Tag: war

6 Reasons the US Will Abandon Taiwan

The Chinese government does not appear to be impressed by the response of Taiwan President Tsai or the US government to the recent US surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, Taiwan’s regional leader Tsai Ing-wen finally made a speech on the panic on the island triggered by Afghanistan’s situation. She declared that Taiwan’s only option is to make itself stronger, more united and more determined to defend itself. Just before Tsai’s speech, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Tuesday responded to whether the US will abandon Taiwan. He said that “When it comes to Taiwan, it is a fundamentally different question in a different context” and the US’ “commitment” to Taiwan remains “as strong as it’s ever been.”

The statements of Sullivan and Tsai show the rapid collapse of the US-supported Afghan government has brought a real shock to the island. Both Washington and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities are diffident about this, and they believe it is necessary to calm the doubts.

However, the empty words of Sullivan and Tsai were predictable. They would inevitably say so, and had to say so. As to whether Taiwan will show resistance when the mainland uses force to unify the island one day, they did not offer any convincing additional information.

Will the US abandon Taiwan? Fundamentally speaking, this is a matter of time and situation, and it will not be decided by a few elites in the US and Taiwan. We believe that as long as the mainland’s strength continues to grow, and as long as it prepares fully for military struggles and has a firm will to unify, then there is no doubt the US is doomed to eventually abandon Taiwan.

The six reasons provided are convincing, perhaps even conclusive. Regardless, it is clear that there is no possibility that the USA is going to go to war to defend Taiwan from China under any circumstances. While it’s true that the US commitment to Taiwan is “as strong as it’s ever been”, all that means is that the US was never intending to defend the island in the first place. Forget Afghanistan, the US doesn’t even defend its own borders these days.

The concept of “strategic uncertainty” only works as long as the opponent is genuinely uncertain about one’s intentions. And China, correctly, is now certain that the USA won’t do anything to prevent the inevitable annexation of what China has always considered to be a rebel province. At this point, it’s more uncertain that the US troops would even fight to defend South Korea in the event of a North Korean attack.

The shock and awe of Desert Storm has long since dissipated. The monopolar world is no more. And even if it takes a decade or more for the Israel-First imperialists in the USA to admit it, this is the reality of modern geopolitics.

Of course, all of this obscures the larger issue that absolutely no one in the media presently dares to discuss. Since the US military can’t, and won’t, defend Afghanistan, since it can’t, and won’t, defend Ukraine, if it can’t, and won’t, defend Taiwan, is it still even able to defend its greatest ally, Israel? While there is no question that all the neoclowns and their pet politicians are more than willing to have it do so, it is the question of its capabilities that is the much more relevant one.

Discuss on SG.

Australian Self-Genocide

I don’t know if this is legitimate or not, but if Australians permit their evil government to force-vaccinate their children, they don’t deserve to survive.

The Australian government is going to seize 24,000 children from its citizens and place them in a stadium quarantine camp to be forcibly vaccinated. Parents will not be allowed to attend. As was reported by the Daily Expose in the United Kingdom and Red State in the United States, Australia’s Brad Hazzard, the Minister for Health and Medical Research, has told parents in a press conference that 24,000 children will be sent to a stadium to get the experimental Covid-19 vaccine, and parents will not allowed to be present. Hazzard insisted to parents that their children would be “well looked after.”

At this point, I think we can safely assume that China will annex Australia any time it wants. If Australians won’t even defend their children from being injected with an experimental gene therapy from which they can’t possibly benefit, they certainly aren’t going to offer even a modicum of resistance to the Red Army.

Apparently Australians have learned absolutely nothing about how to resist illegitimate government from the example provided by the Taliban.

UPDATE: The good news is that the Australian authorities are not actually seizing the children, just taking them with the permission of their parents to be vaccinated and indoctrinated en masse. The bad news is that two of the children are already reported to have died from adverse reactions.

Discuss on SG.

Taiwan is Nervous

And China not only knows it, it is openly mocking the fears of “the secessionists” in the aftermath of the US collapse in Afghanistan. From Global Times, the English-language Chinese newspaper that should be on your list of daily reads these days.

