How did the greatest continental land power in the world lose to goat herders?

How come the largest mechanized army in world history couldn’t defeat tribes of goat herders?

Attached: 8a938caeed600039c7c8ee041431ddbf.jpg (768x430, 65K)

Defeating the enemy hasn’t been the issue. It’s the underlying reasons why people keep joining the enemy that makes Afghanistan such a clusterfuck.

> Iraq

Completely and laughably false. The whole reason there was an insurgency is because the US made Iraq worse than it was before. The Brits gave the US their handbook for dealing with insurgencies and the US threw it in the bin. So simple things like ensuring water and power are on within 6 months and generally improving quality of life of the citizens was forgone for dick swinging, no knock raids on anyone who got ratted out by their neighbour and Marines running down telephone wires because they thought it was funny.

The majority of Afghans didn't even know Afghanistan existed. They live in tiny and insular tribal communities that don't know shit except for we're not them, so they shoot at us.

This has been Afghanistan for basically its whole modern history. No army in the world is gonna change that.

We did. Again, and again, and again. Most of these assholes have never known a time when America wasn't the strongest tribe that would occasionally come around and fuck up everyone's shit.

The problem with this is that there has never been a coherent objective in Afghanistan. There is a hope that somehow it will become a real country that is not shit, but hopes are not objectives.

Don't get between a man and his goat

Attached: 1547812066910.jpg (750x501, 79K)

1. They had a goal to build a local government and army. They achieved that goal and left. If you think that they wanted to include Afghanistan in the USSR itself - you're a moron.
2. They couldn't close the border with Pakistan. To achieve complete victory against insurgents in Afghanistan Soviet should invade Pakistan. Which was not an option.
3. Soviet high command were pussies. Andropov was last person who knew his shit. After his death everything fell apart.

Because the internal situation was already inexcusably dogshit by 1979, on top of being led by old, senile cowardly corrupt garbage. The military was extremely oversized, and for too long had they went with sheer quantity over quality in their end equipment and their military. Seriously, outside of WWII, the best Russian military success stories was always from a dedicate, professional military that was active for a decade or more. Using manuever and tactics to outfight their adversaries, and mostly using spare manpower as potential reserves to be trained and recruited as needed. The Soviet military basically had gigantism and a steroid habit. It was huge and powerful, but as soon as it tries to do anything it nearly dies from a heart attack.

Even without Afghanistan, the Soviet system was doomed because Stalin had no proper successor.

Can if you supply your own insurgency. Soviets knew the key to winning conflicts like this, and ignored everything they had learned to that point.

Yeah, because everybody made the shia/sunni/kurd lines hard as a rock with ethnic cleansing.

How did the US lose to goat herders?

That kinda reeks of the "The US didn't lose vietnam" argument. Their goal was a communist friendly government in control of Afghanistan. They got a communist friendly government barely holding onto parts of Afghanistan and it collapsed within 5 or so years of withdrawing.

As user said, Malaya is the gold standard of a successful one. Though it was a case of the insurgency coming from 39% of the population (Chinese) and reviled by the rest of it (malayan/Indian). Still the Sunnis make up even less and they were no end of trouble. Past that and you can name cases where a nation won the fight but lost the fight back home (French in Algeria). Which seems to always be the problem - insurgencies know they can outlast the occupying power.

As much as I shit on "US didn't lose Vietnam/Russia didn't lose Afghanistan" I think you can argue the US 'won' against the Iraqi insurgency. Had ISIS prevailed in 2014 then it would have been an almost poetic repeat of the Afghanistan/Vietnam scenario (You withdraw and your ally/objective regime collapses within 5 years). In that scenario the US would have lost the Iraq war. I don't know what ultimately stopped the push on Baghdad but I wonder if immediate US assistance didn't help staunch that wound and prevent the collapse (If not US then I'd assume Iranian). So it seems like a lesson for the future of "When you withdrawal from your ally/subject state, fucking get back in there and give them fire support if things go south".

It gets complicated because the regime that took over in Iraq was so Iranian friendly so ambivalent to the US you could say the US lost regardless.

