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I've been skimming the quarterly SIGAR report on the Afghan occupation and it is full of lol worthy details:quote:The U.S. government was ill-prepared to conduct security-sector assistance programs of the size and scope required in Afghanistan, whose population is about 70% illiterate and largely unskilled in technology. In particular, the U.S. government lacks a deployable police-development capability for high-threat environments, so training of more than 100,000 Afghan police has been performed by a variety of U.S. Army aviators, infantry officers, and civilian contractors. The only ministerial advisory training program is designed solely for civilians, but in Afghanistan mostly untrained military officers are conducting that mission. One U.S. officer watched TV shows like Cops and NCIS to learn what he should teach. In eastern Afghanistan, SIGAR met a U.S. Army helicopter pilot assigned to teach policing. Afghan police training has suffered because of this misalignment of U.S. advisors. They've also stopped reporting deaths and desertions in the Afghan security forces. Not a good sign.
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Nov 6, 2017 20:31
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Aurubin posted:How ineffectual is the rest of the royal family that a that a prince like MBS managed to secure power? Well for reference one of the Princes just arrested, Alwaleed bin Talal, once called a Forbes Magazine editor in tears to complain that they were underreporting how rich he was on their annual billionaires list.
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Nov 6, 2017 23:46
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Saladin Rising posted:He hasn't stopped, if anything it's getting worse. I I just remembered when Trump when bankrupt in the 1990s he had to sell his prized super-yacht to Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal at a loss. 100% he's been resentful ever since and is definitely gloating about the Prince's just come-upance to anyone within earshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_5KR
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Nov 7, 2017 03:25
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Al-Saqr posted:2. try being a decent human being and not a total retard, be for democracy, freedom and human rights rather than arbitrarily picking one group of murderers and oppressors over another. Remember this is Grouchio you are talking to, his whole gimmick is being incredibly retarded and masturbating furiously over the most violent and vicious American interventions he can conceive. His ideal ideal foreign policy would be to back Contra style killers everywhere on earth without any regard for the lives lost or misery inflicted or blowback incurred. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 8, 2017 19:51
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Sad recent story from Libya http://www.newsweek.com/comic-con-event-attacked-islamic-paramilitary-libya-702614 quote:
I remember feeling rather  when they held this event last year, it was just a small little blip of freedom and self actualization in the mess that is modern Libya. Pretty sad to see how little freedom the people of Libya have wound up with.
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Nov 10, 2017 19:47
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My main question is: if Saudi or Israel were to launch a campaign against Hezbollah, what would be the objective? Israel could conceivably conduct a limited campaign to destroy Hezbollah rocket caches and positions along the southern border of Lebanon and Syria. However without new political constraints Hezbollah can just replace that material, especially with the strengthened ties between Iraq, Syria and Iran. I have no idea what Saudi Arabia could achieve with any kind of military campaign.
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Nov 11, 2017 04:39
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This whole Hariri business has me really stumped. I'm not convinced Israel will do anything, and I'm convinced even the most incompetent Saudi strategist couldn't come up with a reason to attack Hezbollah militarily. Whether Hariri was forced or bribed into resigning, there has to be some kind of political strategy at play. What it is I can't figure out, possibly it makes no sense anyway.
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Nov 11, 2017 05:32
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Just seeing the kind of disaster MBS was so ready to jump into in Yemen makes it obvious any theories regarding Saudi foreign policy strategy assuming long-term planning or coherent and consistent objectives beyond the fleeting whims of a tyrant can be discarded. icantfindaname is right, this is just flailing.
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Nov 13, 2017 05:28
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American bombing campaigns have dramatically increased in scope since 2016 outside of Syria and Iraq.  Good thing Obama declared an end to the war on terror. Whew, another quagmire averted!
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Nov 16, 2017 03:12
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Volkerball posted:For context, from the midway point of 2016 to now, there's been 14,000 strikes in Syria and Iraq. We're talking fractions of a percent of that in Yemen and Somalia, so I would hardly throw around the word quagmire when it comes to them. I disagree. These are conflicts the United States has been stuck in for over a decade and for which there is no conceivable exit plan or even realistic end goal. The small size just makes them easier for the public to forget.
