the thing that troubles me about the afghanistan pullout (apart from the whole "abandoning innocent women and children to be ruled by bloodthirsty sex-crazed barbarians" thing) is the fact that the empire left so many toys behind. like, why? no way that wasn't a calculated decision. no way would the empire abandon god knows how many billions of USD in (admittedly overpriced and janky) materiel without an incredibly good reason.
i have a couple of guesses. the most benign ones:
(1) it would have been more expensive to ship the materiel back overseas than just replace it (seems doubtful but i'm no military logistics analyst)
(2a) MIC cronies were salivating over the amount of new contracts they'd be able to draw up with their buddies at raytheon to replace everything (most likely reason imo)
(2b) DoD saw it as an opportunity to give themselves an excuse to upgrade (or "upgrade," judging by the f35) a bunch of old tech
(3) sheer logistical laziness and incompetence (highly doubtful, but anything is possible with the empire these days)
(4) they assumed the ANA would take over the goodies they left behind instead of the Taliban
(5) this is all absurdly costly 5D chess to force biden out so kamala can finally become the first woman to sleep her way into the oval office yaaass slay kween (i'll believe it when i see it)
the less benign explanation, which everyone seems to be assuming, is that the empire was fully aware all this equipment would fall into taliban hands and they *wanted* that to happen for some incredibly sinister reason. maybe in hopes that the taliban would fuck around and harass russia and china, but that seems retarded even by burger standards
i wonder if they left behind manuals
i have a couple of guesses. the most benign ones:
(1) it would have been more expensive to ship the materiel back overseas than just replace it (seems doubtful but i'm no military logistics analyst)
(2a) MIC cronies were salivating over the amount of new contracts they'd be able to draw up with their buddies at raytheon to replace everything (most likely reason imo)
(2b) DoD saw it as an opportunity to give themselves an excuse to upgrade (or "upgrade," judging by the f35) a bunch of old tech
(3) sheer logistical laziness and incompetence (highly doubtful, but anything is possible with the empire these days)
(4) they assumed the ANA would take over the goodies they left behind instead of the Taliban
(5) this is all absurdly costly 5D chess to force biden out so kamala can finally become the first woman to sleep her way into the oval office yaaass slay kween (i'll believe it when i see it)
the less benign explanation, which everyone seems to be assuming, is that the empire was fully aware all this equipment would fall into taliban hands and they *wanted* that to happen for some incredibly sinister reason. maybe in hopes that the taliban would fuck around and harass russia and china, but that seems retarded even by burger standards
i wonder if they left behind manuals
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bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@velartrill
> the less benign explanation, which everyone seems to be assuming, is that the empire was fully aware all this equipment would fall into taliban hands and they *wanted* that to happen for some incredibly sinister reason.
my (really) tinfoily theory is that the withdrawal from afghanistan in this way is to weaken europe.
the US really fears for their world-dominance while the EU fares (relatively) well in comparison. nothing better than generating millions of refugees to fuck up the EU who now has to decide to take them all or close their borders. either way the EU will lose.
pepe escobar wrote that leaving afghanistan was "repositioning" because we had more important uses for our resources than maintaining that particular node in the empire of bases, he didn't go into specifics tho so i'm not exactly sure what his theory is