The Military History Thread

[palo5]

Originally Posted by Puhbear69

No, I have to disagree here:

Your privilege, my friend. But I disagree with you about 'industrialization'. They could hardly train their own engineers, which is why the USSR trained so many of them. They wouldn't even have had a technical college without the USSR

Agreed the Russian did a lot for the infrastructure during their occupation. But this wasn't wanted by the Afghans because the Russians did it

Well, Afghanistan and the USSR had a friendship pact long before the conflict, and USSR provided substantial aid to them. The trouble was/is that they were/are so disunited - except against foreigners - so putting a Soviet Contingent there was a really bad move

But as soon as we left, they were back to Civil War

And some years later, the Taliban formed

Nichtsdestotrotz, I really appreciated your post

[blueballsdc]

Originally Posted by 9876543210

Puhbear69,

Good job with the photos. I never had any idea the Afghani's had an inkling of becoming westernized back in the 60's. Just a couple of questions.

Could these photos be showing only the more urban, higher class, politically connected Afghani's? A group of people much more interested in westernization than the rural poor. So, did this westernization also extend to the interests of the rural poor?

A gentleman I know did his research for his doctorate in athropology in Afghanistan back in the 60's. He has also gone back and visited the country many times. He tells me that Kabul was a fairly cosmopolitan city at the time and very western friendly. Many of the elites and leadership wanted to make the country like Turkey and have close ties to Europe and the US.

But once you got away from the cities and out into the mountains and countryside it was a very different story. As he told me, the people there are living much the same as they have for the last two thousand years and most see no reason to change.

[palo5]

Originally Posted by blueballsdc

...But once you got away from the cities and out into the mountains and countryside it was a very different story. As he told me, the people there are living much the same as they have for the last two thousand years and most see no reason to change.

An almost perfect summary

All you need to add is that they're tribal and clannish and whatever other adjective you can use to describe disunity in a country, and they can switch allegiances from one day to the next, even in families

I once read a report that said if "only" 30% of the Afghan army deserted with its weapons in a year, it was a "good year"

[Puhbear69]

Originally Posted by blueballsdc

A gentleman I know did his research for his doctorate in athropology in Afghanistan back in the 60's. He has also gone back and visited the country many times. He tells me that Kabul was a fairly cosmopolitan city at the time and very western friendly. Many of the elites and leadership wanted to make the country like Turkey and have close ties to Europe and the US.

But once you got away from the cities and out into the mountains and countryside it was a very different story. As he told me, the people there are living much the same as they have for the last two thousand years and most see no reason to change.

As I drove through Turkey in the early 80s, I had similar impressions. The cities had more the urban westernized stile people, but when you drove of into the countryside it was really behind one's time.
Nevertheless all friendly people.

I once talked with a college, who's husband died at Kabul in the 70s at an heart attack. She confirmed also, that it was a westernized town at that time. I remembered it when I saw the ruble ground of nowadays and searched for the pictures of the 60s and 70s in the matter of an other forum.

I would like to have impressions of the other cities (Mazar-e-Shraif in the north , or kandabar in the south), but I found nothing ot that time.

[scoundrel]

A society built simply on tribal or clan loyalties and nothing else cannot support a unitary state with a central government. The authority of the clan chief or local warlord will trump the authority of the central government and the unitary state is an impotent, fictitious entity. This was a recurring theme in medieval Europe, which in England was only resolved when Henry Tudor (Henry VII) succeeded in outlawing private armies and making it stick. No doubt a few big cheese nobles tried to ignore him and may even have discovered that their heads and bodies needed seperate maintenance because Henry found out that they weren't going to obey.

In Scotland, the Highland clans were each a private army loyal to the clan-chieftan and clan chiefs were a constant threat. In peacetime, some clans were nae bother, but some were given to banditry and extortion, cattle rustling and so forth. The Macdonalds of Glen Coe, victims of the infamous Glencoe Massacre, had a bad history of lawless brigandage going back generations and this was the reason why the chiefs of their neighbouring clan, the Clan Campbell, were willing to murder them in that spine-chilling way, guests rising in the middle of the night to murder their hosts as their hosts lay fast asleep. It was of course no excuse whatsoever. It is forgotten that so many survivors escaped and told the shocking tale because many of the Campbell footsoldiers were unwilling; the night was thick with fog and at least one sizeable party of women and children walked right past a group of Campbells who ostentatiously pretended that they could not see them. The Campbell officers were scum; the ordinary men showed every sign of having been willing to act decently, if their officers would have allowed it.

