[Epistemic status: Low, I don’t know much about Afghanistan, nor does it interest me much (except for the fascination multiple empires seem to have in expending their treasure there].
There appears to be a near consensus that the Taliban will take over most of Afghanistan soon after the US withdrawal and that they will do this rather quickly.
Will the Taliban take over after the US leaves? If so, how long will it take them?
— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) April 15, 2021
This assessment would appear to be backed up by the takeover of multiple provincial centers by the Taliban, who had previously mainly stuck to the countryside, in recent days.
Even on paper, the two sides are more evenly matched than many expect, according to a recent report (h/t Vendetta):
A glance at commonly cited numbers would leave the impression that Afghanistan’s security forces far outnumber the Taliban, by as much as a factor of four or five (352,000 to 60,000). A more nuanced comparison, however, suggests a different story. Most estimates put the number of Taliban frontline fighters around 60,000. The comparable number of Afghan soldiers is about 96,000. The only detailed public estimate of the Taliban’s militia elements—its “holding” force—is around 90,000 individuals. The comparable government force is the police, which has about the same number of people (84,000) in the field. Thus, a purely military comparison of strength shows that the government’s fighting force is only about 1.5 times the strength of the Taliban’s, while the two sides’ holding forces are roughly equivalent.
The Afghan government forces have much more in the way of advanced tech, but they are too low IQ to use most of it effectively. So its value is limited and will plummet further once American advisors leave.
The Taliban believe in what they’re fighting for so their morale is much higher. Most ANDSF soldiers are in it for the paycheck. Corruption is rife and even those “elite” units (read: minimally combat-worthy) end up not getting promised support from other units, with the result that they end up falling into traps, getting massacred, and becoming demoralized themselves.
So on the face of it the situation for the central government in Kabul is bleak.
But will this mean that the Taliban takeover is guaranteed? No. At least, not all of Afghanistan.
The Taliban has traditionally been popular amongst Pashtuns. But they are only 42% of the population, while the Tajiks and Hazara are less enthusiastic about them and constitute 36%. This might be even more true today than a decade or two ago because the Taliban are reputed to have shifted a bit away from Islamic fundamentalism and more into the direction of Pashtun nationalism.
And indeed, check on the LiveUAMap of Afghanistan – a page that will grow in popularity in coming months – shows that virtually all the pins on the map denoting attacks occur in areas where Pashtuns are the majority.
This follows the classical trajectory of guerilla insurgencies against inept government forces in the Middle East/Central Asia. While they make excellent headway against government forces in areas where they have popular support, blending into the local population and enjoying an intelligence advantage, the going gets much harder once they leave those areas. (Hence, say, why Islamic State ultimately never had a chance of capturing Baghdad).
And even during the five years of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, there was the breakaway Northern Alliance in the Tajik north-east, as well as anti-Taliban guerilla movements in the Hazara and Aimak areas.
So my guess is that things will end up something like that this time too as opposed to any kind of unitary Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Almost all the Pashtun areas will revert to Taliban rule, where they have no already done so. But the “Northern Alliance” will reconstitute itself and will, at a minimum, retain control over the Tajik, Hazara, and Aimak majority areas.
The key question is whether the Taliban will be able to take control over Kabul.
I suspect it will, because another constant of Afghan history is that outsiders tend to insist on involving themselves. One exotic but not unimaginable scenario is that China takes over the US as a security provider. China has a more legitimate interest in Afghanistan than the US because it provides a direct land route to Iran, whose relations have blossomed in recent years culminating in the signing of a $400B deal this year. China as the world’s biggest construction-industrial complex will be in a position to build the roads, railways, and pipelines to actualize that connection. Possibly China will even help it take back the Pashtun areas, with the help of the technologies and practices used to pacify Xinjiang.
Russia enjoys good relations with the current Afghan government (minor footnote: It was one of the few governments to recognize Crimea). (Incidentally, yet another reason why the fake news about Russia paying Taliban fighters bounties to kill US soldiers was so patently absurd). Iran was on the verge of invading Afghanistan a couple of times in the late 1990s. Both would be perfectly fine with such an arrangement.
This opens the rather amusing prospect of the US returning to tradition and supporting the Taliban in its liberation struggle against the Chicom oppressors and its Russian and Iranian lackeys in another decade. That is, after all, about how long it took the US to let bygones be bygones with Al Qaeda/Al Nusra.
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https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/the-interview/20210324-son-of-slain-afghan-commander-massoud-warns-of-civil-war-if-us-troops-leave-hastily
(In Russian)
https://www.ng.ru/world/2021-04-18/100_210418talib.html
Crapghanistan has been a wonderfully profitable Forever War™ for defense contractors. We’re never leaving, and if someone serious backed the idea–lo!–an attack on US soil!
Kabul has begun construction of a $5 million road in the Pamir mountainous region or “Roof of the World” to connect with China through a land route for the first time, inching closer to realizing Beijing’s “huge interest” in investing in Afghanistan, a government official said on Sunday.
Building the nearly 50 km highway that runs through the Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan’s northeastern Badakhshan Province will take a year and a half to complete and, once ready, will allow Beijing to export raw materials from untapped Afghan mines for its increasing domestic consumption.
“We have brought some machinery from Tajikistan for the project because the terrain did not allow us to send them from this side,” Khalil Rahman Omaid, a spokesman for the Public Works Ministry.
The project’s initial phase will include graveling and adding asphalt before “connecting it with a road already in use in China.”
“This route will be used for commerce, imports and export as well as transit. China has expressed a huge interest for investment in Afghanistan, particularly in the mining sector, and this road will be good for that too,” Omaid added.
Kabul’s government will pay the cost of the project, estimated to be nearly $5 million, with a part of the route expected to traverse the Silk Road used by China for trade with South Asia, Iran and Europe through Afghanistan and Central Asia in ancient times, the spokesman said.
“We can say it revives the idea of the Silk Road under (China’s) modern Belt and Road (Initiative) project,” Torek Farhadi, an adviser for the former Afghan President Hamid Karzai,“China has geostrategic interests in Afghanistan, as well as geo-economic ones. At the same time, Wakhan does benefit from easy road access from inside Afghanistan,” Farhadi said.
Both Kabul and Beijing have stepped up their efforts to improve economic and trade ties in the past few years.
More than a year ago, Kabul inked a $2.2 billion deal to export its coveted pine-nuts to China over the next five years, while Afghanistan is already a huge market for Chinese goods.
Additionally, during the past 20 years, China has progressively increased its presence in Afghanistan, extending nearly $240 million in development aid between 2001 and 2013 and ramping up investments in the country, especially since the reduction of US-led troops began in late 2014.
In 2007, with the signing of a deal with the Afghan government, China won exclusive rights to extract copper from the Mes Aynak mine in the Logar province for $3.4 billion.
Under the contract, China will be building a railway network to export the copper from Logar — located to the south of Kabul — to the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif and back to Beijing through an existing rail network in Uzbekistan.
However, the ambitious project has yet to see the light of day due to delays in copper extraction, slowed by the war in Afghanistan.
“Chinese officials, in various meetings here and in China, have not had any specific pledges on the construction of the railway project . . . partly because China wants to wait to see the return of peace (to Afghanistan) before it makes any move for investment more here,” a senior Afghan government official, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the matter.
Decades of war have deterred China from backing several infrastructure development projects in Afghanistan, unlike its Belt and Road Initiative, which Beijing launched in 2013 to invest in nearly 70 countries, including in neighboring Pakistan.
China has remained critical and skeptical of the US military’s presence in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s ousting in a Washington-led invasion in late 2001.
Last week, Beijing offered to host peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, with the US kickstarting its troops’ withdrawal process from Afghanistan on May 1. All foreign forces are expected to leave the country by Sept. 11.
When asked to elaborate on Beijing’s offer to host the talks, its foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said on Tuesday that “China is ready to facilitate intra-Afghan talks and will provide necessary conditions for negotiations in China.”
Experts said that China’s move was to foster “stability” in Afghanistan.
“China, more than any other countries of the world, wants stability in Afghanistan for its security and investment here. It has been trying to communicate with Afghan leaders that peace is vital for the development of Afghanistan too,”
https://i.tribune.com.pk/media/images/Cover1617275701-0/Cover1617275701-0.jpg
Pakistan’s foreign minister confirmed that his country refused to give any military base to the US for monitoring Afghanistan after foreign forces withdrawal from Kabul, local media said on Tuesday.
Shah Mahmood Qureshi said his government, led by Prime Minister Imran Khan, has no intention to give its military bases to Washington.
“Search for bases could be their wish. There’s no question of giving them [US] bases, we have to see our interest,” Qureshi told the local broadcaster.
Qureshi was responding to a recent report by The New York Times, citing American officials as saying that “Pakistan wants to allow US access to a base as long as it can control how it is used”, adding that “public opinion in the country has been strongly against any renewed presence by the United States.”
Some American officials said that negotiations with Pakistan had reached an impasse for now. Others have said the option remains on the table and a deal is possible, the US daily said in its report published on Sunday.
The report also claimed that CIA Director William J. Burns made an unannounced visit in recent weeks to Pakistan, where he had met with the country’s military and intelligence chiefs. However, there is no official word from Islamabad so far.
Last month, Qureshi told the country’s upper house of the parliament or Senate that there will be no American base on Pakistan’s soil.
“We will not allow the kinetic use of drones, nor are we interested in monitoring your drones. This a very clear-cut policy of this government,” the top diplomat maintained.
“Forget about the past,” he added, referring to the reported establishment of a US base in Pakistan during the Cold War against the former Soviet Union and later during the so-called war against terrorism in Afghanistan. However, Pakistan later closed those bases for the US military.
According to the US media, after Pakistan’s refusal, Washington is exploring options to get bases in Central Asia near the Afghan border. However, Russia could oppose this.
Last month, Russia’s special envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said that Central Asian neighbors Tajikistan and Uzbekistan will not allow Washington to establish military bases on their soil.
Imagine if the Chinese start “Xinjianging” Afghanistan. Imagine the near-supernova butthurt levels of the eternal pozzoids.
I also suspect, that in this scenario, there would be almost a soft-eugenics program in place immediately. The Chinese don’t want a population they need to babysit.
The Afghan army is already dissolving as soldiers leave their posts en masse. These are highly inbred and tribal people. They will only fight for Allah or their tribe. The Afghan army is a non entity in any case.
The real issue is that even though the US has left externally, it has kept nearly 18,000 mercenaries in Afghanistan.
https://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/troop-levels-are-down-but-us-says-over-18-000-contractors-remain-in-afghanistan-1.659040
Mys guess is that Afghanistan will become a low intenstiy permanent battleground between the US and China. The CIA and US mercs will keep the Afghan government on life support and guard a few strategic regions. They mainly have three purposes there:
To ensure China isn’t able to build a pipeline through Afghanistan to Iran.
This is speculative. To ensure that the rare earth metal resources of Afghanistan don’t fall into Russian or Chinese hands and is supplied to US firms.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/rare-earth-afghanistan-sits-1-trillion-minerals-n196861
Afghanistan sits on nearly 1 trillion dollars worth of minerals.
My guess is that the Chinese will become the Taliban’s sponsor while the Iranians will back the Tajik Northern Alliance.
The Chinese have an interest in the Talian controlling Afghanistan. A stable and anti-US government would allow it to mine the minerals and perhaps build a pipeline to Iran. They will very likely arm and fund the Taliban to eliminate the last vestiges of the Afghan government. The US mercs will try to stop them.
The Iranians will back the northern alliance while turning a blind eye to Chinese support of the Taliban. They would love to sell the oil to China and get the US out of their border but would also want to keep a foothold in the region.
My guess is that ultimately the Taliban will win and the US mercs will fail to stop their takeover of most of the country. Only the northern alliance will hold out in the mountainous north. Without air support, its really not plausible for US mercs to hold out long against battle hardened mujaheeds.
The Americans are after all simply guns for hire. The Taliban in contrast are warriors of God and tribal fighters. Without air superiority, High assabiya > hired guns. The taliban outlasted the might of the Red army and the power of the American air force, some hired schlemiels won’t prove too much an obstacle.
In the long run, there will be interesting demographics reprucssions. While its neighbors, Iran, Pakistan and Tajikstan are all seeing falling birht rates owing to modernity, the Afghans will continue to live in a state of primitivism and harsh darwinian conditions. Due to outstanding birth rates, over time their numbers will swell to nealry a 100 million and they will spill over and demographically conquer eastern Iran and Western Pakistan.
This demographic conquest is already half way in Western Pakistan due to the refugee crisis caused by the Soviet war in the 80s.
This would be an unequivocally good thing. Afghanistan after all, is one of the last places were people of Aryan descent have high birth rates. 😉
http://whatthedoost.com/2015/11/05/but-you-dont-look-afghan/
This beauty is certainly preferable to the Levantine visage of much of the modern Iranian population.
https://www.kyrgyzamericanfoundation.org/contact
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/delegations/en/eu-kyrgyzstan-enhanced-partnership-and-c/product-details/20200406DPU25151
https://www.economist.com/img/b/1000/563/90/sites/default/files/images/2021/04/articles/main/20210424_asp002.jpg
The man on this picture is becoming increasingly interesting.
I wonder what the “potential” of the Afghan population is. I say it’s pretty high, if they stopped fucking their cousins that is.
No mention of Durand Line, Pathans control both sides of Khyber so of course Kabul is their’s.
2x Pathans around Peshaur in Pakistan, more than the whole Pop of Afghanistan.
https://twitter.com/akhundzadaarif/status/1314760566033059841?s=21
Their traditional solution to that is slave raids:
Which mysteriously stopped 3C. ago
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/815453549462421574/857233434915897354/unknown.png
I do wonder how long Pathans will stay Muslim||
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Pathans are a sick people, who in the 19th century genocided half of the Shias of Afghanistan/Eastern Iran. Whole nation of Afghanistan is an artificial product of British imperialism, and relatively moderate and peaceful Tajiks, Hazaras, Aimaqs, Uzbeks and Turkmens are forced to live in a one one nation with those psychopathic wildlings. All those Pathan settled areas in Northern and Western Afghanistan are product of Pashtun colonization. There is a way to solve problems in Afghanistan, endless supply of weapons to native Dari Speaking and/or Shia folks, and give them freedom to do anything with those beastmen.
Sad that we can’t just arm Sher Singh and couple hundred thousand Sikhs and send them to Afghanistan to wage war in the name of the Khalsa.
Don’t worry Sikh bhai, maybe not in this life or next, but one day we will battle together against endless hordes of Mlecchas and Tayin! Gurus don’t lie!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Indian_relief_from_Amaravati%2C_Guntur._Preserved_in_Guimet_Museum.jpg
As is usual with you, your link is nothing else than half truths, cherry picked photos of Hazara, Nuristani, Pamiri and Kalasha. Who the hell in Afghanistan thinks that Pamiri, Hazara or Kalasha are Afghans?
In an ideal world, the Nuristanis take over the whole place and reassert their old Hindu beliefs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazaras
Yeah, there are only like 5 million or so Hazaras in Afghanistan.
