The stupidity of catering

Catering is a double sided coin, there is a plus side and there is a negative side. In this there are to problems with that equation, in the first these are not sides of the same coin, they are two coins, one is larger than the other and as such we see the reflective setting change. Consider two coins, like a dime and a dollar, or a pence and a pound. Now consider that they both have heads and tails, you can choice one or the other and you think that the biggest one is your gain, but that would be wrong, it is the smaller one and the other side of the larger coin is the headway and losses you make and they tend to be larger. It is the price of catering. Like the stupid manager with dollar shaped pupils, they see revenue, but they do not recognise cost, it is part of another branch of their company, so they sell and dump all the support to the services side, in some cases (what I personally witnessed) selling things that will not work. It was their revenue and their bonus. After which they will suddenly become helpful and let their services department solve it all, making sure that delays are set in motion so that the 90 day threshold is passed and then whatever is paid back will not affect their bonus. The stupidity of catering is always one sided. Even me, I cater to me, I admit that and I have no issues with catering to me, but I will remain fair. I will not sell what will not work, I will not cater to the impossible. And that is the setting we see today, catering to the impossible.

The news (at https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/8/16/the-us-the-taliban-and-the-stunning-defeat-in) gives us “The Taliban victory is a major humiliation for the US”, it is not a weird consideration and there have been like mind voices in the past. I myself voiced issues with inactivity as early as 2013 and 2014, yet the Americans made noise that they knew better and now we see another stage. A stage that the media is ignoring. Yes they give their ‘click bitch’ emotional setting, but the larger stage that Al Jazeera hints at with “It was expected, yes, but not so rapidly, so victoriously, so humiliatingly”. The issues is troops and material, as I voiced the Comanche approach (an American approach no less) well over half a decade ago, the Americans catered to stakeholders and set on a perch. They should have taken a page out of the book of Quanah Parker who gave them hell in the late 1800’s (around 1870), that would have been a way to deal with the Taliban, but they decided to sit on a perch and halt any action and now we see the other side of that coin, the Taliban overran nearly all of Afghanistan in less than a week, they had the troops, they had the hardware and no one had a clue.

Now as we see Kabul being overrun, we suddenly get ‘Afghan President Ashraf Ghani flees Kabul to ‘prevent bloodshed’’ (I personally think he ran for his life caring only for self, but that might be merely my thought). There is also ‘Afghans Need a Humanitarian Intervention Right Now’, yet if you believe that this will happen you are quite crazy. I find the call by Micheál Martin calling ‘calls on Taliban to respect humanitarian law’ and this is politics? The loser in a war does not get to make demands, that has been a set result long before the Americans held that clambake from 19 Apr 1775 to 3 Sept 1783. The Dutch had a picnic opposing the Spanish in the years from 1566 to 1609, as such, I have no idea what will happen in Afghanistan, but it will not be pretty, that much I feel certain about. You see ABC news gave the people 8 hours ago ‘Who are the Taliban and what do they want?’, the did not go into any part of the folly that allowed Afghanistan to be overrun so fast. And the people in the media are not asking that question, not the Democrats, not the Republicans, and as I personally see it both sides catered to stakeholders and the maximisation of war revenue which to the largest degree gave the victory to the Taliban. When you consider the projects that USAID finished in Afghanistan, when you consider the costs and who got paid? How were they paid? A group that can overthrow a nation in a week and we need to consider “USAID completed the construction of three generation plants in 2009, 2016, and 2019 and is constructing three solar power plants and a wind farm that will add 110 megawatts of power to the national power grid” and those are merely the highlights. 

So what will happen next?
That is actually the question that is harder to answer, because it depends on the Taliban and not on the politicians that make claims that there are options and that they are working on this. Because that will be something that is so far from the truth it will become laughable. And it gets to be worse than this, you see the ‘allied’ forces abandoned their translators, the world is seeing that so any encounter where translators are needed it will be on the US forces to find them and secure them beforehand, a much larger tactical advantage then they are considering. 

A stage that might seem to be evolving, but that would be wrong, the larger stage is not that they merely lost, it is that the intelligence services in that region had seemingly no clear insight into their opponents and their resolve, their size and the materials available to them. Afghanistan is 270% of the UK and it got overrun in a week, is anyone waking up to these numbers? The afghan military was useless and their weapons pointless, the same might be said for the departing allies the Afghan army had, as such we see defeat in three ways and the media is not picking up on that, how weird?

The Guardian gives us “The Taliban have 80,000 troops in comparison with a nominal 300,699 serving the Afghan government”, this now implies that the Taliban went up against an army almost 400% their size and still overtook Afghanistan in a week, a cause for alarm and a cause for concern, so when we see ‘The world must not look away as the Taliban sexually enslaves women and girls’ we see that they too forget that to the victor go the spoils, all the spoils. England learned that lesson the hard way, The Dutch taught the Spanish and the Indonesians taught the Dutch, it was an easy lesson and history is filled with examples and the biggest lesson? These winners did not sit on a perch, it never ever works. 

As such the largest station of lessons is about to unleash and it will be worse, because now the Taliban will cry for their right to vaccines, so which nation will ingratiate themselves by providing vaccines? I reckon we will know a lot more when we get to the next weekend when we can sit on our own perches again, preparing for that Monday morning game as a quarterback.

And the Afghan people? It seems to me that the stakeholders will not care, it is not part of their spreadsheet.