...it was a mistake

So just the other day we were talking about the...whatever the fuck the Trumpkins are doing in the Persian Gulf that's not-a-war.

(Here's Mike "My Balls Are In A Drawer In The Resolute Desk" Johnson today: "We're not at war, we have no intention, we have no intention at being at war. The president and the Department of Defense have made it very clear, this is a limited operation.". So it's a "limited operation"? A "punitive expedition"? A cabinet war...no, it's not! It's not a war! IT'S NOT A WAR!

Not a war. Are we clear on that now?)

Sure. Okay.

Anyway, the historical examples we discussed as looking real similar to whatever-this-is included Libya and Syria because 1) the U.S. part of those wars was largely limited to airstrikes, and because of that 2) they largely just resulted in dead and maimed people and blown up buildings and destroyed military things like tanks and aircraft, leaving behind nothing but chaotic failed states that served principally to spread disorder and violence to nearby parts of North Africa and the Levant.

Now.

Just having soldiers to occupy the targeted polities doesn't promise success, either; Iraq is the test case for how you can send a bunch of guys to walk around with weapons and still have no fucking clue how to use them effectively.

But experience (and common sense) would suggest that if the actual end state for - let's us at least be honest and call it what it is- the Fourth Gulf War is something other than "chaotic failed state" someone's are going to have to actually go into Iran and make claim to the actual physical ground, buildings, animals, and people. In war, as in any tort, possession is nine-tenths of the Law, and infantry are the bailiff's men.

Do any of these wanna-be Iran filibusterers wandering around the blanket fort at Mar-a-Lago have a plan for that?

Well...supposedly the spooks at the CIA do:

"The CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran, multiple people familiar with the plan told CNN. The Trump administration has been in active discussions with Iranian opposition groups and Kurdish leaders in Iraq about providing them with military support, the sources said."

If so, then we're out of Libyan territory and closer to Syria, where the anti-Assad rebellion included Kurdish soldiers aligned with the U.S. (who were then abandoned by the U.S. when they became inconvenient to U.S.-Turkish relations, so I'm not sure they'd be the right people to ask about this cunning CIA plan).

What this Kurdish Free Iranian Army idea reminds me more than anything else is the early stages of the Afghanistan incursion, when the idea was to "go in light", using only U.S. Special Forces to augment the "Northern Alliance", an outfit largely made up of - as the name says - the northern tribes in Afghanistan; Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras.

Which wouldn't have been a problem, except for that the largest, most influential, and traditionally most powerful group in Afghanistan has always been the traditional rivals of those groups, the Pashtun, who also comprised the bulk of the Taliban that were the target of the 2001 invasion.

Enlisting the northern tribes meant that even after the Taliban was driven out of the major cities into the mountains of the Afghan southeast the locals who remained behind, the population that the U.S.-led occupying force and the Afghan regime it supported, were mostly Pashtun and were unlikely to cozy up to these damn outsiders. Afghanistan might be the most extreme form of "me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the outsider" kind of clannishness.

So if the Pashtun didn't rally to the government in Kabul - and they largely didn't, for a number of reasons but tribal loyalties being a major part of them - the chance of getting far enough ahead of the Taliban counter-occupation insurgency was slim, at best.

We know how that worked out.

What's the story in Iran? What would sending a Kurdish proxy force into Tehran look like?

Here's a Reader's Digest version of the ethnic makeup of modern Iran: 

Pre-modern Iran was known a "Persia", and the people who lived and live there are Farsi-speaking Indo-Europeans (closely related to Afghanistan's Tajiks, in fact). "Persians" are about 60% of the population of the modern country.

The second-largest group of people are Azerbaijanis, a Turkic-related , that make somewhere between 15% and 20% of the country. The Kurds are about 10%, and there's a couple of percent of various smaller groups like "Lurs", Baluchis, Turks, and Arabs.

What does that mean for a Kurdish "Western Alliance" on the ground in Iran?

Not much good.

 A Iranian Kurdish-led ground force wouldn't be much different to the rest of Iran than an Iraqi or, for that matter, a Saudi or Jordanian army. Or how a bunch of Tajiks or Hazaras walking around Pashtun territory were in Afghanistan. 

They'd be outsiders.

 

And we've been there and done that, and seen how that fucking went.

"Ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublie'" 

The Dreamers Wake

 

This poor bastard is one Dr. William Brydon. He's arriving in British-held what is today Pakistan, the sole surviving escapee of the British Afghanistan expedition of 1844. He could probably have told you what it's like in Kabul today.

It's kind of pointless to refight all the fights we've had over this slow-motion disaster. Largely because we knew, or should have known, that the people who were supposed to be running this goat rodeo knew and have known for years that they were building nothing; that the ridiculous pile of blood and treasure had gone completely to waste.

The only point left to make is the point the GIs in Vietnam used as their summary of the clusterfuck: "Don't mean nothin'." That there was no point at which that rock was going to roll uphill, and the only question was who'd be left standing when the music stopped.

Of course this is a human tragedy. Thousands of people are going to suffer, many of them will die, because of all of this; the initial bizarre "constitution" doped out in Europe that tried to make a conventional Westphalian state out of Afghanistan, Rumsfeld's refusal to accept Taliban terms in 2001, the unwillingness to face the reality of what was happening to the place and the people, the constant insistence that just a few more months and a few more lives would change things.

To me, anyway, the truly "tragic" part - in the classic meaning of the term - is the fate of the poor Afghan sods that worked with and for the occupation. The images out of Kabul are horrifying...and yet...how else could this have ended?

To have ramped up an evacuation program six months ago, say, would have been as much as announcing to the Afghan government and the ANA that the U.S. had no confidence in their ability to hold. That lack of confidence would have been and is, obviously, fully justified. But it would have likely resulted in this disaster happening in February instead of August.

And I honestly can't see a way - short of slamming in a full division complete with heavy artillery support - to have held a perimeter around Kabul long enough to get everyone out. If it was my call to make I might have made it. But it wasn't, and I can see why it wasn't.

So the fever-dream of hustling the East ends, as such dreams so often do, in blood and heartbreak.

Will the waking dreamers learn from this?

Sadly...my guess is that not only will the Western foreign and military organizations not learn, they will refuse to even accept that there is a lesson to be learned here. There will be a brief search for scapegoats, and then the entire episode will be shoved unceremoniously down the memory hole so the next time we need to slay Afridis where they run.

