Coordinated?
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@horace said in Coordinated?:
Doofuses taking selfies. But we can be certain that it will be a rhetorical grenade used by the left, for the rest of our lives. A huge own goal for anybody who thinks conservative politics make more sense.
To be clear breaching the building and with crude medieval type weapons was the threshold for me. Clearing distancing from that behavior would have been enough for me to let it go.
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@loki said in Coordinated?:
@horace said in Coordinated?:
Doofuses taking selfies. But we can be certain that it will be a rhetorical grenade used by the left, for the rest of our lives. A huge own goal for anybody who thinks conservative politics make more sense.
To be clear breaching the building and with crude medieval type weapons was the threshold for me. Clearing distancing from that behavior would have been enough for me to let it go.
Yeah people are stupid and can be convinced of anything. Those doofuses were righteous and willing to tear it all down in service of their beliefs. This is always dangerous, and it's how humans operate.
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WSJ: What Armed Insurrection Looks Like
After overthrowing the government of Afghanistan, Taliban fighters patrol Kabul on Thursday.
Afghanistan’s military has laid down its weapons, and the Taliban have wasted little time in collecting them, raising concerns about how easily troves of U.S.-made arms, military aircraft and armored vehicles have fallen into enemy hands and the new capabilities they bring.
Scores of videos have emerged of Taliban fighters rejoicing near abandoned American helicopters, carrying U.S.-supplied M24 sniper rifles and M18 assault weapons, stacking other small arms and materiel in unending piles and driving Humvees and other U.S.-made military trucks.
The Taliban have seized airplanes, tanks and artillery from Afghan outposts and from evacuating U.S. personnel, revealing one of the heavier costs of a U.S. troop withdrawal amid a collapse of Afghanistan’s government and army.The speed of the collapse has been particularly shocking to those who made the mistake of crediting the words of the U.S. president. Alberto Nardelli at Bloomberg reports:
President Joe Biden told key allies in June that he would maintain enough of a security presence in Afghanistan to ensure they could continue to operate in the capital following the main U.S. withdrawal, a vow made before the Taliban’s rapid final push across the country, according to a British diplomatic memo seen by Bloomberg.
Biden promised U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other leaders at the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, England, that “critical U.S. enablers” would remain in place to keep Kabul safe following the drawdown of NATO forces, the note said. British officials determined the U.S. would provide enough personnel to ensure that the U.K. embassy in Kabul could continue operating.No wonder Mr. Biden wasn’t eager to pick up the phone when Mr. Johnson called this week.
Last month, Mr. Biden provided another wildly inaccurate forecast about Afghanistan in comments to reporters at the White House. Five days later, no fewer than 23 American staffers at our embassy in Kabul signed their names to an urgent cable to Washington directly contradicting Mr. Biden’s public claims. The Journal’s Vivian Salama reports:
An internal State Department memo last month warned top agency officials of the potential collapse of Kabul soon after the U.S.’s Aug. 31 troop withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the document.
The classified cable represents the clearest evidence yet that the administration had been warned by its own officials on the ground that the Taliban’s advance was imminent and Afghanistan’s military may be unable to stop it.
The cable, sent via the State Department’s confidential dissent channel, warned of rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces, and offered recommendations on ways to mitigate the crisis and speed up an evacuation, the two people said...
The cable, dated July 13, also called for the State Department to use tougher language in describing the atrocities being committed by the Taliban, one of the people said.It’s hard to adequately describe the brutality. Ahmad Seir, Tameem Akhgar and Rebecca Santana of the Associated Press report:
Reports of targeted killings in areas overrun by the Taliban mounted Friday, fueling fears that they will return Afghanistan to the repressive rule they imposed when they were last in power, even as they urged imams to push a message of unity at Friday’s prayers.
Terrified that the new de facto rulers would commit such abuses and despairing for their country’s future, thousands have raced to Kabul’s airport and border crossings following the Taliban’s stunning blitz through Afghanistan. In one dramatic image, a U.S. Marine providing airport security reached over razor wire atop a barrier and plucked a baby by the arm from a crowd of people and pulled it up over the wall.
Others have taken to the streets to protest the takeover — acts of defiance that Taliban fighters have violently suppressed.The AP report notes that Amnesty International “said that its researchers spoke to eyewitnesses in Ghazni province who recounted how the Taliban killed nine ethnic Hazara men in the village of Mundarakht from July 4 to July 6. It said six of the men were shot, and three were tortured to death. Hazaras are Shiite Muslims who were previously persecuted by the Taliban and who made major gains in education and social status in recent years.”
Meanwhile in the U.S., the disgraceful riot at the Capitol is looking less and less like an armed insurrection or a coup attempt, despite the frequency with which such terms have been employed by pundits and politicians. Mark Hosenball and Sarah N. Lynch report for Reuters:
The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.
Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.
“Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,” said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. “Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”The Reuters report adds:
FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said.