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Nov 16, 2017 15:17
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Bates posted:They could just stop bombing things. Seems like a very conceivable exit plan. Involvement is much deeper than just the bombing campaign, especially in Somalia. Anyway, asking why doesn't the US just stop bombing Yemen is like asking why doesn't the US pull out of Afghanistan. It's not that the US couldn't, but if it did, the immediate result would make US politicians look really bad. Likewise doing anything that might change the situation favorably for the US would be so expensive it would also be an incredible political liability, as well as the opportunity cost probably vastly exceeding the benefits. Much easier political to contribute the minimum bombs/guns/soldiers necessary to just keep chaos continuing indefinitely. Anyway in other news the Afghan opium crop had another record busting year. http://www.businessinsider.com/opium-production-afghanistan-sets-record-2017-11 quote:Afghanistan's area under opium-poppy cultivation has increased 63% since 2016, rising to 810,505 acres, while its potential opium production increased 87% to an estimated 9,000 tons — both records for the country despite years of anti-narcotics efforts. When trying to understand a civil war like Afghanistan I try to identify factors that can function as feedback loops that positively or negatively effect the course of a conflict. The Afghan government has conceded control of the country side, and coalition allies have even drawn up strategic plans based around the principle of securing urban populations. However in Afghanistan wealth much of the wealth is still derived from the land-the more rural territory the Taliban occupy, the more heroin they can sell, and the more money they have to hire more men to seize more land and sell more heroin, etc. This is a virtuous cycle that strengthens the Taliban and weakens the government. Record smashing opium crops are terrible news for the government any way you slice it.
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Nov 17, 2017 01:19
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Volkerball posted:Pretty sure they could just stop bombing Somalia tomorrow without saying a word to anyone and like two people would notice. They can afford to be patient, and make opportunistic strikes while waiting to see what the future holds for the political environment there. I've not seen many reports of civilian casualties from these strikes, al-Shabaab has massacred God knows how many people, and the strikes and raids seem to be hitting their target. So what makes this issue so pressing to deal with? Do you have a better idea for how to fight jihadists in MENA? Is it just an ideological pillar of yours that says bombing terrorists only empowers chaos? If so, how does Rojava and the intervention against ISIS fit into your view? I would say that America's global anti-terror operations have in many places produced blow-back far exceeding whatever potential they ever had to protect American lives and interests. These actions have proved broadly ineffective at accomplishing their stated aims but are enormously expensive, and should be canceled purely for practical reasons, even putting aside issues of morality and principle. Of course I feel this is unlikely because the public wants leaders to "bomb the poo poo" out of someone, and they are less concerned about whether doing accomplishes anything beyond a sense of extracting vengence. In Somalia prior to 2004 there was no organized jihadist movement. However there were small informal social networks of veterans of the Afghan war, as well as probably less than a dozen Al Qaeda affiliates who had assisted in the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi. Following 9/11, the US initiated what in Somalia is known as the "Shadow War," in which warlords were offered weapons and millions of dollars to assist in killing or capturing associates of Al Qaeda. This operation was a disaster. Flush with cash and guns, the warlords reignited the civil war in Mogadishu. To defend themselves, the Afghan veterans closed ranks around the Al Qaeda members and formed the organization that would become Al Shabaab. The thuggish antics of the warlords alienated the Somali public, who turned instead to the Islamic Courts Union, a political movement that integrated the growing jihadist network into new Islamist state powerful enough to control all of southern Somalia. Now instead of a few dozen conspirators, there were thousands. As part of the effort to counter this movement the US backed the Ethiopian invasion that unseated the ICU, funded, trained, transported, and equipped the African Union peackeeping force that replaced the Ethiopians, and sponsored the Somali Federal puppet government which mostly exists to siphon UN money into the Dubai real estate market. The ICU wasn't a perfect government by any measure, however it was Somalia's last best chance to end the civil war and bring peace to southern Somalia. The invasions destroyed any hope of peace, and the elements of the ICU that survived the invasion reformed into Al Shabaab, adopting whole heartedly the radical jihadist program of Al Qaeda. Now fighting an international occupying force, Al Shabaab