Nicholas Kristof is a ghoul, but I still think about this tweet sometimes.
My own realization that we were over our heads in Afghanistan came when I interviewed farmers who pretended to set up Taliban camps that the US would then bomb. The farmers would collect the remnants of millions of dollars worth of bombs and sell them for $100 as scrap metal.
Reminds me of the stories of how the Taliban would pay random villagers to go to the top of a hill, fire a magazine at a nearby US base, and then just leave, so that the US would have to go into battle-readiness and send out search parties for nothing.
Ah yeah, I remember reading or seeing that somewhere. Really wore down the soldiers because they had to be mentally and physically alert all the time while those Taliban fighters could just fuck off and drink tea together or whatever. Guerilla warfare is pretty easy when you think about it from that level.
Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.
Nicholas Kristof is a ghoul, but I still think about this tweet sometimes.
Reminds me of the stories of how the Taliban would pay random villagers to go to the top of a hill, fire a magazine at a nearby US base, and then just leave, so that the US would have to go into battle-readiness and send out search parties for nothing.
Ah yeah, I remember reading or seeing that somewhere. Really wore down the soldiers because they had to be mentally and physically alert all the time while those Taliban fighters could just fuck off and drink tea together or whatever. Guerilla warfare is pretty easy when you think about it from that level.
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Per this article the actual figure is around 250,000 in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Lmao I really need a link to this, it sounds fucking hilarious
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This is amazing
-Sebastian Junger
Exercise for the reader: explain the M-C-M' cycle of this business.
American foreign aid
Respect the hustle