 WASF.

 

Sunk Cost and Lessons Learned?

We had a fairly long discussion here about the "lessons learned" - or, rather, whether lessons that seem obvious in hindsight were, in fact, too difficult for the military boffins of 1914 to discern - in the first catastrophic war of the 20th Century.

Now the NY Times discusses a pointless (and "catastrophic" in the sense of "blood and treasure wasted for no geopolitically valid objective") war of the 21st Century, the mess that the United States has made in the Grave of Empires:

"It’s not as if Mr. Biden is being pressured to stay in Afghanistan with a cogent argument; most analysts freely admit that the United States has no plausible path to victory, that the military isn’t trained to midwife democracy and that the Afghan government is grievously corrupt.

Rather, the national security community cannot bear to display its failure. That’s why many who advocate continuing the war are left grasping for illogical or far-fetched justifications. In a meeting of National Security Council principals, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, reportedly made an emotional plea to stay in Afghanistan, after “all the blood and treasure spent” there."

This is the classic "sunk costs" theory that has been used to justify military shenanigans since the Peloponnesian War, and certainly we've seen modern Great Powers do this repeatedly (I'd argue that the real problem isn't that the U.S. foreign policy establishment was "traumatized" by the disaster in Vietnam but, rather, that the lessons IT taught were not learned, either...)

To me, the big question that the rolling clusterfuck that is the U.S.'s misadventures in the whole "land war in Asia" business is "is there a way for Great Powers - or, indeed, most polities - to make foreign policy decisions that are based on "national interests" that are, indeed, based on the interests of the bulk of the people in the polity"?

It's hard to see too many examples that prove that there is, so my question for the readership is "can you think of an example of a policy (or set of policies) or decision(s) that show that this sort of intelligent geopolitics IS possible?"

Is there (are there?) examples that, say, the "blobs" of various nation-states could look to for a way to see their way through to avoiding the very sort of complete clusterfuck on display when you look at the U.S. foreign policy camorra and it's work in Afghanistan since 2001?

Happy Xmas (War is Over)

While not really changing my opinion that the current Administration is an overall total clownshow, I gotta give credit where credit is due: Trump left Zalmay Kalilzad in Qatar to hammer out a war-ending ceasefire agreement with the Taliban representatives, and he did, inking a pact at the end of this week that sets out a process to finally #endendlesswar.

Now...there's a bunch of troublesome cans that this kicks down the road.

The Kabul government wasn't party to this critter.

That, in itself, might be a dealbreaker in a sense. Because as sure as the sun rises the odd-lot of tribes currently reigning in Kabul is doomed to fall before the Pashtun factions that are the core of the Taliban. Right up there with "don't get involved in land wars in Asia" (oops!) is "never bet against the Pashtun in Afghan power politics". The critical factor will be the Talibs willingness to be patient and let the Trumpkins distance themselves from this thing, so when the inevitable collapse of the current Kabul regime happens they can wave their hands and make it none of Our Business.

There are also a lot of other people with interests in keeping the Afghan pot boiling, and it will not be simple for the main parties to this agreement to keep them from mucking things up. Various Islamic extremist factions, Afghan tribal interests, Americans who will see this as rightly a recognition that the past 19-odd years have been a complete and utter waste of blood and treasure...

But, frankly, it isn't Our Business; the U.S. has little reason to be picky about who is mulcting the opium trade from the gaddi in Kabul. Provided whoever they are keep the place relatively quiet and regional unrest on the downlow it's a "win" for U.S. interests. When the Taliban is the organization in charge? If they can do that, then more power to them, and us.

Nike employs people who helped kill GIs in Vietnam to make shoes for American feet; why shouldn't Talibs who shot down Americans in the Korengal Valley grow opium for American junkies?

Is this a "good" way to end this mess? Probably not. But, then, there really is no "good" ending, just a selection of bad and worse ones, and this is probably as good as it gets.

Update 3/2: As you might expect, the Kabul government immediately shoved a spoke in this deal, refusing to agree to the prisoner exchange portion.

Plus the Taliban - or some part of the anti-Kabul rebellion - bombed a soccer game almost immediately after a ten-day "reduction in violence" ended. Apparently the Taliban has committed to not whacking GIs but has left the Kabul government fair game.

As Trump famously said about presidenting; who knew this stuff would be so hard?

A Fool Lies Here

In a "revelation" that should surprise no one, the Washington Post published a 2014 report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction that makes clear the ridiculous impossibility of what Rudyard Kipling warned us of in 1891.

What is also clear is that the United States learned only one lesson from the loss of the war in Southeast Asia; that if you draft random people and random people's kids to fight idiotic imperial wars in the global hustings you will be made to pay for it politically because the random people will fight to expose your lies and stupidity.

If you let them draft themselves, nobody will give a shit.

So, despite this voluminous mass of evidence that three successive U.S. administrations have been cluelessly, grossly, lying to themselves and the U.S. public and have, somehow, managed to take a grotesquely mismanaged Central Asian failed state and turn it into a worse grotesquely mismanaged Central Asian failed state, not a single one of the people involved will so much as go shy half a slug or miss a meal. No Bushie, no Obamite, no Trumpkin...nobody will pay.

Read the whole thing; the most obvious "lessons learned" were the things that a bunch of us already knew and were howling about back in the Intel Dump days; that, even if there ever had been a hope after choosing to break into the joint, the choice to bolt to Iraq as soon as possible left Afghanistan to go to hell. That the Afghan corruption that was endemic wasn't - and, probably, could never be - addressed. That the idea of trying to set up a central "government" in Kabul was nonsensical, and became a toxic kleptocracy as soon as it could. That...aw, hell, go read it. The whole damn thing was a clusterfuck from the get go and probably always would have been. But it was certainly mismanaged about as badly as possible, too.

And so, just as in Iraq, now all that's left is to spell out in black ink that all the blood and treasure spent in Afghanistan has been utterly wasted, good for nothing but ruin and delusion and merciless hatred.

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: "A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.

