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Afghanistan

dudalb said:
Painfully true.
Mao was a murdering bastard who is in the finals for "worst human being of all time" competion, but he but spoke the truth when he said

"In the end all political power comes from the mouth of a gun".
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No he didn't. In a lot of countries there are elections and political power passes peacefully from one government to the next.
 
angrysoba said:
No he didn't. In a lot of countries there are elections and political power passes peacefully from one government to the next.
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Yes, but in the end all political power is based on the ablity to coerce, to be able to use force to see the laws are enforced.
 
dudalb said:
Yes, but in the end all political power is based on the ablity to coerce, to be able to use force to see the laws are enforced.
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This is Bob-level reductionism.

Setting up a civil society, with laws, constitutions, elections, courts and other institutions etc... as means of settling disputes and recognizing legitimate power is to prevent violent mobs imposing themselves on the citizenry.
 
angrysoba said:
No he didn't. In a lot of countries there are elections and political power passes peacefully from one government to the next.
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Because the people with the guns want it that way. And for good reason. There are a lot of advantages of such a system, even for the people with guns.

But votes don't beat guns when the two clash. Voting works when the results of a vote are implicitly backed up by the threat of violence. Violence is always the ultimate arbiter of power, even in a democracy. It is delusional to think that any alternative arrangement is even possible for humans.
 
angrysoba said:
This is Bob-level reductionism.

Setting up a civil society, with laws, constitutions, elections, courts and other institutions etc... as means of settling disputes and recognizing legitimate power is to prevent violent mobs imposing themselves on the citizenry.
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I'm not sure why you think you're contradicting him. What you describe is the state monopolizing the use of violence. That allows for non-violent means to be used in conflict resolutions because the the state's monopoly on violence prevents other parties from resorting to it. But it only works when the state is capable of violence. If the state is not better at exerting violence than individual citizens, then those civil institutions cannot constrain bad actors, and everything falls apart.
 
Ziggurat said:
Because the people with the guns want it that way. And for good reason. There are a lot of advantages of such a system, even for the people with guns.

But votes don't beat guns when the two clash. Voting works when the results of a vote are implicitly backed up by the threat of violence. Violence is always the ultimate arbiter of power, even in a democracy. It is delusional to think that any alternative arrangement is even possible for humans.
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Sorry, but this is just silly. Who are the people with the guns in most democracies? The military. So all countries are military dictatorships. Except of course they are not. That is how we distinguish between a military dictatorship where things are as they are because the people with the guns want it that way, and democracies which are usually run by civilians.
 
angrysoba said:
Sorry, but this is just silly. Who are the people with the guns in most democracies? The military. So all countries are military dictatorships.
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That doesn't follow at all from anything I said.

We are not a military dictatorship because our military follows the orders of our civilian government, according to democratic rules. But they choose to do so, they are not actually forced to do so by any outside power. If they chose not to, then we would become a military dictatorship. And that occasionally happens to countries: the military is not nominally in charge, but seizes power anyways.

Violence is always the ultimate arbiter of power. Always. It has never been otherwise. It can never be otherwise.
 
Ziggurat said:
That doesn't follow at all from anything I said.

We are not a military dictatorship because our military follows the orders of our civilian government, according to democratic rules. But they choose to do so, they are not actually forced to do so by any outside power. If they chose not to, then we would become a military dictatorship. And that occasionally happens to countries: the military is not nominally in charge, but seizes power anyways.

Violence is always the ultimate arbiter of power. Always. It has never been otherwise. It can never be otherwise.
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Only if you define power as violence.

But in fact, it comes down to what will be accepted as legitimate. Of course, one route to doing that is through violence: "Accept my rules or face the consequences!" This is power through violence.

Or it could be, "Please do page 45 for homework". The teacher has the power to set homework because the teacher is recognized as a legitimate authority to set homework. In some cases, particularly in the past, this was sometimes backed up by violence. But not anymore. Not in many cases.