“Yesterday’s Saigon, today’s Afghanistan, and tomorrow’s Taiwan?” read some online posts by internet users in the island of Taiwan, implying that the so-called alliance that Taiwan has forged with the US is nothing but an empty promise that will eventually “leave the Taiwan people hurting alone.”

An Op-Ed in local Taiwan news site udn.com said that the unexpected end in Afghanistan has “shocked” US allies and partners, who have become wary of putting the safety of Taiwan in the hands of the US, as the latter may pull the same tricks played in Kabul.

The US withdrawal from Afghanistan will also have a global impact, especially weighing on its image and credibility, the Op-Ed in a Taipei-based news site said, as Washington’s strength in maintaining the global order will be challenged, and the power confrontation in the Indo-Pacific Strategy targeting China will be questioned.

“They should say the day before yesterday, Vietnam, yesterday, Taiwan and today, Afghanistan. Wasn’t the island abandoned by the US in 1979?” Chang Ching, a research fellow at the Society for Strategic Studies based in the island, told the Global Times on Monday. 

As part of its latest efforts to play the “Taiwan card” in countering China, the Biden administration recently announced it would hold a virtual Summit for Democracy, which excited the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authority of Taiwan. Since taking office in January, US President Joe Biden has taken various measures to demonstrate its deterrent against China, such as deploying military aircraft to the island, sending warships across the Taiwan Straits several times and dispatching senior officials to visit the island, blatantly playing the “Taiwan card” to ruffle China’s feathers.

However, the failure of the US in Afghanistan should serve as a warning to the secessionists in the island, who have to understand that they cannot count on Washington, as Afghanistan is not the first place where the US abandoned its allies, nor will it be the last, experts warned….

The US retreat from Afghanistan has taught the island of Taiwan an important lesson, that is, the cross-Straits relations must be resolved by Taiwan itself, as the US may choose to abandon the island at any time according to its own core interests, Chang Ya-chung, a Taipei-based political scientist and member of the Kuomintang, told the Global Times on Monday. 

Furthermore, the US has never promised to send troops if a military conflict occurs across the Taiwan Straits, and only said that it would sell weapons to Taiwan to increase its military strength, Chang noted. 

The US retreat from Afghanistan has taught the island of Taiwan an important lesson, that is, the cross-Straits relations must be resolved by Taiwan itself, as the US may choose to abandon the island at any time according to its own core interests, Chang Ya-chung, a Taipei-based political scientist and member of the Kuomintang, told the Global Times on Monday. 

GLOBAL TIMES, August 16, 2021

Translation: Cut a deal while you still can. The US military isn’t going to even try to stop us, so we will take the island whenever we decide we’re willing to pay the price.

UPDATE: With some amazingly bad judgement that is only exceeded by his astonishingly poor timing, a presumably senile US Senator appears to have just handed China a casus belli to invade Taiwan. On Twitter, of all places.

A senior US senator, also a member of US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on his social media revealed that the US has 30,000 soldiers stationed in China’s Taiwan island. Chinese experts said if this is true, it is a military invasion and occupation of China’s Taiwan and equivalent to the US declaring war on China. 

If the tweet is correct, China could immediately activate Anti-Secession Law to destroy and expel US troops in Taiwan and reunify Taiwan militarily, experts noted.

In the tweet, Senator John Cornyn listed the number of US troops stationed in South Korea, Germany, Japan, China’s Taiwan and on the African continent to show how the number of US soldiers has dwindled in Afghanistan. But in the process, Cornyn revealed the shocking news that there are 30,000 US troops in China’s Taiwan island. 

His tweet raised a wave of doubts among netizens with many commenting below his tweet: “how come the US still has troops in Taiwan,” “so the US army has a secret division in Taiwan,” “Cornyn must have mistaken the number,” and “this should have been before 1979.” 

As a senior senator from Texas, who was once a Republican Senate Majority Whip for the 114th and 115th Congresses, and now a member of US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Cornyn should be aware of the US government’s military intelligence. 

Thus, the possibility that the US is hiding 30,000 troops in China’s Taiwan island cannot be ruled out, and there is a probability the secret was accidentally spilled out by this senior US politician, Chinese observers said. As we know, the US has maintained military communications with China’s Taiwan including weapon sales and military trainings. 