There is pleasure in the wet, wet clay
When the artist's hand is potting it.
There is pleasure in the wet, wet lay --
When the poet's pad is blotting it.
There is pleasure in the shine of your picture on the line
At the Royal Acade-my;
But the pleasure felt in these is as chalk to Cheddar cheese
When it comes to a well-made Lie--

To a quite unwreckable Lie,
To a most impeccable Lie!
To a water-right, fire-proof, angle-iron, sunk-hinge, time-lock, steel-faced Lie!
Not a private handsome Lie,
But a pair-and-brougham Lie,
Not a little-place-at-Tooting, but a country-house-with-shooting
And a ring-fence-deer-park Lie.

What's Pashto for "Contra"?

Apparently the U.S. intelligence community is organizing and funding something - either "paramilitary units" or "death squads" - in Afghanistan.

"The U.S. has trained and supported paramilitary groups in Afghanistan that have committed summary executions, forcibly disappeared people and have been behind more than a dozen serious abuse cases in the last 18 months, a human rights organization said Thursday.

Afghan strike forces, which have been accused of raiding medical facilities and killing civilians in night raids on their homes, sometimes in front of their families, are largely trained and overseen by the CIA, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Thursday."

Here's the thing.

We the People have never really come to any sort of sensible terms our use of mercenary militias in places like Vietnam or Nicaragua. The covert ops guys descended from Donovan's OSS have always had a fondness for using local jamokes to do the dirty work that regular joes either can't or won't, or, worse, get all fucked up personally or organizationally from doing.

Guerrilla wars are filthy because of their very nature. They're civil wars, and civil wars are fundamentally ugly. Adding irregulars and guerrillas just adds to the basic ugliness.

The problem I have with this isn't so much that it's a thing. If Afghans are going have a civil war, I'd just as soon that it be with Afghans and not Americans. And if they're going to have a guerrilla war, I'd just as soon it be with Afghan guerrillas and not Americans leading or driving Afghan guerrillas.

And it's not the basic brutal ugliness of this fight, either. Are these militias murdering people and doing other war-crime stuff? Sure they are. That's what happens when you give people firearms and turn them loose on people who don't have them without some sort of organizational control. "Militia" is just a sanitized term for "mob of murderous fucksticks" that lurks inside every armed group of people who have no institutional control over how they use those arms.

No, it's that we don't seem to learn that arming one mob to kill another mob (along with poor random bastards that have what "our" armed mob wants, or just for pure shits-and-giggles) doesn't do a goddamn thing geopolitically to solve civil war problems without some sort of genuine political solution available. There were negotiations going on that were supposedly leading to some sort of heading-towards-a-solution back in late summer, but part of the Art of the Deal appears to be screwing up that sort of deal, so we're back to Square Zero, only with...death squads?

Honestly. It's like we're the fucking Bourbons ("Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien apprendre.") except with worse taste in entertainment and mistresses.

Your Daily Crazy, Middle East Edition

This is a portion of the transcript of a press conference given by President Trump on January 2, 2019.

I want you to keep this in mind as you read this; keep in mind who this is who is speaking.

This is not your drunken FOX-addled uncle spewing off after too much turkey and football at Thanksgiving dinner. This is not some random park ranter in the piss-smelling pants. This is the man who is legally in sole charge of the armed forces of the United States as well as the executive capacities of the largest economic and military power on the planet.

We begin with a reporter asking a question about the recent announcement of U.S. ground forces being pulled out of Syria and Afghanistan.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I appreciate it, Mr. President. Maybe the military has an angle here or a possible --
TRUMP: They have no angle. I know every angle. No, they have no angle.

We don’t have to wait long for the cray-cray, do we? “I know every angle” – and keep in mind this question was specifically about military affairs. The guy whose closest encounter with any military activity was terror-driven flight from potential Vietnam service “knows every angle”? Really?

The military under past leadership, including for many years was taken advantage of by other countries. Allies and not allies, they were taken advantage of. Our country has to be respected. We're not respected when we do that.

While this may not be overtly nuts – I mean, it IS nuts - the U.S. has undertaken military actions “for many years” but not because it was taken advantage of but primarily to pursue its own interests. This whole “taken advantage of” thing is one of Trump’s more consistent bizarre mental kinks, a seemingly overriding need to be seen as the grifter rather than the chump. It also dovetails with his obsession with alliances and pacts as a sort of protection racket where if the U.S. isn’t making bank it’s being chumped.

But the main point here is to recognize this as a signifier of Trump’s way of thinking, which is virtually indistinguishable from the gutter punks and gangster wannabes I went to high school with. “Respect” was their Holy Thing. The one sure driver of violence for these goombas was the perception that they weren’t being “respected”. It made them dangerously unstable to be around, because you never knew what they’d interpret as “disrespect”. That is this guy’s mindset. Think about that for a moment, and let’s move on.

When horrible things are happening on trade where we have barriers put up, where we have tariffs put on and we open our country up, we just open it up, where cars are sent into our country with virtually no tax, no nothing and yet they won't accept our cars, when cars are sent in and they pay no tax but we're expected to pay 25, 40, 50 percent and we pay nothing, I'll be honest with you, it's just not in my DNA.

This is economic gibberish, but it’s at least consistent with Trump’s obsession with “respect” and the idea that everyone else in cheating “us”.

I don't know how people allowed that in my position, allowed these things to happen. And we're not allowing it to happen anymore. I could be the most popular person in Europe. I could run for any office if I wanted to but I don't want to.

Here’s the first real “WTF” moment. Popular? Run for office? Of…what, “imperial poo-bah”? You’re an object of derision and contempt all over the non-fascist parts of Europe. You don’t know that? Obviously not, and yes, this is just Trump giving himself his usual tongue-bath. But it's the utterly random way this pops in here that is such fine flavor of pure whackadoodle senile-Grampy crazy.

I want people to treat us fairly and they're not. And it's not -- there's no angles. There's no angles.

Back to the “angles” again as senile Grampy suddenly remembers the original point (such as it was…) he was trying to make.

There's nothing -- you know, when a country sends us 200 soldiers to Iraq or sends us a hundred soldiers from a big country to Syria or to Afghanistan and then they tell me a hundred times, oh, we sent you soldiers, we sent you soldiers. And that's 1/100th of the money they take advantage of, they're just doing it to make me happy. I've heard past Presidents say they've involved in the Afghanistan war because they sent us a hundred soldiers.

Presumably this is about the other NATO nations. It’s nonsense. A bunch of other NATO countries pushed upwards of five figures of bodies into Afghanistan; the British, certainly, as well as France and Germany. Almost all the NATO members sent some contingent, the size of which was determined by the capacities of the contributor and the needs of the multinational force commanders.