sought to strike back directly at its attackers, and adopted the tactics of international terrorist attacks against civilians. There is today no prospect of defeating Al Shabaab militarily in the near future, and our allies in the region are by any measure just as monstrously brutal in their behavior as Al Shabaab, they just aren't Islamists as well. One example I like to bring up of the measure of our allies in the region is the former President of Galmudug province, who was arrested in Sweden on charges of genocide for ordering a mass execution including children. He managed to escape because the film of the event was too blurry to identify him. From the beginning of US counter-terror operations we went from a small informal network with less than a dozen people who had participated in terrorist attacks against the US, to a massive trans-national terror network that would probably become a government if foreign support was pulled from its rivals in Mogadishu. I am convinced US policy made this situation worse, and not better. Sometimes so called counter-terror experts will make the point that though US policy in places like Yemen have obviously failed to destroy jihadist organizations continuing the present policy can serve to keep them "disrupted," hampering their organizational capacity to threaten the US. I find this argument. . . plausible. HOWEVER, it has costs. Drone bombing was immensely unpopular in Yemen, and contributed to anti-American sentiment. The Houthi slogan was considered subversive by Saleh because it was viewed as a criticism of his assistance to American policy. Patience did not prove amenable to American efforts in Yemen. See, American policy makers thought they could just keep plinking away at Al Qaeda forever, but then Hadi's government was overthrown and American counter-terror operations had to flee the country with him. Now AQAP has ballooned in terms of membership from probably several hundred in 2010, to over 4,000 as of 2015 and probably even more today. The evidence of success here is minimal. Maybe policy has succeeded in disrupting international networks and operations. However it has failed at destroying local affiliates, despite enormous money and effort. Money better spent on more productive endeavors elsewhere. Further I believe the occupations of Afghanistan and Somalia suffer the same fundamental flaws as the occupation of Iraq, and hence probably cannot succeed either, at least in the foreseeable future. Defeating Al Qaeda in Yemen is utterly hopeless as long as the Saudi Coalition continues flailing about that poor country.
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Nov 18, 2017 04:10
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Duckbox posted:Yeah this. I don't think it was ever possible for the US to have prevented Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf from interfering in the Syrian Civil War. Just stopping private Gulf donors from funding Al Qaeda was difficult enough. Turkey was always going to try and divide the rebels from the PYD, and all the American money in the world couldn't guarantee Syrian rebels would behave as good little western liberal proxies and not engage in a little ethnic cleansing or create a new dictatorship following a victory over Assad.
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Nov 23, 2017 06:39
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Duckbox posted:At the start of the revolution, the PYD was far from the only group in Rojava and their relationship with the FSA didn't go to poo poo until Turkey started getting more involved. Obviously we can't prove a counterfactual and I opposed US intervention at the time (still do, mostly), but if Assad had been ousted in the first year of the civil war, the factional map would have been unrecognizable. It took time for the regional powers to really start digging their hooks into Syria and that, more than anything, is what pulled the revolution into a dozen different directions. The fact is even with all the knowledge of hindsight it is very difficult to say how things would have turned out in alternative circumstances. The best we can do is make broad assumptions about the motivations and capabilities of actors at a given moment, but even those quickly breakdown following small divergences from actual history. Anyone who thinks they know what would have been in the long term in another world is a fool or liar.
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Nov 23, 2017 18:14
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Al-Saqr posted:Dubai police chief 'Crazy Dhahi' calls for aljazeera to be bombed How much of the Gulf spat is just about Al Jazeera? Reading articles like the following, I can see why the thin skinned Arab monarchs are so pissed. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/10/verge-splitting-yemen-171020063508888.html quote:After a tumultuous marriage of more than 27 years, South Yemen appears to be edging closer to divorcing the north in a move politically and financially sponsored by the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE). It's a good article. . . but I can't help but feel it was written expressly to piss off the UAE. I find it difficult to interpret this kind of media and what kind of bias and narrative is present.