GLOBAL TIMES, August 17, 2021

If there are US troops present on Taiwan island, China will crush them by force: Global Times editorial

“If that is true, the Chinese government and the Chinese people will never accept it. It is believed that China will immediately put the Anti-Secession Law into use, destroy and expel US troops in Taiwan by military means, and at the same time realize reunification by force.”

I wish I could say that even the converged gay generals in the Pentagon couldn’t possibly be that stupid. But as unlikely and as ridiculous as a secret stash of US troops on Taiwan sounds, it’s exactly the sort of Smart Boy strategery that laid the foundation for the recent Afghan debacle.

Discuss on SG.

The Scale of Humiliation

Mark Steyn observes that the astonishingly rapid victory of the Taliban may be the Imperial USA’s Suez moment and that the scale of the global humiliation is almost off the charts.

The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it. As I write, every other world network – the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, not to mention the Chinese – is broadcasting the collapse of the American regime in real time; on Fox, meanwhile, they’re talking about the spending bill and the third Covid shot and the dead Haitians …as if the totality of the defeat is such that for once it cannot be fixed into the American right’s usual consolations (“well, this positions us pretty nicely for 2022”).

On the leftie side, of course, the court eunuchs have risen as one to protect the Dementia Kid, and are working as hurriedly as the Kabul document-shredders in an effort to figure out a way to blame it all on Trump.

But don’t for a moment think this is just some rushed, bungled, memo-incinerating abandonment of the US embassy. State Department diplomats have been preparing this move all summer, under cover of a highly sophisticated deflection operation on their Kabul Twitter feed:

The month of June is recognized as (LGBTI) Pride Month. The United States respects the dignity & equality of LGBTI people & celebrates their contributions to the society. We remain committed to supporting civil rights of minorities, including LGBTI persons. #Pride2021 #PrideMonth

I do hope they’ve managed to evacuate the embassy’s LGBTQWERTY flag before the sacking commences.

America is not “too big to fail”: It’s failing by almost every metric right now. The world-record brokey-brokey-brokeness manifested by the current spending bills is only possible because the US dollar is the global currency. When that ends, we’re Weimar with smartphones. Clearly, Chairman Xi and his allies occasionally muse on the best moment to yank the dollar out from under. If you were in Beijing watching telly today, would you perhaps be considering advancing those plans?

In other words, is this not merely a humiliation but America’s Suez moment? In my bestseller After America, I recalled a long-ago conversation with the Countess of Avon (Clarissa Churchill, Winston’s niece, widow of the then prime minister Anthony Eden – and still with us at the splendid age of 101). Somewhere along the way, Lady Avon observed ruefully that the eight days of the Suez crisis in late 1956 marked the great divide between the words “British Empire” being still taken seriously and their being a sneering punchline.

The last eight days may well do the same for the term “global superpower”.

Steyn alludes to, but avoids stating, what is entirely obvious to any historically literate observer. This catastrophic defeat was the neoclowns’ war. This was not America’s failure, it was the failure of the self-styled “national security right” who flattered themselves into believing that they dictated reality with their words. Afghanistan is the neocons’ failure. It is AIPAC’s failure. Genuine Americans never wanted, supported, or endorsed the concept of an empire in the Middle East.

To quote one veteran who served in it: “My friends died for nothing. My soldiers died for nothing. I served for nothing. And the communists took over at home.”

Adolf Hitler erroneously blamed the Jews for the German defeat in WWI. He was wrong to do so because Germany never had any chance of winning that two-front war even before the USA got involved. But anyone in the future who wants to blame those whom Steyn euphemistically labels “the national security right” for the US defeats in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan will be absolutely correct. This was Bill Kristol’s war. This was Paul Wolfowitz’s war. This was Richard Perle’s war. This was David Frum’s war. This was Max Boot’s war. This was Michael Ledeen’s war. This was Jennifer Rubin’s war. This was Ben Shapiro’s war.

