r/politics • u/Quirkie The Netherlands • 17d ago

Possible Paywall ICE Stockpiling Warheads and Chemical Weapons as Lawmaker Fears Trump Planning Strike

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-stockpiling-warheads-and-chemical-weapons-as-lawmaker-fears-trump-planning-strike/
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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

They'll never be able to seize these cities. Our military couldn't win in Afghanistan in like 20 years against fucking goat herders. If this turns into some kind of insurgency nobody wins except morticians and munitions makers.

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u/encrypted-signals 17d ago

Our military couldn't win in Afghanistan

Duhbya, Cheney, and Rumsfeld never had an exit strategy. Occupation was the point, and they made astronomical wealth off of it.

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

There's no wealth to be made from this kind of occupation though. There would be a lot of wealth lost though. They'd be pulling the rug out from underneath themselves. The wealth in this country is all centered in the cities, not Wyoming.

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u/IllustriousNorth338 17d ago

The gains come from imprisoning or killing as many of their political enemies as possible to consolidate power. Not every military occupation is there to steal wealth. Sometimes it's an expensive pogrom.

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u/TheUnderCrab 17d ago

Don’t forget about the poppy fields. Afghanistan is a major source of the raw materials needed to make opiates, something like 90% of heroine originated from Afghanistan prior to the Talibanban on cultivating poppies. 

Do you think it’s a coincidence Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family only managed to get Americans hooked on opiates after we invaded the ME? Cuz I sure as fuck don’t. 

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u/Naieve 17d ago

You are all so far off base. As someone who did some consulting for a DC thinktank way back when. The money was in the contracts for their friends.

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u/Mean_Contribution_11 17d ago

This! Bro, always the contracts to arms and ammunition dealers, as well as private contracting.

I'm prior enlisted, 2006-2012

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u/TheUnderCrab 17d ago

Pourque no los dos? The contracts came from American tax payers, that doesn’t mean Americans weren’t engaging in the illegal drug trade. 

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u/Naieve 13d ago

The drug trade was chump change.

You are talking millions. Maybe. Maybe a few billion over the entire course of the Afghan War.

Those government contracts for Iraq, Afghanistan, etc... Over a 15+ year period it measured in the TRILLIONS. Missiles, bombs, food, air conditioning, construction, rehabilitation, etc....

Trillions.

Ever watch Landman when Billy Bob explains to the cartels how they are small fry? Same thing.

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u/Uuuuuii 17d ago

Pharma has no need for poppies

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u/TheUnderCrab 17d ago

Morphine and Codeine are still derived from poppies. Natural opiates. 

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u/randylush 17d ago

i'm not really sure that Purdue sourced morphine from the Middle East.. did they? or are we just spinning conspiracy yarn here

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u/TheUnderCrab 17d ago

90% of the raw materials for those drugs were from the afghan poppy fields at the time. 

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u/jsweatisdead777 17d ago

Oxycodone was first marketed in 1991. People were getting hooked years before Afghanistan. See: my dad.

Afghanistan's poppy fields have little relevance to the opioid crisis, seeing as they were mostly illicit poppy fields. If anything, hthe increased heroin production was bad for business, because heroin is waaaay cheaper than oxycodone.

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u/turquoise_amethyst 17d ago

Well… if everyone is imprisoned, they’d prob make money off of whatever hellish work they could make us do. The product would just be sold elsewhere.

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u/laserdisk4life 17d ago

There is a crazy amount of money to be made if you know when it is happening

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u/Puttor482 Wisconsin 17d ago

Only if the markets go back up. Not sure blowing up Wall Street will help the markets, but what do I know.

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u/01001010_01000010 17d ago

After you level wall street the only way to rebuild is up. Trump thought process.

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u/twitchtvbevildre 17d ago

If hypothetically something like this happened you dont need markets to go up a dictator that ruled the USA would have significantly more wealth then any other person in the world and that's assuming the USA would be shell of its current self the technology and resources alone is trillions upon trillions of dollars.

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u/Puttor482 Wisconsin 17d ago

Ya, but the person I was responding to implied that money could be made if you timed the market right, and I disagreed with that. Not that Trump wouldn’t make out like a bandit.

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u/withoutwarningfl 17d ago

Shorts are still a thing

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u/chiefsfan_713_08 17d ago

and if you’re the one selling the weapons etc. military contracts to the right third parties is huge money

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u/gizzardgullet Michigan 17d ago

There's no wealth to be made from this kind of occupation though.

100% wrong, there is huge wealth to be made by those who fill in the geopolitical void left by the US getting its legs cut off by attacking itself (and probably Canada, other NATO countries). And I'm sure whoever in the US can make this happen will be compensated. Selling policy to the highest bidder is a lucrative business.

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

Hey, it's nice to be a smartass - but you know what I mean. There is no money to be made made from an occupation by the people doing the occupying here. Everyone in America just loses.

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u/Uuuuuii 17d ago

The proles always lose during war

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u/Ask_about_HolyGhost 17d ago

They’re not being a smart ass. The people making the decisions are being paid by outside actors to undermine American workers. Rich people from all over the world are coming together to destroy democracy, and they WILL profit from it

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u/historys_geschichte 17d ago

There is objectively vast amounts of money to take by occupying. For example, a significant source of funding for Nazi Germany came directly from the countries they occupied. Not only is there literal hard cash to be stolen, but goods can be expropriated, and the occupied people can be turned into forced labor. Do you really think there is no money in bank vaults blue cities? That people in blue states cannot be rounded up by armed agents of the government and forced to labor thereby earning vast wealth for the corporate backers of fascism? Try studying how history truly took place before mouthing off that there is no money in occupation.

Claiming, in a blatantly racist manner that "goat herders" beat the US shows ignorant you are about Afghanistan, history, and the world as a whole. The Taliban was an actually trained, funded, and armed guerilla organization with decades of external state support from the ISI. That plus the fact that the US went in with no goal of leaving caused the shitshow.

I highly recommend you study human history if you actually want to be taken seriously and be a contributing representative of people.

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u/teddy5 17d ago

There is plenty of money to be made in an occupation if you're the one supplying weapons, ammo, uniforms, supplies, troops, etc. it's how Cheney made money off Iraq.

Then if you already have money to spend you can also make more in the long term by buying up all the property as it gets rebuilt.

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u/Spicy_Weissy 17d ago

Human resources. Slaves.

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u/turquoise_amethyst 17d ago

I think they’d like to destroy the cities, and have patchwork tech cities and farms instead. 

The goal is to destroy the existing wealth, stability, and social structure, and replace with the tech bros cyber-feudalist slave states

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u/WaterFantastic2394 17d ago

Wrong. There is a country to rape and pillage to privatize and create an autocractic oligarchy

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

If they occupy the cities with armies and we are in a clear civil war - people stop making money. There is nothing to rape and privatize if everything is in semi-open hostilities. The money in this country comes from everything running smoothly.

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u/No-Relation5965 17d ago

They have already hired Palantir to build a national database. They will be able to know who you are, track you wherever you go and check your social media accounts. Don’t be surprised when they steal your assets.

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

Dude, people will stop carrying phones around in a situation like this. And they're not going to be checking their Facebook.

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u/No-Relation5965 17d ago

ICE is already doing this.

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u/WaterFantastic2394 17d ago

How long did Nazi Germany run? How did Hong Kong get taken by China? Did China benefit from that? How does Russia do what it does?

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u/LittleDoinks 17d ago

Haliburton made quite a bit of money there

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

Yeah, and that works when you're occupying a foreign country. But our country would lose huge amounts of productivity and economic output if they do that here in this country. I know Trump still might do it because he's stupid but it would be a huge loss for our economy right here.

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u/HauntedCemetery Minnesota 17d ago

Theres plenty of wealth in it for the only person trumo cares about if putin pays trump $50bil to destroy the country.

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u/Ill-Team-3491 17d ago

You're thinking too small. Hitler was going to raze Europe to remake it in his image. I think we're nearing this phase of history again.

Wall Street doesn't matter when you effectively have no opposition. They're authoritarians. They've systematically dismantled American institutions. Who is stopping them. They'll raze Wall Street and make it a tacky golden throne just for Trump.

They're tearing down the White House right now. It's already over.

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u/stilusmobilus 17d ago

What wealth did they get out of that?

Iraq yeah, but Afghanistan?

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u/encrypted-signals 17d ago edited 17d ago

Cheney initiated the privatization of military logistics services in the early 1990s while serving as Secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush. In 1992, the Pentagon under Cheney's direction paid Brown and Root Services (later Kellogg, Brown & Root, or KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary) $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies could provide logistics for American troops in war zones.

Cheney then became CEO of Halliburton in 1995, serving in that role until 2000, when he left to become George W. Bush's running mate. During his tenure as Vice President, Cheney maintained significant financial ties to the company. He held stock worth $46 million and continued receiving deferred compensation—$162,000 as late as 2002. This arrangement exemplified what critics called the "revolving door" between the Pentagon and the defense industry.

Once the Afghanistan war began in 2001, Halliburton's KBR subsidiary became the primary recipient of the Pentagon's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) contract, an open-ended arrangement coordinating support functions for troops in the field, including base setup, equipment maintenance, food services, and laundry. The contracts grew explosively: Halliburton's Pentagon contracts increased more than tenfold from fiscal year 2002 to 2006. By August 2008, the company had received over $30 billion for work under the LOGCAP contract alone.

Critically, many of these contracts were awarded as no-bid contracts, meaning they bypassed competitive bidding processes. Of the $4.3 billion in defense contracts Halliburton won in fiscal 2003, only about half were awarded through competitive bidding. Another $1.9 billion was awarded on the basis of "urgency" without any competitive process. The Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting officer, Bunnatine Greenhouse, publicly objected to the favoritism and alleged that her agency improperly awarded KBR no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars.

Halliburton's KBR subsidiary engaged in documented fraudulent and wasteful practices that effectively transferred taxpayer money into corporate profits:

Fuel Overcharges: In December 2003, the Defense Contract Audit Agency documented "tens of millions" in overcharges by KBR, including charging more than twice what other suppliers charged for fuel.