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Nov 26, 2017 02:00
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OhFunny posted:After reading the article it seems to me they want a South Yemen as a bulwark against the Houthis-controlled north. The Saudis are against the idea. Yes, although I'd be careful about reading too far into it. The framing of the article appears designed exaggerate UAE support for secessionism and to make the gulf between Saudi and the UAE appear as great and acrimonious as possible. Aden was a hotbed of anti-Sana'a sentiment long before the current war, and the coalition turned to pro-secession militias from the very beginning of the intervention simply because there were few other friendly factions in the country. Not that petty infighting and disorder would be surprising among the anti-Houthi coalition, but I don't really trust this presentation.
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Nov 26, 2017 07:15
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guidoanselmi posted:Well, yes, it's DM so take it as you will. I respect folks enough ITT to keep the source in mind without a disclaimer. (*Fun fact: I was personally reported on in DM who made up some minor facts about the story for the sake of narrative. Last I checked, a note to the editor didn't change the article - so, yes, I'm personally aware.) The gently caress? Is that actually an editorial or was it just an opinion piece? Over the past couple years I’ve realized it’s actually really cheap for foreign autocrats to buy several inches of column in big American papers. I was reading some dreck by a US Congresswoman not long ago that could have come straight from Turkey’s foreign office. Saudi has so many stooges inside the beltway it’s ridiculous.
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Nov 27, 2017 00:42
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tekz posted:Never heard of this paper, is it reputable? Rather than first asking whether an author is reputable or not, try to read critically. I know its hard to think all the way back to high school English class, but don't let yourself passively absorb a piece's narrative, rather interrogate the article mercilessly. If I tried to tell you here that China was going to deploy troops to Syria, wouldn't you want to ask me "How do you know?" So do the same for middleeastmonitor. Starting from the first line: "China is planning to send troops to Syria to aid President Bashar Al-Assad’s forces, according to the New Khaleej." Hmm. . . Okay so there wasn't any original reporting here, it's just a reprint from another paper. Where did they get their information though? "According to informed sources," oh an anonymous source who it hasn't even been suggested is in the Chinese government or any other place where they might have access to this information. The article is simply rumor and hence of little interest. Squalid fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Nov 29, 2017 |
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Nov 29, 2017 02:17
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Warbadger posted:You have no idea how much Russia has spent on Syria. As far as strategic objectives - you are looking at the ongoing humanitarian disaster, civil war, and largely devastated country of Syria and claiming MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. I know you don't understand why this is a stupid thing for you say, but it is. Stopping the humanitarian disaster was probably not one of Russia's strategic objectives. I'm not sure why you can't see this. Their core objective was retaining a Russia friendly government and by all appearances they have succeed. Your trivial moralizing has little relevance to this circumstance. Bates posted:In terms of strategic objectives the difference is the US somewhat failed to expand its sphere while Russia somewhat salvaged some of its. If avoiding the worst possible outcome is a strategic objective then Russia has succeeded but that's not a very high bar. This is more-or-less my opinion. Although I think it is worth pointing out the central objective of American policy in Syria for at least the last three years has been the defeat of ISIS and removing the Assad regime always came in second to countering the threat of Islamic extremism. One can argue whether this policy was wise or not but I'm not sure how one could disagree. The only point Bates with which I disagree is that America has lost nothing in Afghanistan. America is still paying a great deal for those mistakes.
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Nov 29, 2017 06:53
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Retarded Goatee posted:The amount of unsavory FSA-factions with an obvous salafi agenda that the Americans have funded kinda ruins this narrative. Yes well it was sometimes a fine balancing act between the competing objectives. The United States liked these groups so little they literally tried to create their own moderate rebel factions from scratch and spent hundreds of millions of dollars training and organizing them. Americas main service to these groups was turning a blind eye as the gulf funded them. Actors usually have multiple motivations. Some get priorities over others, and America’s priorities in this conflict have been clear: counter al qaeda/isis and contain Iran in that order. I guess there have also been some efforts at protecting human rights and liberalizing markets or w/e.