Yes, some of them were company-sized or smaller. But that was because the force was set up by the needs of the theater commander and the capabilities of the units sent, not as a grifting scheme.

And, yes; if Andorra sends a quartermaster company they ARE “involved in the Afghanistan war”. Those people are. This points out the fundamentally unserious nature of Trump’s understanding of war; he sees it like a game, a con game, and the less money you make (or lose) the smaller and less important the con.

The MOST bizarre part here, though is that “they’re doing it to make me happy” thing. Why the hell would “they” do that? “You” aren’t that important in the Afghan picture; you’ve been the U.S. CINC for only 2/17ths of the entire Umpteenth Afghan War. "They" have no real reason to make you happy.

Yet it's costing us billions of billions of dollars. I get along with India and the prime minister and he's constantly telling me he built a library in Afghanistan. You know what that is? That's like five hours of what we spend. And he tells it is and he's very smart and we're supposed to say oh, thank you for the library.

Okay. Remember this whole India thing. The little library story is freakishly weird, but it’s not the stupidest part of Trump’s notions about India and Afghanistan.

Wait for it; we’ll get to la-la land in a bit.

I don't know who's using it in Afghanistan but one of those things. Well, I don't like --It's the end of the world and we're subsidizing their military by billions and billions and billions of dollars many, many, many times what those soldiers cost their country.

Here’s one bit of this whackaloonity that I actually have to sorta give him. Yes, “we” have been sinking a crap-ton of blood and treasure into this bottomless pit. Mind you, it has largely been for our own, admittedly by my reckoning strategically clueless, reasons. But, yes. “Billions and billions” (here’s where I hear Carl Sagan rather than Trump’s reedy whine, but, whatever…) have gone down the Afghan rathole.

I’m all in for Trump taking U.S. GIs out of this mess. But the glimpse this presser gives of what goes on – or doesn’t – inside the gomer’s head doesn’t make me feel confident that he won’t just get them stuck into something even MORE fucked up.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. President --

TRUMP: Go ahead, Afghanistan.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In Afghanistan, you have (one?) ISIS and the (Taliban?) is gaining ground. And India…

TRUMP: I think India should be involved in Afghanistan.

Holy.

Fucking.

Shit.

Okay, let’s just sit here a moment and ponder the epically, monumentally, heroically, pure-D, stomp-down, clueless boneheaded geopolitical stupidity of that single offhand sentence.

“I think India should be involved in Afghanistan.”

I have no idea what the fuck his military handlers have tried to tell this gomer. I know he’s functionally illiterate. I know he’s a bumptious rube, a walking Dunning-Kruger who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room on whatever subject comes us.

But…”I think India should be involved in Afghanistan.”

I’m not saying that the Chief Executive needs to be a foreign policy wonk. I don’t expect him to know about the political situation in the subcontinent and the history of the region that still echoes decisions and actions taken as far back as the Mughals. Or that the entire focus of Pakistani Afghan policy is to ensure that the Afghan state provides strategic depth for Pakistan in the event of war with India. Or that the main driver of friction between the current Kabul government and Karachi has been the warming of relations between Afghanistan and India since the U.S. invasion and the fall of the Taliban.

But I’d expect at the bare minimum that their foreign policy advisors would have briefed him – and that he would have understood – on the tense relationship of Pakistan and India.

That they would have hammered at least a working understanding of why the triangle India-Pakistan-Afghanistan is as potentially explosive as nitroglycerine into this dumb fucker’s head. The fact that this moron could just toss this off is possibly as monstrously stupid as getting involved in a land war in Asia, except we’re talking about our involvement in a land war in Asia, so I’ll just say that this is monstrously stupid, even for Trump, and let’s move on.

I gave our generals all the money they wanted. They didn't do such a great job in Afghanistan. They've been fighting in Afghanistan for 19 years. General Mattis thanked me profusely for getting him several hundred billion and thanked me more the following year when I got him $716 billion. He couldn't believe it because our military was depleted. Now we're rebuilding our military. Pat was very responsible for a lot of the orders for the new F-35 fighter jets and F-18s including ships and missiles and everything. But General Mattis was so thrilled.

As always with Trump, it’s all about the money. Keep that in mind. He has no concept that there’s such a thing as geopolitics and grand strategy. If you throw money at something, you win. (Which might explain a lot of the whole “going bankrupt repeatedly”, when you think about it…)

Trump doesn’t get the difference between the problems caused by endless imperial wars run on a credit card have on O&M, and procurement. Why should he? It’s all just the money and all about the money, amiright?

But what's he done for me? How has he done in Afghanistan? Not too good. Not too good. I'm not happy with what he's done in Afghanistan and I shouldn't be happy. But he was very thankful when I got him $700 billion and the following year $716 billion. So, I wish him well. I hope he does well. But as you know, President Obama fired him and essentially so did I. I want results.

This, in terms of Afghanistan, is more than bizarre; it’s outright nuts. This would be like FDR going on the radio and ranting about how because of the debacle at Kasserine Pass he was relieving GEN Marshall. As SECDEF Jim Mattis didn’t micromanage in-theatre efforts in Afghanistan and he shouldn’t have been doing so. That Trump seems to think that is…well, it’s either stupid or nutty, but I’m actually going for the Daily Double of both.

We're going to do something that's right. We are talking to the Taliban, we're talking to a lot of different people but here's the thing because you mentioned India. India is there. Russia is there. Russia used to be the Soviet Union.

No shit, Sherlock.

Afghanistan made it Russia because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia.

This is an almost-fifth-grade-level understanding of the breakup of the Soviet Union, except I’ll bet that the smarter fifth graders actually have a more sophisticated understanding of the actual factors involved.

So, you take a look at other countries. Pakistan is there. They should be fighting. But Russia should be fighting. The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt. They went into being called Russia again as opposed to the Soviet Union. A lot of these places you're reading about now are no longer a part of Russia because of Afghanistan. But why isn't Russia there?

Russia? Fighting in Afghanistan? You WANT that? Because you want to re-create “Charlie Wilson’s War” only you want to be allies with the baddies?

Seriously? WTF? This may be on the whackadoodle-level as the India comment, only with even less political sense because dopey here clearly remembers that the Soviets were fighting in Afghanistan and it didn’t go well for them.