Plus, Tajiks are nearly a third of Afghanistan and many of them have such whitish features. Tajiks are an Iranic people after all.
Pashtuns themselves are Iranics after all. These lands were settled by Aryan tribes emerging out of the pontic caspian steppe.
Pathans are basically Islmaized Hephtalite Huns. The other name used for the Pasthoo by their Tadjik neighbors is Abtali (Hephtalite). BTW, Abtal = heroes in Arabic (singular = Batal, plural = Abtal). Probably going back to Khosrow Anushirvan alliance with both the Hephtalite and Nestorian Christian Arabs against the Mazdakite rebels.
Your pictures are mainly from Nuristani folks. But it is true that the Hephtalite Huns were named White Huns (Spenta Huna) for a reason. They were White Indo-Iranian and archaic Mithraist people under the Hun leadership.
99% Pashtuns do not look like people on this site, nor fo Tajiks:
http://whatthedoost.com/2015/11/05/but-you-dont-look-afghan/
Some children do, but children are fairer almost everywhere.
Anyway Pashtuns are heavily mixed with native populations of Afghanistan, predating Aryan invasions. Language does not equal genetics.
Have you ever met Pashtuns and Tajiks? I have met quite a few.
Yes, sure. I didn’t say Afghanis are white people as a whole. I said there are some white groups in the Afghan population, descended from the ancient Aryan tribes who came from the pontic-caspian steppe and settled Central Asia. From there they invaded India.
I had to run it through google translate so I don’t really fully understand, but it basically implies that Pashtun is some sort of conlang?
According to Colonelcassad.livejournal.com Afgan government has not lost big cities yet and when they start to lose those that is when they should fall apart. I agree with your assessment that it will probably break down based on ethnic lines.
Or from European sex slaves. So did the White Pathans side with their tribe or the USMC?
@svevland I just read the tweet/headline, my world begins/ends with my Guru & the Khalsa.
@Bashibazuk Cool, that reply up there is to Ahmed Shah Abdali asking why can’t we be friends?
@Bakshi
https://www.dawn.com/news/1047719
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/640459736919048202/857248284573564958/unknown.png
ਸਤਿਸ਼੍ਰੀਅਕਾਲ||
Uzbeks like Babur & Timur are peaceful?
Ghazni, Khulji pretty much all the Turks who Islamized most of C Asia, N Iran, Caspian, Punjab were/are Uzbek..
https://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Peer_Buddhu_Shah
https://www.sikhiwiki.org/images/1/11/PirBudhu.jpg
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Timur or Tamer, was a fully Mongolic man, just Turkic speaking, and Babur half. Anyway, present day Uzbeks are more peaceful than Pakhtuns are, something like Uzbek Muslim terrorist outside of Uzbekistan is quite rare, especially in comparison with Pakhtuns and Chechens.
https://youtu.be/Gl3s1eJfp1o
This interview was filmed sometime before 2017, most likely during Obama’s second term.
The very first statement of the interview is hilarious!
At his very core Zbigniew Brzezinski was always a Polish Nationalist, no one should ever forget that.
He sounds sensible and even handed here. It is a pity he does not apply the same logic to relations with Russia.
He was Polish nationalist first, Atlanticist second, Euro-centrist third and Globalist last. A multi-faceted man he was this Big Zbigniew. He has never been an American patriot or even an American-firster. He used the US as all Globalists do. US was just means to an end for him.
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-152/#comment-4709465
It is a bit of a stretch to conflate “the People of Özbeg Khan, Lord of the Golden Horde”
with the current sorry remnant of subsistence herders –
oh, and Timur Leng was a redhead (the Soviets opened his tomb in Samarkand).
Ahmad Massoud was in bed with Rabbani and Hekmatyar until 1990 . He was a warlord but he did not succeed .He tried to storm Kabul in 1990 . India came to his help in 1996 more or less immediately after the final push against marauding warlords by Taliban in 1996 became a fait accompli .
The difference between this 20 years and the last 20 years (from 1979 to 1996 ) was the later was dominated by 6-7 warlord groups with no cooperation or future post Soviet vision . ISI and CIA were in control of these outfits . Now Taliban emerged with full backing of ISI .Taliban had no sophistication ,no exposure and no idea of modern governing .
This time Taliban is much more independent and more exposed to outside politics and maneuvering .
They have no similar groups contenting for power grab .
They have one goal to displace the government . Iran India and China have reached out to them as has Moscow .
Afghanistan future is possibly a prolonged stalemate with Taliban controlling 90 % of the area while northeastern part controlled by the current government .
Pakistan will be the interlocutor though other may want to decide fro Afghanistan but none of them have will or manpower to get physical involved . CIA will be back again or may never leave .
Well Özbeg was Mongol, and his people were Mongols and steppe Türks, most Uzbeks are just Sarts, who have always been sedentary farmers of river plains.
is greatest, in [my choice of] order:
which would make China near-immune from the US Navee,
but I do not think they care who “rules” in Kabul as long as there is lawℴ
they have not supplied the Taliban even though it would´ve been easy.
They have been the Agency´s schnuckiputzis since before the Flood and are bound to become more so due to their control of the Corridor (and they are neither Aryan nor Shia).
Indeed there is no one for them – if there is one thing all Afghan tribes can agree on
it´s that the Hazara are Untermenschen and the Quizil-Bash the hated remnant of erstwhile oppressors.
The Iranians do have a certain interest in not letting the Taliban get too uppity –
ideas of Greater Pashtunistan (to include Paki NWFP) logically entail Free Baluchistan
(to include SE Iran) – even though that might be the most sensible proposal…
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/2048/cpsprodpb/36F1/production/_119056041_finalmap.png
https://media.tenor.com/images/4ae2882eeff6d94ffe247450433e6b41/tenor.gif
https://ria.ru/20210623/korabl-1738233635.html
They’re all just Turco-Muslims to me.
I’m not hating or morally outraged, Taliban are pretty cool.
I think Jihadis are the realest muslims||
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/857186812098117652/857299344422994010/unknown.png
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Symbolic and provocative. At the end almost funny: parading defenceless ships is like hoisting rainbow flags on embassies. Or Franz Ferdinand holding military exercises in recently conquered Bosnia to make a point. Whatever, we have the ships, we have the men, and by jingo we will take Crimea – an actual slogan from Imperial Britain. The homos in uniform are on the march again.
The question is whether British Navy will do it again, warning is a warning, but not doing it would suggest fear, and we couldn’t have that. We will not get out of this morass without some blood. Somewhere, anywhere, maybe Pashtuns, maybe Turks, maybe Galicians or Poles. It won’t matter, there are enough aspiring Franz Ferdinands.
That’s unlikely.
China and Pakistan have been allies for seven decades.
The Taliban is allies with Pakistan, just as Pashtun rebels were allies with Pakistan during the 1980s.
I doubt that China would risk its alliance with Pakistan by backing anti-Taliban and/or anti-Pashtun forces, especially now that Pakistan is helping China diplomatically by keeping quiet about the Uyghurs.
Doesn’t Afganistan have about the same IQ as Iran?
In the ’60s, it used to be said that Iranians would invariably use a hammer on a screw. Back then, some said that Iran was a worse place than Afganistan (though I don’t believe it myself), saying that it had fallen hard from its ancient heights due to inbreeding and malnutrition. The Shah kept special police barracks for travellers to stay in so they wouldn’t be robbed or murdered. Though, at the same time, there were armed convoys for buses in Afganistan.
That budgie is hilarious, thanks 😀
… but that´s as far as the fun goes – I half-and-half expected it from the noises they were making, but they cannot seriously be stupid enough to force the Kerch Strait?!
That´s the death knell for the Ukraine´s access to the sea.
Based on Russia’s modus operandi in Syria, Karabakh, and elsewhere, they would more likely prefer to strike up some sort of balanced arrangement between the government and the Taliban that freezes the combat as much as possible along some sort of stable front line, rather than just backing the national government. China and Iran would be likely to follow a similar approach.
The Afghan government still depends on the US to foot the bill for 80-90% of its military expenditures. If that funding ever dries up, the Afghan National Army collapses and reconstitutes itself as regional militias in the north again. No one else will be dumb enough to step in and take over that funding role, nor will the Afghan government ever be solvent enough to pay its own bills.
It will be interesting to see how long the US will be stuck propping up the Afghan National Army with $5 billion a year after its own troops have departed.
Probably as long as there is money to be made from Afghan Opium which is being handled by the remaining 18,000 ‘contractors’ from the USA. The Afghan National Army will be gone in less than a year, with most of them selling their weapons to the Taliban who will take over the country by striking a deal with the American ‘contractors’ for a share of the Opium profits which the Taliban will use to build up their military by buying up US-made weapons at fire-sale prices. That’s called a ‘win-win’ scenario for both sides of the deal; no need for embarrassing last-minute helicopter evacuations from building rooftops of the US Embassy in Kabul ala the Fall of Saigon. Instead, the American ‘contractors’ will leave Kabul with luggage full of cash, flying First Class to their favorite island paradise to enjoy their nest egg for life.
The Taliban will then work with Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan to build up Afghanistan, thus ending the 20-year ‘War of Error’ by the USA.
Give it to the Greeks, or let the Germans form a new Sassanid dynasty from a fusion of their Turks, Kurds, Iranians, and Greeks. H-man was doing a fine job of developing the place before the Brits and Soviets invaded Iran.
A. Karlin:
Unlike in the 1990s, these days the Taliban are very strong in Northern Afghanistan. Actually most of the recent Taliban offensive is in Northern Afghanistan. Many areas on the Northern Border fell. The Taliban took over nearly all of Takhar Province and several districts in Badakshan, something they were never able to do in the past. This is the place where NA Ahmad Shah Massoud was killed btw.
So one thing is clear – you are not following that conflict. Which isn’t a problem though – no one has the time to follow everything.
Yes.
How many American paid mercenaries are still there? As long as they keep getting paid they will stay. I know a man who spent ten years in and out. He is now retired mercenary and bought a cattle ranch with his pay. His assessment: dangerous but the money is definitely worth it. By far the best deal he could extract from the world in its current configuration.
The Chinese can have it as far as I am concerned but I don’t think they want it until it is really cheap, like totally free. 2051? Do the Chicoms have 30 year plans?
No US/foreign based mercenery is allowed to stay in Afghanistan as per the Doha Agreement between the Taliban and the US. The US merceneries are leaving. In return, the Taliban agrees not to target americans in Afghanistan (mostly the Embassy) and across the world, and not to allow Al Qaeda to target US interests abroad.
But the whole afghan army is practically paid by the US, as the Afghan government does not have the money to pay for its salaries.
So you can have afghan merceneries. But not foreigners.
All foreigners other than diplomats must leave Afghanistan. The US will not target Taliban. The Talibam will not target the US. This is what the deal is.
The Taliban successfully bullied the “allmighty” US into that. A good example for other countries. Resistance works.
And with the northeastern part now being a Taliban hotbed, things are starting to look really interesting.
Learn to find information well, not just info-trash.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/removal-all-contractors-afghanistan-underway-pentagon-chief-2021-05-06/
US contractors are leaving too. The US paid a heavy price for being left alone by the Taliban.
The US has agreed not to target the Taliban. The Taliban has agreed not to target the US and to prevent Al Qaeda from doing so (from Afghanistan). But the price for that is kicking out all the US trash from Afghanistan, contractors included.
I hope you are right but the CIA is finagling reneging even as we type.
Maybe the Taliban could adopt the Palestinians as a side project. : )
The CIA can contract locals there. No foreigners in Afghanistan. This is what the agreement is. Or the US may get targeted by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the US Embassy captured, if it violates the agreement.
Whether the agreement holds, you will see if the Taliban and the US start targeting each other. Currently there is ceasefire – no americans killed in Afghanistan, no US strikes on the Taliban.
If that changes, then the agreement is off.
But the Taliban has a strong hand – unlike in the past, it is very strong in Northern Afghanistan too.
Close.
“We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do…
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!
We’ve fought the Bear before… and while we’re Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople…”
http://www.cyberussr.com/hcunn/q-jingo.html
There is some additional info on the song’s Wikipedia page.
Whatever suffering exacted by the Taliban shall be richly deserved by the people who would not fight.
America offers development, and is repaid with ingratitude.
The Taliban is now very strong in the North-East where Russia’s Northern Alliance used to rule. There will still be an ethnic alliance ruling Afghanistan in the future because Afghanistan is tribal. To think that there could be a democratic government in Afghanistan is to assume that US citizens would accept a democratic government including all people in all of the Americas. Nobody in the USA is that democratic and people in Afghanistan’s tribes aren’t either.
Nobody else in Afghanistan will ally themselves with the Hazara because the Hazara (9% of the population) are nearly all Shiites and the rest are Sunni. It’d be like expecting a Catholic/Protestant alliance in Europe during the religious wars between Christians. Get used to the idea that some people are old-fashioned. [email protected]
Yes son trading Turban 4 hat & daughter a ho
The developed Western culture is a model 4 all
https://twitter.com/JigraaJat/status/1376531281664745474?s=19
Anyway, Taliban will lose a lot of turf over time
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Why do people here consider it impossible that they might create some kind of a political solution? The Taliban would get the bulk of Afghanistan with the Pashtun areas and the capital, but the rest of the country would get a lot of autonomy.
My impression is that the Taliban is totally different from what it was twenty years ago, they seem to have matured in many ways. For example they are no longer so extreme in their enforcement of Islam (or their warped version of it). They are no longer so keen on fighting a war. A few weeks ago there seemed to be a risk of war between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and the Taliban issued a statement that they have a lot of experience about how horrible wars are and asked their Muslim brothers in Takikistan and Kyrgyzstan to consider a peaceful solution. Perhaps they are not so keen on continuing their forever civil war? Also interesting that they are so worried about the peaceful development of Tajikistan, perhaps the real audience for this public statement was not the Tajik and Kyrgyz governments, rather their Tajik compatriots like Massud.
As already mentioned the Russians are okay with the current government and they might like the former Northern Alliance, just like the Iranians, while the Pakistanis are allied to the Taliban. But now Pakistan is warming up to Iran, because now basically both of them are Chinese allies. Russia is also increasingly a Chinese ally. So they have a bunch of war-weary Afghan warlords allied to countries who are allied to each other. I think they will simply find a political solution.
Do not blame Redstan for the failures of Bluestan.
I wonder how many Sikhs there were in Afganistan 50 years ago and what happened to them.
In respect of Iran, that may have been the claim, but I suspect it was and continues to be untrue.
Iran seems to have a level of social cohesion sufficient to absorb and turn back the US supported invasion by Iraq. It also survived and, perhaps, thrived, in the face of the ‘full spectrum’ efforts of the west to destroy it. Also, since the revolution it has managed multiple peaceful handover of power via a sophisticated political system.
In many respect, Iran is a model of good governance, social cohesion and stability – and not just in respect of that benighted part of the world.
