Famous Mainstream Vaccine Expert Issues Covid Vaccine Warning, and Dr. Carrie Madej and Dr. Andrew Kaufman

 Amici,

As you know, I don't have much (really, any) faith left in mainstream medicine now regrading the Covid vaccines, for a variety of reasons. However, I keep reading up on all positions, and this one is something EVERYONE who believes in the current virus-causes-illness meme and the vaccine regime resulting from it, needs to know about.

Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche is the expert, and he makes a very logical case within the usual virus-causing narrative of illness (founded by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, etc). To wit, mass Covid vaccinations across the population while the virus is widely infecting people will only succeed in creating a super virus. “The more we use these vaccines for immunizing people in the midst of a pandemic, the more infectious the virus will become,” Vanden Bossche writes. I've been wondering when this would come up, because, again assuming the standard narrative, this is exactly what one would expect the rampaging and highly mutable virus to do.

Now as I say, for myself, I think the whole Covid fiasco is The Great Reset/New World Order twaddle, a twin sibling to Global Warming, designed to condition us to a 1984 type of dystopia. For a discussion on that aspect of this, see this interview between Drs. Carrie Madej and Andrew Kaufman.

The first 25 minutes will shake your believe in government oversight of infectious diseases, as Dr. Madej recounts how the CDC and the local public health authorities dealt with her when she had patients who experienced a mini-surge in Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. (The authorities all illegally tried to force her to shut up and not treat her patients!) Once Dr. Madej and Dr. Kaufman start discussing vaccines, though, it's a true horror show. (As some years ago the Vatican discovered in Latin America: a vaccine for Tetanus, I believe, turned out to be sterilizing women! Intentionally so. This is now regarded as historically true.)

I'm just a "tin-foil hat" kook to folks until they themselves learn of actual cases like that. Vanden Bossche is as mainstream as they come, however, and what he's saying needs to be heard.

Read the whole article for contra views presented at the end. Note that Vanden Bossche is giving what I like to call "the Minority Report", and naturally the "Majority Report" people have to try to eviscerate him. Ying and Yang. (Or of course in classic Sun Tzu teaching, Chapter 5 of his Art of War, we're referring to the 'normal' force, cheng, and the the 'extraordinary' force, ch'i. Cheng and ch'i often interchange their roles during battle, and that switch could easily happen with Majority/Minority reports, if only people were honest.)

An Préchán

Modernism in the Church: a Review of Ireland's Synodal Pathway

Amici,

Someone sent me this link to the Ireland's 'Synodal Pathway' article. I don't see who, exactly, wrote the article, but it is classic Modernist drivel. True, utter, banal, drivel. For example:

"The changes that have occurred in our human understanding in the past fifty years have been staggering. The stunning technological innovations and inventions, the ever-expanding horizons of insight in the sciences be they in physics, the biological sciences, neuroscience, the social, economic, and political sciences, the arts – the list is almost endless. It is the case that both human history and our self-understanding have changed more in the past fifty years than in the whole of previous human history."

Or just take a look at footnote 3, referencing Christianity in Evolution: An Exploration. Ugh!

This is absurd Progressive Church tediousness. The Modernist, Progressive Church wants to be exciting, "with it" and "on the cutting edge" when it is banal hackneyed tripe. They're still singing "The Age of Aquarius", haha.

Of course the physical sciences have advanced, but to where? We're still trying to figure out where, and the unstated but assumed premise is that as we have advanced in those, so we advance equally well in the psychological sciences. And the psychological sciences? What do we really know about the human heart, the human mind, the human soul, that the great philosophers and saints of the past didn't know? The Iliad exhibits more understanding of the human condition than almost all of modern psychology, and Sun Tzu's immortal The Art of War is wiser in "the social, economic, and political sciences" than any post 1960 work, (and most anything post what, pick a date, 1880 or 1900?).  And they were pagan works!

