What's new
Frozen in Carbonite

Welcome to FiC! Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Afghanistan's Taliban Takeover

It seems someone have left something. Mazar-e-Sharif Air Base is a site for ANA Air Force where better equipped aircraft are stored. Despite Combat Caravans and Puccaras not actually being a serious threat, modern COIN aircraft possess vital technology (avionics, communications, data-links for modern precision munitions).
Not really, all the "high tech" equipment on the birds have, have been at the hands of foreign contractors from the start. When they left, they disabled, or took important components with them, making the equipment ballast, crippling the Afghan Air Force's combat capability.

Not that again, anything the Afghan military received could be considered modern.

What about the minerals that everyone talking about?
Prediction: China will mine them, with a load of troops to guard the mines/etc. But otherwise leave the rest of the country to run itself.

Resource extraction seldom leads to local economic development.
Nah, it's just the pundits of the Beltway Blob are earning their pay trying to drum up support for redeployment (and earning more consultant contracts for their paymasters), while purposefully ignoring the inconvenient reality, like:
  • the values of the minerals they are quoting are for the final product, which ignores the cost of processing, or in Afghanistan's case, the utter lack of any infrastructure to even start to construct the mines and processing plants. And especially the more valuable minerals going to need a lot of infrastructure and resources built up and shipped in to extract into something valuable enough to worth shipping out. A lot of electricity, hazardous chemicals, parts for the machinery using the above, educated people to operate them, you name it. Their go to example is lithium, but processing lithium ore is so infrastructure heavy and expensive, that only some 8% of the annual lithium is procured this way for example.
  • Mining just raw ore and hauling it out of country for further processing runs into the problem, that Afghanistan's transport infrastructure is utterly bare. There are some railroads coming in from Tajikistan or Iran, but they often doesn't reach anything big, and terminate after a dozen or so kilometres. Riverine connections are minimal and undeveloped, and thus riverine trade is also negligent. Pretty much all you have is trucking on paved roads, if you are lucky, otherwise it's trucking on dirt roads. And transporting ore long distance is only cost effective, if you do it by ship, or by train.
  • the US left by August with only a token force in Kabul airport left, and outside of the Khornate Kaukus, and the Beltway Blobbers, everyone is just happy that it's over. Going back in would require a lot of resources and political capital to burn,, while the US has major issues at home. Never mind, that the Taliban is there in force, and re-occupation will be bloody as hell, and even more unpopular than before, and the US has even less ways to supply a major occupation than before. Never mind shipping the mined resources out at any way that's kinda cost effective.
As for China, they might invest into some resource extraction in the future, but currently they have either their own reserves, or suppliers with better security and infrastructure, so I wouldn't hold my breath until they start mining ops...
 
Last edited:
Not really, all the "high tech" equipment on the birds have, have been at the hands of foreign contractors from the start. When they left, they disabled, or took important components with them, making the equipment ballast, crippling the Afghan Air Force's combat capability.

Yes, of course. Citing SOPs is all and good but reality is always diffrent. Only in games you do not have fluid stocks.
Also the hardware is not important. Software is, access protocols, IDs and all else.
Besides they is already ruckus about PRC getting hands on the hardware. Also mind these people who took birds and flew them off to the other countries, especially north and east, and you know who's zone of influence it is and in what international organisations they are parts of.
Also regimental coffers aside and occasional family one can only think what they took with themselves. And belive me they didn't leave empty handed - you need something to barter with for new life and protection and on that level, money or ass is a currency used in cliche films. You need hard currency which are information, hardwere or software and other like that.

Also US have immidately launch bombing campaing round the clock targeting various sites, you do not do that just to burn some useless ATVs or airframes or small arms caches. Look on organisation of the retreat - it is picture of complete strategic disaster and clusterf**** that words do not even begin to describe
 
Last edited:
I would have thought Russia would have first dips on a lot of equipment really, since they have had a presence there longer than the Chinese.

Everyone have got dips on waht they wanted. If not, it means that you are doing it wrong.
Such activities are not ordered from Up, they are day to day modus operandi. What the Up can order is stepping up or down procurement effort.
 
Yes, of course. Citing SOPs is all and good but reality is always diffrent. Only in games you do not have fluid stocks.
Also the hardware is not important. Software is, access protocols, IDs and all else.
Besides they is already ruckus about PRC getting hands on the hardware. Also mind these people who took birds and flew them off to the other countries, especially north and east, and you know who's zone of influence it is and in what international organisations they are parts of.
Also regimental coffers aside and occasional family one can only think what they took with themselves. And belive me they didn't leave empty handed - you need something to barter with for new life and protection and on that level, money or ass is a currency used in cliche films. You need hard currency which are information, hardwere or software and other like that.