Why isn't India there in we there and we're 6,000 miles away? But I don't mind. We want to help our people, help other nations. You do have terrorists, mostly Taliban but is. I'll give you an example. So tall ISIS is an enemy. We have an area where Taliban is here, ISIS is here and they're fighting each other. I said why don't you let them fight? Why are we getting in the middle of it? I said let them fight. They're both our enemies, let them fight.

Another hugely stupid idea, as we’ll discuss below.

Sir, we want to do it.

I think this is Trump pretending to be one or more of his military advisors (or the commanders on the ground in Afghanistan)

They go in and end up fighting both of them. It the craziest thing I've ever seen. I think I would have been a good general but who knows.

Fucking hell. Just…fucking hell.

These are two enemies fighting again but what are we doing?

We’re backing the government we installed in Kabul because the winner of the IS-Taliban fight will then go on to bitchslap our Afghan buddies, dummy.

Somehow, fucking Tallyrand here hasn’t managed to absorb that while there are two sets of “enemies” here there’s also an “ally”, the Kabul government, and that the whole idea isn’t to sit back and let the enemies fight each other but enable the third, “allied” party to win legitimate governance so the enemies don’t take the place back when they’re done (or find time to attack the ANA while they’re brawling).

He's done a fantastic job. He's brought the country together.

I have no idea what this refers to. I think there’s something missing from the transcript here, like Trump calling out the current Afghan head of state.

India, Russia, you look at some of the satellite countries that are extremely wealthy with oil, surrounding. I spoke to some of them. They -- I said to a certain country, very rich country, what would you do if the United States pulled out? Oh, we'd be taken over by the Taliban and terrorists.

I can’t figure out if this is just nonsense or an extremely ugly and bizarre congeries of lies.
The implication of his first sentence “satellite countries…wealthy with oil, surrounding” is that he’s talking about 1) a petrostate that is 2) adjacent to or within close proximity to Afghanistan, that 3) is highly vulnerable to takeover by a takifiri guerrilla movement.

But there is literally no such place that satisfies all three of his criteria.

The countries that border Afghanistan are Iran, – which is a petrostate but far too large and too Shiite to be endangered by a bunch of Sunni religious nuts – Pakistan – which might be vulnerable to unrest but isn’t a significant petroleum producer, and three former Soviet states; Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, which have neither a significant petroleum industry, nor, being closely linked to the "Northern Alliance" enemies of the Talib Pashtun, are likely to be at risk of a Pashtun invasion.

The closest polity that even comes close to meeting all the conditions in this gobbledegook is Kazakhstan, which has its own takifiri issues but 1) not with either the Taliban or an Islamic State franchise and 2) is geographically pretty far from the Pashtun regions.

Whatever the reason for this odd anecdote it’s worth reminding us that Trump does this, though. A lot; just pulls stuff out of his ass that is utter nonsense, or so twisted from whatever its genesis was as to be nonsensical.
And to remind us that he’s usually not called on it, which is why he continues to do it, and I think this is what this is. This supposed conversation never happened, or it happened with some representative of Pakistan and Trump just has this vague memory that he bitched out some wog or other (I mean, they’re all just “shithole” countries anyway, amirite?) for…

I said, ah. They b…then why are you charging us when we have to use your country to send product through? Why are you charging us when we send airplanes over your country? We're doing the job for you, why are you charging us? He said to me, very great gentleman, smart. He said to me, well, nobody ever asked me not to. I said I'm asking you not to. He said we will not charge you. And I'm talking about millions and millions of dollars. Flights over his country. But I say to him, what would happen if we weren't here? And he looks at me and he goes we would be overrun. We could not defend ourselves. And yet he charges us. But he doesn't charge us anymore.

…”charging us” – Trump again with the money, and (of course) his self-styled “dealmaking”.
The getting-hit-up-for-supply-and-overflight thing suggests he’s thinking of Pakistan.
But I honestly have no idea what to make of this whole farrago. I think it’s just all lies and make-believe, simply because I can’t see who this “very great gentleman, smart” and his country could be.

OK. Jeff.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You use the word slowly when you're describing the withdrawal --

TRUMP: I didn't say --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What is your timetable?

TRUMP: Somebody said four months. Obama gave up Syria when he didn't violate the red line. I did when I shot 59 missiles in but that was a long time later. And when President Obama decided not to violate his statement that never cross the red line and then they did and he didn't do anything about it, you know, make a threat is OK but you always have to follow through with the threat. You can't make a threat and then do nothing.

Another of Trump’s over-riding foreign policy principles to the degree he has any is his obsession with Obama, in this case contrasting Trump’s Wag The Dog missile barrage back in April of 2017 with Obama’s backing off Assad after the barrel bomb/gas attacks in 2012.

So, Syria was lost long ago. It was lost long ago.

Wait? Whaaaaat? We’re pulling out of Syria because we WON, right? Because the Islamic State was beaten and “we’re not doing nation-building” (as he told the GIs in Iraq just last week). So…instead, now Syria “was lost long ago”?
Then what the fuck were all those GIs doing there for the past two years?

And besides that, I don't want -- we're talking about sand and death.

OMFG I love this SO much. “We’re talking about sand and death.” That’s your poet-president, that's fucking poetry right there.

“Sand and death.” I saw that movie, too. Tyrone Power played the matador. Linda Darnell was his wife.

What a great flick.

Sand and death.

That's what we're talking about. We're not talking about vast wealth. We're talking about sand and death.

Again with the wealth, but, hey, it’s Trump – you want to know what’s going on under that combover? Follow the money.

Now, the Kurds, it's very interesting, Turkey doesn't like them, other people do.

Some people like anchovies on their pizza. Some don’t. Some people want to butcher Kurds. Some like them. "I don’t really care, do U?"

I didn't like the fact that there selling the small oil they have to Iran.

The fuck..?

This is an outright lie, or some sort of Trumpy-brain nonsense intended to let him off the hook for screwing the Kurds.

The Syrian Kurds have no active oilfields and the Iraqi Kurds sell their Kirkuk oilfield products in Iraq.

Where the hell he gets this I have no idea; maybe Fox and Friends? Anyone heard this nonsense on wingnut websites? It’s not bizarre because it’s wrong – this is Trump – but because it’s so obviously, easily disproveably wrong.