>all these ellaborated essays and walls of text

Russians are subhuman and thus cant fight effectively..
/thread

On the Iraq point, I’m not sure if the continued survival of the government we established is a good thing for US interests. It turns out that majority-Shia democracies like Iran a whole lot.

The power of their armies is insignificant next to the Afghan people's faith in Allah (PBUH).

>the Brits weren't retarded meme

They were full of shit, like you. The Brits couldn't even hold on to the comfy token sectors we gave them. When crayon eaters are better at COIN it's time to take a step back and stop pretending.

Slavs dont know how to fight efficiently and rely solely on sheer numbers to get anything done...and even then the K/D ratio is never to their favour.

Imagine your entire country and political system collapsing because you lost to desert dwellers.
Imagine your country falling into an economic downturn far worse than the Great Depression all because a bunch of goat herders very close to your country kicked your ass.
Imagine your country being run by criminals ever since all because of goat herders with MANPADs

Such is the Pooviet union

Graveyard of empires and whatnot

this. Soviets had no meaningful experience with fighting large scale wars directly and the first one they were in destroyed them

>They got a communist friendly government barely holding onto parts of Afghanistan and it collapsed within 5 or so years of withdrawing.
Only because the Soviet Union itself collapsed. For a while the DRA was able to hold on to the areas it controlled. It was only after the referendum to restructure the USSR in March 1991 that the DRA lost its legitimacy and their regular troops started surrendering. Methinks it's no coincidence that after 11 years of siege, the garrison at Khost surrendered not even a month after the referendum.

>lose
they brutalized the afghanis for a decade and when they decided to fuck off back to the motherland they left six bajillion land mines as a parting fuck you

Fucking this, ppl give the us and the CCCP to much shit

>vatnik squealing

Kek. This is the same kind of damage control argument that the yanks use when they cite their superior K/D ratios and their overwhelming force superiority against the north Vietnamese fores.

It does't matter how well you performed in every battle when you ultimately lost the war and failed to achieve any of your long lasting operational goals.

Their goal was to prop up the Afghan government, which it did for nearly seven years after leaving completely. It would have continued on if Communism itself hadn't collapsed.

>only war the USSR overtly fought in after WWII
FTFY

>democratic majority decides war
>democratic majority decides war was failure and war is bad
>this is everyone else's fault and a huge failure
>better make this a talking point and bring it up whenever possible
>geeze these people are stupid better bring up my oath to defend the constitution when I vote to get rid of parts of it

Total failure. You know what you do if someone wants to suicide attack you in public? Go home, unlock your shotgun after your yatch club approval to joining a hunting club and filling out all the forms and fees to have it, go to your seperate locked up ammunition stash unlock it, pull two rounds out, fill out the government forms showing you have this amount of ammo. Put it in your gun. Go outside, scream NOT IN MY BACK YARD, fire one off into the air. Then once your sure the threat is gone, lock it all back into place separately, and try to get your fellow NIMBY's to hire a new sheriff if you violated the law firing guns off in city limits and try to sexually harass the secretary that has a public job about filing how much ammo you have. Don't forget to let her know your hunting club fully endorses you shooting the thing because there was a circumstance and you should both go pee in the same bathroom. God damn what a failure of a war, we better make sure we can play grab ass with the sexually ambiguous person in the bathroom. I heard a republican does this with gay people. Gays are bad, better let them know they should be on the right side of history and fuck girls with feminine penis' instead.

(Piss Be Upon Him)
FTFY

So they lost.

Okay I will explain user, its called the cold war, when you have a superpower funding, equipping, training and importing insurgents into a country it is really hard to defeat, especially when you cannot engage the logistics or material of the enemy because it is not in the war zone. Look at Vietnam, it was a political mess because the US wouldn't bomb legitimate targets in NV because of the threat of war with the reds. They also had arms being funneled into the region and had Chinese and Soviet training. Soviet pilots fought in both Korea and Vietnam and so did Chinese troops. In Afganistan US armed and trained militants were effective as well as being armed with manpads that were devastating at the time. Especially in the middle east foriegn fighters from the region get imported into whatever war zone because their ideology puts their faith above their country. In other words it had very little to do with the insurgents or their host countries.