If you go to a job interview, the people on the panel have the power to hire you (and to fire you), but not because they have the ability to do violence to you. If you write an article for a newspaper, the editor has the power to accept it or to turn it down as being too un-PC or whatever. Jack Dorsey also has the power to kick off Donald Trump and Alex Jones from his platform, but not because he has more guns much to the consternation of right-wing lunatics. If you are very wealthy, you have the power to lobby government more than you do if you are poor. If you have a very sexy body you have to power to entrance other humans, etc...

Power takes many forms, far more than are apparently dreamed of in your Maoist philosophy. In many cases, power is derived from the acceptance that someone has legitimacy. Mao and others can take over a country with brute force, but they may be hated for it. You can force someone to do something at gunpoint, and that is indeed a form of power, but you cannot necessarily gain legitimacy by doing so. There are other ideas about how power is derived and part of that is through the consent of the governed. If even those who have been subjugated refuse to give consent, then even with violence the would-be rulers with their greater capacity for violence will never get to exercise the power they want.

In the case of Afghanistan, to pull it back to something more relevant to the thread as well as this digressionary topic of power and violence, in fact, The Soviet Union had more guns and a greater capacity for violence than the warlords. The Afghan government probably had more guns than the Taliban and could have, and should have destroyed the Taliban. The US obviously had more guns and firepower than the Taliban. But the Taliban relied on much of the population believing that the Taliban had more legitimate authority. The Afghan government woefully lacked that kind of respect.
 
angrysoba said:
This is Bob-level reductionism.

Setting up a civil society, with laws, constitutions, elections, courts and other institutions etc... as means of settling disputes and recognizing legitimate power is to prevent violent mobs imposing themselves on the citizenry.
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Violent mobs aren't the only "power of the gun", though. Military occupation and the police state are two other examples.

Where do you think the political power came from on Jan 6? The laws, constitutions, elections, etc.? Or from the ability and willingness of the Capitol Police and other security forces to use power against the use of power by a violent mob*?
 
angrysoba said:
Only if you define power as violence.
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I didn't define power as violence. But violence is the ultimate power in human affairs. If someone is willing to use violence against you, and you cannot counter that violence with violence of your own (or have someone do so on your behalf), then you have no recourse.

If you go to a job interview, the people on the panel have the power to hire you (and to fire you), but not because they have the ability to do violence to you.
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No. But they have the power to withhold their money from you (the point of a job being to get their money), and they can do so with violence.

Power takes many forms, far more than are apparently dreamed of in your Maoist philosophy.
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There is nothing Maoist about recognizing violence as the ultimate form of power. Lots of people can figure out this rather elementary truth. What distinguishes Mao is the ends to which this violence is put, and the fact that he feels no need to justify violence. Recognizing violence is the ultimate power doesn't actually justify it morally.

In the case of Afghanistan, to pull it back to something more relevant to the thread as well as this digressionary topic of power and violence, in fact, The Soviet Union had more guns and a greater capacity for violence than the warlords. The Afghan government probably had more guns than the Taliban and could have, and should have destroyed the Taliban. The US obviously had more guns and firepower than the Taliban. But the Taliban relied on much of the population believing that the Taliban had more legitimate authority. The Afghan government woefully lacked that kind of respect.
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The capacity for violence depends not just on the tools, but also the wielder. The Taliban were willing to kill women and children of enemy soldiers. The Afghan government did not have a willingness to do the same in kind. And we basically removed much of their firepower advantage anyways by pulling out the technicians who serviced the more advanced weapons systems such as planes and helicopters.

And it's not the respect of the general populace which was the immediate problem, but the faith of Afghan soldiers themselves. If they aren't willing to commit violence on behalf of the government (and many of them weren't as soon as we stopped helping), then the government doesn't have much violence it can exert.
 
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Orphia Nay said:
That is a good article.

"“The Taliban are inheriting a different country than they left 20 years ago,” US Congressman Jake Auchincloss, a Marine veteran who led patrols through Afghanistan, said in a recent interview. “The literacy rate has doubled, the infant mortality rate has halved, access to electricity has tripled or quadrupled, there are ten times as many kids in school as there were 20 years ago, 40 percent of whom are girls. The Taliban are inheriting a country in which real progress has been made.”