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Nov 29, 2017 08:41
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Mans posted:The reason why Syria is so bloody is because the US and Saudi Arabia pumped, directly and indirectly, so much manpower, weapons and supplies Syria has almost certainly been bloodier than it would have been otherwise because many actors pumped resources into the conflict. Whether you think doing so was moral or the optimal strategic decision for the US, Russia, Iran, or jihadis is irrelevant. Or at least this is the general opinion of the Rand corporation on the impact of foreign aid to the participants of civil conflicts. It conforms with common sense in the Syrian instance as well especially if you believe the Syrian government was about to crumble prior to the Russian intervention.
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Nov 29, 2017 22:57
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Mans posted:Who the gently caress is saying I support Assad? I loving despise the regime. Oh? So I take it you are opposed to US aid to the SDF? That won’t be a very popular opinion itt.
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Nov 30, 2017 19:19
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I have a hard time seeing this mean much in the long term, just as I see little of consequence changing in the relationship between the US and Turkey. Ultimately Russia just can't offer Egypt or Turkey the kinds of things the United States can. For example anyone hear about Filipino Rodrigo Duterte complaining about the U.S. lately? He shut-up pretty fast after he realized the U.S. was the only state capable of providing the kind of high-quality intelligence needed to drive IS out of the city of Marawi. Turkey's position will naturally foster tension between them and Russia. Meanwhile Egypt might flirt with Russia but Russia will never be able to afford the kind of bribes the Egyptian generals extract from America. Even Nasser's romance with the Soviets was ultimately short lived, only really lasting from the Suez crisis to the 1974 peace accord with Israel.
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Dec 1, 2017 07:14
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Yemen is hard to discuss because the war is so unbelievably stupid and cruel no one could possibly have anything to say in defense of the Saudis. Even the most strident anti-Iran hawks would rather just stay silent. Perpetuating the conflict now serves everyone's interests. Iran gets to bleed Saudi, MBS can put looking like a moron during the inevitable withdrawal off a little longer, American neocons get to poke the Iranian menace, and the rest of the world has been bribed by the Saudis into silence. I don't know how long the Coalition is going to keep up this farce. Maybe they're waiting for some kind of face saving gesture by the Houthi, or maybe they're trying to position Aden for effective independence, maybe they just need to keep the distraction going until MBS can succeed to the throne.
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Dec 2, 2017 06:01
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Welp maybe I spoke too soon when I dismissed any hope of victory for the coalition. There's been noise for sometime now about tension between Saleh and the Houthi, the country's politics is so darn opaque it's hard to get a handle on what's happening on the ground. A deal with Saleh might be just what the Saudis need to declare victory and get out. Every faction in Yemen is just so unsympathetic. Whatever happens the people lose.
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Dec 2, 2017 22:20
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Svartvit posted:If you're truly into Yemen analysis, try reading the South Yemen Republic magazines and figure out how Saleh is planning to mess Aden up. I used to try reading the occasional article from Yemeni publications to follow the war. I got kind of tired because it's always "yesterday government forces killed one billion Saudi mercenaries," and it's just like wut, at least make the propaganda plausible. Anyway is there any specific outlet you had in mind? No western sources ever cover the kind of personal or clan politics that are actually useful for understanding a conflict like Yemen.
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Dec 3, 2017 02:38
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Grouchio posted:Why the hell did the British split Yemen in the first place? What gave you the impression that they split the country in the first place? Instead of coming here with tedious and trivial questions have you should consider glancing at a wikipedia page first. Yemen is one of those countries that seems to function like a pit trap for over ambitious empires, much like Afghanistan.
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Dec 3, 2017 04:39
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RIP Saleh. One can only dance on the heads of snakes so long before being bit.
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Dec 4, 2017 15:53
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[quote="“Count Roland”" post="“479003303”"] Ah you saw Scahill’s tweet as well. [/quote] I don’t use Twitter. That is a take on s famous quote by Saleh on how he retained power for so long, there’s even a book titled ‘dancing on the heads of snakes’. The metaphor is too apt not go use.