And as for the actual hard sciences, that depends on what scientist we're talking about, and which field. A lot, indeed, has advanced in the hard sciences, to the point where we can realistically establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars. But the reality is the colonists would be the same human beings as back on Earth, with the same sort of strengths and weaknesses all humans have had since the beginning.

Modernism in the Church is founded on the evolution idea transferred from biology to theology: that we are evolving rapidly spiritually. We know so much more than our ancestors did! We are so much more wiser! More insightful! We don't need all their old-codger laws, rules, and strictures! Right. This is why the Church is loaded with sexual deviants, perverts, and predators. The Vat 2 crowd thought they could discard all the old morality because as a Marxist or any typical Modernist "Liberal" or "Progressive" thinks, we humans are basically good. Just let people alone and they'll achieve moral perfection without all the rules, dogmas, and doctrines.

And look where that got them.

So,  yes, we have a "Church" within the Church, and it will have to be driven out. That process has been occurring, in fact, since the Council ended. This false Church is antithetical to the Faith, which is a Revelation of an Unchanging God to His Fallen Creatures, who without participating in His Incarnation, will (and are) falling back to the hideous insanity of Sodom.

An Préachán 

Trump, Syria, and the Kurds

Is President Trump somehow betraying the Kurds?

This is just another stick to beat the Trump piñata with.

We need to get outta there. That area of the world ate up Roman legions and a number of Roman emperors -- Julian the Apostate comes to mind, but so does the far more worthy Valerian.

It's a part of the world trapped in endless, endemic war, and was before the coming of Islam or the Mongols hoards. (Islam and the Mongol hoards made it worse.)

George H.W. Bush "betrayed" the Kurds, too, as did his son. Hell, the Kurds were "betrayed" by Picot and Sykes after WWI. The Brits "betrayed" them again when they left Iraq after WWII. The only "peace" the Kurds knew was when the Achaemenid Persian Empire ruled that entire area, and ironically enough, it was a Western conqueror, none other than Alexander himself, who overthrew them and ushered yet another millennium of brutal slaughter.

If Alex couldn't pull it off, who are we to try?

We need to get out. It's as simple as that. 

A "great power" is precisely that because it can chose when to fight, and when not to fight. Read Sun Tzu.

In fact, I think President Trump will do that region more good by us getting outta there than us staying. If we leave, and ignore the idiotic provocations of both Iran and Turkey, both of the regimes might well fall; they're probably headed for a collision course with each other anyway. If they're chaos grows, then powers more in need of the region's oil can become involved. 

Israel can defend itself. It's a nuclear nation and nothing terrifies like nukes, which is why the Iranians want nukes so badly, of course.

AnP

Can China Feed Itself?

Can China feed itself? Not really, as of now. And certainly not if they go to war.

We hear endless what a titan, what a colossus, Red China is. And President Trump is trying to slow down their greedy, godless, and already brutal march to world domination. Those deeply vested in China oppose Trump, obviously. Victor Davis Hanson has a good article on China and the President here.

But for what it is worth, as a disciple of Sun Tzu (and I eat popcorn with chopticks and practice Chinese calligraphy when I have the time, which is rare), I maintain that in a street fight, especially if your opponent is a huge, beefed up colusses, it is easy to take him down if you go for a knee. You don't have to take out both knees. One cracked knee will put him on the floor and keep him there. Marquis of Queensbury it isn't, but such is life.

What I mean is, should China – God forbid – ever actually try to go to war with its Asian neighbors, or the U.S., it has a knee in danger, indeed. Its agriculture.

Can Communist China feed itself? And if they can't feed themselves, why not? The Answer: Because they have a huge population much larger than their share of the world's arable land. And they have a top-down, Communist economic system. That's the basic idea. Of course, technology and genetics can help with both (though the Communism will hamper that), but any sort of war or aggressive behavior on their part, and those aids go out the window.

Had the time to do a bit of searching for this. According to this article in Nature: the Chinese hope to become self-sufficient in grain, but right now they import 95 million tonnes (metric) and that's 17 percent of their "domestic production". It's actually an interesting article, especially if one reads between the lines. 