Did Iraq pose an immediate threat to our nation? Perhaps not. But toppling Saddam Hussein and democratizing Iraq prevent his future ascendance and end his material support for future threats globally. The same principle holds true for Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and others: Pre-emption is the chief weapon of a global empire. No one said empire was easy, but it is right and good, both for Americans and for the world.
– Benjamin Shapiro, WorldNetDaily, Aug. 11, 2005

But it was not America’s war, and no American should ever forget that. These second- and third-generation immigrants have systematically labored to destroy what was once, briefly, the greatest nation, the greatest Christian nation, on Earth. Now, imagine how much worse the situation would be today if the cursed neoclowns had gotten their way and US troops were also trapped in Iran and Syria and Pakistan and Ukraine.

But their time is passing. Their failure is inevitable. Those who corrode and corrupt their way to influence and power will never be able to hold on to their positions, because with power comes responsibility and neither corrosion nor corruption are capable of serving as a foundation for building anything but chaos and Hell on Earth.

Discuss on SG.

US Abandons Afghan Embassy

The US retreat from Kabul is rapidly proving to be even more ignominious than the famous flight from Saigon:

The US Ambassador to Afghanistan and some of his staff were seen fleeing their Kabul workplace with the stars and stripes flag Sunday, as the Pentagon increased the number of troops deployed in the region by 1,000 to 6,000.

Ambassador Ross Wilson and the flag were both seen arriving at Kabul Airport, as other Americans still in the country were ordered to shelter in place, with shots being fired at the city’s airport.

Embassy staff will be evacuated within the next 72 hours, as the Taliban makes stunning advances into the Afghan capital city, which worst-case scenarios estimated lasting at least 30 days after the US withdrew from it.

An official security alert was issued by the US government after shots were fired at the airport, sparking fears American jets could be shot down as they try to flee the country, which the Taliban have vowed to rename the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

To cite one Internet wag, we have to run away from them over there so that we don’t have to run away from them here.

Then again, the shambolic defeat of the US military in Afghanistan does lend some support for the inexplicable decision to not send troops to defend the southern border against the ongoing invasion of the nation. Perhaps the tranny generals who failed to defend the US capital from roving bands of FBI informants knew that troops would be equally worthless there.

The Imperial USA has not yet been destroyed, but this marks another step toward its eventual collapse. The nations are rising.

Only 1.85 million people in a nation of 36 million bothered to vote in the last Afghan election. The Afghans knew they were being ruled by an illegitimate foreign government.

Just like Americans.

Discuss on SG.

Kabul Has Fallen

The Taliban have already entered the capital city of Afghanistan, months earlier than expected:

This is the moment US diplomats are seen being evacuated from Kabul just hours before Taliban forces stormed the Afghan capital.

In a stark scene mirroring that of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war, a US Air Force helicopter was seen taking off from the US Embassy earlier today.

The Chinook helicopter was seen taking to the skies above the city – just like in 1975 when a US Marine helicopter was seen evacuating embassy staff from Vietnamese capital.

Smoke was also seen rising from near to the US embassy earlier today as security staff work to burn any important documents, including CIA information, or material that could be used ‘in propaganda efforts’. The US flag is soon expected to be lowered, signalling the official closure of the embassy.

It comes as the US steps up its evacuation of Kabul with Taliban fighters quickly moving in ‘from all sides’. Shots were heard on the outskirts of the capital earlier today, much earlier than first anticipated, before fighters poured into the city.

US Intelligence officials had expected Kabul to hold out for three months, while UK ministers were hoping they had until the end of the month.

Leaders of the extremist group have today demanded the Afghan government surrender the city to them in a bid to avoid bloodshed – adding the chilling warning ‘we’ve not declared a ceasefire’.

As many as 10,000 US citizens are being evacuated from the city. Around 3,000 US troops are being sent to aid the mission.

Meanwhile, Special Forces units are joining 600 British troops from the 16 Air Assault Brigade, including 150 Paratroopers, to begin airlifting more than 500 British Government employees out of Kabul.

It is believed that by Saturday night that the number of UK officials still in Afghanistan had been reduced to the ‘low tens’ – including ambassador Sir Laurie Bristow.

The UK Government says it aims to get British ambassador Sir Laurie and his remaining embassy staff out by Sunday night – amid fears the Taliban could seize Kabul airport within days.

Russia meanwhile today confirmed it did not intend to evacuate its embassy staff in Kabul.