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Dec 4, 2017 16:06
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[quote="“Count Roland”" post="“479003697”"] Ah yeah I just saw it used elsewhere too, Scahill was just the first I saw use it. Anyway, Al Jazeera has good coverage going of this, both what’s happening now and retrospectives on Saleh. What happens to his followers now? I don’t really know who they are or what holds them together. Can another leader come in an take Saleh’s place? [/quote] Honestly I doubt anyone could answer these questions with any confidence.
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Dec 4, 2017 16:50
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Sinteres posted:Hello mission creep. I'm a little surprised Iraq hasn't threatened to cut our supply line yet, but I guess more or less staying out of their internal squabble with the Iraqi Kurds probably bought us some time. The Jerusalem announcement would seem to increase the incentive for a militia group in Iraq to take an opportunistic shot though. Yeah I'm sure the Pentagon would happily keep troops in Syria indefinitely, just like they would have been happy to keep troops in Iraq after 2011. Just as in that case though I suspect it won't be the Pentagon that will get to make that call. America has a lot of allies and competing interests to juggle in the region and Iraq and Turkey could really mess with this deployment.
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Dec 9, 2017 01:52
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Sinteres posted:Super cool of Turkey to provide refuge to a rapist. Just looked him up, and his forces seem to have suffocated 2000 Taliban prisoners early in the war too--great guy! Turkey has done much more than provide Dostum refuge. He’s been their man in Kabul for a long time, probably got money and arms from them in the civil war, and I read an editorial by a US Congresswoman that was really pro Dostum I suspect due to the influence of Turkish lobbying.
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Dec 14, 2017 23:24
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[quote="“Count Roland”" post="“479353954”"] They exiled loving Dostum? That guy is a real piece of work. He’s worked for every side, betrayed every side. He’s been sitting in government only because he’s a powerful warlord and too dangerous not to have on-side. [/quote] He’s been in in exile for over a year now after he raped a district governor. This is actually the second time he has gone into exile for raping one of his ostensible subordinates.
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Dec 14, 2017 23:43
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svenkatesh posted:Does Pakistan qualify for this thread? I put little stock in rhetoric. The US has long complained about Pakistan but has rarely taken any action that could potentially force them to change their policy. Although aid to Pakistan has been declining since Obama's surge, I'm not sure if that actually represents punishment for the tacit(?) support for the Taliban or is just a reflection of the general decrease in American resources devoted to the Afghan war. edit: i also find it difficult to draw much meaning from shifting rhetoric in the Trump era. The Trump adminstration handles public statements and rhetoric much differently than past administrations so dramatic shifts in language can't necessarily be taken as reflecting a meaningful shift in policy. Remember the incident earlier this year where China got Sec of State Rex Tillerson to say the world should be more considerate of Chinese feelings. This is the kind of language the Chinese government pushes in their diplomacy and China watchers treated it as a minor coup for mainland China. . . but it didn't actually mean poo poo because Trump and Tillerson didn't know or care at all about the nuances of diplomatic signalling. They've acculturated a bit into the norms of international diplomacy since but there's still a major element of reading into the tea-leaves with this kind of statement. Squalid fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Dec 16, 2017 |
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Dec 16, 2017 05:01
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Thug Lessons posted:It looks like they just slashed his throat. Which is an insanely normal thing to do to prisoners of war, basically anyone would do it. I mean yeah it pretty much is in this conflict. This is not a defense of anything btw, I have no interest in the insane moral olympics some people here like to compete in. I prefer not to take the side of any of the thugs in this conflict.