They say the Chinese claim to store for emergency (like what, war?) most of what they import (but can we really be sure of that? We know how they lie like rugs about their other production stats). As noted, they have 7-8 percent of the worlds agricultural land, but feed 22 percent of its population. Clearly, any national crisis, like a sustained war effort, would challenge such a situation, putting it under extreme stress.

Apparently, north China produces 60 percent of their grain, but that's due to extensive irrigation. According to reports, water tables are lowering and droughts occur. But hahaha, the article also argues that "Global Warming" (yeah, right) will provide them with both more water and more arable land. Since we know Global Warming is a scam, all of that can be discounted.

Then there's this Bloomberg article: 

This one is ridiculously upbeat about how China will get more countries to grow food for it and how it will use technology to feed itself – but for our purposes, the whole point is that they WON'T get food from other countries if they go to war, A, and B, an agriculture that is heavily based on technology can go bust if the power grids are taken down, or the infrastructure damaged in other ways. (Damage to infrastructure often happens in war, 'tis said.)

All very, very shaky.

And thanks to an acquaintance, here's an air quality map of China. Phew! How do they breathe???

Remember, Communist China produces pollution like the Communist regimes did in Central Europe and Russia. The Chicoms have grievously polluted their environment. My acquaintance also wrote, "A recent World Bank study found pollution in China was caused approximately 750,000 preventable deaths a year and almost five hundred million Chinese citizens have no access safe drinking water. Did you get that? Forty percent of the country has no safe drinking water."

So therefore, it seems to me, that China has more problems than they care to admit, and any crazy war of imperial conquest would collapse them from within. 

AnP

"Trump Admin no longer supports MAGA": Sebastian Gorka resigns after Trump's Afghanistan speech...

...as he should have.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/08/25/breaking-sebastian-gorka-resigns-from-trump-administration/
(Though the White House is hinting that he was fired; clearly, the bottom line is: the Kelly-McMasters faction has won. That means more Afghan war.)

More Afghanistan War

Things have indeed taken a "turn for the worst" at the Trump Administration if this is true; i.e., "once again into the Afghan breach, dear friends, and wall it up with our American dead!" has been going on for 16 years. Surely that's enough?
Not apparently.
The Kelly-McMasters faction has won another round, as I noted above. But to what end?

✔What what DO they expect to win, in the end? What's the goal?

• Sure, most Muslims around the world are average, everyday Abduls and Alis, and like people of other religions everywhere they think theirs is the best of the lot; however... 
• What distinguishes Islam from all the others, however, is pretty big; indeed, essential: it's the only religion founded by a pirate (a land-pirate, of course); indeed, it was founded by a guy who made Blackbeard look bookish.
• That brutal thug might not actually have existed, or if he did, he could have been quite different than his traditional portrayal. But that is irrelevant because his traditional portrayal is "gospel" to Muslims, and Muhammad (the name "Muhammad" is a title, "the Praised One", and had been applied to Christ for centuries) is considered the paragon of all men and someone who is to be emulated in the extreme.)
• The way their religion works, then, and because of the 1400-year-old example of their founder, Muhammad, a ruthless warrior, "ethnic cleanser (of Jews), treaty-breaker, and "womanizer" (to put that last very politely), in the overall scheme of things, the more violent fire-breathing fanatics in that culture come out on top and the more peaceable types learn to keep their mouths shut to keep their heads on.
• The way their religion works is that Allah is capricious. He can change basic physics at any time, cause the sun to rise in the West, whatever, and he can change morality too. You don't know what he wants you to do but if you feel the urge to emulate Muhammad, the only way you'll know if you should is to go try it. Allah will either favor  you or you'll be dead.
• Because of that essential Muslim world-view, and because of the 1400-year-old example of their founder, Muhammad, a ruthless warrior, "ethnic cleanser (remorseless murderer of Jews), treaty-breaker, and "womanizer" (to put that last very politely in an understatement of a millennium), so in the overall scheme of things, the more violent fire-breathing fanatics in that culture come out on top and the more peaceable types learn to keep their mouths shut to keep their heads on.

Ergo: No "moderate" Muslims can ever hope to "reform" the religion because no one will ever be able to separate Muslim worship of Allah (i.e., "Allah" is the Arabic for "the God") from either what's technically called "Muslim Volunterism" (from the Latin "voluntas", or will) the will of Allah being paramount of every other divine attribute) and Muhammad, the "cap and seal" of the prophets. 

• (He didn't have any male children, even though Allah gave him an unequaled libido and a host of women of all sorts, sizes, shapes and ages, because of the basic Muslim idea: that all the prophets were related; so since M didn't have any males heirs, there can be no more prophets. Shia Islam has a story of its own here, but that would be a long essay in itself.)

Trump's election: We Were Supposed to Get Realistic About All of the Above

Turns out: NOT!

I came across a great word in the Comments section of AKA Catholic (a Trad blog on my blog list): "ethnomasochist". We've been governed (more in Europe than the U.S., at least until Obama was elected) by ethnomasochist types, folks who seem to hate their own culture and who seem to want to promote something completely alien. How else would one explain Angela Merkel, for example? Or Pope Francis? (The Italian public is fed up with him and his endless rants for no-holds-bard immigration.) The general "PC" culture refuses to accept that Islam is different, implacable, unstoppable, even if the vast majority are not terrorist themselves, the free-wheeling, free-booting Prophet-Founder left a free-wheeling, free-booting religion.

• So one major reason Trump was elected was he "called it like it was" about Islam and the endless wars we've been involved in. 
• The second was he seemed to be suggesting getting out of those wars and stop trying to be Islam's enabler. 
• For that's what the U.S. is in a sense (and it's true about the West in general); we've been "enabling" Islam since before Franklin Roosevelt (ugh, what a disaster he was and historians treat him as greater than Lincoln and Washington combined) met with old ibn Saud (Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman, etc., etc., al Saud) in February 1945.

A Bit of History

• If I remember it correctly, it was the British who created the Gulf Emirates back in WWI days – the idea being to keep coastal oil supplies available for the Royal Navy (the Brits kept tight control of Iraq and Iran's oil resources between the World Wars, too; Britain had been a staunch ally of the Turks, and the Disraeli government fell in part because of an Irish-American's reporting on the Turkish atrocities in the Balkans: see Januarius MacGahan, the "Liberator of Bulgaria"). 
• And really, the West helping the Ottoman forces "modernize" in the late 19th/early 20th century all helped to bring Islam out of the unremitting Dark Ages it had fallen into since the 17th century.  
• The Brits and the French divided up the spoils of the Ottoman Turks during World War I (see Sykes-Picot).  
• The U.S. stayed out of that then, immediately post-WWI, but by the end of WWII, the U.S. helped the Brits overthrow Iran's PM in 1953, Mosaddeq, yet by 1956, the U.S. wouldn't support the Brits and French as they tried to re-seize the Suez canal. (And that fiasco meant there weren't enough forces to do anything about Hungary's1956 Revolution.)

The one bright spot in the entire region was Israel, but our ethnomasochist types hate it with a passion.

• Turkey was supposed to be the one, only, single successful "secular" Muslim country...
• But even when Ataturk was alive, he slaughtered non-Turks (see: Slaughter at Smyrna 1922) and the continued deportation of all non-Turks from Turkish controlled territory throughout the Republic of Turkey's history, and how that "secular" government has treated Christianity.
• Today, they've gone whole-hog Islamist (if I may so put it).

We've played a complicated and foolish (and ultimately dangerous) game with Islam for some time now. Most (if not all) of the Western leaders have not seen the essential, profound civilizational threat Islam poses. The bottom line: If it weren't for us, they'd still be back in the 7th century because that's how their religion works; yet we haven't really helped them "get out from under" the one thing that holds them back. 

• (For the truth of the assertion about Islam being – as the young Churchill called it in the 1890s – the strongest retrograde force on Earth, see my reference to Robert Reilly's "Closing of the Muslim Mind" below for a book that details Islam's intellectual fall, and the reason for it.

