The idea that we need to keep wasting trillions of dollars paying off bit players in Central Asia because otherwise China will be able to exert soft power in the region (that is, waste trillions of dollars themselves) has got to be the dumbest argument for staying in Afghanistan.
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It's like the chocolate and peanut butter of orientalist stereotypes—the languorous but cunning puppet masters of the Middle Kingdom will exert their enigmatic spell over this warlike mountain people forever stuck in the 7th century by funding another expensive highway project
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History shows the most likely outcome of active Chinese intervention in Afghanistan would be the Taliban sacking Beijing and becoming completely Sinicized within a generation
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Sometimes I feel like our great strategists have never seen a topographic or population density map of Chinapic.twitter.com/ZTsN6dVSAC
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I'm sure it will work out better for them than it did for the US, Russia (twice!), Britain, Rome, Greece, etc.
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I don't think it's reasonable at all to compare the situation now to Antiquity. Nothing is remotely the same except for the geography, and even then the tools we have for surmounting it AND the problems it causes are different. Even the comparison to 19th century is iffy at best.
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It's sort of a weirdly ambiguous title, when you think about it....
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Pretty sure China is up to the task of handling various Afghan tribes. They'll just build them some camps and teach them Xi Jinping Thought. It'll be swell.
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