Pressure ever-mounting; crash coming...

 Friends,

Things are mounting to crash-level madness. Afghanistan is a complete fiasco (maybe the powers-that-be intended just that to happen? Part of a far bigger plan?). People are fed up. Even Donald Trump was booed at his mega-rally in Alabama when he tried to encourage people to get 'vaccinated'. I'm glad. Someone needs to get it through his head what's going on. (If the "vaccines" turn out to be half as half deadly as many are predicting, then Trump will be dead politically, but we'll have to wait for that to develop.) 

I see the FDA is going to approve the Pfizer "vaccine" as early as today, regardless of all the injury and death it causes, and regardless of the fact that Pfizer lost the "control group" and regardless of whatever "good" effects it is claimed to have, they're limited, and have to be propped up with continual "booster shots". I would expect a number of legal people to file emergency stay petitions with various courts. But once the FDA (as political an organization as any) gives its approval, suddenly government will have legal force to compel vaccination.

Microbiologist Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi details "vaccination" effects. 

Information from Israel, Norway, etc., i.e. heavily vaccinated countries, is revealing that the so-called "Delta variant" is NOT a product of the unvaccinated, but rather a product of the vaccinated. This is just incredible, but absolutely true. Yet, the forces of government grind ever on to force everyone to be "vaccinated".

The news from Australia and New Zealand is insane. Absolutely, purely insane. (Lots of video.) The police in Australia are beating more people than the Taliban are beating in Afghanistan. I read about a couple of runners, joggers, that were chased by a helicopter, chased to their home and the chopper stayed over their house, preventing their getting out again. 

Meanwhile, Australia's truckers are getting ready for a strike. They, the "Long-haul truck drivers, "are not permitted to stop and eat, or shower, or rest outside their vehicles by orders of the government." That is insane. So they're going to try a nationwide shutdown.

Thousands have been arrested, shot with rubber bullets (nasty things, if you don't know; they're huge and dangerous) sprayed with tear gas or pepper spray, and so on. 60 people, the entire congregation at one church, were arrested. Absolute madness. And all this, according to world meters, for a total of 984 deaths (supposedly) due to Covid, or 38 per million. My friends, this is madness!

For just one great video of Aussie man-on-the-street interviews, click here. "You won't see this video in the mainstream media". The interviews begin at about 55 seconds in. At 7:08, especially, watch the Anglican priest's speech. Excellent!

Things are truly out of control, and literally anything can happen, and might just well. And remember, all this madness in Australia, France, and other countries, is expected to come soon to the U.S. Get ready, for someone somewhere will "go postal" and then a national martial law will be imposed and the fight will be upon us.

One good bit of news is that since neither Biden nor Camel-toes Harris is capable of doing anything, the Left has no leadership acceptable to the majority of the country, and the Right will be forced to stand up for individual rights or be itself destroyed.

A few weeks ago, just to show how divided and sick our society is, I listed some of the headlines at LifeSiteNews. (One could do this with any news organization, but Lifesite is more honest than most.)

• Australians snitch on fellow citizens over lockdown protest; The month-long lockdown in Sydney was recently extended to last another month. Politics - World Jul 28, 1:54 pm By Isabella Childs
  

• Former Planned Parenthood president was told to say ‘abortion’ in every interview; Dr. Leana Wen — who is an outspoken abortion supporter — was voted out by the board in 2019 after she was warned that she didn’t focus enough on abortion.
  

• Biden expected to announce vaccine mandates for all federal employees, DOJ declares mandates legal
• America had its first show trial on Tuesday and it was loathsome
• Big Tech using shared global ‘counterterrorism’ database to go after Trump supporters, ‘far-right’
• Trudeau withholds health care funds to New Brunswick, alleging sufficient abortion access isn’t provided
• DC cardinal rescinds permission for Latin Mass at National Shrine that would ‘be at odds with the restrictions’
• NY Gov. Cuomo: ‘Knock on doors,’ ‘put [people] in a car,’ ‘get that vaccine in their arm.’
• Full 8th Circuit to review Missouri pro-life law blocked by 3-judge panel
• Pro-LGBT James Martin: You’re not pro-life unless you take the COVID vaccine
• ‘The elites control Canada’: Veteran pro-life activist on the fight to save the unborn
• Polish priest fined by German court for criticizing homosexual predators in the Church

An P again: every day, it just gets nuttier and nuttier. Sooner or later, probably sooner, the system will just go BOINK! and crash. In fact, I've been seeing a number of mainstream articles about "the coming crash". In the beginning of the 16th chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, we read this famous passage:

1 And there came to Him the Pharisees and Sadducees tempting: and they asked Him to shew them a sign from heaven. 2 But He answered and said to them: When it is evening, you say, It will be fair weather, for the sky is red. 3 And in the morning: To day there will be a storm, for the sky is red and lowering. You know then how to discern the face of the sky: and can you not know the signs of the times?

