@Cerberus Leonid Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan in spite of army experts' advice

@CowperKettle I'll believe it.

@Cerberus They shouldn't have told Biden that it would be at least weeks and probably months for the Taliban to overrun everything. He was counting on having more than a day.

@tchrist To do what?

To get people out if it started to go south.

Time to get the translators out, etc.

The Biden government shouldn't have abandoned free Afghanistan.

The timing is a detail.

Free Afghanistan abandoned free Afghanistan.

Of course the Trump government was also to blame.

@tchrist Hollow Biden rhetoric.

You can't keep fighting somebody else's civil war for them if they don't want to stick up for themselves.

Ghani and his corruption are not the free people of Afghanistan.

Perhaps not.

I think this is the important part.

I'm not sure that region of the world has a culture disposed to not having corruption. I don't know.

Merely maintaining the status quo was not that expensive.

That would require the Security Council.

@tchrist I'm not sure whether it is society or culture. But that doesn't mean the Afghani population is responsible and should bear the consequences of the deeds of Ghani and the army created by the Americans.

I don't know want "not that expensive" means when it includes deaths and severe, lasting injury.

@tchrist It did not until a few weeks ago.

@tchrist A small number of deaths, especially compared with the ones that have already fallen since the American retreat, let alone the ones to fall over the next year.

You need to run for head of NATO.

Any peace-keeping army must suffer some deaths.

To argue against any military deaths is to argue against all peace-keeping.

A trillion dollars, thousands of our lives, pouring money into the sand forever.

Forever.

They didn't want it.

Not even forever.

We were an occupying foreign force, all of us.

The free population of Afghanistan very much wanted it.

I doubt whether the invasion was a good idea.

Not enough to fight for it, apparently.

But, when it happened, America made itself responsible.

@Cerberus They seldom are.

> You break it, you bought it.

@tchrist Are the weak undeserving of protection, because they are weak?

@Cerberus So, invade Shinjang next, right?

And Tibet.

And Hong Kong.

All those places see atrocities by the powerful against the weak.

Because you are not protecting them.

It's hard to keep track of who deserves our protection and who does not.

Let alone how to effect that.

Consider Burma.

The overseas world is beset by a sea of troubles. Who will take up arms and thereby end them?

Would you send your sons to die there?

If not, then do not insist that we do so.

Unto how many generations shall the sins of the fathers be visited?

Nobody likes how that has played out.

haaretz.com/us-news/…

There was also no domestic support for us to be there.

An article on the extremely poor way in which the Americans tried to create an Afghani army.

You must have a point.

I think the large majority of funds spent were wasted.

It's all my fault. I'm very sorry. Can we please talk about anything else now?

Instead, they could have kept the Taleban at bay with a fraction of what they spent in trying to create this army.

Guess not.

Simply by using their own army, as they had done until Trump gave the order carried through by Biden.

But, yes, we shall change the subject.

> In one instance, the U.S. spent $547 million to buy and refurbish 20 G222 military transport aircraft for the Afghan Air Force. Sixteen of them were later sold as junk to Afghan scrap dealers for $40,257 because the American refurbishers delivered flawed and unsafe aircraft.

From the Haaretz article.

Yep. Quite interesting. I guess Afghan officials stole hundreds of millions and there are some nice cozy houses on the Mediterranean cost, packed with their family members.

For instance, Switzerland this year dropped a long-time investigation into embezzlement of Russian taxpayer money. I guess a lot, a lot has landed in Swiss vaults.

I'm sure.

And it was probably much, much more than mere hundreds of millions.

Botanichesky = Botanical

Sad = Garden

-chesky is the male possessive ending, turning the noun Botanika (Botany) into an adjective

Sad is derived from a verb meaning "to make something sit". To make something sit in the ground, as saplings.

Hence, cognate with English sit

Makes sense.

While in English, sad is cognate with satiety

Is it really.

The New York Times is showing 252,369 new covid cases reported today, and 1,016 new covid deaths. We really didn't want to see those numbers again! And the Washington Post is reporting that a decision has been reached by the administration to announce this week that they will start giving everyone a third shot starting 8 months after their second dose beginning about a month from now.

@Cerberus It is. I've been crying, often sobbing, for days. And I'm not even directly inflicted.

@CowperKettle The capabilities of the C-17 include rapid direct delivery of forces by airland or airdrop into difficult tactical environments. The C–17 is capable of performing both inter-theater and intra-theater airlift missions. The C-17 is the only aircraft capable of routine delivery of outsize cargo (tanks, helicopters, etc.) to short, austere airfields. Carrying a payload of 164,900 pounds, the C-17 can take off from a 7,000-foot runway, fly 2,800 miles (4,500 km), and land on small austere airfields as short as 3,000 feet. The C-17 is equipped with an externally blown flap system that allows for a steep, low-speed final approach and low-landing speeds for short-field landings.

They need to fly these in and out of Kabul as if they were airlifting Berlin.

@Xanne I agree

I wonder how many people one can load into Mriya

And It's a pity that there is only a single An-225 in existence

There are several hundred C-17s, most US but also NATO and several other countries.

The An-225 could carry several hundred people, I think.

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@Færd There are some signs that the Taleban will be more moderate this time.

Let's cling to that.

> De Amerikanen hadden wel een netwerk van administrateurs, maar dat waren special forces die met grote zakken geld van Kabul naar diverse hoofdkwartieren reden – zonder verstand van zaken. Dat het geld niet of nauwelijks bij soldaten is gekomen, is een deel van de verklaring waarom de wil tot vechten lijkt te ontbreken.

Someone who operated in Afghanistan for years says that hardly any of the money distributed by the Americans ever reached common soldiers.

They were simply not paid.