Also US have immidately launch bombing campaing round the clock targeting various sites, you do not do that just to burn some useless ATVs or airframes or small arms caches. Look on organisation of the retreat - it is picture of complete strategic disaster and clusterf**** that words do not even begin to describe
Software can be erased quite quickly if needed, or if you know which component it is, physically destroying the storage. And in case of things like encryption, even the software doesn't help much, if you don't have the key(s) used.

Not that again, anything the Afghan military ever received haven't been stolen from DoD or it the contractors years ago (because it turned out, that the Pentagon and the big US weapon builders still used plain text FTP to transfer to send each other highly classified documents and blueprints back in the year of 2014-16, or other still partying like 1999 computer security ...). Or that because of the corruption of the Afghan military, examples have been handed over to 'interested parties' on the sly.

As for pundits whining about evil China stealing secrets, now that the US is gearing for a new Cold War against China is normal, it doesn't have to be factual. Just like how they whined about China stealing IP to create the Harbin Z-20 from the S-70 (civilian version of the UH-60 BlackHawk), which ignores that the Chinese Navy legally bought and operated them since 1984, and the early models' documentation and parts have been widely distributed anyway for decades, and practically any patents regarding that model have been expired long ago. Never mind, that the Z-20 had bunch of improvements on the original model, from greater lift capacity to their own fly-by-wire controls.

As far as the US bombing go, I can't remember them hitting anything from the old AAF bases, as the Afghan military collapsed so fast, even with restarted US bombing, that the US ended up with a token force holdin Kabul Airport, while the Taliban held everything else, including old AAF bases, and their hardware in like a day or two. The US forces probably disabled anything in the Kabul airport just for spite, but I never seen any clear information about those either.
 
NEWS


Things are heating up in Afghanistan as ISIS is stepping up their campaing of terror amids new Afghan govenrment efforts to consilidate.
 
Can they do anything more in Europe than kill a few hundred people?
Killing a couple thousand people in the US led to them subsequently losing ten thousand lives and dozens of trillions dollars combined with a gigantic geopolitical upheaval. Just as a reminder before you continue digging yourself so deep that even Cloak&Dagger would sound like Talleyrand in comparison.
 
The initial battle, as always, was easy to win. But the Yanks never really understood the true trap of Afghanistan.

Conquering it is laughably easy..........................
What in the dammit. No post should ever include the phrase "conquering it is laughably easy" and the word "Afghanistan" simultaneously.

Ever

1632149698792.png
 
What in the dammit. No post should ever include the phrase "conquering it is laughably easy" and the word "Afghanistan" simultaneously.

Ever

View attachment 3613
Oh come on, plenty of empires had pretty great time stomping on the inhabitants of the region for over a millenia*. The stupid memery started when idiot Europeans with w bad case of White Man's Burden started to meddle with it's affairs far from any reasonable supply lines. And to prevent other Europeans doing the same for no good reason.

Besides that, the greatly irony of things, that the US' conquest was pretty easy (hard to, when it was the northern alliance, that did most of the direct fighting and bleeding), and they had sky high approval amongst the locals for kicking out the Taliban, and the expectation that they'll usher a new era of development and prosperity. Then they pissed it away in no time in multiple ways, because they didn't bother to learn how afghan politics work, which included the corrupt as fuck local warlords playing the US forces like a cheap fiddle.

* Key ingredients: hold only the cities and the major routes directly, light touch on the rural countryside, as they don't give a fuck about things outside of their region, until you piss them off.
 
No, seems to have been English AND history education.

For the sake of those whose militaries devoured their education budgets, implying that Temujin's conquest of Russia (it was Subutai, actually. He also happens to be the greatest general in history) is equivalent in any way to Afghanistan the Unremarkable Until Elphenstone is ridiculous.
 
No, seems to have been English AND history education.

For the sake of those whose militaries devoured their education budgets, implying that Temujin's conquest of Russia (it was Subutai, actually. He also happens to be the greatest general in history) is equivalent in any way to Afghanistan the Unremarkable Until Elphenstone is ridiculous.
Oh, of course, it's not equivalent because India isn't related to it. ;-)
 
Last edited:
mongol-empire-conquest-map-genghis-khan-s-death-its-greatest-extent-vector-illustration-50898993.jpg


Looks like a lot of territories that would be called part of modern day Russia to me, Vikram. Oh look, the majority of it was during Genghis' lifetime too!
 
Back
Top Bottom