Contents:
Ironically, it is from the Pakistani Intelligence Services that the United States received the largest or almost total amount of news and information precisely, or apparently, against the Taliban. Quos Deus lose vult, dementat.
Sometimes it has happened. In the case of Kunduz, the very evident and aggressive Taliban operations were deemed ineffective or irrelevant. No agency of the Afghan Service took seriously or even studied the Taliban operations in Kunduz. The Resolute Support Mission, composed of about 13,, soldiers from 39 NATO countries and from other countries, operates from Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar and Laghman, and focuses mainly on the training of Afghan forces, as well as on military consultancy and assistance, hoping that the local Afghan forces will reach a level capable of ensuring at least fictitious national independence.
At least until , akey year for the new relationship between NATO and the Afghan government, the Italians — who are still training the Afghan police very well — went there especially not to displease the usual U. Big Father that the Italian strategic system still sees as unquestionable and unassailable.
But it has never been enough. Nevertheless, the silly servility and sycophancy of Italian politicians, who closely resemble the character of Nando Mericoni played by Alberto Sordi in the movie An American in Rome , is still largely widespread. Italian politicians — even starting from the text of the Constitution — do not know or do not want to understand the eternal rules of foreign policy and strategic thinking, of which they know nothing yet.
Robert Gates, then the director of the Strategic Evaluation Center, recounted that Brzezinski complained in that the United States was not doing enough to support the Afghan resistance [99]. The Saudi government downplayed the revolt in the media, claiming it was part of an isolated incident and not evidence of wider discontent []. On this day, May 31, , Reagan chose to speak about freedom [] — an ideal he hoped the Soviet Union could work towards through a future of cooperation with the United States. Bush cut all overt aid to Pakistan under the Pressler Amendment and 2 On September 13, , Secretary of State Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin pledged to a mutual cut-off of arms to both sides of the conflict to begin on January 1, Even there, serious efforts at a negotiated peace for the first time in more than a decade are sputtering along.
Certainly you cannot obtain votes, additional funding and small favours from foreign policy. This is the level of Italian politicians, especially in current times more than in the past. This is the terrible case of a propaganda that stifles even the ruling classes that should be immune to it. Certainly this was not even true in Afghanistan because the bad guy, namely Osama bin Laden, was often elsewhere.
As has precisely happened, the killing of Osama bin Laden did not change anything. He had to be killed because he had killed American citizens. True, right. There was even Germany present in Afghanistan to contemplate its military decline, but above all to show — even eighty years later — that it was no longer a Nazi country.
As Marx would have said , le mort saisit le vif. In short, the varied presence of NATO and of the initial coalitions of the willing in the War on Terror had no clear ideas and probably did not even know where it really was. Later, however, the withdrawal from the Afghan territory — coincidentally after the great Battle for Kunduz — ended in December , but leaving alive and operational as many as 8, soldiers on the ground. Currently as in the past, the real problem for Afghanistan is Pakistan.
General Musharraf, the former Pakistani President from June 20, to 18 August 18, note the dates and perpetrator of the military coup, clearly stated that the Inter Service Intelligence ISI , i. Pakistan keeps on supporting terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan and in other parts of the world — not only the Taliban, but also the other groups. Hence the forgetfulness — so to speak — of the Afghan governments with regard to intelligence comes from far away. As a result, however, also the Afghan State in all its forms collapsed.
Therefore also the two agencies linked to the Soviet intelligence Services evaporated. It was largely made up of Pashtuns and was particularly popular among the working classes. The very superficial Marxism shown by the faction was often only a way to defend the Pashto world from the pressures of other ethnic groups. Eternal separation between rural and urban areas, a typically Maoist and classic crux of every practical and extra-Western interpretation of Marxism-Leninism.
The Parcham reunited laboriously with the Khalq faction during the Revolution, but it really came to power only after the Soviet operation, the local coup, i.
Meanwhile, it was Amin himself who had ordered the assassination of his predecessor, Mohammed Taraki. In the intermediate phase of his regime, Amin also had many Afghans assassinated — and not only his known opponents. Nevertheless, the shift between the different ethnic groups is precisely the key to understanding the Afghan intelligence services prior to the U.
