and getting fabulously rich pale in signficance.
Remember the discussion of mining the rare earth elements? Perhaps the Talaban can develope an economy less destructive than growing opium. Maybe real sustainable agriculture is a future goal. Perhaps.
The Taliban has shut down the opium trade before, but not the heorin replacement is such a cash cow it is hard to see them shutting down. But that was then and this is now, with new leaders. So it is one’s guess, and I surely would not offer one.
Wait a doggone minute. Does anyone even remember why the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1988? It wasn’t because of the US-supported mujahideen and their Stinger missiles. Yes, CIA asset Osama bin Laden (Tim Osman) and the Taliban always claimed that they drove the Russians out. Truth is, Gorbachev knew that the war had become a stalemate and was no longer worth it, so they pulled the troops out voluntarily with Afghans blowing kisses to the convoys on the way out. Andy can attest to that.
It’s taken the Americans 20 years to come to the same conclusion, but sorry, Afghans won’t be blowing kisses as we leave. We’ve killed More than 71,000 civilians since 2001. There’s a lot of payback due for war crime, if not in this world, then the next…
I would rather agree with your post. Of course, the presence of stingers was not the reason for the withdrawal of troops. Soviet troops fought quite successfully in Afghanistan. And former Afghan fighters admit it. The Afghan government held out for three years after the withdrawal of the Soviet military contingent. A lot of reasons came into focus at that time. This is a protracted war, and huge financial expenses, 15 thousand killed and wounded Soviet soldiers, the betrayal of generals (remember the Georgian Shevardnadze – this cunning, corrupt fox. He sold weapons and plans for the movement of convoys), the senselessness of chasing every shepherd in the mountains, etc. etc. At the end of the war, my father wanted to fly in Afghanistan. But, thank God, there was nothing for the high-altitude interceptors to do there.
Afghanistan needs soft power to transform. Or none at all. Let them decide – it will be their choice. It is impossible to fight with all the people.
Truth is, Andy, foreigners have always had a hard time occupying Afghanistan for long. The British, after 3 wars there, came to understand that. Not the Americans, though… 9/11, make war on the “terrorists” wherever they might be, the hunt for Osama bin Laden that went on for over a decade after he actually died in December of 2001. Most Americans don’t remember any of that. That’s why they call us the United States of Amnesia.
America’s top military and political brass met in emergency session over the week to discuss the most important issues bothering them with the Taliban take over…. THE CONTINUED SUPPLY OF Opium!! Americans cannot do without this very critical commodity and their large user population will be at risk. Plus importantly too, the US gay military will be cut off from billions in cash funding. Oh boy, it is critical for the US.
Well, that’s it. While you were sleeping there on the other side of the planet, the transfer of power in Kabul took place.
The world is watching.
The world is watching and laughing as Americans are fleeing with tails tucked between their legs!!!
Rana, The Americans bascially were already gone. What remained was just a dollar pipeline to keep the government going until the end happened, which always does. Now there will be an evolution toward and improvement, a spiraling down, or go sideways as world powers fight over access to control the mineral wealth of Afghanistan. It’s people were never viewed as having in value at all, and hence completely disposable items by the former colonialists. It’s called, “asset stripping”, a term that mass media will not use as it will get them on a shit list. We know, from personal experience here at VT. But that comes with the territory these days.
The big cash cow based in cow bull is closed for pentagonistanians and other war criminals like the Aussie inbreds “special forces” etc.
Afghans say that if a few pennies out of every dollar allocated for changing Afghanistan was actually spent in the past twenty years for its intended purpose the place would have been unrecognizably better.
Afghanistan has been occupied many times before but never conquered.
A US military contractor with an open contract in Afghanistan is the classic definition of frenzy.
wonder what kind of deal the tliban made for the In Situ Actor Defections…
sounds like an open city…
“…to learning where the Taliban’s material support comes from,” where has it always come from the Narco industry developed by US except this time the junk-head master spooks will have to go to Taliban with bags of green dos to load em on their planes. It’s only a matter of time.
I would like to add: the peoples of Afghanistan have had their own way of life from time immemorial. And if such a society is capable of evolving, progressing, if there is a need and desire, this must be done from within the society itself. Educate people, build infrastructure, and so on. The UAE is also a Muslim country, but look how modern it is. Afghanistan is a very controversial and peculiar country. It is impossible to change them, to bring them democracy from the outside. They may enjoy living in earthen houses, chopping off their hands, stoning women, engaging in homosexuality, or putting a stool behind the donkey. And now we are trying to understand how it happened. For 20 years they fought against the brainchild of Pakistan – the Taliban, this is a toy of the Pakistani special services. And now, in a hurry, everyone is running away. So why then all this was necessary?
The US is leaving Afghanistan, spending about two trillion dollars on the “democratization” of the country. On the Internet, they are joking that with this money it would be possible to build a decent house for every Afghan, buy a car, several heads of cattle, and train all the Taliban in Oxford, Harvard and Massachusetts.
Only the Taliban themselves (the Taliban are a terrorist organization banned in Russia) do not need either one or the other or the third. They need to be left alone – in that Muslim Middle Ages, where they slept for centuries, where women are stoned for treason, men are cut off their throats and hands for “wrong” faith, where pedophilia, bestiality and sodomy are widespread. And the most serious sector of the economy is the production and sale of drugs to the wrong “infidels”.
About 140 billion dollars were invested by the Americans in various programs in the country – from educational to training of law enforcement forces, from building all kinds of infrastructure facilities to supporting the emerging “democracy”. And now it turns out that all this money was thrown down the drain…
” Do you realize what you have done?” (V.V.Putin. Munich speech)
It’s the same west old usual imperialism, from ancient Rome until UK and US later, on the pretext or believing, they have to go “civilize the barbarians”, but just when at same time in that place there is some economic valuable thing to loot, or any strategic geographic location from which they want to appropriate, because when nothing is there, nobody cares about what they are do or do not on such country.
History always repeats itself in one way or another. This a new fall of Saigon but in Kabul this time.
Always remember why the US invaded Afghanistan in the first place? It was supposedly to capture Osama bin Laden who supposedly had directed 19 Arabs armed with box cutters to attack us on 9/11. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) was the lone ‘no’ vote in Congress against the war in Afghanistan in 2001, voting against an authorization for use of military force (AUMF) shortly after the 9/11 attacks. At the time, she was reviled for being unpatriotic, even receiving death threats. “When I voted ‘no,’ I said it was a blank check and would set the stage for perpetual war, and that’s what it’s done,” she said. How right she was.
Andy asked in a comment recently, what good have American and European troops in Afghanistan done in 20 years? How many schools have they built? How many bridges? Have they built even one industrial plant or factory that employed Afghans? Did they even try to understand the Afghan people, culture, traditions? The Russians did, but not the Americans. Rather, US and NATO troops sat in closed bases and bombed everything that moved. No wonder they hate us so much.
Employed many Afghans as farmers growing poppy…..
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