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Dec 27, 2017 06:02
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Brother Friendship posted:Consider me in the same group as Saudi Arabia in that I have no clue how they're going to end this war. Military victory is off the table due to its terrain and a lack of commitment by the Saudi's to send in decisive numbers of their own soldiers (are they waiting for the US to get involved?), without seizing most of the territory under Houthi control they can't starve them into submission and the Houthi's have no reason to negotiate or give in for the same reason the Taliban is still fighting the United States almost twenty years after our invasion of Afghanistan. Iran has committed relatively little to the Houthis and yet have ensnared the Saudi's in a quagmire that they can neither escape from nor break without ramifications that the Saudi's seem unwilling to commit to and so we have the perpetuation of this opaque conflict that is, by and large, out of sight and out of mind. A good post, though I can't resist a bit of nit-picking. Firstly "Iran. . . [has] ensnared the Saudi's in a quagmire" is a terrible way to frame the conflict. Iran does not control the Houthi anymore than the US controls the Syrian rebel opposition, or Jordan or Saudi Arabia. There's not much information on Iran's position towards the Houthi's original coup d'etat against Hadi but the analysts I've read suggested Iran probably disapproved of the operation. Presumably because they foresaw the chaos that came of it. Probably the war would be not much different even without the aid provided by Iran, although that is difficult to judge. Don't strip agency from the players in these conflicts. Saudi Arabia and the Houthis got themselves into this mess all by themselves. To comment on how Saudi Arabia thought it could end the war successfully, I suspect there was literally no serious planning at all. Which is kind of shocking looked at from the perspective of Western Europe or North America, where militaries have legions of professional staff who write contingencies for just about everything, and states have professional bureaucrats prepared to implement complicated schemes. For example before WWI the German General Staff literally planned the movements of every single unit of the German army for an advance into France years before the war ever occurred. However for example during Iraq's invasion of Iran there was virtually no plan at all after the first several days, just a few general operational goals like threaten Tehran which were probably completely unrealistic. Saddam was too suspicious of his generals even to permit them to do serious planning, as it presented opportunities to threaten his rule. There was no real preparation for serious resistance, the expectation was just that the Iranian regime would collapse. So knowing the way this kind of dictatorial regime operates, if I ask "should I assume there is a serious strategy at work here?" I can say no. There's no reason to give the Saudis the benefit of the doubt. This all probably just vanity and wishful thinking. Much like everything MBS has attempted lately.
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Dec 30, 2017 01:33
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Xerxes17 posted:MBS must be Grouchio then. lmao, you're making me suspicious. This explains SO MUCH Brother Friendship posted:The trick is never to admit the fight against ISIS is "complete" Honestly I have a hard time imagining anything but a hard future for the The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. I agree that helping them was the correct decision but where do they go from here? If the US ever really exits they will be exposed to the same kind of coordinated air attacks that have proved so effective in this conflict. As that someone else was saying recently, there's no reason to assume US support will be enduring, especially with our Special forces already stretched thin. If Afghanistan really heats up again next spring they may be redeployed as a matter of necessity. Economically Rojava remains deeply precarious. So far as I'm aware Arab support remains shallow and could easily turn against the PYD or at least decline to actively support future conflicts with the regime or Turkey. None of this may matter this year or next, but what about five years from now?
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Dec 30, 2017 20:22
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Al-Saqr posted:Hey guys, I'm taking a break away from the forum to take care of other things in my life, I'll probably be back in a couple of weeks but with the Iranian protests happening I just want to give my 2 cents:- This is more-or-less what I have been thinking. Though even if a protest doesn't bring down the government that doesn't mean it won't have an impact! It is odd seeing the contrast between this thread and the Iran protest thread in c-spam. Here everyone is hyped, there they have immediately dismissed the protests and mocked it all as a CIA plot. Funny how radically our perception can diverge. I sometimes wonder if we are all just hopelessly blinded by our prejudices and assumptions.
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Dec 31, 2017 08:07
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Volkerball posted:https://twitter.com/KurdistanHRN/status/947489498589487105 Azeris are also being reported as heavily represented in protests. With large demonstrations occurring in cities dominated by this Turkish peaking minority such as Tabriz and Ormia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5_N0eHa0PA
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Dec 31, 2017 20:02
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Human Grand Prix posted:The Syrian Army did not have any tanks that could be considered modern at that time. The aircraft and pilots that they were losing were far from decent - Mig-21s and Mig-23s and whatever lovely Sukhoi Fitter variants they were flying would be mediocre by 1980s Standards, much less now. They keep their modern planes (Mig-29s) near Damacus and in Latakia I think you are exaggerating the security of the regime in 2015 or at least people’s impressions of its security at the time. There are many articles from the time in which the authors say that it looks like it’s going to collapse or at least continue to retreat. Too easy with hindsight to say everything would turn out as it did.
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Jan 4, 2018 17:31
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