Listed below are the Afghan National Army / Afghan National Police loses so far for June (Courtesy of Oryx who only includes a loss if he has an individual photo of the vehicle – so this list is just a bare minimum of losses).
The large number of captures indicate that Afghan government forces are abandoning their equipment rather than making a stand. Notice the fifteen 122mm howitzers that were captured intact – I’m guessing the fifteen M1117 ASV’s might be towing them.
Armoured fighting vehicles (16, of which destroyed: 3, captured: 13)
Artillery and Mortars (19, of which captured: 19)
Anti-aircraft guns (2, of which captured: 2)
Aircraft and Helicopters (4, of which destroyed: 4)
Trucks, Vehicles and Jeeps (461, of which destroyed: 38, captured: 423)
About quarter of population of Afghanistan is Twelvers and Ismailis, even some powerful Pakhtun tribes are Shias, but yes generally Pashtuns are hostile towards Shia, which is ironic, for Pakhtun tribal law is full of un-Islamic oddities.
In mid 19th century almost half of the population of Afghanistan were Shia Muslims, but emirs of Afghanistan suspected them of being more loyal to Iran, and huge number of them were massacred and expelled. Many Afghan tribes were uprooted and sent to Northern areas for pacification of Uzbeks and other ethnicities. In 1890s emir of Afghanistan conquered the last bastion of Aryan Paganism in Afghanistan, Kapiristan or land of Kafirs, but after destruction of shrines of old gods and mass forced conversions, the land was renamed as Nuristan, the land of light, well Muslims sometimes got a good sense of irony…
According to one of the last great Indian Buddhist yogis and Siddhas, known as Buddhaguptanatha, and who lived in the turn of 17th century(from 16th to 17th), there were still isolated and small communities of Jains and Buddhists living in remote areas of Afghanistan. He even claimed that the famed holy land of Oddiyana is not situated in Swat valley, but near Ghazni, Afghanistan!
If things would have gone bit different in history, Afghanistan of present day would be like Iranic Tibet or Nepal.
Unlike Russians and Turkish, Persians have done their best in keeping their empire intact, even trough harsh circumstances. Well some areas like Eastern Caucasus, parts of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan are lost, but imperial core is still intact, even though Persians make just little over half of the population, if we would be talking of tribal PoC like Bantus, Arabs and Slavs, there would be now at least dozen different countries in Iran.
How strict was the Taliban in trying to outlaw Bacha-bazi or did it just have the law on its statute books but let it slide in practice?
Pretty lethally strict. Like all good Islamist reform movements, they looke D at all the traditional Mediterranean Islamic pederastry and said, “This shit is Haram.” I heard it didn’t make a real come back till the Northern Alliance takeover and new Afghan government.
A greater Iran would be a nice way of solving some of the Afghan issues. It would be nice if they could work with China and Russia in that regards. Most of Afghanistan prospers when connected with its natural ports in Balochistan.
Overall though, a ludicrous place for anyone to fight and die over who isn’t either a Persian or a Eurasian Spanning Land Empire bent on direct conquest whose first military policy is “skull pyramids first, ask questions later.”
Greater Iran would be cool.
https://i0.wp.com/kyleorton.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/iran-territory-losses.jpg?resize=625%2C540&ssl=1
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-21750dc5fe3a8495259a9ddc2ac06ef5
For some reason I got some kind of error, and can’t edit my post.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5e/31/fa/5e31fa9d452aa5365373188e1b670c13.jpg
Traditionally Herat was one of the core regions of Iran.
So who did it better
Indeed, the Taliban of today are far, far different than they used to be. Namely, they’re now literally more like a gang or mafia with an islamic veneer than actual islamists. Hence why they don’t want a lot of fighting. Bad for business.
This fits the Pakhtun mindset well. A commenter on Razib Khan’s blog described how… religiously pragmatic they are. More naturally atheistic than the Chinese, even. They don’t even care or know a bit about Islam, it’s just that jihad is an easy way to accumulate big boy points.
Or Macedonian “nice mountain fort there my friend, it would be a shame if someone would sneak up at night and slaughter all the inhabitants” tactics
I just hope that when the end comes we don’t end up grabbing at helicopter landing skids from the top of the embassy. This decline and fall with flashy public demonstrations of incompetency is disheartening.
These guys:
https://youtu.be/Ns1q-DOF5gI
I had the same feeling about the Ingush and Chechen I have had the “pleasure ” interacting with in the early 90ies. Similar mindset. The pragmatic, tribal and clannish mentality of the “lots of sons with lots of guns” type. Islam is only respected as long as it does not interfere with the clan and tribe, tribal customs are paramount and clan cohesion is of utmost importance. The Dagestani are more “normal” Muslims in that regard, at least the few I personally known.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/u-s-contractors-in-afghanistan-are-hiring-amid-withdrawal.html
Contractors are beefing up their presence
About 60 years ago or so, they were restoring the Buddhas of Bamiyan. I think they would have become a popular pilgrimage site, under different conditions. I wonder whether they will be rebuilt or not.
“With love you could persuade a Pathan to go to hell, but by force you couldn’t even take him to heaven.”
https://twitter.com/muskanajibullah/status/1291269859758628869?s=20
Does anyone have an opinion to share about Mohammad Najibullah?
In 1994, India sent senior diplomat M. K. Bhadrakumar to Kabul to hold talks with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the defence minister, to consolidate relations with the Afghan authorities, reopen the embassy, and allow Najibullah to fly to India, but Massoud refused. Bhadrakumar wrote in 2016 that he believed Massoud did not want Najibullah to leave as Massoud could strategically make use of him, and that Massoud “probably harboured hopes of a co-habitation with Najib somewhere in the womb of time because that extraordinary Afghan politician was a strategic asset to have by his side”. At the time, Massoud was commanding the government’s forces fighting the militias of Dostum and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar during the Battle of Kabul. A few months before his death, he quoted, “Afghans keep making the same mistake,” reflecting upon his translation to a visitor.
In September 1996, when the Taliban were about to enter Kabul, Massoud offered Najibullah an opportunity to flee the capital. Najibullah refused. The reasons as to why he refused remain unclear. Massoud himself has claimed that Najibullah feared that “if he fled with the Tajiks, he would be for ever damned in the eyes of his fellow Pashtuns.” Others, like general Tokhi, who was with Dr. Najibullah until the day before his torture and execution, have stated that Najibullah mistrusted Massoud after his militia had repeatedly put the UN compound under rocket fire and had effectively barred Najibullah from leaving Kabul. “If they wanted Najibullah to flee Kabul in safety,” Tokhi said, “they could have provided him the opportunity as they did with other high ranking officials from the communist party from 1992 to 1996.” For these or whatever reasons; when Massoud’s militia came to both Dr. Najibullah and General Tokhi and asked them to come with them to flee Kabul, they rejected the offer.
Najibullah was at the UN compound when the Taliban soldiers came for him on the evening of 26 September 1996.
I’ve come to believe that the photos of women in miniskirts are somewhat misleading, that it took a while for the oil money to work its way out. And Eastern Iran may have looked a lot like Afganistan, with fortified homes.
Though, I remain puzzled why people would have thought Iran in an inferior state of civilization to Afganistan. I think there were a lot of objective signs. Like lack of shoes in Afganistan, and lack of toilets at tea houses. Cobbled together buses. The border guards in Afganistan presented a sad picture.
Perhaps, they were charmed by the scenery of Afganistan? Or by the simple ways of the peasants? Maybe, women liked that the men were taller? Or had a bad experience with mullahs. If you have rocks thrown at you, that probably ruins your experience of a country.
https://www.e-ir.info/2015/12/27/snake-oil-u-s-foreign-policy-afghanistan-and-the-cold-war/
Afghainstan should seriously study the it’s socio- political transtion ( fragmentation ) over last 70 years to prevent future becoming hostage to powerful outisde forces. It wont achieve if it doesnt rise above religious linguist tribal divide.
Peopel look to past for inspiration whether it is Ranjit’s worshipping Sikh or Babur worshiping Pakistani or Suregon Ganesh worshipping RSS looking for validation as the first head transplant suregon or some White left- out lookimg for reliving the world of 1900 . It only brings disaster and creates another layer of divide and nepotism on top of the existing one.
The world we live in has 21 st centry’s probelms and we harken back to yeasteryears problem as issues to focus and solve . Our attitude is to ignore the current .We just make it worse .
USA and Afghaunstan is no different . Neither is Sher Singh’s Shikh poltics or RSS ‘s focus on Babaur.
Yes and no, nice map, though. The areas Iran lost were non-core or non-Persian, by adding them the internal variance would increase, e.g. Azeris would be almost equal to Persians. Is that a good idea? With a big city like Baku competing against Tehran?
When large countries (empires?) collapse it is usually of indigestion. Iran will always be a target for destruction by external interests – that has been the situation for 2.5k years – it would make it more vulnerable.
I don’t understand the irrational desire to “control the others“. Apart from the fact that it is the definition of evil, it never works out. Look at Germany, France, Turkey, England, Hungary, or Russia, Ukraine, Poland etc…whenever their appetites got too big they paid a high price for it. It is the logic of a harem, and harems don’t function well and are not really fun (in the long run).
Thanks, I was working from memory. “got the money too!” was an interesting touch, I can’t imagine Russians singing it. Maybe that’s why they always win at the end.
We are in a Crimean War situation and the West foolishly thinks that they can redo the late 19th century. Same pressure and attack on all fronts, same insane appetites, same local allies – but today Russia has weapons (nukes) and is consolidated. As then the quasi-homo Anglos are in the forefront, a sad spectacle they could pay for dearly.
Effort-poast coming through:
A portion of the Taliban leadership has lived in Doha, Qatar in the last 15 years. Their wives are with them. Their children were born in modern hospital with quality nurses and top doctors from allover the world.
They enjoyed climate-controlled appartments and houses with modern appliances. They travelled around in Qatar in comfortable SUVs on smoothly paved roads.
They had reliable electricity, water, waste-disposal and fast internet connection – thanks to a large corp of foreign experts and a huge army of foreign guest-workers – the majority of them were/are not Muslims. Local supermarkets have all the fine food from allover the world and was avaible to them thanks a generous allowance from the Qatari emir.
The Taliban leaders and their families were seen going to entertainment & sport facilities and shopping malls. Their children went to international schools with modern equipment and competent teachers – many of them were not Muslims. There are rumors that the older children are now attending universities in the Gulf region under pseudo names.
—> Those Taliban leaders are going to have alot of discussion with their families, when the Taliban establish themselves after conquering Kabul.
–> Don’t they want the same comfort and safety for all Afghans or at least for the Pashtuns?
–> How does Afghanistan finances those comfort for the Taliban elites – nevermind the average Talib fighter and his family – in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan?
–> Are they expecting their wives to start going to the water-pump/river again and wash clothes with their bare hands?
–> Do they like to see their relatives die, because Afghan healthcare can mostly not even provide basics?
–> Yes, the Gulf emirates have their modernity/comfort/infrastructure by selling oil/gas – but at least they have something to share with the world and learned to hire/work with/trust the foreign experts.
If the Taliban want those for themselves or the Afghans – they have to sell something to the foreigners.
NO – selling heroin won’t be enough.
–> Yes in the first few years the Taliban might renege on some portions of their promises – like women’s rights.
But reality is a cruel rapist. There is nothing you & the toughest Talib can do about it.
–> How long will the Taliban be rulers if they don’t find jobs for the soon to be 300 000 young people entering the labour market every year?
–> How long will the Taliban be rulers if Afghans are dying in the hospitals?
–> How long will the Taliban be rulers if Afghans are going hungry in the streets?
–> How long will the Taliban be rulers if Afghan farmers are hit hard by climate change?
–> Does a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan need remittances from emigrants abroad? Emigrants, who hate the Taliban.
–> Afghans might be poor and distressed, but they can see the world on their cheap smartphones – at least they want to see a road to prosperity & want to see Afghanistan being a respected country. They are not like the isolated North-Koreans.
–> Will be the Taliban be able to deliver this road-map? With engineers and managers or with recitations of the Quran?
Taliban are fighters and warriors. Victory over the Americans/NATO and the local lackeys might give them some prestige around the world and a few years/decades of euphoric “building the new Islamic society”. But victory and peace always grinds warriors down.
It took nearly 12 years from the Fall of Saigon in April 1975 to the 6th party congress in December 1986 for reality to defeat the Vietnamese communists. Let’s see how long it will need to defeat the Taliban.
Remember folks, the Western countries, Russia, China and emerging countries like Turkey don’t need Afghanistan, BUT Afghanistan needs our knowledge, tech, consumers, tourists, capital and investors alot.
Four ideologies emerged during the 19th century: liberalism, socialism-communism, fascism and jihadism. Two ideologies have already landed in the trash-can of history.
Liberalism is heading there too by going through the local pride-parade.
Jihadism had not the chance, because so far they only had two years in Egypt and 5 years in Afghanistan. The sooner the Taliban rule Afghanistan, the faster Jihadism lands on the trash-pile of history.
Did you ever read what the Doha Agreement says?
Btw – did you ever read anything new?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-planning-to-evacuate-afghan-interpreters-contractors-ahead-of-withdrawal/ar-AALomYW?li=BBnbcA1
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/without-u-s-contractors-afghan-military-will-lose-its-main-n1269686
Americans are already gone from most of Afghanistan, the only remaining ones are in Kabul area. Even the afghan interpreters are being evacuated.
Oh, btw, americans are not allowed to even defend or operate at the Kabul airport (with or without contractors), so they are begging for Turkey to do that. Which is something that Turkey refused, after a warning from the Taliban.
Which is huge, and became a big problem, as the security of diplomats (and basically everyone) moving in and out of Afghanistan is at stake.
Most people of Herat region are Persian speakers, Parsiwans, and Shias, actually about half of people of Afghanistan are native Persian or Dari speakers. Azeris of Iran feel being as part of the nation as Volga Tatars feel being part of Russia, in other words very much, without Soviet Union and Russian legacy Azeris of R. of Azerbaijan would feel as Iranian as Azeris of Iran, even Ayatollah Khamenei is of Azeri heritage.
For Iran imperial unity has given stability, if Iranian state would have gone through Balkanization, it would be highly likely that various small statelets would now be just pawns of greater power.
Anyway China is a historical success story, as is even Russia. Without existence of Russia who knows how far Islamic Ummah would reach….? At least to borders of Nizhny Novgorod?
Look at Ukraine? Well now I don’t understand you.
Anyway Georgia and Armenia should be annexed in future back to Russia, Azerbaijan divided between Iran and Russia. There is an easy solution in Georgia, but sadly till present time Russian authorities have not been creative enough in supporting of Mingrelian nationalism. Just give support and money to some Kavkaz mafioso Mingrelian and Adjarian nationalists, join South Ossetia with North Ossetia, annex Gori or Shida Kartli to Ossetia, and Georgian core region of Kartli-Kakheti would be landlocked, and with no other choices than becoming of new Tatarstan or Udmurtia. United Ossetia+Gori would even have a slight non Georgian majority, western Areas of Georgia would be two or three provinces, or autonomous republics, Mingrelia, Adjaria and Abkhazia. Oh, and annex Armenian majority areas to Armenia. How easy it would be to cut Gruzia into multiple pieces.