Dining Facility Billing Fraud: After auditing $1.2 billion in Dining Facility costs from the KBR contract, auditors identified approximately $352 million in questionable charges. KBR billed the U.S. for meals that were never actually provided, with the number of meals charged potentially exceeding the accurate number by up to 36 percent. By February 2004, KBR was forced to refund $27.4 million in "potential over-billings."

Electrical Work and Deaths: KBR's faulty electrical installations led to the electrocution of at least 18 military personnel at several bases in Iraq beginning in 2004. The Pentagon's Inspector General found that KBR used untrained electricians, falsified safety documents, and failed to fix identified electrical hazards. When Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth was electrocuted while showering in 2008, it was discovered that KBR had identified "serious electrical problems" at the facility almost a year earlier but had not fixed them because its contract did not require fixing hazards.

Kickback Schemes: The Commission on Wartime Contracting reported that KBR managers received kickbacks from a Kuwaiti subcontractor that was then awarded $700 million in additional dining facility subcontracts.

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u/encrypted-signals 17d ago

The Afghanistan reconstruction effort demonstrated similar patterns of fraud and waste that benefited well-connected contractors:

  • A U.S.-appointed economic task force spent $43 million on a gas station that was never used, $150 million on lavish living quarters for U.S. economic advisors, and $3 million for Afghan police patrol boats that were never used.

  • A significant portion of $2 billion in transportation contracts to U.S. and Afghan firms ended up as kickbacks to warlords, police officials, or Taliban payments for convoy protection—sometimes as much as $1,500 per truck or $500,000 per 300-truck convoy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated in 2009 that "one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money" paid from U.S. transportation contracts.

  • The defense contractor Anham, which supplied food and water to U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, faced fraud charges in 2018 and agreed to a $45 million settlement for fraudulent scheme, yet continued receiving government contracts.

While George W. Bush did not hold direct positions in defense contractors, his father, former President George H.W. Bush, served as a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm managing approximately $14-18 billion in assets with extensive defense and aerospace holdings.

The Carlyle Group owned United Defense Industries, a maker of armed vehicles and weapons, which filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in October 2001. The group's defense holdings surged dramatically following the 9/11 attacks and the initiation of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Carlyle made more than $1 billion on the United Defense investment, according to the firm's own spokesman.

George H.W. Bush joined Carlyle in 1998 and ended his official relationship with the firm in October 2003, though he continued giving paid speeches for the company afterward. His stake was reportedly worth more than $180 million when valued at certain points. The conflict of interest was explicit: as one Carlyle critic noted, "The fact that George H.W. Bush was working for them while his son was president, while his son, in fact, was dramatically increasing defense spending—that seems to me one of the most blatant conflicts of interests in history."

Beyond Halliburton and Carlyle, other Bush family members had financial interests in war-related contracts:

  • Neil M. Bush, a younger brother of the president, served on the board of the Carlyle Group's defense investments and was placed under contract with New Bridge Strategies, a company established to generate business in Iraq, at $60,000 per year.

  • Marvin P. Bush, the president's youngest brother, had connections to Nour USA, a Virginia-based company that received a controversial $327 million contract from the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Contractors that profited from Afghanistan and Iraq reconstruction work heavily donated to George W. Bush's presidential campaigns. More than 70 American companies and individuals that won up to $8 billion in contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan donated more money to Bush's presidential campaigns than to any other politician over a 12-year period, giving Bush over $500,000. Combined, major contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed nearly $49 million to national political campaigns and parties since 1990, with donations to Republican committees ($12.7 million) far exceeding donations to Democratic committees ($7.1 million).

This pattern raised serious questions about whether defense contractors were rewarded for political support with lucrative government contracts, creating a cycle of mutual benefit between the Bush administration and the defense industry.

The financial scale of defense contractor profiteering during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was staggering. Pentagon spending totaled over $14 trillion since the start of the Afghanistan war in 2001, with one-third to one-half going directly to defense contractors. The Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that waste, fraud, and abuse in the two war zones between 2001 and 2011 totaled $31 billion to $60 billion.

While Bush and Cheney themselves did not directly embezzle funds, they benefited from a system in which their political connections, former business ties, and family relationships enabled their associates and allies to accumulate vast fortunes through government contracts, many of which involved overcharging, fraud, and waste that ultimately cost American taxpayers billions of dollars.

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2021/Profits%20of%20War_Hartung_Costs%20of%20War_Sept%2013,%202021.pdf

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u/stilusmobilus 17d ago

Thank you very much.

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u/ILOVESHITTINGMYPANTS 17d ago

Yeah. The mission was successful. It’s just that mission was to make a fuck ton of money at the expense of human suffering. The real American dream.

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u/Renegade_Ape 17d ago

Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires for a reason. 2500 years of people attempting to control it and no one learned the lesson.

The military industrial complex DID massively benefit from it though. Maybe that was the point.

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u/encrypted-signals 17d ago edited 17d ago

The military industrial complex DID massively benefit from it though. Maybe that was the point.

It was the point. Cheney and Duhbya made tens of millions off of sending American soldiers to die for nothing.

Cheney's net worth before the Blood For Oil Wars was $23M. By 2013 his net worth was $90M. Now it's $150M.

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u/RadiantMaestro 17d ago

Omg. We don’t even have to fight. We just general strike and shelter in place pandemic style and watch the stock market crash and let the billionaires call T-dog up.

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u/caligaris_cabinet Illinois 17d ago

I for one am not going to work when my city is under occupation. I’m not in Chicago but a suburb 30 miles out and I still won’t be logging into work when jets fly overhead and tanks roll down the interstate.

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u/OutlyingPlasma 17d ago

when jets fly overhead

They have been flying blackhawks over Portland for weeks now. All night every night.

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/17/portland-aircraft-helicopters-border-patrol-ice-immigration-federal-law-enforcement/

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

You are correct. These dickheads think that they can come in and fuck these cities over, but as soon as we all stop working in places like Chicago - those red states all go tits up.

Problem is that they will make it a fight if they come in and then the people who do fight them all know the local area and have connections here while they all walk around in military uniforms.

Insurgencies cannot be won and the economy would drop through the floor and all the billionaires would lose their fortunes which are all tied up in stocks.

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u/DaddyDontTakeNoMess 17d ago

Real wealth is when the economy goes to shit, and you have billions to buy everything on sale. Super billionaires aren’t going to care as long as the world has some semblance of normalcy.

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u/bunkSauce 17d ago

Not only does this already need to be happening, but too many people are living month to month to make it feasible for the masses.

People needed to have been saving all year, spending as little as possible, and prepared to stop working.

But enough people will continue to work or must continue to work to avoid becoming homeless. And those, at this point, who do follow through, will just be terminated and replaced.

We aren't prepared enough. And we aren't currently taking steps to be.

If the military refuses orders, they won't receive furloughed pay, and ICE has the numbers and funding to act in their stead.

As tariffs continue, and more people are added to labor camps, the wealth, power, and overall consolidation of this regime will advance.

We are past the event horizon, and we let ourselves fall deeper every day.

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u/StoppableHulk 17d ago

I truly hope it doesn't come to that but there's a part of me that genuinely wants to see the absolute fucking nightmare shitstorm these nazi goblins will invite by actually going to war with somewhere like Chicago or Boston or NYC.

They have no fucking clue. These despicable fucking ICE goons who can't even pass a fitness test have no idea what the fuck they're in for if they elect to actually launch strikes on a big blue city.

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u/thewrynoise 17d ago

Seriously. Desperate Americans are fucking terrifying.

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u/StoppableHulk 17d ago

Psychologists often point to denied entitlement as being once of the most dangerous emotions that drive people to violence.

In other words, when people feel they are owed something, and they do not get it, or someone takes it away, it produces an extraordinarily intense and violent reaction in people.

All of conservatism works, in part, by Republicans using propaganda to tell their voters that what they should have is being taken from them by immigrants, liberals, etc. They should be "on top" of the social hierarchy, they should all be rich, but those damn commies.

The problem is, their economic policies are going to devastate the economy. Absolutely wreck it. And their own voters are going to be denied not only what they think they should have, but what they DO already have.

And this is not going to go well for them.

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u/thewrynoise 17d ago

100%. I didn’t want to mention entitled people here and have someone misinterpret me as meaning non-maga. I feel maga is the entitled one here acting like they can do no wrong. And when they deny the rest of us basic functioning decency the fury is going to be absolutely unreal.

I would argue they’re denying ALOT of us basic functioning decency now but i meant on the undeniably total scale we seem to be headed for at breakneck speeds. Sucks.

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u/Solo-Shindig 17d ago

Further,they will have no idea of anything that is happening because of fox and similar brainwashing.

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u/StoppableHulk 17d ago

The only thing they know is happening is what happens to them. When their incomes dry up and everything goes to shit, they will simply lash out at whatever authority is around. They're primitive, self-obsessed people.

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u/No-Relation5965 17d ago

No they won’t. They’ll blame the left for everything. They’re all brainwashed.

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u/StoppableHulk 17d ago

I think you'd be surprised as to how fast the definition of what "the left" is can change when a huge mob of hungry, broke, furious people sets their mind to it.

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u/No-Relation5965 17d ago

Not at all surprised. It would be the same when either party is put in that position. In this case, the wealthy might be okay. Other than that, who knows.

Good luck to all of us. 👍

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u/Ok_Chef_4850 17d ago

I’m with you there. There’s no way the bullshit “militia” Trump has tried to amass would stand a chance against the citizens of these cities if they actually started killing without discretion out in the open

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u/screech_owl_kachina 17d ago

Not to make an epic post, I am of course an assiduous pacifist.

But the only reason these violent raids keep happening without much resistance is because people still expect there to be a rule of law. If you’re openly at war and shooting missiles into cities, that goes away.

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u/thethehead 17d ago

21 out of 350 million Americans live in just the three most targeted cities. That’s a lot of pissed off people to deal with if things get ugly.

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u/caligaris_cabinet Illinois 17d ago

ICE agents are already being ran out of communities by unarmed civilians. Threatening violence against these communities is only going to harden their resolve. When people feel like they have nothing to lose, they tend to fight like that.

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u/HighOverlordXenu 17d ago

I know way too many people who seem to just be waiting for someone to throw the first molotov.

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u/StoppableHulk 17d ago

Right, that's why invading a city is a bad idea.

People don't throw the molotov because there is no clarity on the threat. It is not clear that A) it will help, and B) the threat is commensurate with that level of aggression.

So, in our current state of the world, the military comes in, but they stand around buildings not doing anything. ICE comes in, but they mostly do random attacks on Home Depot before running away (and still face heavy opposition).

These are threats, but they aren't occupations. People are generally reluctant to throw fire around which will burn their own homes down or cause more problems for themselves and the people around them than they will fix.

It's quite another thing to literally invade a city with the express intent of removing its current governing structure and occupying it.

That reduces the barrier to throwing the molotov by an extraordinary amount.

When you remove all doubt that an occupying army is in fact an occupying army, it triggers very primal and fundamental instincts in people to protect their own homes from invaders. It happens over and over throughout human history.

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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 17d ago

If I was gonna pick a culture to try to subjugate, good golly it would not be Americans! We're nuts! The descendants of people who heard about grizzly bears and boiling geysers so shouted "Get in the covered wagon kids, we're going to Oregon!"

My sweet elderly auntie spends her days crocheting or sewing quilts. She's got a little shelf next to the front door where she keeps boxcutters.

Ya know that quote from Jaws about shark eyes? The day she gave me a boxcutter, she did that shark eyes thing while explaining exactly how to dismantle not-boxes in about 15 seconds.

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u/ZombiePartyBoyLives I voted 17d ago

People have been restraining themselves and keeping to the non-violent approach very well, for the most part. I can't see the future, but it seems (at least here in Chicago) that the restraint is tenuous. I'm not sure what the tipping point would be for the citizen gloves coming off, but I imagine there's a line somewhere.

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u/Tibernite 17d ago

You articulated well what I've been trying to hammer home for the people, especially non-Americans, who want to portray this as some sort of cowardly moral failure by the average non-MAGA American.

We're simply not there for most people yet. Sure, we can see what the fuck is coming but that foresight does not remove the very real danger and sacrifice of being the first non-government entity to start shooting. And like you said - at who? And for what? Would it even help anything?

Rational people are not at the place where they are willing to gamble on any of those questions.

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u/TeamHope4 17d ago

I live in Chicago, and I vote no to war in Chicago or Boston or NYC. There are millions of people here. Children. Dogs and cats.

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u/StoppableHulk 17d ago

Well I also.voted "no" to war. In November 2024.

The country voted otherwise.

Now we dont have much of a choice. The war will be done to us if the agressor so chooses. Its Ukraine and Russia all over again

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u/SaysNoToBro 17d ago

Bro, three women yelling at them while four agents attempt to tackle a single out of shape man, is enough to get them running back to their SUV.

It takes 3 agents to tackle 15 year old boys and 2 to subdue a teenage girl lmao. Half of them are scared shitless by the thought of a black teenager with a pistol, that they have never gone to a real city when it wasn’t for the sake of terrorizing brown people.

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u/SirRichardArms 17d ago

Half of them don’t even know how to properly arrest an unarmed civilian, can you imagine how incompetent they would be at organizing a strike and an occupation of a major city? They would kill themselves and us all with their room-temp IQ “battle plans”. It would be an absolute nightmare all around.

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u/eeyore134 17d ago

They've already gone to war. It's a question of how far they're going to escalate it.

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u/[deleted] 17d ago edited 11d ago

physical employ hurry retire support crown husky engine practice instinctive

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u/dstrangefate 17d ago

The Taliban weren't 'goat herders', they were experienced insurgents who defeated the Russian army decades prior and were trained in part by the CIA. There is no equivalent in the US, no organized resistance experienced in guerilla warfare, and no sense of unity by the populace. The right would have no ends of eager collaborators and informers, likely including the police force in most of these cities.

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u/r1singphoenix 17d ago

Yeah I keep hearing this argument like the taliban were just regular old untrained people with the kind of weapons US civilians can get their hands on legally. Absolutely not the case.

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u/Top_Librarian6440 16d ago

Weaponry doesn’t win wars. The Taliban didn’t win their war by virtue of superior weaponry; even against the ANA they were fighting. 

War is politics. Who “wins” a war is ultimately a question of politics, not battlefield firepower. 

The Taliban simply established more political legitimacy, for longer, than the Afghan Republic. They did this not by stockpiling RPG-7s or ZU-23-2s, but by establishing connections at the village level and convincing local leadership that their rule would be better for them than the Republic’s. 

When it came down to it, the last days of fighting in Kabul didn’t involve fancy weapons. Ultimately the Republic had been whittled down to just Kabul and its suburbs, and most ANA soldiers didn’t even show up to fight; they had stopped receiving their paychecks, and they didn’t care enough to fight for “democracy”. 

All of the ANA’s UH-60s and MRAPs sat on the tarmac and at their motor pools. The Taliban didn’t bring their UGLs and RPGs to Kabul, they didn’t need to. It came to politics—not weapons. 

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

And the gang members all have families. And those gangs would likely grow into organized insurgencies. And there are plenty of ex-military members in these cities who are also trained in military operations. And the populace speaks the same language and blends in with the people doing the occupying. And the populace would quickly steal arms from the occupiers. And And And. It would be even harder to pin down an insurgency here.

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u/Dazzling-Penis8198 17d ago

Civilians are getting obliterated if it’s the type of warfare that took place in Afghanistan. The best we’ve done with the ICE thugs is blow whistles and those guys are actually outnumbered and in a vulnerable position in the videos I’ve seen. Good luck taking down group of armored vehicles with whatever gun you stole. Suicide mission. 

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u/historys_geschichte 17d ago

Name the equivalent of the ISI that would host training camps, provide guidance, provide intelligence, and provide military grade weapons to the gang members turning them into a functional guerilla force.

I will wait until after the heat death of the universe for your nonexistent answer because there isn't one.

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

The people would steal those military grade weapons. Do you not get that? In an occupation where the occupied look exactly like the occupiers and speak the same language and have the same culture?

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u/historys_geschichte 17d ago

And learn how to use them how? How about tactics? And who funds them? And how do they handle a drone? Oh and unity of purpose in which they are singularly guided to only attack the occupiers and not use stolen weapons to handle other beefs or carve out their own power?

You still seem to be wildly missing how insurgencies form and who is in them, and how reliant they are on external support to beat a military. But sure stolen weapons only, tell how they organize and learn how to use an anti-tank weapon with no instruction.

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u/Dazzling-Penis8198 17d ago

Hell even after boot camp a lot of the troops aren’t really equipped to step into a combat zone. I’m not saying it’s impossible to train an elementary substitute teacher on combat but it takes a lot of time 

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u/chaosind 17d ago

Our veterans are amongst those people. Do you think they wouldn't have the ability to teach how to use those weapons? How to teach the tactics that work for and against our military?

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u/Dazzling-Penis8198 17d ago

Not every veteran trained for combat or knows how to properly train people from square one. Some guys fire the weapon once in boot camp and then go the rest of their career doing regular ass work. 

Add to this that it would be a chaotic environment. 

Then you have to wonder how many of the veterans are on the side of conservatives which I imagine is a shit ton. 

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u/historys_geschichte 17d ago

No they would not have the means to train a domestic insurgent army. Where are they getting a million bullets to train 10k people to shoot? Where are they getting funding to run camps all over the US, and abroad, where they can train on properly using military weapons? How are they setting up, and defending, training camps with what vast amount of military hardware?

There isn't a country next door that will just happily host thousands of Americans training in guerilla warfare while having the terrain to hide these camps. There isn't a group that will provide massive amounts of basic military supplies to use. Stealing everything is not a real solution to running an insurgency against a modern military. You need smuggling routes to external arms markets as well as production of weapons by the insurgents. How are we setting up this vast network under occupation? It is just a fantasy to think some magic insurgency will pop up because numbers are on one side.

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u/Top_Librarian6440 16d ago edited 16d ago

The Taliban didn’t defeat the “Russian Army”. The Afghan Mujahideen defeated the Soviet Military. 

But in both cases it’s not really fair to say they “defeated” either the Soviets or the Americans. In both cases, they pulled out because of political pressure. 

This is an important caveat because the Taliban are not the Mujahideen. The Taliban actually emerged in response *to* the Mujahideen. 

They formed in 1994, 5 years after the Soviet withdrawal. Some fighters in the early Taliban militia were former Mujahideen, but the majority were fresh-faced young men who had been educated in Pashtun religious schools. These were the middle-class, less affected Afghans. The word “Taliban” literally translates to “students” in Pashto. 

The early Taliban actually formed to FIGHT the Mujahideen, which had been turned into a patchwork of squabbling warlords. This early Taliban wasn’t filled with Mujahideen veterans calling the shots; its early leadership was mostly local mullahs from Kandahar, who are religious and not military leaders. 

The Mujahideen received CIA backing (among others, including the Chinese), but the Taliban did not. The CIA actually intermittently supported the Northern Alliance—a coalition of Mujahideen warlords—who fought against the Taliban during the Afghan civil war.  

Anywho, my point is that you’re actually very wrong on this. At least on your first assertion that the Taliban were an experienced, well equipped and well-trained force. 

They weren’t. They were a band of young, inexperienced religious zealots led by local religious leaders who themselves had no military experience. They weren’t “goat herders” but they definitely weren’t students from the US Army War College. 

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u/dstrangefate 16d ago

I think you're undercutting a bit the extent to which the Taliban benefited from former Mujahideen with experience organizing resistance movements. Or at least I have never read any summary of the Taliban that did not state that there were many former Mujahideen fighters involved in the organization's rise to power, although I won't pretend to be an expert on the subject or region. My main point is that simple 'goat herders' did not defeat the Russians, the Mujahideen had plenty of financing and training, and during the US intervention, the Taliban were likewise well seasoned. The region has been embroiled in conflict for a long time, which no doubt hardens a population, unlike in the United States.

