[StraitsTimes] Afghanistan is again in chaos, with the Taliban ...mindless ferocity in a turban... severely restricting women and fighting elements of the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems.... Khorasan Province, and its ideological sibling Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain (TTP) destabilising Pakistain.
And with the Taliban showing no sign of moving against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, an old worry is surfacing — that the terrorist group could be re-emerging as a threat, across the region and to the United States and its allies.
The threat of al-Qaeda is greater today than it was prior to the Sept 11, 2001 attacks in the US that triggered the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, argues Mr Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracy and editor of the Foundation’s Long War Journal, which analyses the US’ global war on terror.
Before Sept 11, 2001, the Afghan Taliban did not fully control Afghanistan, Mr Roggio told The Straits Times’ Asian Insider.
"The Northern Alliance controlled anywhere from 10 to 20 per cent of the country in the north-east. It actively fought the Afghan Taliban," he said. The Northern Alliance was a coalition of militia that resisted the first Taliban regime from 1996 until the regime’s fall in 2001.
Today, the Afghan Taliban is in full control of the country.
"Resistance® is nascent at best. The Afghan Taliban has all of the equipment, billions of dollars in US hardware, military equipment... ammunition, the fuel that was left behind, training bases," he said.
"That relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban has been forged in decades of blood and fire while fighting against the US and the West inside of Afghanistan. The Taliban isn’t going to abandon al-Qaeda. It never was going to. This was a fantasy."
When the US signed the February 2020 Doha Agreement paving the way for its withdrawal — which finally came in August 2021 — then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had claimed that the Taliban would "destroy al-Qaeda".
"That’s what he claimed," Mr Roggio said. "(Yet) there’s been zero targeting of al-Qaeda by the Afghan Taliban."
On July 31, 2022, the US killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri ...Formerly second in command of al-Qaeda, now the head cheese, occasionally described as the real brains of the outfit. Formerly the Mister Big of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Bumped off Abdullah Azzam with a car boom in the course of one of their little disputes. Is thought to have composed bin Laden's fatwa entitled World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. Currently residing in the North Wazoo area assuming he's not dead like Mullah Omar. He lost major face when he ordered the nascent Islamic State to cease and desist and merge with the orthodox al-Qaeda spring, al-Nusra... in a dronezap in downtown Kabul, where he had lived in a safe house run by Taliban Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani ...son of Pashtun warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani, still titular head of the Haqqani Network.... . The Taliban had "grossly" violated the Doha Agreement by hosting and sheltering al-Zawahiri, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said after the strike.
The TTP is threatening the Pak state, said Mr Javid Ahmad, non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Centre in Washington, and a former ambassador of Afghanistan to the United Arab Emirates.
"The TTP is a classic case of reverse insurgency," he told Asian Insider. "This time, it’s threatening the Pak state."
"They believe that if the Afghan Taliban managed to secure their own syariah-based emirate in Afghanistan, so could the TTP in Pakistain," he added.
[WND] President Trump, provoked by Joe Biden's announcement that the U.S., which already has given Ukraine tens of billions of dollars, is now authorizing sending 31 Abrams tanks to the embattled nation, says the war needs to end now.
At the Post Millennial, Trump was quoted from social media, "FIRST COME THE TANKS, THEN COME THE NUKES. Get this crazy war ended, NOW. So easy to do!"
The report said Trump's comment came after Biden announced the U.S. would send Abrams tanks to eastern Europe to be used in the fight between Ukraine and the invading Russia.
Just this week, it also had been reported that Vladimir Putin might be able to cut a deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan to obtain access to billions of dollars worth of American war machinery left behind when Biden orchestrated a rout of American forces from Afghanistan.
#1
I agree with Trump's assessment. Great caution must be exercised:
"But when (Russian COL and US Intelligence Source) ...Kuklinski traveled through Scandanavia and Wester Europe, he always left word. During 1977 and 1978, until he began to fall under suspicion and surveillance in Warsaw, he delivered information that revealed how the Soviets would put all the armies of Eastern Europe under Kremlin's control if war came. He told the agency how Moscow would run the war in Western Europe; its plan provided for the use of forty tactical nuclear weapons against the city of Hamburg alone."
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, The History of The CIA, page 417.
#3
If you took me back 20 years to post 9-11 and told me that Donald Trump would be the strongest rationale voice trying to prevent nuclear war, I would have recommended that you consider a 12 step program.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
01/28/2023 10:47 Comments ||
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#4
^ We are very fortunate that McShame is dead and Miss Linsey is a weak sister.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
01/28/2023 10:49 Comments ||
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#5
Fucking dirty traitor.
We've been at war with Russia since 2016. They collided with Trump behind the scenes to engineer his election. Then he tried to overthrow our democacy on J6.