This is a disaster and a national humiliation, but it is one that was both inevitable and obvious, predicted by me and by many others, for nearly two decades. And Russia has no need to evacuate its embassy staff, for unlike the USA and the United Kingdom, it is not at war with the Taliban and it has not been defeated by them.

The policy of Pax Americana enforced by our troops stationed around the world is not only a failure, it is leading to the corruption of the American military.

War is the health of the state, true, but unlike the tango, it does not require two. However, it has become clear that the neoconservative utopians in the administration do not see this undeclared and unconstitutional war as a reactive strike in self-defense, but more as a means of reshaping the global order. I expect this attempt to work about as well as Woodrow Wilson’s did in 1918.

It is not only the inevitable failure of this vision that concerns me. A military machine is a delicate creature, designed to do one thing very well—destroy the opposition. It is a well-known fact of military history that fighting troops and garrison troops are two very different things, and attempting to turn the former into the latter significantly impedes their ability to perform their primary mission.

History proves that no utopian vision, however sweeping, will ever bring a permanent peace. Let us then abandon visions of a global Pax Americana, bring our soldiers home, and only send them forth when war is necessary and declared. And when the war is won and the enemy is destroyed, bring the troops home again immediately. They deserve no less.

Bring them home from Germany, from South Korea and Italy. Bring them home from Kosovo, from Afghanistan and Kuwait, from Turkey, Spain, Iceland and Belgium. Bring them home from Panama, Portugal and Japan. Most of all, bring them home from Iraq. Now.

Our matchless soldiers have won the war—they cannot win the peace.

Bring Them Home, Worldnetdaily, February 23, 2004

UPDATE: Bagram airbase also fell to the Taliban this morning, surrendered by the Afghan troops who were defending it after the US withdrawal.

Discuss on SG.

A Rapid and Unexpected Collapse

It’s not the collapse of the US puppet regime in Afghanistan that is surprising, it’s the speed of the collapse, especially when compared to the collapse of the Soviet puppet regime there.

The 20 years of America’s and NATO’s war in Afghanistan has ended in ignominious failure – total and absolute. So, of course, did the Soviets’ war, but not quite so abruptly.

After the last Soviet troops crossed over the Friendship Bridge linking Afghanistan and Soviet Uzbekistan, the mujahideen launched a major offensive, confident that they would be able to defeat the government forces in short order. Their offensive collapsed completely. The Afghan army stood its ground and not a single major population center fell into the hands of their opponents. It was not until two years later, when the post-Soviet Russian government of Boris Yeltsin cut off funding to the Afghans that the PDPA regime finally fell.

The contrast with what has happened this past week could not be clearer. Even after the Soviets had left, the troops they had trained and equipped fought hard and successfully. Today, the troops that America and its allies trained and equipped at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars have scattered to the four winds with only the slightest effort at resistance.

But, to be fair, the problem lies not in army exercises or crates of machine guns. The current batch of Afghans have had plenty of both. They outnumber the Taliban and are better supplied. The problem is one of morale: simply put, not many of them are willing to die for their government.

The PDPA had a well-deserved reputation for corruption, incompetence, factional in-fighting, and dogmatic, counterproductive policies that alienated the Afghan people, such as its Marxist assaults on religion and private enterprise. Meanwhile, the PDPA’s opponents, the mujahideen, the Taliban’s precursor, enjoyed substantial support from the United States, including signing for the delivery of sophisticated Stinger missiles.

The fact that the Soviet-backed government put up a better fight than its contemporary counterpart can, therefore, only have one explanation: Afghans respect their current rulers even less than they respected the socialist PDPA. And that is really saying something.

The neoclowns who run US foreign policy – and increasingly domestic policy as well – operate through corruption because they are wicked and because their primary weapons are a) deception, b) access to a near-infinite supply of manufactured money and c) human weakness. And while corruption is indubitably an effective means of degrading and destroying organizations, institutions, and traditions, it is an incredibly weak foundation for building anything from buildings to nations.

This is why the servants of Satan are always defeated in the end. They can’t hold onto their gains, even when everything is under their control, because they cannot build anything that lasts.

Two years after the Soviet empire retreated from Afghanistan, the empire itself fell. If the amazingly fast collapse of the US puppet regime is a harbinger for a similar series of events, the imminent fall of Kabul would appear to suggest that the collapse of the US empire will be even more rapid, and even less expected, than the fall of its Soviet predecessor.