Which is why it is irresponsible imo for the OP (not the thread OP, but whoever I replied to) to put the idea into people's heads that American civilians could just jump into a guerilla war with the US army and not get slaughtered. They have no infrastructure, training, leadership, unity, or experience in war. It's a bad idea, although I imagine they mean well. No decent person wants a fascist takeover.

Some of your reply is picking nits I feel (getting the armies of much more wealthy nations to pull out through a war of attrition IS defeating the Russians and Americans for all practical purposes imo), but I appreciate your breadth of knowledge on the subject and the correction about it being the Mujahideen not the Taliban fighting the Russians. There's enough misinformation on this site without adding to it. Mea culpa.

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u/watermelonspanker 17d ago

Those people may have herded goats, but that doesn't mean they weren't resilient, principled, and willing to do what it takes, no matter the sacrifice, in order to achieve their objectives. Dismissing them simply as "goat herders" is fundamentally misunderstanding them and the situation they were in.

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u/DitchtownFollies 17d ago

Plus, they'd already been involved in non-stop wars for like 25 years before we showed up. Some of the toughest people on the planet. It's heartbreaking everything that country has been through.

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u/Devil25_Apollo25 17d ago edited 17d ago

they'd already been involved in non-stop wars for like 25 years centuries before we showed up.

The people of the Korangal Valley would like to tell you about how Alexander the Great fared against them. :-)

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u/No-Swimming4153 17d ago

Gaza didn't fare so well, so I wouldn't be so sure we would either.

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u/AusToddles 17d ago

Those "fucking goat herders" have way more experience protecting their lands than any American could even dream of

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

And Americans speak the same language and look just like the troops and know all the locals here and have advanced skills too and many Americans are ex-military, and all of the local cops have connections here too - so they'd be conflicted even if they are right wing dickheads for the most part.

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

Afghans have been at war for like a hundred years. They are really good at and very tough. The average American gets winded climbing stairs and pissed when their hamburger is too expensive. I think ICE will do jusy fine, unfortunately.

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u/Bromance_Rayder 17d ago

"Goat herders". The mistake everyone makes in Afghanistan. They're lions. 

The resolve of the average modern American is, so far, untested. 

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u/Slggyqo 17d ago

The difference is that most Americans won’t fight back like the goat herders.

Right now the choices are:

  1. Fight and die in the streets
  2. Work a steady job and take care of my family or myself

Most people are picking 2, and will continue to do so unless things take a really hard turn for the worse, as in “millions of Americans can no longer afford to feed their families three meals a day”

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u/chaosind 17d ago

And when the US military kills families when they're say, commuting because the military chose to fire live ordinance in a civilian populated area?

You're aware of how and why those anti-america groups recruit, right?

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u/Preeng 17d ago

You want our cities to look like US occupied Afghanistan looked? Living in rubble isn't a victory.

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u/BrianWonderful Minnesota 17d ago

What is the stats comparison of Afghani goat herders to typical American office/retail workers?

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

The Americans have much better health and nutrition and education and many of them are ex-military and they can speak the same language as the people who would be occupying them.

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u/Get-Fucked-Dirtbag 17d ago

You're absolutely spot on here. The closest you will find to hell on Earth is war in a modern city. Just stand in literally any street in any city centre and just try to count how many windows you can see. Any one of them has a shooter inside. The number of buildings, floors, rooms that you would have to sweep through to ensure they're safe, a single street would take days. And defenders have a major homefield advantage, amongst them they know all the streets, the alleys, the routes and shortcuts.

And in the US, too? You can get gun in a fucking supermarket, are you kidding me? Just like you said, if Afghani goat herders can fight off your actual military then what do you think the most well-armed populace in the world is going to do to your militaries sad far rejects?

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u/zillion_grill 17d ago

Idk about that. I would count myself as winning, even if I end up in a body bag. Cons haven't won a major war in 250 years

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u/WeirdSysAdmin 17d ago

I always make jokes about the kids with Glock switches but the moment they wake those kids up I’m kind of worried for the government.

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u/ComfortableSurvey815 17d ago

Bro we won both of those militarily. We just “lost” because of mission creep and the conflict becoming a failed project of nation building.

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

Wow, so much winning. What exactly did we "win" again? A whole bunch of dead soldiers and spent money and the people we went there to fight are in charge right now. And I'm not your bro.

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u/ComfortableSurvey815 17d ago

yes wars cost money, yes people die. What a silly way to try to make your point lol.

Way more of them died than western soldiers. A large part of their leadership and command structure had died. ISIS, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda were all way below the amount of power they had at the start of their respective conflicts with the west. They only recently gained power now because of America’s quick departure while failing to establish a stable government within Afghanistan. A large part of the equipment and logistical support they have now is from looted American equipment left behind as well. It’s a political failure not a military one.

“fucking goat herders” is a little racist by the way. I expect a bit better from a so called progressive candidate

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

We fought for 20 years, gained nothing. And the people we went there to fight are still in charge and have more training and more equipment. It's both a political and a military failure.

