Direct translation of the article
[Regnum] According to The New York Times, citing sources in military circles, the United States and NATO are going to withdraw troops from Afghanistan by early - mid-July, which is two months ahead of the September 11 deadline set by US President Joe Biden. So, perhaps, the forecast of American General Mark Millie, the 20th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the hasty departure of his compatriots from Afghanistan, is coming true. At the same time, in an interview with The Associated Press, he predicts the dangerous consequences of such an action for the abandoned country and reflects on its "uncertain future."
A historical analogy involuntarily suggests itself. In 1989, the Soviet Union carried out the withdrawal of a limited contingent of troops from Afghanistan in the shortest possible time and practically without incidents. Moscow's protégé, President Mohammed Najibullah, managed to retain power until April 1992, when the radical rebel forces entered Kabul. How long the current Afghan government will last is an open question.
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#3
"It’s just a tragedy that the United States didn’t take seriously the peace process in Afghanistan, which should have been done much earlier before the opportunities ran out,"
They didn't *want* peace. Peace would have meant US troop withdrawal. They wanted war, endless war. And they got it. Made a mint from arms sales and supplying boots & beans. War is a racket.
#5
The tragedy really was that the USA never understood the perpetual war process that IS Afghanistan. The Afghans will continue to oppress and fight each other to the very last Afghan.
Posted by: Bubba Lover of the Faeries8843 ||
06/02/2021 12:56 Comments ||
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#6
^As I recollect, Mongols had no problems pacifying Afghanistan.
#7
Alexander the Great conquered the area, by keeping to the valleys and cities and left the hill tribes alone. Mongols did the same thing but if some of those tribes caused issues, a pile of heads left on the burnt out villages sent the appropriate message. Some of the areas from Iran to India still have lower populations than they would of from Mongol depopulation.
#8
"It’s just a tragedy that the United States didn’t take seriously the peace process in Afghanistan,
The Taliban negotiators were uninterested in anything less than total surrender of the country, returning them to power and the status quo ante of 2001. And even if the negotiators had been serious, they could only speak for themselves, and not for any of the many other jihadi groups in the area that have also been attacking the locals and the foreigners. The Afghan government has been fully aware of the pointlessness of the exercise, but has been required to engage in the dance by the foreign governments looking for an excuse to disengage from the region
Edward Luttwak, the distinguished Israeli-American strategist and public intellectual, tweeted the following this morning:
11 Chinese universities teach Greek and Latin. Another 20 seek staff to so as well. Back in the US, the Princeton CLASSICS department has just eliminated the Latin or Greek requirement "to address systemic racism". Truly racist say I. Why not just end it ? Jobs await in 中国
The Chinese characters at the end mean "Middle Kingdom."
Princeton created an uproar by ditching the requirement for classics majors to learn Greek or Latin. That shouldn’t be a surprise: In 2017 Harvard eliminated the music theory requirement for music majors. Music theory is to music what grammar and vocabulary are to language.
In China, meanwhile, up to 100 million children study piano, not counting orchestral instruments. Classical music thrives in Japan and South Korea as well as China, where aspiring youngsters and their parents have embraced the most characteristically Western art form. As Luttwak observes, it isn’t just music: Chinese universities are building up their classics departments.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing is China’s enormous interest in Western philosophy. Peking University is China’s Harvard, and its undergraduate philosophy syllabus puts every American university to shame. There are two courses on Aristotle, three on Plato, four on Kant and five on Hegel, three on Nietzsche, two on set theory, and twenty-two (no typo) on logic. Of course, there are also courses on Chinese philosophy, and a bunch on Marxism (my guess is that the Marx courses aren’t well attended).
China offers its undergraduates a deep dive into the Western mind—Greek, Latin, and Continental European (although there also are a couple of offerings on John Rawls). Why? China appreciates Western creativity and wants to learn the trick. China’s hierarchical society doesn’t foster creativity (that is, tolerate the eccentrics and oddballs who discover things like General Relativity) as well as the West, to be sure. But learning the philosophy and music of the West is the next best thing.
Under Mao Zedong, China had a "cultural revolution" that destroyed its universities and sent academics (and many others) into exile to "learn from the peasants" in remote villages). Now WE are having our own cultural revolution, as a Chinese acquaintance taunted me, complete with "struggle sessions" and "criticism and self-criticism" over supposed systemic racism.
Our brightest young people are out trying to devise the next killer app. The way things are going, we will be geeks in a new Roman Empire. The dissipated, infertile Greeks fell to the intellectually inferior Romans, who absorbed the parts of Greek culture they found useful and, in their own way, preserved it. As we burn down our own culture, China may become the last refuge of classical philology, Western philosophy, and classical music.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/02/2021 00:00 ||
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#1
the most astonishing thing is China’s enormous interest in Western philosophy.
#2
Oh yeah! Well I bet China doesn't have majors or Women's Studies, Critical Race Theory, or Humping Grasshoppers like the US universities do! So THERE!
#4
While commies in the West are destroying institutions, those same institutions are being exploited by the commies in the East to progress their economies and technologies. Eastern commies have no problem with the 'past' sins of others, just the benefits they deliver now.
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
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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.
Edward Luttwak, the distinguished Israeli-American strategist and public intellectual, tweeted the following this morning:
