[ExI] riots again

[Tomaz Kristan]

On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 6:45 PM, Charlie Stross <charlie.stross at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> On 6 Oct 2012, at 17:26, Tomaz Kristan <protokol2020 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > the Taliban are not the Soviet Union.
> >
> > Of course not. And they are not China as well. We know that, what's your
> point?
> >
> > Oh, I see:
> >
> > > They and their friends are only a threat to the west insofar as
> certain interest groups over here need an enemy to point the Two Minute
> Hate at.
> >
> > They are not a real power at all? Just an imaginary foe?
>
> Pretty much. They're poverty-stricken bumpkins from one of the poorest
> countries on the earth, with a total population about equal to the
> Netherlands. The entire Arab world is, again, pretty damn poor --
> especially if you subtract the oil. They're not building ICBMs. If you want
> a threat, you should consider Pakistan -- which has been massively
> radicalized by persistent US support for anti-communist hardliners ever
> since General Zia's coup against Bhutto, and which *does* have nukes and
> IRBMs. But again, Pakistan has those nukes and IRBMs because of India; the
> west just wouldn't be much of a priority for them if it wasn't for the
> terror drones and the troops in their holy places (Arabia, notably -- same
> thing that got Osama bin Laden riled up in the 90s).
>
> To put it in perspective, the current US military budget, of around $600Bn
> a year, exceeds the GDP of Afghanistan by a factor of 30; it's about the
> same size as the entire GDP of Iran, and exceeds the Iranian military
> budget by a factor of nearly 70.
>
> They're paper tigers. The only way they *can* hurt us is via terrorism.
>
>
> -- Charlie
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>



Downplaying  a threat and underestimating a foe who regularly kills you
solders is just STUPID.

But the Talibans must be happy having West internally divided. With a
strong faction of those in the West, who say  ... "we are just imagining a
danger, there is none!".

Russia, now a semi democratic country, knows that they would get some
nukes, had they perpetuate some 9-11. Arabs knows, that they wouldn't. Even
if they somehow succeed to repeat 9-11.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20121006/22e966e2/attachment.html>