Fukkin saved, I'll remember that one

(((How?)))

Read The Bear Went Over The Mountain. Soviet military operations were fucked from the top down and bottom up.

You only need to glass the dissenters and political rivals of whatever puppet government you are putting up. They will all fall in line and if they don't, then you make them through the threat of violence, and if they still don't. Then, THEN, you can glass them.

"The Prince" and "Small Wars field manual" should be mandatory for anyone to comment about COIN operations ITT's. Defeating insurgencies is pretty easy, the only real problem is making sure everyone on your side is operating on the same page, both militarily and politically. Hence the reason why we (US) suck ass at COIN. But if you do manage to get everything in sync with yourself, then its easy.
>Destroy the opposition
>Hold onto Civilian Population that has been conquered through the use of your own forces and the military and police forces of the host nation over time
>Start with securing major CivPop hubs and the routes between them and then work your way into the sticks of the country
>Anyone who apposes your rule and the rule of the government you set up, destroy them. Doesn't matter if they're actively fighting against you or if they merely disagree with you. Destroy all opposition and the rest will either get destroyed as well or will learn to fall in line
>Rinse repeat until the host nation can self sustain its own defense and basic rule of law(Police and Court system)

Anyone, especially politicians, who think that they can control and therefore, "limit" the violence within a conflict should be immediately removed from office or from their position of power. There is no such thing as a "civilized" war, you are either with me or you are my enemy is the only kind of mentality you should have going into a COIN operation. As for why the USSR specifically lost Afghanistan was because they would launch these massive fuck you fighting columns of mechanized units to cleanse the countryside of anyone and everyone that was unfortunate enough to be in their path. But once the commies would bulldoze through, they would just leave and go back to their bases, letting the insurgents to come back out from the hills and reacquire their control over the CivPop. Your not really accomplishing much of shit if you don't even control the fucking population.

Attached: WAR-ART-mountains-of-Afghanistan-Soviet-airborne-army-assault-rifles-a-machine-gun-equipment-Canvas- (1000x625, 100K)

>Malayan Emergency.
Malaya was unique because the insurgents were Chinese communists and ethnically different from the native population. They were also laughably disorganized by the end of it. This makes it easy to isolate the population from the insurgents. Then there are a few things you should take into account.

>hearts and minds meme
The Brits invented it but Malaya was before they went full retard with the idea. Now we have American leftist latching onto this idea without understanding the context of it. Hearts and minds is important but you also need to torch some villages to make a point if you have too. Especially if you are dealing with a population whose familiar with violence as a part of their daily life (hint, Afghanistan).

>manpower and experience
The Brits just came off of fighting in Burma and other shitholes in South East Asia where the Japanese were masters of jungle warfare. This gave them invaluable experience which directly influenced doctrine. The Brits still had colonies at the time. In particular those in Africa, specifically Rhodesia. They were experienced in operating in a shitty environments where it's hot as balls and you can't see more than 5 yards for half the year. This is where Ronald Reid Daly, the Rhodesian SAS, and many of the NCOs in the RAR cut their teeth. New Zealand contributed pretty heavily as well. There is also a stronger tradition of COIN in the British Army do to their Empire.

>foreign policy
The problem with U.S. COIN operations is that our foreign policy changes every 4-8 years which makes it a complete clusterfuck to get anything done. A OAF Nation contributor wrote a great series I'll link below. The Brits on the other hand have some insulation from this.

oafnation.com/2015814new-american-royalty/

I'm serious, read this article. U.S. foreign policy is a complete clusterfuck run by nitwitted bureaucrats who wouldn't know their ass from a hole in the ground.

Attached: 1548048274766.png (500x386, 300K)

The fall of ISIS occupied Mosul was a triumph of the Iraqi central government

Based and redpilled.

>Imagine your country being run by criminals ever since all because of goat herders with MANPADs
top kek