Look at all these Kremlin operatives spreading disinformation. Facebook censors this shit, WTF? Don't let the nazis win.
#6
If those tanks threaten Crimea, Putin will use nukes. He said he would. He said he's not bluffing. I believe him because he has his back to the wall and he sees no other option.
And then what?
The only rational thing to do here is negotiate a settlement.
Zelensky will continue to think like that until he's burning under a mushroom cloud.
The problem is that mad men like Biden, his handlers and Fat Bob are willing to risk a nuclear war to accomplish their goal of regime change in Moscow. They can all go to hell but I would appreciate if they don't drag the rest of us with them.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/28/2023 12:10 Comments ||
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#7
Fat Bob, you are full of shit.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/28/2023 12:12 Comments ||
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#8
The four years of Trump's term in office were the only four years in which Russia didn't take more territory from Ukraine.
Biden gave Putin the money to engage in this war when he shut down major parts of the US oilfield. He's buying Russian oil from Venezuela _today_.
Even while Putin's talking about the nukes.
Do you want to know why Putin's talking about nukes?
Because a fucking offspring of a Ukrainian Bandarite Nazi got the United Fucking States government to go along with his bioterror experiment and kill seven million people.
[American Thinker] When has a Republican been in D.C. too long? When he prioritizes the Ukraine war over the disintegration of the U.S.-Mexican border. And not just any Republican, but a Texas Republican with a pivotal House leadership role.
Michael McCaul is the Texan. He chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He should know better than most about the dangers flooding across the southern border. Dangers posed by illegals, drugs, human trafficking, and cartels. More ominously, the cartel wars raging throughout Mexico threaten to venture north into the U.S. Tens of thousands of Mexicans are dying in those brutal wars. Are American lives next?
The Freedom Caucus, having wrestled important concessions from Kevin McCarthy in exchange for the speakership, has another more critical job: Stop McCaul and other House Republican war hawks from escalating America’s involvement in the Ukraine war, where the U.S. has no vital interests or national security stakes. Shift the focus to the southern border and the growing threats there.
In Ukraine, increased American military aid and bold talk out of Washington about assembling a "Coalition of the willing" to oppose Russia more aggressively politically and, perhaps, militarily is sheer folly. The smug assumption is that conflict with Russia can be contained to Ukraine. Conceit and miscalculations may trigger a U.S.-Russian war. A war that likely won’t be limited in scope.
After two devasting 20th century wars, Europeans grasp that fighting Russia would result in widespread carnage. Germany had its arm twisted to provide fourteen Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. Biden announced that the U.S. plans to send 31 Abrams tanks. With the preponderance of Russian military assets in Ukraine and a buildup of assets just across the border in Russia -- estimates range in the hundreds of thousands of troops -- 44 tanks won’t tip the balance for Ukraine.
Biden’s latest military aid package to Ukraine carries a $2.5 billion price tag. Total outlay in aid to Ukraine is a staggering $26 billion.
Americans have every right to demand answers to why Biden and Congress have no hesitancy in sending $26 billion in aid to a faraway nation at war but allocate only a pittance to secure the U.S.-Mexican border.
Why is McCaul leading the fight to aid Ukraine but not leading the charge to stop the ruin of his native Texas and the rest of his country?
Per CNN, via Breitbart, McCaul, being very condescending in that Washington establishment way, lectures us "that skeptics of aid to Ukraine do not understand ’what’s at stake.’" McCaul doubled down, saying, "We have to educate our [fellow House] members. I don’t think they quite understand what’s at stake."
Us dumb skeptics and McCaul’s witless House colleagues just don’t get it. But it’s McCaul who either doesn’t understand what’s at stake along the border or, worse, doesn’t much care.
An estimated 5.5 million illegals (slightly less than metro Atlanta’s population) have poured across our vanished southern border since Biden was sworn in as president. How many more millions will cross before Biden’s term ends in January 2025?
What about the fentanyl that’s entering the U.S. by truckloads? Fentanyl produced by Mexican cartels with China’s help? In 2021, Fentanyl killed an estimated 100,000 Americans. The death toll is being tallied for 2022.
While the mounting national crisis due to the open southern border has taken tens of thousands of American lives and risks greater death, the Washington establishment is invested in the Ukraine war -- a war that D.C. is pushing into a proxy war between Russia and the U.S.
[Ascent] Some people become rich due to good luck and others become broke due to bad luck. But, in many situations, decisions that you make throughout your life will impact whether you end up wealthy or struggling.
Finance expert Dave Ramsey is a firm believer in the idea that your money mindset can have a huge effect on your ultimate net worth. Specifically, Ramsey thinks that rich and poor people approach one particular type of decision in a very different way -- and that these differing approaches have a meaningful impact on whether you end up financially successful.
