Don’t be a Jihadi?

There it is. Everyone’s guilty once you’ve flung shrapnel through their chest.

But you still can’t imagine why the French-aligned government got ousted in a coup on these terms.

The French are arrogant, no doubt, but that’s different from wanting to rule the area or wishing it ill.

Explain it to the 2700+ dead that the French are responsible for.

There a) was no occupation

The French Defense Minister Florence Parly announced in February 2020 that France would send an additional 600 troops to the Sahel region, bolstering Operation Barkhanes’ force to 5,100 troops.

b) not even the Putschists were in “full revolt”.

More and more voices are being raised against the presence of the French soldiers of Operation Barkhane, despite the lack of alternatives.

You’re either deeply misinformed or deliberately lying.

Can’t raise prices if nobody has any money

😎

Because last I checked when the Sahel states wanted them gone they packed up and left.

Check again.

Operation Barkhane dragged on for eight years. It sparked domestic protests within the first two years. By the end, the Sahel states were in full revolt against French occupation.

France never shied away from throwing down with them, where they were reluctant is stomping Tuaregs, instead opting for endless negotiations and mediating.

The problem is with your language. You seem to think dropping 200 lb bombs on a city to wipe whole neighborhoods off the map constitutes “throwing down”, like its a bar room brawl everyone will walk away from in the morning. You don’t seem to want to acknowledge that they killed thousands of civilians. A 9/11s worth of people, to put it in a parlance you might appreciate.

And much like in Israel and the US occupation of Iraq/Afghanistan, the response from French allies was always “those civilians had it coming”.

That is what spurred widespread opposition to Françafrique policy.

I don’t know how we got from exploding pagers to space lasers.

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They literally think they are part of a Master Race and that their magic jizz will create a future line of ubermensch.

It’s esoteric fascism.

Europe has not been aggresive at all.

France is no stranger to military intervention in Africa. Indeed, a cornerstone of Françafrique, France’s sphere of influence over its former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, was France’s permanent military presence on the continent. Since decolonization in 1960, the French military has intervened over fifty times in Africa. These interventions have ranged from brief counter-insurgency missions and evacuations to longer-term peacekeeping operations. While France would scale back the scope of its operations in Africa following it’s failure to stop the 1994 Rwandan genocide, it nevertheless maintained a force of 5,500 troops on the continent.

Over Fifty Times.

You don’t. You have lots of conscription to supplant your front lines. You do all sorts of corruption in the middle-ranks of the military, so junior officers can generate income off the desperation of their greener soldiers. You create an industry around the war, such that everyone hates it but someone is always profiting off the misery of others.

And then the machine grinds on.

“We need people from this big war to fight the next big war!” is the line of thinking that’s going to burn everything to the ground, just like it did a century ago.

Between Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Iran, Britain floating warships off the coast of China, Indian and Pakistan firing on one another, North Africa in a decade long bloodbath, the US sending marines to suppress unrest in local cities… its not good folks.

If you make sweeping generalizations about an entire ethnic group, you might be a racist.

Broadly speaking, sure. I think the “Afghanis didn’t want Americans holding their nation at gunpoint for two decades” is empirically well-proven, though.

The rest of the shit is just ahistorical nonsense. The primary appeal of the Taliban is rooted in their opposition to the secular warlords and opium cartel bosses who were backed by the US in place of civilian government. Just like in Iran, after the takeover by the Shah, urban liberals were either ingested into the American murder machine or exterminated as disloyal opposition. What opposition was left fell to rural religious conservatives who spent the next generation resisting the occupation.

When the Taliban was suppressed they had schools for girls and nobody forced people at gunpoint to go to them.

When the Taliban was suppressed, a few major cities had schools for the families of occupying soldiers and civilian bureaucrats. And some of the Afghanis were permitted to attend, as an incentive to remain compliant. The women and girls in the rural backwaters weren’t invited to these schools. The young boys weren’t invited either. The country was plundered, the bulk of the population subjugated, and individuals who resisted were arrested, tortured, and executed.

The idea that Kandahar was transformed into Boston under US occupation is absolutely farcical. Poverty was endemic during most of the US occupation, percipitating multiple famines during the '00s and '10s. 36% of the country experienced extreme poverty under US occupation. One in five children died under the age of five years old.

How Taliban insurgents initially managed to win support in those early years was by rebuilding the domestic supply lines that the '02 invasion had flattened. Only after they’d revitalized the western provinces could they shepherd the manpower to repeal western forces. And, in the end, it was those who could supply the bread that made the rules.

Proximity to the equator and high elevation make for ideal launch sites. Then eastward facing, because you want to run counter to the earth’s spin as you launch and be out over open water if something fucks up. One reason why Kenya, Brazil, and Indonesia were floated as a high efficiency international spaceports decades ago, when efficiency was considered more important than inflating a billionaire’s ego.

I mean… its a big deal if you’re anywhere near the launchpad. Or, in or around South Padre Island.

Also can’t help but notice that Starbase, Texas is practically hugging the US/Mexico border. Almost as though Abbott didn’t want this shit landing in his own backyard when it failed.