But Kurds are selling oil to Iran. I'm not happy about it at all. At the same time, they fight better when we fight with them. When we send 30 f-18s in front of them, they fight much better than they do when we don't.

Close air support! Wow! Whoodathunkit? Would he have made a Great Captain? Would he? I'm tellin' ya, Napoleon has nothing on this joker.

And you've we want to protect the Kurds. But I don't want to be in serious forever.

So we’ve got your back, Kurds. Except…only until we get bored. Or it costs too much. Or we just stop giving a shit.
Sadly, this IS what you get when you trust Uncle Sammy. I suspect there’s a Vietnamese Montaignard word for it.

It’s sad and the death.

I remember saying stuff like this when I was 19 and stoned out of my gourd.

If we fight ISIS-- you know where else they're going? To Iran, who hates ISIS more than we do. They're going to Russia, who hates ISIS more than we do. Then I read when we pull out, Russia is thrilled. You know why they're not happy? Because this be and we're killing ISIS also for Iran.

I have no idea what the hell this means, and I don’t think he does, either. The Islamic State was born in the wreckage of the Sunni parts of western Iraq and eastern Syria, neither of which have the slightest similarity to any parts of Iran or Russia.

He’s just pulling this stuff…well, you know.

I sort of understand why none of the journos push him on this nonsense; he doesn’t know anything, and if you push it all you get is more gibberish. But, seriously…how can you respect this? How can you treat this like someone who should be doing anything other than tending the fry pit at some Mickey D’s somewhere instead of making geopolitical decisions for the globe’s biggest superpower?

And just while we're on Iran because people don't like to write the facts. Iran is a much different country than it was when I became President. Iran when I became President, I had a meeting at the Pentagon with lots of generals, they were like for a pry, better looking than Tom Cruz and stronger. I've had more I said this is the greatest room I've ever seen. I saw more computer boards than I think that they make today.

WTF? I got nothin’ here. Wow. Even when I was stoned out of my gourd I made more sense than this.

And every part of the Middle East and other places that was under attack was under attack because of Iran. And I said to myself, wow, I mean, you look at Yemen, you look at Syria, you look at every place, Saudi Arabia was under siege, they were all -- I mean, they wanted Yemen because of a long border with Saudi Arabia. That's why they're there, frankly. But every place was under siege.

I realize that this is a critical piece of GOP foreign policy, so it would be unrealistic to expect Trump’s toddler-level comprehension of geopolitics to question the “Iran is the Great Satan” trope. But, as usual, he takes the basic GOP talking point and goes utterly fruit-bat with it. “every part of the Middle East”? Like your pals in Baghdad, who are Iran’s de facto allies?

I actually asked a question. They had plenty of money. President Obama had just given them $150 billion. He gave them $1.8 billion in cash. I'm still trying to figure that one out, plane loads of cash, I...cash from many different countries.

This is easily understood if you recognize Trump as FOX-news-uncle. The “Obama gave Iran cash” thing is a wingnut trope that turns the Obama release of the impounded Iranian assets (which had to be delivered in banknotes because the banking embargos were still in place) into some sort of giveaway/bribe/corruption thing.

You know why from five different countries, Jeff? Because we didn't have enough cash in, they had to use the current at this with all of that being said, I did something called terminate the horrible Iran nuclear deal, which by the way, in eight years gives Iran the legal right to have nuclear weapons. I did it. Iran is no longer the same country. Iran is pulling people out of Syria.

I have no idea where he gets this, either. The IRGC is a Syrian partner and will continue to be so long as the Syrian Arab Army is fighting the civil war. If Trump really believes this – and, again, this is entirely likely to be pure Trumpian nonsense – he is either being really poorly advised or has a criminally low level of understanding of what his own intelligence people are telling him. Either way it argues a dangerously huge lack of geopolitical savvy.

They can do what they want there, frankly, but they're pulling people out, they're pulling people out of Yemen. Iran wants to survive now. Iran was they were going to take they can do what they want there, frankly, but they're pulling people out, they're pulling people out of Yemen. Iran wants to survive now.

To the best of my knowledge there are no significant Iranian assets in Yemen, which makes logistical and geographic sense if you think about it for two seconds; there is no direct land route from Iran to Yemen, and there’s no way for an Iranian freighter to put into a South Yemeni port.

Again, this is a dangerously idiotic way to think of the situation in the south Arabian peninsula if you are the U.S. head of state and charged with directing U.S. foreign policy.

Iran was…they were going to take over everything and destroy Israel while they're at it. Iran is a much different country right now. They're having riots every week in every country, bigger than they've had when we do all of the things that we gone pan (done?). Iran is in trouble. I'd love to negotiate with Iran. There but Iran is a much different country right now, Jeff, than it was when I took office. What I took over two years ago, Iran was going to take over the most and they were going to have all the weapons they wanted in a short period of time because of that stupid deal. When I terminated that deal and then did what I had to do, Iran is a much different country today than it was 19 months ago, that I can tell you.

There’s a lot of nonsense to unpack in this one paragraph.

The 2019 situation in Iran is little different than it was in 2016, largely because of the relatively consistent rumble of the low-grade Shia-Sunni Wars of Religion kicked off by Dubya and Dick’s Excellent Middle Eastern Adventure.

The one major difference is that the Trump Administration has made what I consider the major geopolitical mistake of taking sides in this religious war, and even moreso (in my opinion) by siding with the Wahhabi Sunni of Saudi Arabia, a metastable autocracy founded on the idea that petroleum wealth will both last forever and make the rule of a gang of inbreds from the Hause of Saud tolerable to the bulk of ordinary Saudis. I consider both these propositions to be sketchy in the medium term and unsustainable in the long term.

If Trump would “love to negotiate with Iran” there’s nothing stopping him. The probability is high that his idea of ”negotiation” is no different than his other diplomatic encounters with places like North Korea or the EU, which consists of 1) him throwing down his objective and folding his arms – which hasn’t worked with the EU, or 2) giving his counterpart what they want and then claiming it as a win for Trump, as he did with the NORKs. The Iranians, who have no real reason to take whatever one-sided “deal” he’d be offering, have no real reason to negotiate or, given his renege on the original "stupid deal" he and the GOP congresscritters welched on, any reason to trust him to hold with another deal, no matter how favorable.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: On the timetable for withdrawing troops --

TRUMP: It just over a period of time. Oh, we're withdrawing. We're hitting them very hard.