Armenians deserve their place in the motherland, their cause is Russia’s cause. Northern Azerbaijan is harder to bite, well where there is a will….
Pan-Russian Imperialism is the solution to all of our problems, isn’t that right my fellow Slavs?
I never had a harem and I’d be happy to investigate the issue more closely to be able to declare it “not fun in the long run.” I’m planning a long running experiment with a large harem. For ethical reasons I don’t want to expose anyone else to this horrible experience, and I’d volunteer so that the negative effects could be studied on my person.
Oddly enough, it seems Pathans were popular with Western travelers. Possibly because they were so alien. Or typical idealism about “noble savages.”
At one time, Afganistan and Tibet were the only two countries without any rail. And now Tibet has high speed rail, though Afganistan appears to have no passenger service.
I suspect that any attempt to unite Afganistan would require passenger rail. Not sure how practical it would be with the terrain, especially if people were trying to sabotage the track.
Well put …
asceticism and non-corruptibility were their major selling points in a corner where both are in short supply, making it easier to overlook their humorlessness;
they have lost the former, and there is no Mahdi (or 12th Imam) in sight.
On the upside, contrasted with the abject corruption the US always seem to
leave behind they are still demi-gods
(and unemployed young men are an asset, not a liability; as for “women´s rights”,
well … )
We´ll see how far Chinese investment goes 😉
the second would be the big problem.
Most of the population centers aren’t in the mountains (most of em full of Hazaras nobody likes anyway) but under them. A Kabul-Ghazni-Kandahar-Lashkargah-Ferah-Herat line wouldn’t be much of a challenge. This line can be extended to Zabol and Serhetabad easily.
So the thing to watch is Nike opening up a shoe factory in Kabul in 8 or 80 years?
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt were not Jihadists. Islamic State in Iraq and Syria was Jihadist. The Talibs are somewhat in between these two.
Arabs are secularizing fast.
Come to think of it, Islamism has been extremely lame, fake, and gay, fascism in a glorious Gotterdammerung took tens of millions to the grave with itself, all of Islamic State’s atrocities were a weekend’s worth of hard work for Communists at their “peak”, what has Islamism done, patrolled some unfortunate thots and served as useful idiots for America and Israel in Syria before retreating into the gutter of history as they doing so now.
“It is the logic of a harem, and harems don’t function well and are not really fun (in the long run).”
Speak for yourself.
We will see. Nobody is talking about elephant in the room – Americans. What would they do? I think, Americans would be ok with civil war in Afganistan. Some stability / prosperity gained by cooperation with Iran / Pakistan / Russia / China would be bad for them.
So, I am making prediction. ISIS is going to make huge comeback in Afganistan. Also, push for the color revolution from Pakistan to Tajikistan would be VERY intense. Americans need these bases.
We like to burry USA as dying Empire. It might be dying, but it is still Empire.
Jihadism uniquely requires high TFR. Afghanistan currently seems to have the highest in Eurasia. But how many can Afghanistan realistically support? Pakistan seems to be fortifying the Durand Line. Anyone in power will probably want to lower that number to stay in power.
I think that it will be very interesting to see how Islamism adapts in the West and in Russia. There might be interesting developments to follow. I am not sure whether Western Muslims will secularise faster than the Western societies degrade. If not, then Western Islamism might become a force to be dealt with.
Southern route doesn’t look too difficult. I wonder how much it would cost.
I guess once a line like that was built, people might start seeing the benefits and want their own connections. Wouldn’t even have to be an integrated system – just more connections to the outside world, even freight would probably have a profound effect.
Historically controlling Afghanistan’s cities is easy (including by outside powers) but controlling the countryside is impossible and counterproductive (including by national governments). As long as you have limited goals and don’t panic you can be okay.
My understanding is that a lot of the early Taliban recruits were boys who’d been abused in the manner to which you allude.
So no, the Taliban isn’t very tolerant of that garbage. To their credit.
Afghani cuisine apparently incorporates a lot of pumpkin…which is always a good sign.
Also an excellent option.
Interestingly enough, the Azeris were the major leading ethnic figures amongst modern Persian nationalism, identifying very strongly (and with good reason) with a wider Iranian Empire and a more modern Iranian State. The Russian conquest only amplified this. It took decades, and I mean decades, of Soviet pressure and education and more modern nation building on top of a century of Russian Imperial control for that to change, and only within Azerbaijan the Nation.
Even to this day, a lot of leading figures with the theocracy, both the Republican and Priestly aspects, are Azeri.
As for controlling others, I would agree. I think though there is something to be said for culturally contiguous zones that allow for autonomous action within a wider federal or imperial framework. That something can be said in many ways, but it is something.
Herat was just on my mind with the whole idea of the “Afghan Redistribution.” Well, anyway, it will be for them to figure out. I’m sure it will be exciting, however it ends. Hopefully for the better.
Hindus are selling their daughters,
Singhs are making life difficult for Delhi & Lahore
What’s changed?
https://twitter.com/bijjaichhand/status/1128599391168647170
Well for the last 500 hundred years nation of Iran has been largely Azeri project, most rulers of Iran have cpme from those lands, but too often modern westerners are lacking in their imagination and subconsciously impose their standards to other cultures and nations. It’s like modern historical tv series, they all are shitty, just modern liberals in period clothing, even Brits have lost their ability to create authentic historical drama. In this matter liberals show that they have a genuine lack of empathy and imagination.
The Americans don’t have access to the Afghan border. It worked as long as they had Pakistan as an ally (and the Chinese had a conflict with the Soviets). But now China is way more important for Pakistan than the US, so they have no reason to help the Americans create instability in Afghanistan. It must be noted that the mujahedeen and the Taliban were both to a large extent created by the Pakistanis. Now that they find themselves in agreement with China, Iran and Russia about what kind of government they’d prefer in Afghanistan, the Americans will find it impossible to do anything.
This is not unusual. Often peripheral groups play an outsized role in revolutionary movements. Christian Arabs were instrumental in laying the intellectual and organisation framework for Pan-Arabism. Perhaps they were motivated by subduing Islamic chauvinism. The conditions are somewhat different but it would not surprise me that Azeris played a similar role. A narrow Persian chauvinism would be worse for the peripheral groups compared to Pan-Iranism.
Azeris and their lands are not peripheral, Tabriz has often been a capital of Iran. Persian culture and language were prestigious in all countries from Turkey to India. If some ruler of the past wanted to make his country more internationally accepted and refined, he switched his court language to Persian
It was the Azeri military aristocracy who made Iran Shia.
Karim Khan Zand and Reza Shah were Kurds 😉
Which just shows that Iranian nation is and has been a collective project of various nationalities of Iranian lands, Kurds, Azeris, Luris, Mazanderanis, Parsis and so on.
Yep, the Greeks simply talked of Persians and Medes during Achaemenid times, but it was a conglomeration of Iranian peoples (and probably some pre-Iranian peoples like Elamites). Herodotus mentions the Persians and Medes themselves as being composed of numerous tribes
https://www.reddit.com/r/iranian/comments/o7iqyk/prime_minister_of_pakistan_we_used_to_speak_farsi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb
https://youtu.be/ErKl35eF9Lo
I wonder if Pakistan’s parliament still uses English. I know they used to in the days of East Pakistan. If so, should be easy to reintegrate the Pakis now living in the West. Pols, including Muslim Indians, can be sent on the first planes, there to take charge of their new districts.
When I try to look up video of the parliament, all I can find is clips of Indians making fun of them for fighting or using foul language.
Pretty.
This chap seems to have adapted to the transition.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/NINTCHDBPICT000472653534.jpg
https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/NINTCHDBPICT000423036186-e1551367019132.jpg
https://whatsnew2day.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/1618436545_729_What-blatant-hypocrisy-Imran-now-tells-women-to-hide.jpg
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/04/07/13/41448198-9444837-image-a-20_1617798230051.jpg
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRGueuqU-hOCgu-SQQej5Vyls92iYIk-jK7Gg&usqp.jpg
Oh come on!
Without the BMW Series 3 there wouldn’t be a Series 7. The midsize is the cash-cow for the whole company, the flagship is just for prestige.
This applies to conservative Islamist groups as well. In the beginning it just the pressure to dress modestly, but take a look at the wives of many MB members: full niqab, no activities outside the household. This is where the journey will head to when the Islamist rule with a weak or no opposition at all.
It’s all about how many extremely willing to kill & die men you have. Througout history.
Ceasar without his 10th legion? Just one the many Roman generals.
In 1945 the core of the Vietnamese Communists were around 3000 people. But they were very violent. In the late stage of WW2 they managed to kill around 3000 to 5000 poeple – de facto killed off all the competing groups. This actually impressed many young Viets to follow Ho Chi Minh and his crew. Their ranks swell within months.
The Vietminh only had a hardcore of around 20000 fighters and auxilleries left after Dien Bien Phu – but all their enemies were demoralized. That’s why their enemies agreed to a truce and partition of Vietnam. All the French had to do was send an additional force of 2/3 divisions and they could renew the pressure and regroup the losses of DBP. There were 15 million people in Northern Vietnam in 1954.
Ben Ali’s rule in Tunisia ended when the Tunis’ PD’s SWAT team refused to arrest the protesters.
We all could see in 2016 during the coup d’etat in Turkey. Hardcore Erdogan followers charged the military units, which deployed on the streets. The officers were not willing to order to shoot those vanguard at once and soon more citizens follow those Erdogan fanboys.
ergo: Technically Hisbollah could takeover Lebanon right now and probably very swiftly. A prolonged crisis or infighting of Egypt’s elites could create an opportunity for MB to take over country.
In the Arab countries it’s all about secular men, willing to kill against jihadists willing to kill.
Everyone else is just a herd of sheep or beta wolfs willing to follow the alpha. Everywhere everytime.
As long as the white men in the US Spec-Ops units and commanders of SSBN/SSN are willing to take orders from Globohomo, Globohomo will strive.
Well, Islamists are like other political movements, for example like Socialist ones. Both British Labour and Pol Pot Red Khmers were Socialist, but only the Red Khmers went forward with an eradication of the “bourgeois “. The Labour ended up bourgeois itself.
Among the Islamists the most important distinction is among the national and international lines. The Salafi are usually Internationalist in the sens that they hope to build a worldwide Islamic Empire with a single Ummah independent of ethnic origins of the faithful. The Haraki are usually more local and attached to a nation or a region, of which they hope to revive “the Islamic Greatness “. Erdogan for example is a typical national-islamist, while Ayman al-Zawahiri was a typical islamic-internationalist (or international-islamist).
Sometimes these branches fight against each other, sometimes they collaborate. As I wrote to Karlin above, it will be interesting to follow the evolution of the “Western Islam ” among the immigrants, their offspring and the converts.
Behind the veil.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/2a/44/20/2a442044d063f43c8c7b043cf2f5a40a.jpg
Ukraine was fine as long as things were ambiguous. Ambiguity always outlasts clear-cut solutions, in geopolitics as in personal life. Today Ukraine is a budding mini-empire with a mania for mono-culture that is bound to fail. It is too easy to exploit.
Regarding Azerbaidzan: I agree that the Azeri part of Iran is well integrated. But that would never be the case with Baku Azerbaidzan. You could have a cultural-economic continuum, but trying to absorb it (and other areas like Herat, Tajikistan,…) into a larger Iran would be a risky proposition. More likely to destroy the state than to succeed. The train has left the station – today you cannot undo 100’s of years of separation, not without an unacceptable level of control (and probably violence).
Both China and Russia are relatively homogeneous. In places they are not, they have issues, some genuine and some caused by external meddling (it’s often hard to tell even for the participants).
Georgia is a backwater with short, cute, (often hairy) girls. Let’s keep it that way. A Caucasian reservation. Splitting it apart would just give us more Sasquatch-populated skanzens. A tempting idea, but the evening is getting short, so I will pass…
I have done some research and harems are simply a bad idea. Trying to control disparate people in the same place triggers low atavistic emotions, conflict, and a huge amount of unnecessary accounting.
It is the accounting that at the end destroys it – Ottomans tried eunuchs, but that introduced an element of perversion that undermined the whole enterprise. Others tried self-managed hierarchies, or sequential and other unnatural orders. It never works. As we can see with today’s obvious collapse of the Western liberal (harem-like) ideology, the dynamic is all wrong. Money helps, but it only delays the inevitable end.
It is the uncontrollable resentment that kills it: the past is brought back, micro-divisions multiply, purity has to be enforced – and what is purity in a multi-cultural setting? And of course, the deviant variants proliferate. The harem-society idea has a tremendous appeal in the short run, but it always ends in a cul-de-sac of its own making.
Since you asked :), the Achilles heel of all consolidated unified societies is yearning. People naturally yearn – usually for something or someone else. With societies the yearning-resentment dichotomy is impossible to permanently solve, you just learn how to live with it. In personal lives, it is more straightforward if you are lucky. (If not, just vaccinate and be done with it – this is a throw-away allusion, ignore it :).
There is a way, but it’s hard. I call it “baiting.”
Rome did it, for example. You make the subjugated one want to integrate.
Arabs are not the main pillar of Islamist political power of the 21st century, or late 20th century.
The most powerful Islamist/Jihadist states or political regimes, are Islamic Republic of Iran (1979-today) and Erdogan’s AKP rule (2003-today) in Turkey, and both seem to be resilient governments.
Islamism is the ruling ideology of the two most powerful countries of the Middle East, and minus Egypt 2 of the 3 largest (Egypt, Iran, Turkey) countries of the Middle East by population, and both of them are non-Arab powers.
Whereas the most successful Arab countries, are only under the power of the aristocratic families, or secular dictatorships. When Islamism briefly rose in Egypt via Morsi, it was quickly removed by Saudi planned coup d’état (2013).
For Arabs, the Muslim religion should feel like a family heirloom and that they should be leaders of it as their aristocratic right of birth (King Hussein of Jordan is descendent of Prophet Muhammad); Islam is a product, and designed for, the Bedouin culture of the Arabian peninsula – as a locally designed franchise of previously fashionable Jewish-Christian texts, that had been “trending” in other regions for some centuries earlier.
But Turks and Iranians, as foreign adoptees of the Arab’s religion, are regularly dominating the region, and winning the battles to lead the Muslim world, which composes 1,8 billion people, of which the Arabs today are only around 420 million.
https://youtu.be/BzsIxK4gWZc
I remember reading comments to Niyaz songs where people used to argue whether the lyrics were Dari, Urdu, Farsi or even Turkish. People probably were bi or even trilingual there in Middle Ages. Our Sikh friend probably knows that some of the terminology he sometimes uses comes straight out of Arabic transliteration into Hindustani dialects.
Of course, that was before the White Men drew the borders. Perhaps it is time to erase these Great Game anachronistic divisions. The Durand Line should go first.
Mostly seems to have worked out for Genghis.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/1-in-200-men-direct-descendants-of-genghis-khan
Today the most populous Muslim majority country is Indonesia, which was islamized through the work of Sufi missionaries / merchants. No Jihad was necessary to islamize most part of the greater Malay realm (including the Muslim portion of Thailand and the Philippines).
I think their miserable human capital causes this problem.
Should they stop cousin fucking completely, and establish an eugenic selection, this will cease to be a problem.
“Macho” types always end up being weak.
There is, in general, an inverse relationship between surface and depth.
They drew it with the help of local princes, like the raja of Punial.
Incidentally, the raja still spoke Farsi at least as late as the 1960s, though only in a polyglot fashion and probably imperfectly, as he was basically illiterate.
Genghis was not the society. He was entertaining, but his empire didn’t last, his DNA did. Another harem that went to pieces.
You can also kill them, it is faster. Regarding what people want that is not easy to know. It also changes over time. There is today no luckier population from Africa than the descendants of slavery living in US, many don’t seem to want it. So it is more complex.
I am not familiar w baiting, what is it?
Yes, accross the whole of that region, local aristocracy mostly went along the British and Russian colonialism. Although the Afghan King was smart enough to balance both powers against each other, it didn’t really help Afghanistan in the end though.
I read that in some Maghrebi regions the inter-cousin marriage still represents up to 85% of all marriages. It was close to 100% among the Religious elites and the Aristocracy before the European colonisation. Add to this the impact of centuries of trans-Saharan slave-trade and you understand why the IQ of most people in that region went down the drain.
Why something is how it is, never really interested me much.
How to change and improve on it, is.
Must have been an interesting time in the ’60s when the Soviets and Americans were both building roads there.
Hopefully, the region will become peaceful enough so that one day TF can cycle through to visit his home country. The high passes take effort, but it is worth the expense to come down into isolated valleys and be regarded by the locals, even Pashtuns with rifles, as the Amerinds regarded Cortez upon his horse.
Helps to know how you got here, if you want to go elsewhere, I think.
Perhaps I am myself being too obsessed with the “how we got there” part, but I believe that we need to understand the past to become able to move the present into the direction of a better future.
I still have some (purely scientific) curiosity about the issue, and so I’d be happy to add some bold experimental research (N=1, with myself as the husband and lord of the many ladies), to just test it one more time. Science!
https://twitter.com/bijjaichhand/status/1128599391168647170?s=20
The tale of the Sword echoes across the ੪ echoes
The amount of faggotry in this thread is astounding।।
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
N
Any nation that gives a bloodied nose to USatan, deserves to exist, congratulations Taliban and Pakhtuns!
The harem research that in my experience works best is the double-blind or anonymous model. My cousin used to describe it colloquially as nobody knows nothing model. Unfortunately his experiment went awry and now he just washes a lot of dishes and rarely leaves the house.
As with the MRNA research, speed, secrecy and a good cover story are key to success. Good luck!
Ukraine is a model case of nationalism’s shortcomings, not imperialism’s. Very few traditional empires were obsessed with being of mono-cultural.
There are 25 million Azeris in Iran, and less than 10 million in the independent republic, couple generations of healthy education and Shia indoctrination would be more than enough, Iranian religious and historical narrative is much more coherent and consistent than that offered by Turkish nationalists or Soviet Union.
WRONG. Russia has no acute or genuine problems outside of DICh, where only a small fraction of Russia’s minorities live. Udmurtia, Chuvashia, Mordovia, Mari, Komi, Bashkirs and so on, live in a complete peace, and well integrated with Russians and state. Similarly China has almost no problems outside of Xinjiang, except a few Kham monks burning themselves, Tibet, Yunnan, Guanxi are extremely peaceful regions, with practically no terrorism or violent accidents.
Cute and hairy? One does not go with another, ha!
Traitorous Georgia must be punished, what else would be more befitting than fragmentation of her lands. Putin has wisely ensured that Georgia’s fate is tied with Russia. Adjaria has long traditions of autonomy, Mingrelia has more thousand years of history of being and independent and separate nation from the rest of Georgia, Samstkhe-Javakheti is majority Armenian, areas directly south of Ossetia, Shida Kartli or region surrounding Gori have just a few hundred thousand inhabitants, by joining Shida Kartli to Southern Ossetia and uniting both Ossetias, there would be a new administrative unit with large majority of Ossetians and Russians. In such way core Georgia or Eastern Georgia, the most populated area, would be contained and cut from the sea. It’s a crime how stupid Bolsheviks were in drawing of borders…
Georgia is a Russian land, liberated from Muslim yoke by Russian lives, without Russia there would be nothing else than just another Muslim country among the sea of Islam.
Who could ever forget that beautiful, mad redhead, Shah Ismail I? Last good poet in Old Azeri (before it became a Turkic language.)
Well said on the modern Western liberal values projection. It’s a damn shame. The funniest way I ever heard this parodied was a comic where a “Western” being shown in the future has a talking donkey complaining how its sentient, genetically modified animal rights are being abused, and how it too will have the vote one day.
Very often the case, but not for the Azeris, as Altan makes clear. It’s more comparable if anything to Viking nobility heavily investing in making Russia a European Power when they rose to power, or when a local sino-nomad group takes over China, then doubles down on the Chinese cultural values.
In fact, the Azeris explicitly rejected a more “diverse” nationalist concept of Iran, pushing for a crash course in Persian linguistic nationalism, which is ironically the only thing that separates Persians from Azeris, as Azeris are basically a turkic-speaking Iranic people, and entirely Shi’ite, and before being Sunni(ish) like the rest of Iran, and originally Zoroastrian, just like the rest of the Persian peoples (excluding Pashtuns, Tajiks and Alans, who are variously Sunni or Weird Caucasian Mountain Faith).
It’s funny then, hearing some small foreign-backed organizations in Iran complaining about “linguistic discrimination” against Azeris when their own ancestors said, “We’re going full Iranian, and every Turkmen in this damn land is going to speak Farsi like it’s his mother’s tongue.”
On that note, Iran should also get Iraqi Kurdistan. It would have more cultural stability as a part of a wider Iranian People’s state, rather than in competition with Arabs, while simultaneously, the Shiite Arabs of Baghdad region, Iraq would pleased to be under a good Shiite state. The only reason they weren’t was because the Ottomans won a war. It’s not like they wanted to be ruled by Heretic Turks or themselves.
My knowledge of Indonesian history is limited, but I’ve understood that Islamisation there was much more complicated than what you are claiming. Javanese Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms fought at least for couple centuries against expanding Muslim Malay powers, and later Western colonization quickened the conversion process. For Islam gave Malays a common united identity in their struggle against colonisation.
https://abhidharma.ru/A/Bodhissatva/Content/Prajnaparamita/0001/0001.jpg
13th century Javanese statue of Prajnaparamita, mother of all Buddhas.
Shame what we lost, the land where Atisha Dipamkara and Tilopa studied under the great masters. The Buddhism of Malay lands was quite much like in Tibet.
I think that is a bit of a stretch. Linguistically, Azeris in Azerbaijan tilt strongly towards Turks. Culturally too, they seemed to developed real affinity with the Turks; often mediated; at the level of the average person via Turkish serial dramas and movies. So, I think at Azeris in Azerbaijan are a complex matter. Linguistically, they tilt strongly towards Turkey, genetically they are Iranian, culturally they adhere to some old Irani traditions but they seem to identify with modern Turkdom. Religiously, they strongly tilt Shia but about a third are Sunni. And let’s not forget the Soviet inheritance. It is not entirely clear to me, Azeris belong to the Iranian world. Of course, personally I do not want Turkey having another ally.
“Shiite Arabs of Baghdad region, Iraq would pleased to be under a good Shiite state” If you follow Iraqi politics and the rhetoric of the militia leaders, very few express a desire to live under Persian rule. One of the largest parties and militias of Moqtadr Al-Sadr has positioned himself as an Iraqi nationalist.
Why break up something that’s geographically basically a single unit? It pulls a westoid and a commie, by inventing fake nations based on larp. Just annex the thing wholesale
Whole Georgia should be annexed, but for easier digestion, Georgia should be cut into chewable bites. Resistance is easier when all inhabitants of Georgia identify with the Georgian nation. Anyway Mingrelia/Colchis, Armenia or Ossetia are not fake nations. Autonomous Georgia, under Russia’s rule, cut from the sea, and historical Georgia divided by Russian and Ossetian majority lands, would leave no other choice for Eastern Georgia/Kartli-Kakheti than to accept her fate.
Divide et Impera.
Come on maaan!,the U.S., military is is boosting it’s moral with drag queen shows,plus putting girls with two mommies in charge of weapons systems ……our enemies are quaking with………OK ,not fear, but laughter.
Thank you, but I don’t think RusFed needs even more Georgian “Thieves in Law”. I would be of opinion to lump Georgia and Armenia together and deport all the “ancient, proud” and social climbing Christian Caucasoids there. They would be counterbalanced by a large DICh nokhchistan, essentially a large bantustan for Islamic Caucasoids. That way they will forever neutralize each other in their endless squabbles and blood feuds in which no Slav should have ever taken part if not for the Oldenburg / Holstein-Gottorp “Romanov”‘s reckless Imperialism.
For a hammer everything is a nail.
You’re literally a faggot.
If you’re concerned who enemy women marry, well that’s an easy solution.
You fail to understand that your complications arise from trying to do everything non-violently
You think I’m a retard when there’s a better read from the situation over here, faggot.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
I don’t think you’re retarded, although you often seem to behave as such. It’s an old ksatriya / brahmin problem, or military / intellectual problem. Those who tend to overthink seldomly respect those who tend to overkill and vice versa. The fact that you see everything as a problem potentially solved through violence doesn’t help solving the violence problem. But you probably already know that through your own existential experience.
What problem? Brahmin r subordinate to Khatris, morality is inept w/o violence
Khalsa is sole political/spiritual authority on this Earth, none else.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/777363116454313984/826609768448917534/unknown.png
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
From what I see there, it encourages both brawn and brain, not ooga booga africa tier “beat all problems to death”
Not subordinate – cooperate. Balance is best.
You’re lit in a society that wants to inject poison in ur kids & cut their genitals.
There’s a point where the brain cncludes it time for brawn- rest is cowardice
Cowardice often disguises itself as Dharma – Bhima to Arjuna
https://twitter.com/Parikramah/status/1287794290886873091?s=20
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
https://twitter.com/Parikramah/status/1287792349968556034?s=20
You’re just completely wrong on a fundamental level, and I can’t even bother 2 reply beyond minimaly
I’m not even sure why it’s so hard to understand, but then I remember most of u r Eunuchs.
:woman_shrugging:
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Islam is a version of the Jewish-Christian texts (i.e. Eastern Mediterranean Semitic culture with Greek influences) that has been locally designed and customized for the Bedouin soul of the Arabian peninsula.
Washing your feet in cool water, after long marches by the desert stars, is a second nature of Arabian men, but becomes an exotic cargo cult habit when spread for political influence to tropical rainforest people of Indonesia, or Indo-Aryans of Pakistan.
As many of the customs of Christianity and Judaism, had been ordinary daily life of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean (and can still been seen today when that part of the world is visited), but is treated as an exotic cargo cult when it replaced the ancestral heritage of the Celtic tribes of Ireland or Aztecs of Mexico.
Bible is a world of olive branches, palm leaves, barren fig trees and Samaritan women, that was and still is a prosaic second nature to the tribes of the Eastern Mediterranean, but becomes an alien and exotic import in the taiga or the Andes.
And so most of the idiosyncrasies of Islam are customizations of the fashionable trends, of the neighbouring tribes, to life in the Arabian peninsula, and are sensible for the region, where tribal alliances were made by trading women, and you do not have regular access to running water.
Circumcision is a meaningless operation in freshwater and maritime regions, when you can wash everyday, but it was a very logical, life-improving technology for people living in inland settlements in desert regions (such as Jerusalem or Medina), who could not waste the rare access to running water to wash themselves.
For Bedouin walking across a desert, daily fasts of Ramadan is a reliable way to create religious experiences without killing yourself, especially via its restriction of drinking water, that can cause hallucinations by dehydration – but allow you rebuild your strength in the cool Arabian night. Needless to say, Ramadan has become an absurdity among Muslims in Saint-Petersburg or Stockholm today, when they have to eat breakfast at 4 am, but in such a climate as cannot lost sufficient water to induce any of the mystical hallucinations useful to religion.
People who designed a religion, view its habits as prosaic and natural heritage of their ancestors, but the for the foreign adoptees there is often seen more of an attitude to the religious rituals as if worshipping an exotic technology.
Gurus designed Sikh Dharma to be our sword and shield, they have an important role to fill in the future, as they had in the past. Our truths are contained in gestating form in their religion. Lotus Born knew well what He was doing.
Balance, ha, what that even means? Has world ever been in a balance, and is balance worthy of being pursued? What makes balance different from stagnation? Aboriginal Australia was in kind of a balance for tens of thousands of years before British came and ended that balance. Horrible existence they had, didn’t know how to make bows, Tasmanians didn’t even know how to make fire. Abbos practiced cannibalism and had various perverse rites, but yes they had a “balance.”
So they had water to spare for washing of their feet, but not for their willy? Isn’t that a contradiction? Anyhow, ancient Egyptians and Ethiopians practiced circumcision, and their lands had no lack of fresh water. It’s quite probable that circumcision is a barbaric African custom. Romans, Hellenes and Aryans were deeply shocked when they encountered that uncivilised practice. In my understanding circumcision was much smaller operation during the existence of temple Judaism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_equilibrium
Arguably the world has always been balanced and always will be.
It’s also how Arab culture can adopt to the modern world – it appears to be most stable when they can maintain aristocratic rule.
Where there is significant ethnic homogeneity, Arabs operate modern world’s most successful Ancien Régime aristocracies, such as in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Morocco, Abu Dhabi, etc.
These countries can be surprisingly stable, with high state capacity (for example, they managed the coronavirus pandemic better than most of the world).
By comparison secular dictatorships that usually emerge in multiethnic regions of the Middle East, by rule of a minority tribe over a majority tribe, seem to be unstable failures among the Arabs, such as seen in Baathist rule in Iraq and Syria. And multiethnic government of Lebanon, explores the worst possibilities that European enlightenment’s concept of democracy could provide to them.
Nobility ruled regimes among the Arab countries also almost always welcome non-Muslim interference in the region, whether it will be American, Russian or Chinese.
This is because they view Islam as a family heirloom, which should be their right of birth. They view Islamist governments in Iran or Turkey, as trying to lead the Muslim world, and that would primarily be at expense of the natural leadership of the Arabs.
Therefore, the Arabs, prefer to ally with non-Muslim powers like America, Russia and China, who do not aspire to lead the Muslim world.
When a Muslim Brotherhood government formed among themselves (in Egypt in 2011), within two years the Arab monarchies launched a coup d’état and installed military guardian’s rule over Cairo.