And while it seems to have escaped mainstream observers, I tend to doubt it is an accident that the Taliban’s massively successful offensive comes just two weeks after the Chinese foreign minister recognized the legitimacy of the Taliban’s government in Afghanistan.

Discuss on SG.

Mr. Buchanan’s Questions

In which I answer Pat Buchanan’s questions about the failed invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

The questions that need answering. Was not the attempt to transplant Madisonian democracy into the soil of the Middle and Near East a fool’s errand from the beginning?

Yes. First, the Middle East and Near East have zero interest in Madisonian democracy. Second, what the US empire has been exporting for the last 40-50 years is not “Madisonian democracy”, but rather, a foreign imperialism that wears Madisonian democracy as a skinsuit.

How many other U.S. allies field paper armies, which will collapse, if they do not have the Americans there to do the heavy lifting?

All of them except for the Japanese armed forces. Even the highly-regarded Israeli Defense Forces are a little more than a Potemkin military, whose excellent historical reputation is primarily based, as the Israeli general Moshe Dayan observed, on the feeble capabilities of their historical opponents. And the US forces are observably inferior to the current Russian and Chinese forces, and, on the basis of their failures in Afghanistan, quite possibly to Iranian forces on the ground.

Is what we have on offer — one man-one vote democracy — truly appealing in a part of the world where democracy seems to have trouble, from the Maghreb to the Middle East to Central Asia, putting down any deep roots?

Democracy no longer holds any appeal anywhere, not in the Maghreb, not in the Middle East, not in Central Asia, and not in Europe. Everyone knows it is fake and gay and literally Satanic.

Who lost America’s longest war?

The neocons who have run US foreign policy since the first Bush administration did. Americans are fortunate that the neocons were unable to enmesh the US military in Syria or Iran, or the consequences would have been even worse.

To be more precise, if the Israelis are to be believed, a small group of Jewish Boomers whose fathers were followers of Leon Trotsky did.

In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history. They believe that the right political idea entails a fusion of morality and force, human rights and grit.

Are they wrong? Have they committed an act of folly in leading Washington to Baghdad? They don’t think so. They continue to cling to their belief. They are still pretending that everything is more or less fine. That things will work out. Occasionally, though, they seem to break out in a cold sweat. This is no longer an academic exercise, one of them says, we are responsible for what is happening. The ideas we put forward are now affecting the lives of millions of people. So there are moments when you’re scared. You say, Hell, we came to help, but maybe we made a mistake.

“If America is beaten, the consequences will be catastrophic. Its deterrent capability will be weakened, its friends will abandon it and it will become insular. Extreme instability will be engendered in the Middle East.”

  • Charles Krauthammer, 2003

It is now obvious to the entire world that these neocons are evil, incompetent idiots who did, in fact, produce an epic series of historic disasters. And they should be held responsible for the catastrophic consequences they knowingly risked.

Discuss on SG.

Run, run away

To absolutely no one’s surprise who knew the first thing about The Graveyard of Empires, the US empire is in what was always the absolutely inevitable full retreat from Afghanistan.

The Taliban seized the cities of Ghazni and Herat on Thursday, in the most dramatic string of captures since launching their offensive. Taking the strategically important Ghazni increases the likelihood the Taliban could take the capital Kabul.

There is also heavy fighting in the second largest city, Kandahar.

The insurgents have moved at speed, seizing new territories almost daily, as US and other foreign troops withdraw after 20 years of military operations.

The city of Qala-I-Naw also fell to the Taliban, who now control about a third of the country’s regional cities and most of northern Afghanistan. The group’s rapid advance has dealt a crushing blow to government security forces.

Sources have told the BBC that Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, is also now in the hands of the Taliban, though this has not been confirmed.

As it happens, Kandahar has already been taken by the Taliban, while the USA and the UK prepare to stage a recreation of the retreat from Saigon in 1975.

Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar, fell into the hands of Taliban insurgents, a spokesman for the militant group and local government officials said early Friday. A local government official later confirmed to the Reuters news agency that the militants had taken the city following “heavy clashes late last night.”