Anyway...

• Gorka is out, and Gen. Michael Flynn is out too. 
• General Flynn was the first take down the Neo-Conservatives and Deep State crowd made in Trump's Admin. 
• Flynn pulled no punches about Islam. 
• Since then they've been working assiduously to turn the Trump Administration into another George W. Bush-type Admin on foreign/military affairs. 
• Looks like they're succeeding. As I say, the Kelly-McMasters faction is winning.

Dangerous

This is quite troubling. Gorka didn't hesitate to speak plainly about Islam and Jihad, and thus he made many, many enemies in the ethnomasochist PC "Deep State" that runs the U.S. and the Western World.

• Not surprisingly; the Left is celebrating, because they WANT yet ANOTHER "Neo-Conservative" Republican lost-in-the-swamp-of-an-unwinnable-war Admin to beat up over its "foreign wars". 
• (The American Left keeps thinking in terms of short-term political gains: they're like people in Noah's day, going about their petty affairs as the clouds gathered darker and darker.)
• Example: Keith Olbermann tweets that "Gorka resigns. So the Day isn't a total loss. Now leave the country, @SebGorka, you Nazi f_ _k." https://pjmedia.com/blog/liveblogevent/fridays-hot-mic-21/ (Stay classy, Olbermann; actually, I hope such a person lives long enough to know what it is to be enslaved by a conquering amir, though in truth, it is such types as that who are the first to convert and make sex slaves of the daughters – and the sons – of their enemies.)

Culture War

Are we engaged in a cultural war with Islam? 

• How you answer that depends on how you see the modern world, 
• The massive Islamic immigration into the West, 
• The West's fulfillment of Stalin's quip that we'd sell to the Communists the ropes they would later hang us with – though it isn't the Communists who are buying the rope, it's the Muslims.
• In other words, are you an "ethnomasochist"?

This refusal to see what's happening is sort of like turning a blind eye to North Korea developing nukes. Neither scenario is going to end well. Refuse to believe we've been in a cultural war – as does the ethnomasochist PC crowd in general, the Deep State, the "Governing Party" and the mainstream media and academia (but I'm repeating myself) – refuse to believe it if you will, but as a life-long student of history, I don't see how it can be anything else but a life-and-death struggle.


As Anthony Esolen wrote here:

When people praise me for perspicacity, I shake my head and reply that almost all of what I do is to notice what is in front of my nose, and write about it. Almost all of what I do is to refrain from shutting my eyes toward what is right there, plain as day. It’s not that I notice it and others don’t. It’s that I won’t un-notice it. I won’t pretend not to see what I do see, and what everybody else sees too.

 
I don't want to "un-notice" anything either.

• One other thing I'm certain of is that the Russians and Chinese – the other bearers of our complicated, soulless techno-international finance world,, would not hesitate, if the U.S. or Europe collapse and Islam tries to take advantage of that and seize control (see below about the war between the Byzantines and the Persians) – I honestly believe the world's remaining nuclear powers would try to use nukes to solve the Islam-on-the-cusp-of–final victory problem. 
• They probably hope it doesn't come to that, obviously, but unlike the West, they'd pull that trigger.

The Afghan War

It is nuts to continue the endless war in the planet's most difficult fighting terrain (difficult because of ground itself, the vicious, brutal tribes who inhabit it – among the most ruthless fighters on Earth – and the difficultly of actually reaching it and resupplying your forces). George W. Bush was nuts to "nation build" there, and Obama played a disingenuous game for 8 years about it. But Honestly, it's crazy. It makes Vietnam look like "a walk in the park". About Vietnam, too, remember:

1. They Johnson Administration didn't talk much about "victory" either, something Trump didn't mention in his speech. LBJ kept thinking he'd make some sort of deal with "Uncle Ho". Didn't happen, did it? 
2. Lyndon Johnson and his military leaders seemed to be oblivious of what an endless war would do to the country. 
3. One can make the argument that because of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Thailand never fell to the Communists (the old "domino theory") but whatever the value of that argument, NO ONE can make such a claim about Afghanistan, whose main neighbors are none other than Iran and Pakistan.