THIS MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN YOUR FINANCIAL SUCCESS
According to Ramsey, a big difference between rich people and poor people comes down to the question they ask before they make a decision about whether to buy something or not.
"Rich people ask 'How much?'" he said. "Broke people ask 'How much down, and how much a month?'"
#1
That’s the next pivotal choice after graduate from high school, get married before having children, and get a job. Also, is total spending more than one’s income — even slightly — or less?
#2
Debt, like credit, is a wonderful thing for a person who understands its management. No credit or debt and the world is a catastrophically more impoverished place.
Of course, managing credit and debt entails math, so it's inherently rayciss.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
01/28/2023 11:30 Comments ||
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Many people just have little discipline. The Elizabeth Warrens of the world blame it all on the Democrat donors big banks. If you don't want to pay a 21% APR, then either go without, pay off the balance in full, or just suck it up.
I have to wonder with online shopping (especially with Amazon Prime) that impulsive people with just a few mouse clicks will buy something. Multiply that by numerous times, et voila, there's almost a trillion dollars of credit card debt.
And get this: there are accounts of people getting letters from their banks/CC companies offering to increase their charge limits. Almost macabre. But why should the banks care? The government will just bail them out again.
Student loans are another trillion, too, but that's another story.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/28/2023 12:48 Comments ||
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#5
And get this: there are accounts of people getting letters from their banks/CC companies offering to increase their charge limits.
The banks get their profits from interest. They really don't care about the principal. They want you to be an interest paying slave for your entire life and the way they accomplish that is to entice you into more debt.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/28/2023 12:51 Comments ||
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#6
You can have anything you seek
For a dollar down and a dollar a week.
[AlAhram] The deadly church attack in Algeciras has rekindled Spanish concerns about the jihadist threat, which experts say is still present although the country has been relatively spared from attacks in recent years.
On Wednesday evening, a machete-wielding attacker entered two churches in the southern port city, killing a verger and badly wounding a priest.
Officials have identified the suspect as a 25-year-old Moroccan man saying there appeared to be no third party involved.
"These are one-off actions, there is not going to be a campaign of attacks like there was years ago," Carlos Igualada, head of the International Observatory on Terrorism Studies (OIET) told AFP.
"Since the end of 2017, the number of terrorist acts in Europa ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... has dropped considerably and the attacks that are taking place cause fewer deaths, with bladed weapons in which only one terrorist takes part."
Which is a far cry from the atrocities committed "in Gay Paree, Nice, Berlin, or Brussels, where the dead were counted by the dozen," he said.
Although the government has not yet confirmed the attack was of a jihadist nature, the Audiencia Nacional, Spain's top criminal court, has opened a terror investigation.
"All the elements that characterise and define jihadist methodology are present," Chema Gil, professor at the ISEN University Centre in Cartagena told public radio.
Whether or not he was acting as a "lone wolf will have to be determined by Sherlocks", said Gil, who is also co-director of the International Security Observatory.
FIVE QUIET YEARS
The bloodshed sent shock waves through Spain, where the memory of such attacks has largely faded as the country has been largely spared over the past five years, unlike its European neighbours.
"It is true that in Spain we have not had the frequency of individual attacks as they've had in La Belle France, Germany or the United Kingdom," said Manuel Ricardo Torres, professor of political science at the Olavide University in Seville.
The last attack in Spain was in August 2017 when a group of young radicalised Moroccans and Spaniards of Moroccan origin mowed down pedestrians in Barcelona and a nearby seaside town, killing 16 and wounding 140.
For Spain's interior ministry, which updated its anti-terror strategy last year to take better account of "lone actors" and "self-radicalised cells", the threat remains.
Last year, ministry figures show the security forces carried out 27 anti-terror operations targeting jihadist cells, arresting 46 people across Spain which since 2015 has been on alert level four, out of a maximum of five.
Since the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 which killed 191 people and injured around 2,000, the authorities have arrested nearly 1,000 suspected jihadists.
RADICALISED LONE WOLVES
Like its neighbours, Spain is now facing the threat of "individuals who become radicalised online and can become extreme enough to commit attacks within several weeks -- a risk which is quite high," said OIET's Igualada.
Although such attacks are "less lethal" and have a smaller impact than large-scale assaults, they are "more difficult to prevent" and involve major efforts by the security forces, said Torres.
The normalisation of ties with Morocco in March 2022 after a nearly year-long standoff over Spain's position on Western Sahara has also played a role.
"Anti-terror cooperation with Morocco is currently very good," said Torres.
"This has allowed Spain to carry out many anti-terror operations on the basis of information provided by Morocco," he added.
During the last major joint operation in October, police made 11 arrests in Spain while Morocco detained two on grounds of participating in a terror organization, the interior ministry said.