After Islamist governments form in Iran and Turkey, then their ambitions include a leadership role over the Islamic world, and resistance against Israel becomes an important priority, and sphere of leadership over the Arabs (although for Erdogan’s Turkey, this resistance has so far only been rhetorical).
Israel is a rhetorical Achille’s heel for Arab rulers, as they can be seen to be compliant in a lack of leadership over Islam, and the de facto control of Islam’s third holy site by non-Muslims in Jerusalem.
Anciens Régimes among the Arabs, understand that this resistance, is primarily aimed against themselves and influence over the Arab, as it concerns the question of Islam.
Israel de facto controls the third holiest site of Islam, while Islamist Iran and Turkey are the most powerful countries in the region, and both seek leadership and dominance of the Islamic world.
https://i.imgur.com/N7lliRc.jpg
Then what you meant by balance has no meaning and/or is not same as the equilibrium of chemistry and physics.
I heard something like this related to a very old friend of our family, who had worked in the Arab world as an engineer (this was in Soviet times). The story I heard was that he said he decided to be circumcised and that life was a lot easier for him after this.
That is, such a thing that can improve your standard of living, if you are working in tents in the deserts in Egypt, or in the outback in other unsanitary third world countries without much water. And that’s what life was like in Medina of Muhammad or Jerusalem of the Second Temple.
By the way, Ethiopia is inland, and a significant part of the country is desert. Notice that all historical regions where circumcision was a tradition, are desert regions.
Israel is also half desert, and the Arabian Peninsula is majority desert. It is historical custom always adopted among the people who lived in or around deserts.
Culturally important settlements of Ancient Greece and Rome were maritime, and there are no deserts in them.
The only desert in Europe is a small area of Southern Spain, which was not an important centre for Romans.
It is hardly a co-incidence that circumcision is a custom adopted only among desert peoples, but not among the non-desert living peoples.
Ethiopian highlands(Ethiopia proper) were traditionally lush and forested, same with the fertile Nile river valley. Eastern Ethiopia is quite arid, but it was conquered relatively late in Ethiopia’s history.
During the Hellenic era many Jews wanted to assimilate into the Greek culture and stretched their foreskin back so that they could too go to gym as other respectable citizens, later rabbis wanted to stop this practice and started to cut more skin away. Anyway Northern Africa and Arabian peninsula were much more fertile 2000 years ago, and even more 3000 years ago, as various climate studies tell us.
If you look in the airport today, there is provided a special bath with cold water taps for Muslim men to wash their feet, as part of their prayers before flying. This is one of the 21st century’s “concessions to multiculturalism”.
Of course, for Arabian nomad of the 7th century, washing your feet in cool water was wonderful pleasure, luxury, or even – privilege.
In the 21st century airport, it becomes quite a strange and alien custom, as we have almost universal access to water, and live in cold countries, and have wasteful warm showers with it. For a modern man, the desire of Muslims to wash their feet in cold water before travelling, takes the appearance of an exotic and strange habit.
However, in its original context, among the nomadic tribes of the Arabian peninsula, it would have seemed natural and normal, if somewhat luxurious.
And so, for so much of the modern view of religious customs that have been imported from foreign nationalities, and which were created by people living in very divergent times and place from our own.
In their original context, many of these religious habits would have seemed to be self-evident to the local culture of the nationalities that originated the religion, and such tradition might even have been associated to religious motivations, to give the religion a sense of common sense, rather than vice-versa.
Abother excellent comment Dmitry.
Arabs have lost the primacy of Islam long ago, already Ibn Khaldun wrote about it some 700 years before present.
That is why the opposite trends in Islamist movement, the local/ethnic and international/panislamic are important. If the local Haraki trends end up dominant, then Islam will continue its slow degradation towards a subpar modernity imported wholesale from the more advanced geopolitical/technological powers. But if the Islamic international truly becomes a thing, possibly with an important input from the “Western ” Muslims, then a completely different Islamic reality might emerge in the next few decades.
One should keep in mind that the whole MENA region is slowly but surely moving towards a crisis of epic proportions where the hydrocarbon trade no longer allow to ensure the minimum survival if the bloated populations that have developed in mostly desertic environments. On top of that the pressure exerted by Sub-Saharan hordes and the potebtial Indian subcontinent migrations might also throw the “traditional ” Arab monarchies and military dictatorships off-balance. Half a billion people will enter in a state of turmoil there.
If only 10 % of people there are smart enough to move North West and 5 % are lucky enough to cross the Mediterranean, then the Islamic factor’s importance would increase by an order of magnitude in Eurasia. A new balance would be needed.
What I write about is the dialectic opposites balancing each other. A dynamic balance is always the most natural state. Hindustani society was unable to find a way to balance and produce a synthesis of Sramana – Brahmin and Ksatriya – Brahmin contradictions. It ended-up dominated by cultures that were better at balancing their warriors and their intellectuals.
Balance is always best.
Lack of merit, not lack of balance, is the reason for losing to outsiders. Are you claiming that there was no balance in Persian society before the Arab invasions? To me it seems that Byzantines of the 7th century had no balance with their endless Christological disputes, or during the 8th century when the Iconoclastic controversy engulfed the whole empire in flames, even so Orthodox Byzantines survived unlike Zoroastrian Persians.
Indian civilization was decaying already before the invasions, getting more agrarian, losing it’s economic complexity.
Claiming that society needs a balance to defend itself is in my opinion very reductionistic take. Relatively speaking, yes, we need some balance, but balance is not all. To me it seems that balance is just s new western buzzword or concept, like nature, or natural.
Well, then how you explain the female circumcision?
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/464/mcs/media/images/68887000/jpg/_68887607_female_mutilation_464.jpg
It’s not Islamic and never has been. The immense majority of Muslims do not practice it and never did.
Where I claimed so?
I was just interested if Dmitry could think some common sense explanation for it.
Well maybe you are right about the circumcision being a common sense tradition in the desert context, but Judah, Samaria and Phoenicia were not any deserts, but part of the fertile crescent.
Only men can answer to matters of politics (balance)
The definition of Man or Narh (Lion) has been given
As to anything else we answer with Sri Bhagvati Devi
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/781981619073318943/856447327900532737/unknown.png
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Zagros mountains are much more formidable barrier than the Taurus mountains, how many times Persians advanced deep into Anatolia, but Romans could never invade the Iranian plateau. Asia Minor was one of the richest, or possibly the richest area of Roman empire, IIRC there is archeological evidence that Asia minor was economically growing till 6th or 7th century.
Ying Yang equals balance in your opinion? Wow! Of course most translations are very crude, but polarity would be in my opinion better translation for ying and yang. Interdependent-polarity mayhaps?
Do not misunderstand me, balance has it’s uses, but getting attached to balance, or thinking it’s all that being or society needs, is also not Middle Way/Madhyamaka.
But well if you mean by balance, dynamic equilibrium, then whatever dude, I’m not going to argue about so abstract concepts like it or balance. At least dynamic equilibrium sounds better, more concise.
Dialectic dynamic balance. Of course it is interdependent, how could it be otherwise. Balance is not stasis it’s the opposite of stasis.
Many here will talk of Circumcision but of Kesh?
The most Aryan & Noble of traditions
https://www.manglacharan.com/post/importance-of-kesh-suraj-prakash
https://twitter.com/YungBhujang/status/1142214014912598016?s=20
https://mobile.twitter.com/SirPentapotamia/status/1312875714836942848
http://www.punjabmonitor.com/2013/04/was-guru-nanak-cleanshaven.html?m=1
Basically, this is my response to the Russo Balkanoid Kvetching about balance
If a single hair head to toe is shorn you are UN Aryan and unfit to speak as a Man.
The Lion’s mane disappears when he’s castrated।।
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
http://www.sikhmuseum.com/nishan/mistaken/large/trident_1.jpg
http://www.sikhmuseum.com/nishan/mistaken/large/moon_13.jpg
Aad Chand or Aad Shakti Devi & Moon of Shiv
Locks of Shiva & Broad sword of Goddess
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Good to know, but humans are not lions. We’re 1,5 % genetically different from the Chimpanzee. Therefore, the hair is not much correlated with virility in our species. In fact, excessive testosterone is leading to baldness…
https://cdnimg.rg.ru/i/photogallery/2020/08/02/b45b01f63eea42f/b45b01f63eea42f1596368630.jpg
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2014/05/08/10/conchita-wurst-euro.jpg
What about the chemical and biological warfare? When I served in the army we had a test where we were put into container full of tear gas, dressed in protective clothing and wearing gas masks. If one was not very careful with making his dress 100% airtight, then gas leaked inside of one’s clothing, with negative effects, like heavy coughing and itching of the skin. We all had very short hair and no facial hair, but with a beard and long hair, I think it would have been extremely hard or impossible to get the gasmask airtight. In military matters such aesthetical sensibilities are just a hindrance.
Our Sikh friend is possibly sponsored by L’Oréal ..
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71PMAoss2QL._AC_SY879_.jpg
Shampooing leads to baldness. That’s why they have to constantly look for new customers.
India gets pretty hot. Isn’t having unshorn hair kind of an obstacle to conquering the whole of it? I find it perplexing how the Sikhs adopted the custom in that environment. Or is it worse to have the sun directly on your head?
That suggests that you may not know enough about either one. 🙂
I am all for kicking Georgia around for their incredible stupidity (and producing the Saakasvilli moron). But something tells me that they have been punished enough – the poison cake they ate under Saakasvilli is still in their stomach. They will suffer enough.
Some were obsessed, e.g. Poland before WWI, Hungary in early 20th century (also a mini-empire), Turkey today, even Izrael to some extent if we push the definitions. Ukraine is an aspirational mini-empire, they are quite multi-cultural, it is not a traditional national state.
The Iran-Azeri situation is exactly as I wrote before: that train has left the station, too long a separation and large metropolis like Baku would never be comfortable inside another country as a second city. Plus that guy in charge in Baku today, well, let just say his vissage hardly adds anything to any country, I don’t see him in Tehran with that face. (He could use some real hair as a proper Caucasian.)
He has a typically Median profile though.
https://www.livius.org/site/assets/files/3498/firealtar_sassanid.jpg
https://vestnikkavkaza.net/upload2/2015-12-02/7fb78e7bd940e0d49465beba280c6241.jpg
See, the whole point is that we’re not arguing from your perspective of scientific practicality.
You’re arguing that you’re Dharmic and furthermore Aryan.
I’m pointing out that those are things for whom even children have sacrificed and you’re below even being spit on, Slavic AaronB
https://youtu.be/4K5-MlT5Gds
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
You can tie a beard & be okish, furthermore there’s a gas hood that the mask can seal to. Even further is that Yes Kesh forces a different fighting style. For example we generally understand grab a beard or Turban in a fist fight = stabbed
Use chemical or biological on Singhs and invite Nukes. Cultures adapt, but ADharmic Monas are not that imaginative. Quite simply don’t keep Kesh unless you’re ready to die for it. That’s why it’s the mark of both Warriors and Brahmins (renunciates)
I simply cannot understand having full legal license & even encouragement to keep and use weapons yet still not. Concealed carry like most of USA isn’t even close to how ARYAN open carry of arms is; christian culture simply doesn’t allow it. Anyway, everyone knows the Singhs are foremost among Aryas and this is the standard SatGuru has set. Afghan mothers don’t scare their sons with the name of a (christian) White man.
https://im.indiatimes.in/media/content/2016/Jun/like_1466511823.jpg
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Does he have much Jewish ancestry?
Are you familiar with the story of Samson and his hair?
And where did I argue that?
Besides, the Sramana were both Dharmic and Aryan, but did not share your weird capillary fixation. They shaved their beards and hair as a symbol of renouncing their ignorance. Same thing could be said about Adi Shankara.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OJ3Ei4Bdz7g/maxresdefault.jpg
Should we believe that they were adharnic mlecchas ?
Not that I am aware of.
You’re unaware of their discourse with Guru Nanak Dev Ji then, go be a Hindu Brahmin cuck lolllll
Their cutting as a form of renunciation (death) only further reinforces the point; also we’re Kshatriyas.
You can follow them into the forests you came from, leave the women.
All the Devas, Munis & Bodhas have a Joorah or Top Knot. You’ve lost, also Viper4Android is gr88.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
You are Ksatriya alright, none is denying that. But I can’t see why this should be important for me or anyone else who is not part of the Varna system.
Varna is a universal descriptor, you can’t be born Kshatriya you become it via action.
Anyway on a more serious note, I’ve only met Slavic or certain Indo-Iranian girls w/ this phenotype
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/640459736919048202/858396490119643146/unknown.png
Like really pulled back features, even Brahmins don’t really get it.
Any knowledge on it? Genuinely interested beyond muh dik bs
I doubt that would happen… Never say never – but I would put it at a 99 percent impossibility. China and Pakistan are good friends. China is heavily invested in Pakistan from the border of Xinjiang all the way down to Gwadar Port. China doesn’t put military boots on the ground to help Pakistan fight the separatists in Pakistan – who target Chinese projects to stunt economic growth in Pakistan. There are “private” security firms – but overall – China expects Pakistan to provide security. China is too smart to pull a US maneuver. Likewise after Iran and China signed a 25 year pact – western media tried to stir up nationalists in Iran by claiming they were going to put Chinese military bases there. Both governments laughed it off. The only place China has a base is Djibouti – and that’s in an area where other governments have naval bases too – so it’s not isolated. Tajikistan let’s China watch Uyghur jihadists who go fight in Afghanistan and try to sneak back into China – right near where the three borders are close… That would probably be the extent of any Chinese boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Ultimately the goal of China and Russia would be for Afghanistan – regardless of government – to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – which would basically shut the door on the US in Central Asia.
“especially now that Pakistan is helping China diplomatically by keeping quiet about the Uyghurs”
The dirty secret is that except for Turkey – other Muslim nations don’t care for the Uyghurs (well the jihadi type anyway). Even Indonesia – if they catch any extremist Uyghurs – deports them back to China. Nobody wants jihadists… Again except Turkey who used them by the thousands to go to Syria to fight Assad. The non-jihadi type stay put in China and were part of the “other” 11 million (overwhelming majority) Uyghurs – who never needed re-educations. Pakistan has their own Uyghur type separatists in Balochistan. They don’t feel sorry for the likes of the people waving East Turkestan flags popularized by the BBC and the like.
Oh, Azerbaijan the country is a different matter, though your statement over a third are Sunni I find…unbelievable? At most I thought it was around 15% of Muslims in Azerbaijan.
Azeris in Iranian Azerbaijan are the more traditional Azeris. Azeris in Azerbaijan suffer from conflicting modern identities that have seen elites favoring “Turanism” for realpolitik reasons. If the elites embraced traditional Azeri culture, they would pretty swiftly see their country fall into Iranian dominance (they put a lot of effort into crushing Iranian religious influence on the Shi’a community to avoid a possible Islamic Revolution). By embracing Turanism, they are able to better balance against several countries while also receiving US and Russian aid, etc. The era of Soviet Nationalism and also religious suppression and attempts to separate the Azeris from Iranian influence are all very vital, as you mentioned.