Lyndon Johnson, one of the more reprehensible men ever to be president, never read Sun Tzu.
Sun Tzu wrote that a long war serves no one and no purpose, except to bring down a state.

Chapter 2 Waging War
2
When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. #
3
Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. #
...
19
In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns. # https://suntzusaid.com/book/2

The Reality

About the endless, 1400-year long war between Islam and the rest of the planet, we can say:

• The West has unmatched force (though the Chinese are trying to catch up, and may have done so) but not the will to engage in an endless war... 
• Whereas Islam hasn't (yet) unbridled force (they'd need nukes) but its violent advocates have the will to kill millions for centuries to force the world to submit to Sharia. 
• That's just the lesson of history (a lesson so many on both Western Left and Right don't seem to want to learn, or even want to hear about, because, as Anthony Esolen says. everyone sees it but many pretend not to). 
• You can fight against such crazies; it's been done: the Romans fought the "Q-speaking" Celts in Northwestern Spain back before Christ, but you need a couple of hundred years of war (as they had then) and you'd have to use your absolute force. The slaughter was horrific.  
• Thus, the West hasn't the will for a true Total War against Islam. 
• We've had a few lucky battles: Charles Martel at Tours, the Battle of Lepanto, a long series of hair-breath victories by the Byzantines that no one remembers after the Battle of Manzikert (which, curiously, took place in August, August 21, 1071), and the Battle of Vienna, etc. 
• But as the Battle of Manzikert suggests, all those successes come to naught when the other side wins a "final" victory.

The Muslim leaders who want to bring down the West know all that (9/11 occurred on the anniversary of the battle of Vienna), and can wait us out.
 
Again: Most Muslims are average, everyday Abduls and Alis, and like people of other religions everywhere think theirs is the best of the lot. But the way their religion works, in the overall scheme of things, the more radical guys come out on top and the more peaceable types keep their mouths closed to keep their heads on.

Afghanistan again

Afghanistan is not the center of Islam. It's not even backstage. It's not even in the theater's store room or even the toilet. It's the sewer behind the theater in an alley full of mutant crocodiles (as it were). 

• The Pakistanis created the Taliban, but the brutal tribesmen who are among the most effective fighters in all Islam just happen to live in this remote place. 
• If you wanted to "win" Afghanistan, you'd have to either nuke it, or conquer both Iran and Pakistan, and then occupy Afghanistan. 
• You'd definitely have to remove Islam itself and replace it with, what? Buddhism? Quakers or the Amish version of Christianity?  
• Since those are not options any Western political leader would contemplate, then what? 
• Our "leaders" clearly don't know, so why are we tolerating this endless war?

A few curious facts about Islamic military and population history:

• N.B. Arabs can't fight, Oh, on a certain level, sure. I mean historically they've not been known as good soldiers. Raiders, tribal warriors, sure; they have a "warrior" culture and a "warrior religion" with a resilient (although too often depraved) tribal culture, but otherwise, consider: 
• They're good as kamikazes, of course; the Iranians never tire of using them as suicide bombers (ever notice you never hear of an Iranian suicide bomber? Of course not.) 
• The Great Islamic Conquests Never Happened; i.e., the Arabs never had a horde of unstoppable Mujahedin Jihadi Bedouin storming out of Arabia, either out of the Hijaz or the larger peninsula; that's a fiction. They simply never had the population to do anything remotely like that, A, and B, the "Arab" conquerors of the Persian Empire and most of Byzantium were ethnic Arab-speaking peoples already in place in what's now Iraq and Syria; they began migrating to those regions in the 100 years or so after Christ. (Many came from the far south of Arabia, always the most culturally advanced peoples on the peninsula.) By the 500s, they were quite populous and financially successful. But they weren't Hijaz or Bedouin Peninsula Arabs. 
• It was these "Arabs" who staged a coup d'état at the end of another long, never-ending disastrous war, the "Great War" between the Persians and the Byzantines of the very early 600s. (It's a scenario that could easily be played out today: suppose the Russians and the US/Euros fought it out to exhaustion; and the many Muslims who have been immigrating into the West would simply seize control of the lot – something that could actually happen, given the right circumstances – you know, like exhausting ourselves in war.) 
• The Arabs never had unconquerable generals: Khalid ibn al-Walid probably is totally legendary (he was supposed to have fought 100 – or 1000, whatever – battles and won them all), or at least has been quite distorted historically.