[BLAZE] If education was really so important to modern civil rights leaders, they would be calling for the K-12 education system to be laser-focused on producing more critical thinkers — not on producing the next generation of BLM protesters.
America’s public schools are ground zero for political indoctrination, so it is no surprise that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ decision to reject a proposed AP course in African-American studies caused controversy. DeSantis said the inclusion of topics like "Black Queer Studies" ran afoul of Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits instruction that defines people as oppressed or privileged based solely on their race.
Instead, corporate media outlets are doing what they do best: telling half-truths, writing inflammatory headlines, and leaving out key context in order to inflame the public and damage political opponents. No one took the time to explain why students would spend more time reading the black feminist manifesto from the Combahee River Collective than reading the Moynihan Report on the state of the black family. Few pointed out the fact that Florida law already requires teaching African-American history or that the governor signed a law in 2020 that would make the Ocoee Massacre part of the state curriculum.
#1
Norma McCorvey getting pregnant is the only significant sexual act that I know of. You could argue about whether some of Clinton’s Oval Office antics were historically significant, but I guess that would depend on your definition of “is.” If there is some black queer sex, I don’t know about it. Don Lemon makes a yearly attempt, but that’s why I don’t watch his show.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
01/28/2023 12:29 Comments ||
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#2
^ Andrew Gillum's escapades with black John's and drugs prolly qualifies, since it gave us Governor DeSantis
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/28/2023 13:23 Comments ||
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#3
There is recent stuff. Jussie Smollett probably had some incidental gaysex with his “attackers” but it wasn’t central to the scandal. I’ve listened to plenty of episodes of The History Guy and there just isn’t enough steamy Nubian gay sex there to fill a paragraph. Jefferson wasn’t using Ben Franklin as a human inkwell during the signing of the Louisiana Purchase. Sure there is probably some naughty video of founding fathers frolicking in only their powdered wigs but that has nothing to do with historical fact. American History is mostly wars and court cases. They need to just mandate a separate indoctrination class for the queer stuff or people will begin to disbelieve all the rest of their revisionist fake stuff and people will begin to think for themselves.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
01/28/2023 14:04 Comments ||
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[YouTube] Russian tanks have taken heavy losses in Ukraine. Countless images of decapitated turrets and burnt-out wrecks have made headlines around the world with some proclaiming the death of the tank altogether. They argue that the threat of artillery, drones, and man portable anti-tank missiles makes them extra vulnerable on the modern battlefield and an unsustainable risk to their crews. But is that really true? It turns out that, rather than the tank itself, Russia's tactics may be to blame for these losses.
#1
The Russians are aware of 'combined arms' tactics, the problem is they don't have enough infantry to fully employ these tactics. Adding to the problem is the Russian reluctance (for obvious reasons) to use Tactical Air resources in the fight.
#4
Russia has always fought like this. They just throw it all out there and fight. People and equipment are considered expended once they move into the fight.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
01/28/2023 12:14 Comments ||
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#5
Because their doctrine and design favors massed frontal assaults and they discourage initiative by lower ranks. Used out of their "design envelope" they unfavorably showcase the trade-offs their designers baked into them.
#6
Part of the problem is the battalion tactical group concept. Good it theory, but how the Russians put it together is awful. Russia already is having a manpower shortage for the military and when they made these, they refused to reduce the amount of armored vehicles in them. So instead of having a crew of 3 and 7 infantry mounts, they have a crew of 3 and 3 (if at all) infantry mounts. You cannot secure the area around the BMP with just 3 infantry. This was a huge part of the breakdown of the combined arms we saw north of Kiev and the piss poor maneuver and performance of the armored forces.
#7
If they can't fight effectively on their own border, what do they have in a big distant fight besides nukes?
Exactly.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/28/2023 13:06 Comments ||
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#8
^ Part of the problem is the battalion tactical group concept. The Russians gave it so many toys that it has enough combat power to get in trouble ...one time and one time only.
#13
Of course it will. Along with drones, satellites and spy squirrels
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/28/2023 21:43 Comments ||
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#14
Swarms of robotic thingies *is* the future of combat, air and ground. The first ones will be semi-autonomous, with a human acting as 'platoon leader'. Later, they get better thanks to machine learning.
It will be interesting to see how the Markers do. I understand that 4 are going to the Donbas in February for training.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...Formerly second in command of al-Qaeda, now the head cheese, occasionally described as 
...son of Pashtun warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani, still titular head of the Haqqani Network....
I agree with Trump's assessment. Great caution must be exercised:
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
[BLAZE] If education was really so important to modern civil rights leaders, they would be calling for the K-12 education system to be laser-focused on producing more critical thinkers — not on producing the next generation of BLM protesters.