I mean, I don’t mind Turkey having another ally. They can all ally whoever they want. It’s their region of the world. Let the strong and wise make decisions hopefully for the betterment of their people. May the weak and foolish destroy themselves, so that their people need not suffer under them for long. Of course, I want Russia, Iran, and Greater Syria to rule the whole area, but that’s my personal bias.
Oh, they are still nationalists. They are just less so then before (peak Pan-Arabism/Iraqi Nationalism was probably during the Iran-Iraq War and First and Second Gulf War). If Iran continues to make good inroads, with proper propaganda, schooling, education, possible annexation, and most importantly, if Iran comes out a powerful winner (everyone loves winners), then the status ante-bellum could easily be restored. Whose to say he isn’t playing a good cover game? More importantly, whose to say it will last?
We didn’t get the Festung Europa against evil Anglos, but we are getting something much, much better, the fortress Eurasia! What a joy!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/The_name_of_Enannatum_I%2C_ruler_or_king_of_Lagash_is_mentioned_in_this_inscribed_cuneiform_text._Detail_of_a_stone_plaque._Circa_2420_BCE._From_Girsu%2C_Iraq._The_British_Museum%2C_London.jpg/1280px-thumbnail.jpg
No! He is like the Sumerian rulers of the ancient past! Ha, ha!
Some fool here, without common sense, claimed that Azeris have around 30% East Asian admixture, nothing could be farther from the truth. They are almost purely of Caucasian and Western Iranian/Median stock.
The Uighur salafists in Syria are well-renowned for their vicious brutality. Perfect specimens to be promoted by the West.
Punjab is well-watered, but still has a pretty damn dry climate.
Speaking of hair, Serbians used to wear long queues similar to the Manchu, except with no shaving of a part of the head I think.
Ceased after the 1804 revolution, because it was impractical – Turks would just pull our guys by the hair to expose their necks and cut.
Pulled back?
I’m thinking that they must have had a different campaign season. Maybe, winter. Still, I imagine dysentery and heat stroke would be big problems. Probably a place where you need to carry a lot of salt with you.
I doubt your hypothesis. Desert people from MENA had enough time to evolve sunken eyes, thick eyebrows and hooked noses to deal with stable features of their environments (too much irradiance and frequent sand storms). If there was real biological need of less foreskin that would have evolved too.
Muslims inherited the custom from Jews and Jews introduced the custom because their crazy god told them to do so to be the chosen people, it commanded all males in Abraham family and descendants to cut their foreskin (i.e. it was introduced as a way to mark them apart from other peoples).
Regarding washing their fleet before prayer, it is a practical thing, they do it because they have very smelly feet from using sandals in the scorching heat (or even worse, socks and sneakers). When they pray they usually squat/prostrate together in close proximity so washing their feet is a necessity.
Aliev family are secularized Shia Muslims, and Heydar was Major General of the KGB.
I believe that today Baku and Moscow are the only leaderships directly born from the KGB, while it’s more common that postsoviet rulers originate from communist party apparatus (as in Almaty, Tashkent, etc).
Aliev family has a distant connection by marriage to Mountain Jews, through Ilham Aliev’s grandchildren, whose father is a billionaire prince of the “Crocus Group” construction empire in Moscow. This father is half-Mountain Jewish and half-Muslim.
This family had constructed the football stadiums for the 2018 World Cup in Rostov and Kaliningrad, and they built “Crocus city” as a satellite city in the North West of Moscow.
–
This is also the kind of people in Moscow, that were inspiration for the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, as they iconize Trump. See 2:06 – Trump has apparently opened their “Vegas” mall in Crocus city. The popularity of Trump with elites of second world countries (while Trump was equally hated by elites of first world European countries), is some material that sociologists need to write books to explain for us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_GSMelpYXo
https://www.instagram.com/p/CBadswQKDDL/
Btw, that’s the reason Hitler trimmed his moustache from Kaiser Wilhelm II style to, well, Hitler style: to be able to put the gas mask in battle during WWI without gas leaking in. Later he kept the moustache short for branding purposes.
The last time Tibet as an independent Empire – there were no trains yet…. Nepal though is negotiating with China to build a rail line connecting it to China using the new Tibet line. Bhutan and Nepal are as tough to build a rail line as the Tibet region – so now that China has shown it is viable – Nepal wants in..
Kalahari Bushmen also circumcise.
Your question is an interesting one though: Why didn’t it evolve? Maybe, because the cultural adaptation got there first? Or, maybe, because fewer men reproduce than women? Curious how Bushwomen have rather grotesquely long…
As far as I know Bhutan never had rail, (though Nepal did) not sure about Sikkim, but I’d guess not, so technically the “two countries” thing is probably wrong, though it is something that people used to say, apparently ignoring smaller states.
India is now building a rail connection to Sikkim, BTW.
Correct.. The US and Saudis (which is why Bin Laden was there) funded the training of the mujuahedeen in Pakistan – where on the Pakistan side of the border were the same ethnic group. Pakistan got nothing but heartache from helping the US and the Saudis. So now that “Iron Brother” China now has all the economic and military aid they could hope for – they are turning away from the US – and by extension – they are becoming friendlier with neighbor Iran rather than the far off Saudis.
Good points. I can’t speak to ethnic tensions in Russia – but in China much of it is western hype. Just compare some of the major ethnic groups. Even if Tibet was it’s own country like the US and Hollywood want – there would literally still be more Tibetans in China (spread out in Sichuan – Qinghai – Gansu – Yunnan) than in Tibet itself.. Most westerners have zero clue. The are more Mongols in China than in Mongolia. More Jurchen/Manchu on the China side than the Russian side. I’m not sure about the Hmong people though – whether there are more in China than Vietnam. I will have to check that one.
Judea is inland, separated behind small mountain ranges from the sea and with frequent lack of water.
The importance of Jerusalem in ancient times, is because it is an elevated fortress, and has access to an underground water source.
I’ve driven around Jerusalem, and this is an elevated city on the edge of endless deserts. West of Jerusalem are some forests, but not far from city walls, is desert that passes to Cairo in the South West, and across Jordan and Saudi to South West.
Much of the content of Abrahamic religions, is common sense “health and safety” regulations of the Ancient Israelites that had lived in this location.
For example, Jewish diet law prevents the eating of shell fish. This would have been a sensible regulation for people living inland, as shellfish frequently causes toxic food poisoning, due difficulty verifying how fresh they are.
Regulations relating to dairy food, will have been the fact that Near Eastern nationalities likely genetically have lactose intolerance, and therefore they had tried to find ways to avoid problems of digestion that were related to lactose in dairy products.
Prohibition of pork seems less easy to explain, but probably there had been a zoonotic disease related to pigs in that epoch, such as “foot and mouth disease”.
Not necessarily, as the preservation of customs of a lost civilization, is based in the desire to become close to a “golden age” – the epoch of divinity or revelation, according to their religious texts.
So that for Salafi Islam, the dream is to recreate the world of the 7th century, to cosplay and become as close as possible to the time of Prophet Muhammad.
In Haredi Judaism, there is the desire to recreate the world of the late 18th century, when their great rabbis like “Nachman of Breslov” had lived.
Amish wish to recreate the world of 16th century rural Switzerland or Germany, when the Radical Reformation had occurred.
Cosplaying Starwars and Harry Potter fans, represent the same desire, when they dress in their customs, and try to become closer to the holy age represented in the texts that had become important to their lives.
And as in Goethe, when he recognized the need to journey to Rome, if was ever to understand the ancient authors.
Of course, to really understand, we need to visit and explore the sites of the ancient peoples. But for those of us living distant from the source of the text, then even Mediterranean salad and potted supermarket olive trees might seem better than nothing.
Good point. Maybe Trump’s aggressive (almost vulgar) masculinity appeals to parvenus who made money recently in shaky ways. And it offends people socialised to keep their display of wealth down.
There is an equally strong atavistic hatred for Trump among the European upper middle classes. They can’t stand him, it is emotional. One possibility is that for many of them America has always been the place to potentially go to – to escape – and Trump’s rhetoric (not his actions) made them uneasy: what if the escape hatch is closed?
Or maybe the European elites blame Trump for destabilizing the good life they have themselves. What they miss is that Trump is a symptom of what is happening and not its cause. As things fall apart, the shock will be impossible for them to bear – this is going to be entertaining. There are few things as unhinged as liberal elite morons with no ability to fight or do anything useful confronted with the demise of what they have. The last few times they went violent and also switched back and forward like a jojo, post-Enlightement collapse during French Revolution and the unhappy events of the 20th century – after the elite over-production got out of hand.
The old fools are complaining because all the bad things were only supposed to happen to their children, not to them. In US, the Republicans can be defined as the party of people who are angry that the bad stuff is now happening to them and not just to their children. They threw Trump into the breach, it didn’t work. What now?
“Moqtadr Al-Sadr has positioned himself as an Iraqi nationalist.”
Yes but at the same time his main patron was Iran. When Solemaini was killed he was one of the first calling for the US to vacate all their Iraqi bases. So he is an Iraqi nationalist – but a Shia solidarity proponent at the same time.
UAE’s economy seems to be beginning to diversify from hydrocarbons. https://iap.unido.org/articles/progress-and-future-economic-diversification-uae
Saudi Arabia might be more facing this danger.
But the management of aristocrat-led Arab countries, generally do seemed surprising competent, and not an “idiocracy” in the sense of the ethnic minority led secular dictatorships that had often emerged in more multiethnic Arab countries* i.e. Baathist Iraq and Syria or Gaddafi’s Libya.
Many of the oil-wealthy Middle Eastern countries have falling fertility rates, which could eventually help to improve their potential political stability, but the fall in their fertility rates won’t be nearly fast enough to match the problem of future declining fall in oil demand (that could be beginning as early as the 2030s).
Economies of Kingdom’s like Jordan and Morocco, survive on tourism and agriculture, and won’t be facing significant changes.
I guess the future of Egypt’s economy must be an interesting question (for someone who knows about this topic). Whether Al-Sisi has a chanceto be a kind of Pinochet that reforms the Egyptian economy, or a stagnating figure like Lukashenko?
I am not convinced by these explanations.
Most Jewish dietary laws have no practical rationale – you’ve looked at the standard selection where practical reasons can more readily be found, but have omitted much more (not just you, most people do this – this is a classic explanation of religion).
Beyond diet, Jewish law is vast and complex, and I doubt you can find a rationale for more than a small fraction.
I am a fan of the pragmatic approach, but I wonder if you are operating from an overly narrow understanding of what might constitute pragmatism for humans.
But might it be pragmatic for humans – in the deepest and highest sense – to occasionally depart from the “narrow” perspective of human survival, and try and achieve a “wider” view – to see the world from the perspective not of the individual organism, but of the “whole”?
In ancient philosophy, this used to be referred to as seeing the world “sub specie aeternitas” – in Latin, from the perspective of eternity.
But what pragmatic value might there be in occasionally departing from the perspective of narrow self interest and trying too see life from the perspective of the “whole”?
Well, for one thing – being less attached to survival and self-interest gives one the courage to take risks. People excessively preoccupied with surviving don’t take risks and don’t discover new ways to flourish.
Secondly, not being preoccupied with survival makes people willing to explore randomly rather than merely follow a preconceived plan that one imagines advances the agenda of survival.
Are the great discoveries of European science and thought a product of a an attitude that is not excessively preoccupied with survival? More than anything, might the period between 1500 and 1950 be seen as a period of adventure – where people took their lives lightly? In the words of Joseph Conrad in one of his stories – “that time when we held our lives lightly on the palm of our hands”.
Finally, might it be pragmatic from the point of view of being cheerful and avoiding depression? People who are cheerful and not depressed – people whom “the world does not weigh heavily upon”, who do not live in constant anxiety over their survival – are such people not more enthusiastic about living in the long run, and more accepting of death?
Interestingly, in the early 20th early thinkers like Freud and Bertrand Russell, and many others, began to reconsider the common sense 19th century view that mankind wants only to survive physically, in response to the strange and senseless devastation if World War One.
And even educated middle class Polish and Spanish people, that I personally heard talk about politics, seemed to all passionately hate Trump.
So it seemed like a trend across Northern and Southern Europe, and included people from borderline first world European nationalities like Spain, which had not even been democracies as late as the 1970s.
Personally, I was never “triggered” by Trump, although by 2018 even I had realized he was not a particularly competent politician (e.g. when he was saying to journalists rude comments about Haitans for no reason). But I’m from recently only middle class background of second world origin, which is probably not the right kind of cultural background to become triggered by Trump.
Well I must admit that I was wrong, there are many cute and hairy creatures among the inhabitants of the animal kingdom.
So now you have made a new category of countries, so called mini-empires? I thought that Israel and Turkey are quintessential nation states. Countries with imperial identity strive to accommodate different nationalities living on their territory and make them to be part of the same nation or empire, like Russians with their concept of Rossiyane and autonomous ethnic republics, or Chinese idea of Zhonghua Minzu, and that Han people are just one part of the great Chinese nation. I dont see such policies in Turkey, Israel and Ukraine. But, yes Ottoman Empire had a proper imperial identity under the caliph-sultans.
You have just conflated ethnic chauvinism with Imperialism, which is not necessarily true.
Just realized I had Ano4 & AnonfromTN mixed up.
My mistake but I’m mostly out from this convo,
If you don’t actually think about guerilla/street war
You won’t understand Sikhi not aimed at any1
As far as the chick, ‘sharp’ features and a wheatish tone are IA ideal so I assume it’s the original phenotype, gut feeling. About 5-10% of R1A area (Arya lol) women have that Donbass to Delhi basically.
These misrecognitions are improving: at least they’re both the same nationality.
https://kulturologia.ru/files/u22291/18700698_1633023526737976_17437142816576.jpg
Most frequent ethnic Russian types.
From left to right = from North to South and from West to East.
That means the Turkey of the Erdogan-era is in fact, Imperial.
For instance, the AKP did try to accommodate local Kurds, and not just Turks.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2012/6/12/turkey-to-allow-kurdish-lessons-in-schools
There is also a growing Arab population within Turkey with much of the former Syrian North de-facto integrated into Turkey.
Hopefully Afghanistan can finally have peace. My Father, while a firm believer in his own cultural background’s superiority, once said the that if any foreign people truly like the Afghans, they will leave them alone: “maybe in 50 years of peace, or a hundred, they will advance, but it is for them to do.”
I wish the Taliban well, and also the many peoples who have had trouble with them in their country. In time, I’m sure they’ll figure themselves out.
All the “learned” people like Dmitry don’t get it. Male Circumcision is exactly what it says it is… To be seen as separate from the “heathens” surrounding you. It had nothing to do with geography.
There is no “reason” for females to have a hymen… But they do.. It is a good way though to know whether someone was cheated out of marrying a virgin.
Well you must be wrong, for the neighbours of the Jews, ancient Egyptians also practiced circumcision, thus it’s possible that Jews learned from them.