Are you withdrawing, or hitting “them” very hard? Seems impossible to do both at the same time anywhere but inside of Trump’s head.

When I met with the generals in Iraq, I said to a couple of the generals, why didn't you do this before? He said, sir, our commanders were telling us what to do. I said don't you tell them? No, sir, we take orders. And they're great soldiers. They listen. I do it differently. I sat around and after a few minutes they listened up and said this is what we should do.

This little anecdote is baffling not so much because of the point of it – which is the point of almost all Trump anecdotes, highlighting the very stable genius of Trump (who in “a few minutes” grasps the elusively obvious solution that has eluded all these so-called “generals” and “commanders”) compared to the dullards around him – but the actual circumstances.

Who are these “great soldiers” (apparently “generals” but not generals who are “commanders”, since that get told what to do by the latter)? When and how did this meeting occur? Why?

And why, if “they listened up” when Trump told them “what we should do”, hasn’t the geostrategic situation in southwest Asia suddenly improved dramatically? It’s almost as if this was an utter fiction. But, frankly, even a fiction this little story seems ludicrous.

The scene as painted here by Trump is some anonymous GSA-issue conference room somewhere in Iraq, where a group of “generals” sits down with their commander-in-chief. There is some sort of discussion in which 1) the POTUS asks pointedly why these GOs haven’t figured out how to hit “them” hard by withdrawing, 2) the GOs explain that it wasn’t their fault, they were chust vollowink orders, and 3) after a mere “few minutes” suddenly the POTUS expounds, like Christ preaching in the temple as a youth, to the astounded senior officers who, we’re left to suppose are dumbfounded and enlightened by His wisdom.

If it was comedy it’d be fairly brilliant. But it isn’t supposed to be comedy, and as such it’s just ridiculous.

I cannot imagine how the people listening to this stuff don’t start giggling at Trump. It must take a lot of practice.

But we were supposed to be out and that was five years ago and we never left. I see soldiers that are so badly injured and hurt, I don't want that. Why want it. And our military is getting really strong.

Okay, brace yourself, because we get into some deep inside-of-Trump's-brain stuff here.

I can tell you story when I got here about our military that I don't even want to talk about. I don't even want to talk about. One of the NGS, we do these reports on our military. Some I.G. goes over there, and he goes over there and they do a report on every single thing we're fighting wars and they're doing a report and releasing it to the public. The public means the enemy. Those reports should be private reports. Let them do a report but they should be private reports and be locked up and but for these reports, criticizing referring for these reports -- essentially given out to the enemy is insane. And I don't want it to happen anymore, Mr. Secretary. You understand that. Look at the reports. Nobody more critical of, hey, it's not my fault, we're getting out smart.

This is…this is just tinfoil hat looney.

Seriously.

This is completely off-the-trolley gibbering nonsense. I’m not even sure what the hell he’s talking about here, other than it combines all Trump’s usual paranoia and his belief that there is some sort of critical OPSEC problem that he wants to solve by taking information that – at least in theory – the American public needs to know to make informed decisions about aspects of the military operations ostensibly conducted in their name are performed and closing it off to the public.

And the thing to remember is that IG investigations are NOT typically conducted for tactical events. Those are performed either by the local commander or someone above him in the chain of command. I've undergone IG inspections as well as been in units that underwent IG investigations. They were nothing like this lunatic espionage picture that Trump paints here.

The IG looks into things like GI-quality-of-life, maintenance, training, and personnel issues. The IG’s brief is not ”every single thing we’re fighting wars”, and the tactical or strategic value to even the most alert enemy of a typical IG investigation is likely to be extremely low.

But beyond the misinformed notion of who and what the IGs this is a reminder that, aside from all the looney stuff above, Trump has the “gut” – and remember how much he relies on that capacious organ – of a dictator.

He genuinely believes that 1) the Inspector General is giving away vital military secrets, and 2) that the only way to prevent that is for the IG’s reports to be “locked up” and the American public be kept safely away from even that level of knowledge of what is being done in their names. Think about the implications of that for a bit

But we're getting out very carefully. Yes, ma'am.

Well. THAT’s good to know.

I know that it’s difficult for the press people to do anything about these bizarre streams of verbal diarrhea. But it’s import for We the People not to begin to just overlook them or, worse, begin to accept them as ”just what he does”.

If your grandfather began to talk like this you’d, at the very least, consider taking his car keys away lest he end up in a ditch somewhere in the Poconos. This is not the behavior of someone who still has all his tacos on the combination platter. And yet this is what has the final say over much of our military and foreign policy.

Andy points out in the comments that all this is "shooting fish in a barrel" and, yes, there's certainly nothing newsworthy that a retired artillery sergeant with a geopolitics hobby can pick the nutty out of a Trump interview as easily as you could pick the cashews out of a bowl of mixed nuts.

But...that's kind of the point, isn't it?

The fact that the Chief Executive of the world's hyperpower is goofier than a wilderness of monkeys...shouldn't that be appalling? Shouldn't the people recording this nonsense be sounding the panic alarm? Should we, reading it, be horrified, angry, and - at the very least - committed to both acknowledging that nobody this unhinged, ignorant, and proud of both should be in charge of our lives and be clamoring that our Congresscritters be impeaching and convicting the rascal? Hell, the Emoluments Clause alone is enough to fry the dude.

That's my point here.

Not pointing out the crazy. Pointing out 1) how obvious the crazy IS, and 2) how it's not even being presented as "crazy" but as business as usual.

I don’t know about you.

But the fact that reading stuff like this isn't scaring the hell out of 99.9 percent of John Q. Public scares the living hell out of me.

Soldiering in the Dead Time

One of the odd things that I remember about the Army of the late Eighties was something called the "half-day schedule".

You see, the week between Christmas and the New Year was a dead time for the peacetime Army of that era. Other than the guys posted to places overseas that might genuinely expect some sort of trouble the CONUS outfits typically scheduled nothing for that week. My two units at Fort Bragg and the third at Ft. Kobbe in Panama went to a training schedule that stopped at midday.

So everybody got out for PT in the morning, did some sort of minor housekeeping chores (this was a very popular time for knocking out the bullshit classes required by DoD or DA - accident prevention training, driver training, PMCS...whatever, if it could be done in four hours it was done), and then knocked off in the afternoon. The single guys played football or watched television or just hung out in the barracks, the married guys went home to the Issue Spouse and kiddos.