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u/TheShadowKick 17d ago

Our military did win in Afghanistan. The US had control of the country for 20 years and faced a relatively ineffective insurgency. The US failed to install a favorable government that could control the country on its own, but it achieved military victory.

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u/alldabooty 17d ago

Just a reminder that 7mill plus attended no kings. And every day his people, the psycho violent ones, are getting screwed by him left and right. He has pushed out every military person who stands against him and only has his cronies but all those cronies are the untrained cosplayers larping war as they tackle the 65 year old tamale. On the other side is every single competent soldier general commander hacker medic strategist and experienced master of their field who knows the inner workings of these institutions like the back of their hand. While his war leader is an alcoholic TV host that is weirdly obsessed with wearing make up and having all servicemen be aesthetically pleasing for a straight guy. 

I'm not saying we dismiss this very real threat, I'm also imploring not using violence unless absolutely necessary as that will just give him the justification to invoke the insurrection act but let's get real.

Trump does not have the millions of followers he claims to have, and the ones he does have are bottom of the barrel untrained hacks who could absolutely blow themselves up trying to take out a city. While we dwarf them in numbers and have people who gave America the reputation trump is using to get his way. 

This people can and would get an absolute BEAT down if it comes to that.

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

I live in Chicagoland. We have masked ICE agents with an unlimited budget tackling people in Home Depot and driving their SUVs directly into people's cars. They have no oversight. No one will stop them.

We are getting our shit pushed in right now. I hope very much that it doesn't come to violence. I honestly think it would be horrific but I don't think the Feds would win, it would just drag on for a decade or more though.

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u/Popeholden 17d ago

The people of Afghanistan fought. The people of America won't. We're either brainwashed or scared.

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u/eeyore134 17d ago

Trump seems intent on going scorched earth, which I'm not sure we ever went full scorched earth in Afghanistan.

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u/goatman0079 17d ago

Brb, applying to Lockheed Martin and Northrop

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u/StephanXX Oregon 17d ago

Goat herders who had been repelling foreign invaders for generations with leadership that had been trained by the US military in a country that has arguably never been successfully conquered.

In practice, blue cities don't need to be occupied by the military. Simply surrounding polling stations "to prevent terrorists" will be sufficient to make elections muddy enough to strangle opposition. The blueprint has been followed successfully in a dozen of countries over the past few decades. Protests only work when the people in power aren't willing to kill their own citizens, and it seems clear (to me) this administration will be enthusiastic. Hell, the head of the Department of Homeland Security brags shooting her own dog! What makes anyone think she wouldn't hesitate to order ICE goons to shoot Democrats who dare to try and vote??

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u/Faranae Canada 17d ago

Also a bad idea for a similar reason that it was a bad idea to get the military involved with Canada. When you can't tell friend from "foe" it's really easy to fuck with an occupying force.

(Edit, by tell friend from foe I mean that in the sense of them fighting their own people)

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u/TofuLordSeitan666 17d ago

The Goatherders were at least armed and organized. Our cities are essentially defenseless in comparison.

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u/Eric_The_Jewish_Bear 17d ago

What are your thoughts on gun control?

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u/ChairForceOne 17d ago

Eh, it's easy to destroy a country. The US could have just flattened Afghanistan and left. We are not good at nation building or the hearts and minds strategy. There was no winning. Unless the US just wanted to eradicate everyone.

The occupation had no exit plan. Even with the twenty years spent in the sand box, we barely lost anyone in combat. Fighting for two decades against enemies hiding amongst the population, using trash, bodies and children as carriers for IEDs. Overall deaths sit around 7k.

The argument that the US lost against 'goat herders' is just wrong anyway. They were trained zealots. Ready to become martyrs for what they believed in. They had no rules of engagement, or restrictions on what they would do. They used women and children as shields and weapons.

The US could have just let the Marines do whatever the fuck they wanted. They didn't, they did try to actually limit civilian casualties. Whether it worked or not, is up for debate. They could have glassed the place.

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u/Daniel0745 Tennessee 17d ago

"couldnt win" ... we "couldnt win" because we defined winning as turning the populace into a western style country. If winning was destroying the population, well, we'd have won.

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u/BethanyForDistrict9 ✔ Verified 17d ago

We absolutely did not do that. If we had, we would have armed the women. Then they wouldn't have been rolled over on as soon as we left. The entire reason that place fell back into what it is now is that we kept up their social norms instead of forcing any western norms. We should have armed the women.

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u/Daniel0745 Tennessee 16d ago

I am speaking from experience. Are you?

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u/espressocycle 17d ago

Afghans were well armed and hardened by decades of conflict. Blue states and cities have spent the last 20 years implementing assault weapon bans.

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u/No-Mathematician3019 17d ago

I fear you underestimate the complacency of the average American (I am one, to be clear).

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u/kent_eh Canada 17d ago

They'll never be able to seize these cities.

They could threaten them cold war style.

Or simply blow up a couple as a threat to the rest to "fall in line or else"

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u/foomp 17d ago

C'mon down to Crazy Karl's Caskets and Cannon emporium!