The greatest humiliation in US history

The bolder fringes of the punditocracy are drawing parallels between Saigon 1975 and Kabul 2021. Change up the background a bit, and helicopters departing the embassy roof looks like Kabul is turning out just as bad as Saigon.

They're wrong.

It's way worse than that.

America's technology advantage 75 years ago was awesome enough, but nothing near what it was in Afghanistan. 

The Viet Cong had semi-peer benefactors, Russia and China.

The Talibs have basically one benefactor, from the "shit-hole" part of the map; Pakistan.

And yet, America has thrown in the towel. Conceded defeat.

Lost.

Besides... they got bigger fish to fry. The People's Liberation Army is just spoiling for a fight, and they are a super-dooper threat to the American way of life. So we gotta let bygones be bygones, and not live in the past. Afghanistan would have turned out hunky-dory if the dumb-ass Afghans had been smart enough to figure out their best interests.

The Chinese are smarter, and they will for sure shower us with rose-petals when we lead them to freedom and democracy. Human rights too.

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Western media are up a stump on these developments. Blaming Trump is becoming a bit of a shabby gambit. 

The Indispensable Nation and the City on a Hill are up the same stump. Blinken blamed the Afghan people today for "their loss of freedom."

Neither Biden or Blinken or anyone else in America's ruling class is capable of seeing this from Afghanistan's perspective. America's withdrawal and surrender is not a loss of freedom.

It is victory over a foreign invader.

Most explosive story in the world ignored by US media

Hot on the heels of Erdogan's announcement that Turkey is sending 5,000 troops to Qatar, comes news that Pakistan is sending a further 20,000.

Ostensibly they will be there to discourage any untoward moves by Qatar's suddenly hostile neighbours. In reality, who knows?

Maybe they're just there to ensure first dibs on the looting of Qatar as soon as they get the green light from DC? After all, if you think Donny J is unpredictable, try following Pak or Turk politics for fifteen minutes.

This is the most important story in the world at this moment. Our GCC allies are turning on one another with a vengeance, but you don't see much about it in American media because everyone is obsessed with the Comey non-story unfolding in Washington.

The clash of civilizations

Malala Yousafzai is big news these days.

She is the 14 year old "child activist" who survived a Taliban assassination attempt in Pakistan. Her crime? Speaking out for the right of girls to get an education.

That is a story guaranteed to evoke revulsion across the Western world.

Which is why I wonder about the story. I am reminded of that equally revolting story about the Iraqi troops dumping babies out of incubators in Kuwait. That was another story designed to whip the West into a righteous frenzy of vengeance.

And it worked. The American public was overwhelmingly behind the first Gulf war.

More than twenty years later, the war parties need to ramp up support for a wider war on the Taliban. Who better to raise that support than a "child activist" brought low by a Taliban bullet?

There is utterly no evidence that the Nations of Virtue or our allies in the Towelistans have the slightest compunction about snuffing the life a child, be they a teen, pre-teen, or toddler, boy or girl. In fact, there is a vast archive of evidence to prove that we are absolutely indifferent to the children at the receiving end of our projectiles of democracy and missiles of peace.

They've never been anything other than collateral damage.

But let the Taliban execute a "child activist" and suddenly the lives of children become sacrosanct. There is a medivac jet idling on a runway in Islamabad to take the victim for advanced medical care in Dubai. Headlines around the world scream about the barbarity of our Taliban adversary.

It's all a little too convenient.

I'm betting that before long Malala will have made a full recovery, thanks to the miraculous interventions of Western medicine. She will be spirited out of Pakistan and make the rounds of the talk show circuit. She will be on Good Morning America and Ellen and Oprah and Piers Morgan before she becomes a regular on the dog-and-pony show of those internationally famous child activists, the Kielburger brothers.

And by God, we'll have to do something about those primitives over there in the Pakistani tribal lands before they try to kill another 14 year old.

Leon Panetta is mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore

Enough is enough!

The endless squawking when an errant Hellfire takes out an obscure Paki village.

The pouty closing off of supply routes when Apache attack helicopters took out two dozen Paki border troops a couple of months back.

And last but not least, the bags of umbrage taken when those Navy Seals forgot to get prior permission before they dispatched the 9/11 mastermind to his reward.

So Mr. Panetta has put the towelers on notice; shape up or we take the gloves off.

America is SOOO at the end of her long-suffering patience with you people...

Drone-ageddon; we can't beat them on the ground but watch out for death from above

That's the US Army circa 2012.

Run out of Iraq.

Run out of Afghanistan.

Mocked and taunted throughout the Middle East.

But watch out for our drones.

We've definitely got drone superiority.

Those teenage gamers in charge of the video screens in Nevada can still kill with the best of them. The Pentagon was pleased to announce the latest drone scores today. We got five terrorists in Yemen and four in Pakistan. At least we think they were terrorists.

Hard to confirm.

We don't actually have the resources on the ground to go to the scene and find out.

Like all technological advantages in war this advantage won't last long. The other guys sooner or later will figure out how to defeat them.

They'll also figure out how to make their own.

It's happened with every single wartime innovation from tanks to airplanes to nuclear weapons.

Paki drones over California...

Coming soon. After all, we've set the precendent.

The Paki Problem

Lost in all the ink that's been spilled about the grave threat that the nuclear ambitions of Iran pose to civilization is the fact that the towel-heads right next door already have nuclear weapons.

Listen to the GOP presidential wannabees. They out-do one another with tales of what they gonna do if Iran doesn't open up and spread her legs. Do they ever mention Pakistan?

No!

Why do you suppose that might be? After all, towel-heads are towel-heads and nukes are nukes, are they not? Could it be that once you have nukes, ain't nobody gonna bother you?

That's why a number of high-ranking Israeli officials have opined that Iran would be insane if they weren't developing a nuclear weapon.

Pakistan is in turmoil today. Gilani and Zardari are both beholden to more stake-holders than they can count. Musharaff is threatening a come-back, or at least a coming back.

Whither Pakistan?