One of the major signs of Aryan Mahapurusa or Great Being, which Buddhas and Chakravartins are, is well developed foreskin, which fully covers the head of genitals, our texts say that the foreskin is a sign of modesty, it keeps our shame covered, it is quite remarkable that ancient Hellenes had a similar opinion regarding the matter. Both Hellenes and Aryans thought that a man is only truly exposed and naked when glans are visible. That’s why there was no social stigma in being naked and practicing sports, for uncircumcised men were not truly naked according to ancient Indo-European cultural norms. Ancient Hellenes and Romans who had small foreskin, even practiced tying of their foreskin, so that glans would not be visible. Kynodesme was the name of such practice.
It was also a matter of self restraint and self control, for free men would not expose themselves like animals or slaves.
Bashi I think that explanation lies in Tetragrammaton, for he is the master… without privacy, exposed before him, naked. Quite sad…
In my opinion there are also other various good explanations for circumcision:
-Being a part of tribe, there are various Australian and Papuan tribes who have historically practiced circumcision, it was a rite of manhood, which made a man full member of the tribe.
-Then some Africans say that god created men imperfect, that men had a feminine part, foreskin, and women had a masculine part, clitoris, and that by removal of such parts, man would become fully man and woman fully woman.
-Desert sand?
-Sign of covenant between god and his people?
Oh well, whatever is the reason for such practices, we all are human beings capable of change and enlightenment, no matter what those old Sanskrit and Pali texts say about the major and minor signs… So do not worry my circumcised friends! Still I have always disliked piercings and body modifications made because of aesthetical or religious(superstitious) considerations, and it’s my right to have such an opinion.
Softer approach and some concessions does not remove the fact that Turkey is constitutionally and politically mono-linguistic and mono-cultural Turkish nation state. There is some confusion here because during the 19th and 20th century there were various modernist liberal nation state empires in the Europe, which were fundamentally very different from traditional empires like Russia, Ottomans, China, Persia and so on. All of those empires were just expansionist nation states, and in the end every one of them withdrew from their colonies. For nationalism and imperialism don’t work well together in the longer run.
What else Nazi Germany’s plans were than applying of 19th century style nation state colonialisation and imperialism in Europe instead of Africa? Was there fundamentally any difference? Well there was one, Russians were not any colonial negroes, but fought back till death!
Ungrateful lyakhs! How anyone can be so ungrateful?! Being Soviet puppet state was not nice, but was it anything compared to that fate which was planned by Nazis? Complete destruction of Polish nation, with sad and ignorant remnants living as slaves of German herrenvolk. Hell even Islamisation is better for nation than such fate!
I didn’t make it, it exists. Actually most empires have been quite small, often a strong core nation dominating a few surrounding groups. Imperialism is nothing else but a desire to control others. That’s what the word ‘imperator’ meant.
Whether on a small scale or a large scale it is the embodiment of evil. That’s what all evil when properly understood is: different ways to try to control others.
Your inability to appreciate the Caucasian beauties is odd: the hirsute ancient Caucasus population is one of the main DNA sources for modern Euroasian civilization. Maybe the cold weather there, maybe natural selection, in any case, there was no hair in Africa and East Asia, this was a uniquely Euroasian phenomenon. Let’s keep it going, give those Gruzin girls a chance :)…
Will they? Do they have a capable leadership?
Dostum, one of the leader of the first NA prefers to play the blame game instead of staying in Afghanistan. Such people will lose against the Taliban who are in better shape than in the 1990s.
https://tolonews.com/afghanistan-173131
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/best-afghanistan-withdrawal-and-outcome-what-should-the-plan-be-and-what-leverage-does-the-coalition-have.918450/post-76940869
It is noticeable that the Taliban are quite active even in core territories of the first NA.
https://www.longwarjournal.org/mapping-taliban-control-in-afghanistan
Lol this meme is a work surely of the antibaltic lobby. Why represent the eastern baltid as such a fat ugly man with small eyes, that you would imagine works as a policeman. Meanwhile they claim this classically handsome, intelligent looking man (who we would probably unconsciously stereotype as a promising young lawyer or perhaps a television presenter) and classically beautiful female model (that could work as a model in luxury yogurt commercials), are “pontid”.
Balts are a very normal looking ancestry that can look typical everywhere in Northern Europe, and looks majority more like the “pontid” example. E.g.
–
According to a commercial DNA test (for the little such tests are accurate, which I doubt), my family also has majority Baltic ancestry, and I would boastfully or thankfully said I look more like the “pontid” example.
Most of the nationalities with Northern European origin, are externally overlapping. Most of people of Northern nationalities, could be swapped at birth around Northern Europe, and nobody would notice them as foreigners.
Our mind’s focus on the strange or mutually nonoverlapping faces, is related to the sorting mechanism we use when think about concepts of different nationalities. Our mind orientates between the physical appearance of e.g. Russian, Polish or Irish people, by remembering those atypical faces which are nonoverlapping.
So, I admit, that I mentally visualize “typical Poles” as looking like the film director, Kieslowski, with very distinctive faces, or perhaps like Chopin with his strong appearance. However, of course, the majority of Poles, does not look like Kieslowski or Chopin; most would not be out of placement among typical Russians, Balts, Austrians, English, or Germans.
It’s rather that we use this minority of faces which do not overlap between Northern European nationalities, to mentally orientate ourselves; so we use the non-overlapping as an anchor, and when we say “this is a typical Polish face”, we really mean only – “this is face that is exists among Poles, but would look like an unusual face among otherwise majority similar looking Northern European nationalities”.
What many centuries later became the retrospective and mythological interpretation of the practice, is not explaining its adoption.
Most historians believe that Lycurgus has probably never existed (at least he was not a single historical figure), but Spartans have retrospectively always justified their distinctive habits on his supposed visionary wisdom.
Similarly, Athenians did not start to harvest olives, because Athena defeated Poseidon for their veneration with her gift of the olive tree.
These myths were created centuries later, as a retrospective justification for practices that were seen to be distinctive among their nationality.
These practices which were adopted for practical reasons, have latter taken the status of laws, and when encountering foreign nationalities they become a national distinction.
So that for Greeks, one of the distinctions of their noble race from the barbarians, was that the latter were the people who do not exercise naked. Naked exercise became a symbol of the Greek civilization, and its noble nature, in comparison to the clothes barbarians.
But the founding of the custom of exercising naked, allegedly by the winning runner Orsippus, was likely just a practical result of the fact they had decided to make the first Olympic games in the middle of Greek summer, which is not suitable weather for exercising – and Orsippus probably was noted by the other athletes to have a competitive advantage in running without clothes.
Hmm, you have a strange subconscious bias, to my eyes the eastern baltid man does not look fat or ugly, quite many Finns and Northern Swedes really look like him. But it’s okay, we all have our aesthetic preferences, as long as we dont judge people’s innate value based on such reasons…
https://imgs.aftonbladet-cdn.se/v2/images/author/5a1045cf-2e6b-4962-a394-a57663ea6bec?fit=crop&h=800&q=50&w=800&s=b7dd01ddee192cc69bd92b1f1a4a6cf5359d9c37
https://justnujusthar.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/jan-guillou-2014-32.jpg
Excellent Swedish author, Jan Guillou, he would not look out of place in Russian Urals region, I think?
https://b64ix7dnvkpq5gw27hb5o11vw-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Bjo%CC%88rk.jpg
Or what about famous and musically horrible Icelandic artist Björk. Epicanthic folds, even though she is fully Icelandic/Nordic.
Nordicism as an ideology is based on false premises, nothing else than imaginary fantasies of Anglo-Germans. Just think of some one like Rudolph Hess? Real Nordic people are phenotypically quite diverse, just like Russians.
I can’t take seriously a guy who thinks that Romans were an embodiment of evil. State of semi-permanent tribal warfare is better? Cilician pirates were probably nice fellows, sad that those embodiments of evil came and conquered them.
You are now mistaking Gruzinkas with Circassian beauties.
Main sources of dna of modern Euro Asian civilization? What the hell? You are Slovak, not American, Caucasian race, or that Caucasus was the urheimat of Europeans has no basis in genetics.
In ancient India it was common for sages and holy men to go naked. Hellenes were greatly impressed of this tradition, gymnosophists they were called in Greek. Though this tradition has mostly disappeared among the Buddhists, it still lives among some Hindu mendicants and especially among Jains. Of all religions of the world, they are closest to us Buddhists.
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/planetarij/5522102/1203595/1203595_600.jpg
Here are naked monastics of Digambar Jains, who are more conservative of the two surviving sects of Jain Dharma. Like our Theravadins..
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4e/22/ac/4e22ac78d5299989b796812f6e8fe31e.jpg
Here is their “Buddha,” or Jina.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/india/sadhus-went-naked/story-4bDBKPIN04Zs5AsPHOIpcL_amp.html
Re: the possibility that the Chinese will get militarily involved:
I’ve always been pretty skeptical of this scenario for a variety of reasons, but one thing that recently gave me slight pause for thought was the recent movie “Operation Red Sea.” Perhaps, it was that they said “yellow cake” like 100x times, but I felt the movie was very neoconish and almost represented an about-face in themes. Clearly, Muslims were portrayed as villains, and I was wondering if it related to the Uyghurs, or it was meant to signal a more aggressive foreign policy in the ME.
BTW, I don’t recommend the movie, except for the first five minutes, which is an interesting inversion of the films “Captain Phillips” and “Wolf Warrior II.”
The Jains are very interesting. I was quite surprised when I learned that they have a practice for the remittance of sins where a Jain monastic would gladly accept the sins of people who ask him to do so, and would pray for the sins to be transferred from the actual sinners to the sinless monastic to free the sinner from sin.
A notice to our Christian friends here, the Sramana and the gymosophists were well known in the Hellenic civilization and the Egyptian Alexandria was one of the main trading centers along the Silk Road connecting to India and China. At the time of Jesus Christ, Alexandria was home to up to half a million Hellenized Jews, more Jewish people lived there than in Jerusalem itself. Other Hellenistic Jewish people lived scattered along the Silk Road itself up to Southern Indian shore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_the_Roman_world
It is quite possible that Jesus growing in Alexandria (according to Celsus) came in contact with some religious ideas / practices that were t the time more prevalent among the Indian religious groups.
You seem to suffer from a romantic, mythologized view of history. Of course, Romans as an empire were evil, among others they killed a few million Gauls, destroyed Carthage (for no good reason), and enslaved and murdered in gruesome ways large part of their own population. If that is not evil, what would be? Who cares about pirates? that was minutia, again that silly romanticism.
(Romans also invented cement – no architectural purist can ever forgive them.)
People in Central-Eastern Europe (like me, if you wish) are genetically descended from the urheimat of Indo-Europeans who formed in southern Russia and Ukraine steppes from two groups: north-eastern palaeolithic hunters and the original tribes who lived in the Caucasus region – including NE Turkey and NW Iran. Based on testing, the Caucasus contribution was mostly female.
There you go: you can call them Circassian, Gruzin, whatever you wish – there is a certain affinity we share. I agree that most Americans are hopelessly confused about the term Caucasian. But they are these days confused about most things. Don’t join them.
Really, can you tell me where you read so? In Buddhism there is transfer of merit, but there must be always means to it, like Mahamaudgalyayana saving his mother from hell, without Karmic connection such transfer is in my knowledge impossible.
Child sacrifice is not evil? And before you say that such claims were just Roman propaganda, the same fact is corroborated in Jewish and Hellenic sources.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/21/carthaginians-sacrificed-own-children-study
Cilician pirates, silly romanticism? It’s not my problem if you don’t know enough about history of Classical era. Cilicians practiced piracy in such a massive scale that Romans and others were dying from the lack of food, and international sea trade was almost impossible.
You probably mean Anatolian farmers and not Kavkaz people? Am I right Bashi?
I watched a documentary a few months ago. A Jain renunciant performed the ritual of the transfer of sins during the filming.
https://www.eupedia.com/genetics/starcevo_culture.shtml
https://www.eupedia.com/genetics/linear_pottery_culture.shtml
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56029-2
https://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_G2a_Y-DNA.shtml#famous_people
Late stage LBK pculture people practiced large scale cannibalism and intense tribal warfare.
(Georgia produced the vast majority of the current Thieves in Law….)
Very puzzling, I do hope that the translation was good. Jains believe that Karma is its own subtle substance, which is carried by people, and that one can not be liberated before he has purified all of his karma, therefore if Jain renunciate takes away bad karma from others, he will just prolong his existence in Samsara. Were those Jain renunciates naked or dressed in the white? Probably in white?
Lot’s of Jains in Gujarat, very prosperous fellows…
https://s3-ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/soulveda-media-prod/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/22171000/1519988614.banner.PIL-Jain-Palitana.jpg
Both, some were dressed in white, others were naked.
If a Bodhisattva is adamant at liberating the Infinite number of sentient beings from an infinite amount if kleshas, isn’t it going to take an infinite period of time?
Okay, they were Digambars then, who are much more purists than Svetambars.
But unlike them we don’t believe that Karma is a physical substance and that by eliminating or purifying that substance we will gain a release from all pain. In Buddhism even a serial murderer can achieve the enlightened state, at least in theory and as long as he is human.
And it isn’t going to take infinite period of time, when you are a fully awakened Buddha you can see all other beings as Buddhas. Depends on a perspective. Attainment of sincere motivation to save all beings is crucial on the road to Buddhahood, beings who lack of self-grasping, are truly and innately aware of their dependent nature.
Summer time was not the reason for the Greeks exercising naked. They liked homosexual acts. They lusted after other men’s flesh. Heathen behavior. There are places much hotter than Greece in the summer.
The ancient Greeks worshipped the male body as reflected in their homoerotic art and phallic architecture. And they openly practiced homosexual relations such as pederasty which was regarded as a rite of passage for young boys wishing to join full adulthood by entering into a homosexual relationship with an older man.
Taliban just took over the Shah Massoud residence (something it was never able to do in the past), and the Uzbekistan border, with americans still in the country.
But muh Northern Alliance!
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/6879172.html
Americans destroy their own equipment at Bagram Airbase.
https://tolonews.com/afghanistan-173234
The best part is how they stole out like a thief in the night so there would be no humiliating footage as from Saigon.
It is accelerating.
All US and NATO troops have left Bagram in a hurry, ahead of schedule, as the Taliban regains control of Afghanistan.
With a thousand US troops left to safeguard the US Embassy in Kabul, will Kabul be a repeat of Saigon?
Worse, they are taking over Badakhshan, the core territory of the old NA.
https://www.rt.com/russia/528326-afghanistan-taliban-border-tajikistan/
https://twitter.com/billroggio/status/1411305024408465414
Local pro-government officials are escaping from Taliban via plane.
https://twitter.com/RisboLensky/status/1411585241739939841
Yes, they also took over all districts of NA Takhar province and its capitol Taloqan is surrounded. There are also reports about ongoing talks over the surrender of Fayzabad the capitol of Badakhshan
Listening to the “experts” here who do not follow the conflict but are talking about muh Northern Afghanistan!, muh Northen Alliance!, is funny though.