Also, that early "Arab Empire" of the Umayyad's wasn't even "Muslim" but had a form of Christianity (see: The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research into Its Early History (2008) by Karl-Heinz Ohlig & Gerd-R. Puin (Editors); it was the subsequent mostly Persian Abbasids who were the first "Muslims". (The words "Islam" and "Muslim" came into use at the end of the Umayyad period. The Koran itself has a murky history, and appeared about this time.) 

• The various tribes of successive waves of Turks eventually took over the "Arab" Empire and (with through their various tribes and dynasties, and with various exceptions, like the Fatimids in Egypt or the Mongols) ruled it until 1918. 
• The point above about the Umayyads is fascinating, because the Abbasids always, always, always claimed the Umayyads were heretics and not true Muslims. The words "Islam" and "Muslim" had begun to appear before the Umayyads fell, but the Abbasids did everything they could to murder every single Umayyad they could. Eventually, they did. 
• The mostly Persian Abbasids ran the empire till the Turks began to replace them, and (as noted above) despite various ins and outs, the Turks ran the place until 1918, everything except Iran, which has been a mortal enemy of the Turks for a millennia now.

So it is that in Afghanistan we have yet another example of a non-Arab people who have been transformed by their Muslim religion into "a force to be reckoned with".

Summation

We've been in Afghanistan for 16 years and are simply no closer to victory than we've ever been. 

• And unlike Vietnam, which had a long coast line and with which we could use to advantage (we could have re-commissioned our old battleships – well, we unwisely got rid of the South Dakota class just before that war got out of control in the Lyndon Johnson Admin, and the one New Jersey BB they tried to use, they said it was too expensive; yeah, right – to just sit off-shore and bombard the daylights out of them at little cost to ourselves. (Riiight. It was FAR cheaper to lose hundreds of aircraft and their crews instead of reviving the BBs, whose best work was bombardment.) 
• But Afghanistan is a mountainous, nearly inaccessible hell-hole populated by some of the most violent and least "civilized" people on Earth. 
• It's insane to keep up such a war.

That's especially true since Pakistan borders it on the east, and the Paks are the ones, through their ISI, their infamous and deadly secret service (whose official emblem is a rather diabolical-looking goat's head), who created the Taliban to begin with; while on the other side of Afghanistan is Iran, and I hardly need to mention how dangerous they are. To the north is Russia or former Central Asian states.

Meanwhile, the real, never-ending trouble is Islam itself. And no, I'm won't debate that with anyone who hasn't read Robert Reilly's The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist by Robert R. Reilly (2010).

So, Gorka was quite correct to resign. Napoleon said, "If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna." Why would you invade Kathmandu?

Final note: Sorry for being so long-winded, but it is unbelievably frustrating. I would say if you're going to fight "radical" Islam, you need to take on the culture that creates it, and not invade Afghanistan. If some very nasty terrorists use part of it as a hideout, we have weapons that can deal with that. If you don't have the courage to do that, hire Klingons. But honestly, if a Byzantine emperor or a "prudent and sagacious" Tisroc of Tashban was going to do it, he'd just pay one or two of the endlessly warring factions to fight the others to exhaustion. Something like what the infamous Cardinal Richelieu did to the Germans in the Thirty Years War. Otherwise, it's just pointless.

No wonder Gorka resigned. What we're doing there now is nuts.

An Préachán