William Lind, the great historian and military affairs analyst, has said in so many words that those who form alliances with occupying armies do so at their peril, since occupying armies eventually go home.

The hill people of Vietnam, the Montagniards, learned this truth the hard way when the U.S. came out with ‘Vietnamization’ of the war effort, bureaucrat-speak for transferring the burden of the war off U.S. shoulders and onto South Vietnamese ones.

Just as our so-called ‘Afghan allies’ have learned the same hard truth. That is, if any of them were genuinely allies in the first place. Remember: Islamic doctrine councils the forming of fake alliances and false truces when it suits Islamic purposes. Such agreements and treaties can be broken at any time by a Muslim, with the approval of their prophet.

The US military has forgotten how to retreat. They did not destroy anything that could be used by the enemy. They did not booby trap anything.
No demolition at all. Many things could have been done but weren’t.

Having a Vietnam flashback here, hundreds of helicopters, artillery, rifles, millions of rounds of all types of ammo, Tan San Nhut air base, with it’s first class runways and hardened hangers, port facilities, trucks, warehouses, roads, bridges, the list was mind boggling. And we went for the whole thing again, in Afghanistan. With the same results. No wonder the communists are so confident.

@ The Old Freedom Fighter Re: “Fill us in on what transpired in the former USSR & the Eastern Block nations after the collapse of communism. Expect much of this to happen in the FUSA, especially what occurred in Yugoslavia as many have been predicting recently.” Thank-you for the kind words, as they say in Texas I’d better go get a bigger hat. Happy to help in any way possible. Unfortunately, vis-a-vis your question, I am not a specialist in that area, but I can offer a few observations and tid-bits of information, for what they are worth. So, in no particular order… An interesting phenomenon observed by historians and political scientists over the last half century or so concerns the effect of global communications and international travel – our world getting more-networked and smaller, if you will. Many futurists have predicted that as the world grew smaller and the barriers to communication, travel and commerce were reduced or outright eliminated, the barriers of ethnicity, nationalism, and so forth would come down as well. People would tend to disaggregate themselves and become more international in character. That was the thinking. In fact, the opposite has happened. As globalism and its effects have been felt, these have intensified all-the-more the feelings of ordinary people to identify with their ancestry, home and place they call home. La Patrie as the French say. In Spain, the Basques have intensified their drive for their own homeland. In Canada, the separatists in Quebec; in Scotland, Scots who wish to break free of Great Britain, and so on. As it turns out, modern man wants to belong to something and somewhere just as badly as his ancestors did. He still wants a place to call home where he can be amongst his own kind, a place to plant the flag, if you will. Paradoxically, the globalist ruling class, the jet-setting types who fly to Davos every year and who express their net worth with large numbers with lots of commas – they have become more international in their focus, not less. The same is true of many of the largest Fortune 500 firms. General Motors may be an American auto maker in terms of where it was founded, but a great deal of its market share now lies in places outside of the U.S. like the PRC, which is why their executives sound like internationalists at the UN and not Americans like the people who ran the company in 1955. A second observation is that Balkanization needn’t be an inevitably violent or chaotic process. If the political will, wisdom and temperance of mind are there on both sides, separation can be peaceful. The now-famous “Velvet Revolution” – the amicable divorce between Slovakia and the Czech Republic which broke up the former Czechoslovakia, is one well-known example of that. If, on the other hand, there are simmering animosities on all sides, and the desire to separate peacefully isn’t there to any great extent, then that portends badly… Read more »

Spent most of 2008 in Kabul. Had a lot of fun, though never understood exactly what the end game was supposed to be.

Somehow I doubt that there was a PowerPoint titled “Slinking Away in the Night Like an Abused Dog.”

That said, the US was there twenty years too long. Should have studied the three British Afghan Wars, and the Soviet Afghan War before deciding on this folly.