"The question for Western policymakers should not just be whether, as Auchincloss asked, the Taliban will maintain this progress, but why, despite it, the country still fell."
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My guess: The numbers looked good, but didn't actually measure the kind of progress needed to keep the country from collapse.

This article is basically just the precursor of a handwringing think piece a decade hence: "When we left Afghanistan ten years ago, literacy was doubled and infant mortality rate halved. Now the situation is even worse than before we went in. What happened?"

Narrator: The Taliban happened.
 
angrysoba said:
Sorry, but this is just silly. Who are the people with the guns in most democracies? The military. So all countries are military dictatorships. Except of course they are not. That is how we distinguish between a military dictatorship where things are as they are because the people with the guns want it that way, and democracies which are usually run by civilians.
Click to expand...

Why did President Eisenhower deploy the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce school segregation?
 
angrysoba said:
This is Bob-level reductionism.

Setting up a civil society, with laws, constitutions, elections, courts and other institutions etc... as means of settling disputes and recognizing legitimate power is to prevent violent mobs imposing themselves on the citizenry.
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And how does a Government does those things?
In the end , by force or threat of force.
That is just a fact of life. The power of government in the end rest on the ability to use force if necessary.The minute a government hires a policeman, it is in the coercion business.
And there is nothng wrong with that. You need the sanction of force to have any kind of civil society,human nature being what it is.
 
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dellarte said:
Muslins are not native to Mindanao.
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:dl:

I hope that's not a typo. I've been on a one-man mission to get that into common usage.

Thank Norman Stanley Fletcher.

dudalb said:
The minute a government hires a policeman, it is in the coercion business.
And there is nothng wrong with that. You need the sanction of force to have any kind of civil society,human nature being what it is.
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That should be the end of that off-topic drift - we know with 100% certainty that if all the cops died tomorrow, there wouldn't be a government for more than about 5 minutes.

Anyway, back to Afghanistan, or someone may like to start a [very short] new thread - the idea that democratic governments don't rely on guns (metaphorical in the case of places like everywhere outside America, where cops aren't routinely armed) is naive in the extreme.
_______________________

I thought the Taliban and ISIS hated each other and ISIS had no power in A'stan, but it looks like there's a Special K branch there.

And, of course, they're sticking their noses in...

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/24/isis-terrorist-threats-afghanistan-kabul-evacuation-506807
 
The Atheist said:
:dl:

I hope that's not a typo. I've been on a one-man mission to get that into common usage.

Thank Norman Stanley Fletcher.



That should be the end of that off-topic drift - we know with 100% certainty that if all the cops died tomorrow, there wouldn't be a government for more than about 5 minutes.

Anyway, back to Afghanistan, or someone may like to start a [very short] new thread - the idea that democratic governments don't rely on guns (metaphorical in the case of places like everywhere outside America, where cops aren't routinely armed) is naive in the extreme.
_______________________

I thought the Taliban and ISIS hated each other and ISIS had no power in A'stan, but it looks like there's a Special K branch there.

And, of course, they're sticking their noses in...

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/24/isis-terrorist-threats-afghanistan-kabul-evacuation-506807
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They're the Cereal Killers.
 
At least two explosions outside Kabul airport, claims of U.S. casualties:

Explosions at Kabul airport with US personnel reported among casualties


(CNN)At least two explosions took place outside the Kabul airport on Thursday as the United States and other countries try to evacuate their citizens and Afghans at risk from the Taliban.

Three US officials and a source familiar with the situation said that according to initial reports, there were some US personnel among the casualties.

"We can confirm that the explosion at the Abbey Gate was the result of a complex attack that resulted in a number of US & civilian casualties. We can also confirm at least one other explosion at or near the Baron Hotel, a short distance from Abbey Gate. We will continue to update," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby tweeted.

The blast happened at one of the entry gates of the Hamid Karzai International Airport and appears to be a suicide attack, according to three US officials.
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