Hours before the Taliban claimed control over Kandahar, the US announced plans to deploy 3,000 troops temporarily to aid the evacuation of its embassy staff. Another 1,000 US soldiers will be sent to Qatar for technical and logistical support, and some 3,500 to 4,000 will be positioned in Kuwait to deploy if needed.

“We’ve been evaluating the security situation every day to determine how best to keep those serving at the embassy safe,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price. “We expect to draw down to a core diplomatic presence in Afghanistan in the coming weeks,” he said, adding the embassy would not be closing.

Britain is also deploying some 600 soldiers to Afghanistan to help evacuate UK nationals in the country, UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said.

But the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan is just the punctuation mark. What we’re witnessing is the end of the US empire, with all the alien rulers, corrupt judges, illegitimate government, incompetent generals, foreign profiteers, and hordes of invading migrants, moral degeneracy, and declining religious faith, morale, and national confidence that customarily accompanies such events. If history is any guide, this is not going to be turned around, so it is time to stop thinking in terms of “preserving” and “conserving” and “restoring” that which is destroyed, and start thinking in terms of building anew with the benefit of the lessons learned from the decline and fall of the United States of America.

The lesson, as always, is this: sink the damn ships!

The Great Retreat begins

The Saker, more or less accurately, in my opinion, reads the tea leaves behind recent strategic actions by the United States and its armed forces:

I think that there is very strong, even if only indirect, evidence which there is some very serious in-fighting taking place in the “Biden” administration and there is also strong, but also indirect, evidence that the military posture of the United States is undergoing what might end up being a major overhaul of the US armed forces.

If true, and that is a big “if”, this is neither good news nor bad news.

But this might be big news.

Why?

Because, objectively, the current US retreat on most fronts might be the “soft landing” (transition from Empire to “normal” country) many Trump voters were hoping for. Or it might not. If it is not, this might be a chaos-induced retreat, indicating that the US state is crumbling and has to urgently “simplify” things to try to survive, thereby generating a lot of factional infighting (at least one Russian observer specialized in “US studies”, Dmitrii Drobnitskii, believes to be the case: see the original article here, and its machine translation here). Finally, the state of decay of the US state might already be so advanced that we can consider it as profoundly dysfunctional and basically collapsing/collapsed. The first option (soft landing) is unlikely, yet highly desirable. The second option (chaos-induced retreat) is more likely, but much less desirable as it is only a single step back to then make several steps forward again. The last option (profoundly dysfunctional and basically collapsing/collapsed) is, alas, the most likely, and it is also, by far, the most perilous one.

For one thing, options #2 and #3 will make US actions very unpredictable and, therefore, potentially extremely dangerous. Unpredictable chaos can also quickly morph into a major war, or even several major ones, so the potential danger here is very real (even if totally unreported in Zone A). This, in turn, means that Russia, China, Iran, the DPRK, Venezuela or Cuba all have to keep their guard up and be ready for anything, even the unthinkable (which is often what total chaos generates).

Right now, the fact that the US has initiated a “great retreat” is undeniable. But the true reasons behind it, and its implications, remain quite obscure, at least to me.

I believe it is option 3 – profoundly dysfunctional and basically collapsing – that is the explanation and my reasoning is fairly straightforward. The US military is in far worse shape than even its biggest skeptics comprehend, and these retreats, from Afghanistan to Ukraine, are taking place in order to hide the US military’s lack of capability. With the prospect of a vaccine mandate being forced on an unwilling military by an unelected commander-in-chief, the US military will be fortunate if it doesn’t fall apart faster than Creepy Joe’s eyes light up after catching sight of a child in the crowd. 

Any confrontation, with any enemy provided drones and missiles by either Russia or China, will reveal the US military to be not just a paper tiger, but a paper tiger who has been thoroughly immersed in water. At this point, I think it is more likely that we’ll wake up to find the USA being ruled by a USMC colonel and China in possession of Taiwan than for Creepy Joe’s anti-administration to engage in large-scale offensive operations outside the US borders.

It’s clear that the AIPACkers and ELOWs in the anti-administration desperately want war with Iran before they lose their influence over the US military. But it’s equally clear that the US military has no hope of winning any serious encounter with the China-Russia-Iran anti-imperial alliance. Hence the serious in-fighting presently taking place within Washington.