Troops to leave Afghanistan by 9/11/21

[Rev. Rye]

Actually, the problem is something even more fundamental than the nature of Afghanistan: the nature of guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla groups are like the hydra; cut off the head of one and two more will come to take its place because they don’t rely on centralized leadership. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if not for the fact that literally anyone and their mums can be a member, and once the guerrillas start to look like the lesser evil to the population, your chances of victory are pretty much fucked unless you’re willing to commit genocide.

It’s not a coincidence that the only major war the US has fought and decisively won since 1945 was the first Gulf War, when we fought Saddam Hussein’s traditional Western (in terms of tactics) army. And, meanwhile, the rest of the times we’ve done it in that time, we’ve picked fights with Guerrilla forces. And despite all our military might, we got our asses handed to us. Because they can keep a fight going, and even if one group loses popularity, a new one starts to pop up. And the cycle continues because these groups still seem preferable to the Western invaders, even if they seem barbaric to us. If you’ve never watched The Battle of Algiers and you have any interest in how shit like this works, you need to stop what you’re doing and watch it right now. It’s on YouTube, it has English subtitles, it’s in Blu-ray quality, and unless you’re based out of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, or Korea, you have no excuses, and even in those cases there might be an upload that hasn’t been blocked yet:



Matthieu fundamentally misunderstands the nature of what he’s been dragged into, and any victories he may have against the FLN in the short term will fail; the FLN are the ideological grandparents of the insurgent groups we’ve been fighting nonstop since 9/11, but they’ve developed a level of legitimacy that the French forces simply don’t have and never will again. And we’ve learned shockingly little in the decades since France lost Algeria.

And once that happens, as Valkyrie said, the only options we have are pull out, keep fighting and keep failing, or commit genocide, and given how much of a cult of martyrdom has developed in Middle Eastern terrorist groups, I don’t think any half-measures (like we wound up doing with the Native Americans, i.e., keeping some of them alive) are going to cut it. And if those words terrify you, that’s only a sign you are still sane.

So, to sum up, our options boil down to something a bit less than honorable, no solution at all, and descending into total barbarism with what accounts to a Final Solution. As many drawbacks as there are to just pulling out, It’s by far the best solution available to us.