The American administrators who distributed the money were clueless of the situation in Afghanistan.

Maybe the proper approach would have been to set up a quasi-independent state within Afghanistan, and keep it democratic. Ahmad Shah Massoud famously held a whole mountain-surrounded valley independent from the Soviet forces, because in the mountains it was easy to suppress their incursions.

Set up something akin to Hong Kong, under the UN aegis.

> ... his role as a powerful insurgent leader of the Afghan mujahideen earned him the nickname "Lion of Panjshir" (شیر پنجشیر) among his followers, as he successfully resisted the Soviets from taking the Panjshir Valley.

> The valley again witnessed renewed fighting during the 1996–2001 civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance under the command of Massoud, where he again defended it from being overrun by the Taliban.[4] The Panjshir Valley was considered one of Afghanistan's safest regions during the era of the ISAF-backed government,[5] and as of August 2021 is the last anti-Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan.[6][7]

Oh, it's still one of the strongholds against the Taliban.

Interesting.

@Cerberus My sister wrote a kind of 150-page thesis in her university in Delhi about Afghanistan's role in Russia's security outlook, and I was "editing" the text from Russo-English to proper English, and got a lot of interesting stuff appearing in my mind now and then.

I was impressed by Massoud and liked him, based on what I read.

Too bad he was assassinated.

@CowperKettle What was the conclusion of her thesis?

150 pages is long!

I kinda feel like there's the bones of an interesting question here:

I can't quite figure out what though

I thought about porting it to Linguistics but I think it's too English centric

also, too malformed

it's currently a rant about people saying ass a lot

@MattE.Эллен It is also a clearly stated question: why do Americans use the word ass so frequently in ordinary speech? What function does it have in language?

@Cerberus I don't recall any kind of a radical conclusion in it. It was back in spring/summer 2014.

My impression was that "Russia has no clear-cut policy in the former -stan republics".

And it has benefitted from the US invasion, because in the runup to 2001 Russia was spending more and more to shore up the defences of Tajikistan.

It was one big headache less.

After the 9/11, there was a big discussion session of top brass military, security and Putin. They voted, and the majority voted against providing the USA any help in transporting the NATO troops into Afghanistan and back.

Putin overrulled the majority, and provided the USA with transportation help and did not make any moves to prevent the USA from establishing military bases in the -stan republics of the former USSR.

There was even one transit NATO station inside Russia itself, but the Communist Party of Russia staged protests, and the station was never used.

Putin wanted to use his influence with the NATO to set up some kind of New Yalta Agreement, under which his authoritarian rule would be respected and Russia would "influence" former USSR states.

This got especially urgent after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004.

Then he saw that no Yalta Agreement was forthcoming, and gradually started the whole anti-NATO-expansion paranoia.

Shutting down foreign ogranizations in Russia under different pretexts to counterdict their "influence".

In Yekaterinburg, there was the British Library where people could go and borrow a book in English, browse the Internet for free, and discuss different things with visiting foreigners.

It was shut down in mid-2000s

There were traincars in Yekaterinburg criss-crossed with British Union Jack and adverts saying come and borrow books etc.

It all started being suppressed after the Orange Revolution.

But very, very gradually.

And I tried to read into Russia's policy in regard to Central Asia, and basically I decided that it was a catastrophy, with zero professionals and no kind of any policy.

Russia just tried to wage influence by shutting down gas pipes and giving money, and turning pipes back on, and withholding money.

Central Asian common people were very pro-Russian, because they did not like their corrupt regimes, but Russia has failed to use this.

Even many Afghan people are pro-Russian, thankful for houses and factories built by the USSR during the occupation. And a degree of civil order maintained by Soviet troops.

My sister told me that an Afghan guy studying at the University was very pro-Russian and anti-USA.

Human beings are strange.

Novosibirsk in winter

In the Mytischi town just north of Moscow, a math teacher strangled his sister, also a teacher, to death over an argument about Donald Trump.

The Trump supporter then tried to get rid of the body and keep the police off the train by writing a plan for himself to follow, but to no avail.

@CowperKettle Sounds appropriate, somehow. Was the plan introduced into evidence?

@CowperKettle From what I read, life in Afghanistan was better under Russian rule than it has been since.

But the Russians could not hold it either.

@CowperKettle Do you know this game? store.steampowered.com/app/1138660/Black_Book

It is about Russian mythology.

It gets great reviews, I'm putting it on my watch list.

@FaheemMitha Probably yes

But the man could have invented the "Trump" story. We only have his evidence. Who knows.

@Cerberus No, I never heard of it. ))

Might be good, I hope

THey use some Russian words, like zagovor (charm; when you kind of inflict a charm on a person to make him do something)

From "govorit", to talk, to speak

And the prefix za-

The prefix "za-" imparts a perfective aspect to a verb; or imparts the transitive meaning.

Govorit = to talk

Zagovorit = to start talking;

Zagovorit [someone] = to place a charm on somebody

Nine-year-old Alisa Teplyakova failed to gain enough points to enter the prestigious Moscow State University, where she intended to study for a psychologist, free of charge.

She finished school aged 8.

Now her dad decided to pay for her education.

Had she chosen a less prestigious university, she would have gotten a state-funded course.

But MSU only takes the best, or the richest.

School graduates usually submit papers to several universities, and pick the best one that is ready to take them on.

Alisa is the Russian form of the name Alice

Well, the whole 'what do you call someone from Afghanistan?' just became a thing (it took twenty years)

@CowperKettle This looks like a lot of fun!

I look forward to playing it some day.

twitter.com/jaketapper/status/1427704804667756553

Afghanistanian and afghanian sound overly lengthy to me.

Thanks for the Twitter update.

@user178758 You're welcome!

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