In a lot of outfits the single guys took all the holiday duties so the married guys could spend time with their families. Here I am at two in the morning pulling HHC CQ during that week. You can tell how thrilled I was to be there and be awake at that moment.

I suspect, like many of the "traditions" of that time the old half-days of Dead Time are long gone. We're a "warrior" Army now and I suspect that warriors are not encouraged to laze about the barracks watching "He-Man" cartoons.

But I'll bet that this week still has that strange, drifting, almost-vacant feeling that we shared during dead time. The sense that the old year had passed away but the new one had not begun; a hollow time, a sort of military Zappadan during which the guys (and girls) have waaaayyyy too much time to think about things done and undone and regret them both.

What made me think of this was coming across the news from Afghanistan and realizing with a nasty start how We the People have allowed our news sources to consign the guys and gals there to Dead Time.

While those of us Stateside civilians enjoy the seasonal largesse of material goods and family coziness they are still soldering on, and sometimes dying, as hidden from our sight as though they were in another world altogether.

Which ones of us know, or care, about the families and beloveds of MAJ Brent Taylor, who won't be calling his home in Salt Lake City this holiday? That received the most awful Christmas present imaginable? Would we care if we knew? Care enough to rouse ourselves from holiday torpor to so much as give their grieving so much as a thought?

How have we come to this, where we are sending young men and women to serve in the hard lands, and, when called upon, to die in our names and without so much as a whisper in our ears to remind us that they have been killed with fire and steel, gladiators for our indifferent spectation?

Last year I posted one of my favorite Heine poems that reminded me of the lonely feel of soldiering during this un-time.

Now much as I love poetry I'm nothing of a poet (if you want to suffer I will dig up some of my old efforts, but, no; some things should be whispered only down a well at midnight) but I think that this poem really needs a translator who once humped a rucksack. So here it is again; my own take on Heine's vision of the Lament of the Tower Guard. The original text is at the link above. It's well worth the read for the poet's words in the original German.

If my work - and Heine's - please you, I hope you will also take a moment to ask yourself; what is being done in your name, and by whom, in this dead time far away from your sight, and do you care enough to stand up and ask; why?


Lost LP/OP (Enfant Perdu)

Forgotten outpost in the Liberation War
I've served here faithfully these thirty years.
I fought without hope that we would win,
knowing inside that I wouldn't get home safe.

I watched both day and night; I could not sleep
like my buddies did in the hootch nearby;
(though the loud snoring of these heroes
made sure I couldn't nod off even had I wanted to).

In the night weariness would grab me,
or fear - for only idiots have no fear -
and I would sing songs and rouse myself
and them, taking my revenge.

So...there I was, my weapon in my hands
when some sneaking bastard showed his head,
and I shot him good and proper and gave his brain
a juicy dose of hot lead.

But war and justice have far different laws,
and worthless acts are often done right well;
The fuckers' shots were better than their cause,
And I was hit and fell bleeding.

The LP is overrun! With my wound draining out
I go down hard and my bros all grab a hat -
So I died, unconquered, my rifle still ready;
Only my heart was broken.

~ Heinrich Heine

Bamyan

It once was famous.  It had been a center of Buddhist learning.  There are over 3000 caves in which lived thousands of Buddhist monks and mendicants.  There are oil paintings in those caves, perhaps the oldest in the world, that predate oil painting in Europe by 600 years.  It was also a way-station for the Gautama’s missionaries on their way north to China to proselytize and spread the seeds of the Middle Path.   And it was a rest stop, a mountain oasis, for southbound merchants on the old Silk Road.   

An early American traveler described it as no longer bustling, a serene and comfortable place.  The valley, he said, is rich in grains, clover and beans.  Poplar and mulberry trees predominate.  Another traveler, US Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas, visited there in 1951.  He described it like a Shangri-La in his book ‘Beyond the High Himalayas’.  Infamous now of course because of the Taliban dynamiting the statues of Buddha, and Buddha’s wife and child in 2001.  Even though those monuments had survived the previous 12 centuries under Muslim rulers.  

Bamyan is in the news again for religious reasons.  But this time it is a different religion.  It has become a Sanctuary City for thousands of Hazara, who are predominantly Shia and not accepted as fellow Muslims by the Talibs.  They are considered apostates and are a despised ethnic group by the Pashtuns.  They have just last week fled their villages seeking safe asylum from Taliban attacks.   The Afghan National Security Forces are not able to stop these attacks.  And neither apparently can the 10- to 14000 American troops who are training and advising Afghan forces or engaging in counter-terrorism missions.  Nor can the 6000 NATO soldiers and the 26,000 military contractors that are there.  In my humble opinion there is no possible unconditional victory over the Taliban in this ‘Forever War’.  Not without the complete and continuing cooperation of Pakistan and other neighboring countries.  Which is not going to happen anytime soon, at least in Pakistan where there are powerful elements allied to the Taliban.    

I sympathize with those Hazara victims who will end up forcibly converted, or worse.  And I commiserate with those Afghani women who will again be incarcerated in the burqa and will again be denied education.  And certainly there will be revenge killings in Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, or Mazar-i-Sharif if the Talibs take over.   But what is our role?   Why does the US and NATO have to be the policeman here?  It is not in our precinct. 

My solution?  I have none.  You cannot save the country.  Keep on negotiating with the Talibs?  I don't think so, they know we are leaving and will outwait us?   We have been there for 17 years.  But the Afghan Civil War has been going on for 40 years straight since the start of the Saur Revolution in 1978.   

Perhaps allow the country to informally partition itself?  Give support and weapons to the Northern Alliance?   China has interests in the north.  They have signed contracts for developing oilfields near the Amu Darya.   And the Chinese also have a three billion investment in Afghani copper mines.  Sounds to me like this brouha is in their precinct.  Or we could stay out of the way of Iran if they send in troops to support their co-religionists in Bamyan and other parts of the Hazarajat – and also in the Persian speaking districts of Farah and Herat Provinces?   Not only stay out of their way, but perhaps actively encourage them by ending Trump’s attempted barricade of the Iranian economy?  Why not?  They provide weapons and support to Shia militias in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Yemen; and in some cases they provide IRGC Special Forces.  General Soleimani and his Qods Force should be next door in Bamian instead of on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

Photo by Alessandro Balsamo