The Glencoe Massacre of 1693 anticipated the methods finally used to break the power of the clans after they had pushed their luck too far in the 1745 Jacobite uprising. Clans which had adhered to the Jacobite Pretender against the established Hanovarian monarch were brutally suppressed; murder, rape, arson, the confiscation of their cattle and the buring of their crops. Even in medieval times, this degree of victimisation would have been considered extreme and really bad form; but it was done in order to break the power of the clan warlords for ever. They were even denied the right to wear their clan tartan, because this served as a uniform in war. Only clans like the Cambells and MacNeils, who had fought for the Elector and his redcoats were gently treated, and even they lost their right to support private armies. Anyone who wanted to wear a tartan had to join the Black Watch and fight overseas for King George.

The consequence of prohibiting private armies was the de-population of the Highlands. The clan chiefs no longer had a reason to want to maintain a large servant-farmer community once they derived no power from the headcount of men of military age who were beholden to them for the means of life. They gradually moved over to sheep farming, which was profitable and required little labour. Having no further use for their tenant families, they evicted their tenants in a brutal and pitiless manner, showing, after centuries of allegiance from their tenant families, how much loyalty means in this world. Most of them moved to London and gambled away centuries of patrimony, before (hopefully) dying of syphilis. But this was the way the London government saw to it that its writ would run in the Scottish Highlands and there would never again be an insurrection similar the Forty-Five.

Ultimately, there will be no unitary state in places like Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, until the power of local chiefs has been broken and the authority of central government is unchallenged. I suspect this will eventually happen, and that the methods used will be as pitiless, if pehaps not as brazen, as those employed to destroy the clan system in Scotland.

[9876543210]

scoundrel,

Interesting analysis. It makes me wonder what a friend from the Burns Society would think of it.

Originally Posted by scoundrel

Ultimately, there will be no unitary state in places like Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, until the power of local chiefs has been broken and the authority of central government is unchallenged. I suspect this will eventually happen, and that the methods used will be as pitiless, if pehaps not as brazen, as those employed to destroy the clan system in Scotland.

And I wonder who would do that nowadays? The US and its allies couldn't get away with it. Maybe the Pakistani's or Iranians?

The Pakistani's might be able to get away with it (as could the Iranians) in Afghanistan but probably not in Pakistan. But the political consequences would probably be really nasty.

[rotobott]

Afghanistan is the biggest producer of opium, which destroys lives the world over, particularly in Pakistan

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19152346

Doing nothing is like giving your local drug dealer diplomatic immunity.

[otokonomidori]

The Six Day War of 1967. I remember the day it started - being more interested in girls and guitars rather than geopolitics I was a bit surprised but damned pleased too when I saw the Israelis give Nasser et al a severe drubbing.

I reckon that war that happened when I was 16 shaped the world we live in today -

[Puhbear69]

Originally Posted by rotobott

Afghanistan is the biggest producer of opium, which destroys lives the world over, particularly in Pakistan

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19152346

Doing nothing is like giving your local drug dealer diplomatic immunity.

Good Point !

In more than 10 years having international troops stationed in Afghanistan it was not successful, to prevent the cultivation of opium.
Opium is not growing up in one day.

That seems to be intention. And the arms dealing subsequently too.

[haroldeye]

Scoundrel,

I think you'll find that there were more Scots on the Government side of Culloden Moor than on the Jacobite side.

Like it or not the events in Scotland throughout the 18th century were all about the power struggle of who governed Scotland for the crown. Wade built his forts and his roads before the '45 and also set up Companies of irregulars to keep watch on the clans who were always warring with each other. It was from these Watch companies that in 1739 the Royal Highland Regiment were formed for service overseas. All the Watch companies wore the Government tartan which was very dark hence the soubriquet Black Watch. During the '45 the Highland clans split about evenly for and against the Government and then mainly on religous grounds. The lowlands were predominately protestant and supportive of the Government. As long as the Pretender was winning those opposed to him kept quiet but as his support fell away so did the apathy to his cause.

After Culloden the Scots loyal to the Crown were given free rein to ensure that the clans never again would support the Pretender and the French troops that formed the backbone of his efforts. Tartan and the pipes were banned and opposition ruthlessly crushed. But this was no worse than civil savagery in the penal code. By our standards quite appalling but par for the contemporary course.

The clearances were inevitable just as the enclosures in England were. If a man owned a thousand acres and could make ten times more money from those acres by farming sheep rather than tenanted farms then logic stated clear. Not very pleasant especially if like some of my ancestors you were the ones dispossessed but this sort of thing could and is still happening today. The by product of the clearances was a large Scots presence in what are now the Dominiums and the Scots dedication to running the British Empire.

Oh and don't think that any system set up by the Pretender would be any better than what happened. He was supported by the French kings and look what they did to their own people.