I believe that, in any case, ethnic factionalism — probably dating back to the old political-tribal faith — was the key to the functioning of the new Afghan Intelligence Services, even during the naive Western administration. Furthermore, the KHaD was placed outside the administration of the Interior Ministry, dominated by the Khalq and then immediately transferred to the office of the Prime Minister, who later also became National Security Minister. The Directors of the Afghan Intelligence Services always reported directly to the KGB and, in , the standard situation was that the Afghan Intelligence Service employed almost 30, operatives and officials and over , paid informants.
As also shown in Syria, Russia paid but did not trust it too much. Again in the s, the KHaD always had both East German and Soviet instructors and numerous secret mass executions took place. In an old confidential document, CIA also estimated that the total cost of the Soviet engagement in Afghanistan was over 15 billion roubles, plus additional 3 billion roubles for the period when it did not directly occupy Kabul. Since currently the rouble is still worth The KHaD also created tribal militias on the borders, while the KGB organized the internal tribes on its own, mainly for sabotage and to spread dezinformatsjia.
It was made up mainly of former KHaD agents and Mujahideen. Indeed, there was no other population available. The Service, however, was known to be bad or even very bad: its operatives and analysts were selected only on a tribal level or by simple political affiliation.
They never went to school for education and training. They had no serious training centres and they did not professionally check their networks of informants.
Even the United States, however, spent a lot of money in Afghanistan: the Congressional Research Office has calculated a 1. What about China?
First of all, China wants the political stability of Afghanistan, which is a neighbouring and Islamic country. In particular, it controls Kabul to prevent Uyghur jihadism from finding a safe and secure place there. It prevents the Uyghurs from having contacts with the Taliban. It has already happened. Everything will happen when the United States definitively leaves Afghanistan, since China now regards that country as an essential pawn in its relationship with India, while — through Pakistan — China strengthens its relations with the Taliban, which the Chinese view as the next and inevitable masters of Kabul.
This forecast is really easy to make.
China has also put pressures on Kabul for Afghanistan to accept its satellite positioning system, instead of the GPS developed and managed by the United States. Some Chinese troops, however, have also been stationing in Tajikistan for long time, again to protect the Wakhan Corridor. Trade between Afghanistan and China is fully asymmetric and, until Afghanistan is completely pacified — certainly by others and not by China -we believe that that the issue will not be very relevant, at least for China.
He holds prestigious academic distinctions and national orders. When COVID coincidentally emerged from Wuhan two months later, scientists were rushing to generate similar alarmist forecasts using a variety of questionable scientific models. While scientific models are admittedly fallible, one would nonetheless be hard-pressed to justify the endless string of contradictions , discrepancies and wilful amnesia in the global pandemic narrative.
The mortality rates are only slightly higher than the human toll from seasonal flu and are, in fact, lower than many ailments for the same age cohorts. Was it the science of mass-mediated hysteria?
There are other troubling questions yet unanswered. Who was Patient Zero? Why was there a concerted media agitprop against the prophylactic use of hydroxychloroquine that was backed by the Indian Council of Medical Research ICMR no less? In a real pandemic, nobody would care where an effective remedy comes from. The virus does not care about borders and geopolitics; so why should we politicize the origins of an antidote? Who benefits from global lockdowns that are destabilizing all facets of our society? As the author had warned for more than a decade, the world is staring at a confluence of risk overloads, socioeconomic meltdowns 1 and a Second Great Depression.
For the ruling classes, COVID is fortuitously deflecting public attention away from the disastrous consequences of decades of economic mismanagement and wealth fractionation. The consolidation of Big Tech with Big Media 2 has created an Orwellian world where collective hysteria is shifting loci from bogeymen like Russia to those who disagree with the pandemic narrative. While rioting and mass demonstrations by assorted radicals are given a free pass — even encouraged by leaders in the West —Facebook posts questioning lockdowns are deemed subversive.
This is a world where Australian Blueshirts beat up women , manhandle a pregnant woman in her own home, and perform wolf pack policing on an elderly lady in a park. Yet, the premier of the Australian state of Victoria remains unfazed by the unflattering moniker of Kim Jong Dan.
The corona-totalitarianism is unsurprisingly most pronounced in the Anglosphere and its dependencies.