Ok, so how is it that so many cannot see the signs of impending doom? How is it that the mainstream media insists on counterfactual "fact-checking" that tells us what we know is false?

In The Gospel of Mark, Chapter 3, we read the following:

22 And the scribes who were come down from Jerusalem, said: He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of devils He casteth out devils. 23 And after He had called them together, He said to them in parables: How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. 26 And if Satan be risen up against himself, he is divided, and cannot stand, but hath an end.

Abraham Lincoln used this passage in his famous 1858 "A House Divided" speech, which won him national acclaim. (Well, not so much in the South.) But today we in the West are divided in cultural basics, and I mean the very essence of what constitutes life, personhood, sexual identity, and so on. Absolutely basic stuff.

For example: Is abortion murder? Is the taking of a human life permissible when the person hasn't even been born yet, and thus innocent? If that is so, why not kill a new-born babe? (Many actually do and academics with cushy jobs and tenure argue for just that.) Can two men, or two women (or two women and one man, etc.) "marry"? Doesn't that equate coitus, the sexual process involving the physical transmission of life, with anal intercourse and tribadism? Must a man who has been surgically mutilated and chemical polluted (à la Bruce Jenner) be called a woman? Do not laws passed and enacted that declare a man who claims to be a woman a woman – actually, legally – negate the female sex from legal standing?

All of these items involve lying about the actual nature of thing – things understood in their right nature in all of human history – in order to achieve some social end and the promotion of some cultural statement, almost always narcissistic statement by the cretinous. But can we base a healthy society on lies, at all, especially such sociopathic narcissistic lies?

In politics, the situation is the same. The Western government system is based on elections, because of the practical idea that all government needs audit, and regular elections encourage perpetual audit. Yet underlying all that, deep below the electoral mechanism, is the Western and Christian religious idea that all men (the English word means all people) are created by God and thus equal, not in individual ability, but in individual rights. Yet what happens when massive questions arise about the legality of elections? Doesn't it behoove the winners of the election to work with the losers to uncover any irregularities of outright fraud, and thus ally fears and suspicion? And when the winners try every trick in the book to keep the elections in shadow, obscured legally and forensically, isn't it obvious that the losers are going to conclude fraud DID occur? Denying audit of such an election is the recipe for revolution, or slaver. Or both.

Or how can an economy work when jobs are shipped overseas? People are equal legally but not in talent, drive, and fortitude. Not everyone can "code" or "flip burgers" all their lives. Doesn't a country like the U.S. become a mercantile colony of China when American manufacturing jobs go to China, and then the Chinese sell the products back to Americans? What sort of government promotes that? It's insane. What government closes down oil exploration and pipelines in its own country but allows its traditional enemies to build their own pipelines?

One could go on and on. Perhaps most significantly of all, what sort of government bends every law and smothers every right to force "vaccinations" on its population for a disease that does not kill 99.5+ of those supposedly infected with it, especially when the "vaccines" are emergency use only?

Does any of this make any sense? Maybe to Chinese Communists and a few other groups who want to see Western Civ go down, but not to too many others. 

It makes no more sense than a narcissistic moron stamping down on the central religious rite that has animated and encouraged and form a great religious Faith or two millennia. But that is the world we live in, and it cannot, and will not, last much longer.

It's the signs of the times, about a house divided against itself.

An Préachán

Some Good news: Alberta is done with Covid. Who's next?

 Amici,

Some Great News! The Canadian provice of Alberta is done with Covid. 

In a news conference last week, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, explained the province’s public health system needs to respond to a variety of diseases besides COVID-19, especially as fall approaches.

“What we know from looking around the world is that COVID-19 will not be eliminated,” Hinshaw told reporters. “We will be needing to live with this virus for years to come.”

According to the Alberta government website, the province will begin “bringing the health response in line with influenza and other respiratory viruses.”

This includes shutting down all COVID testing centers by the end of August, lifting the mask mandate for public transport as of August 16, and lifting all requirements to quarantine after exposure to the virus, or even after experiencing COVID symptoms. The provincial government of Alberta is thus putting the response to virus squarely back in the hands of the people, which is where it ought to have been all along.

This is, of course, great news, indeed. And equally of course, it is bringing outrage from "all the usual suspects":  "Doctors express outrage over Alberta's plan to eliminate Covid rules" – well, of course they do. That  would be the equivalent of turning part of Canada into Sweden and exposing the fraudulent narrative that Covid is. Or perhaps to put it in a more North American context, it would be the equivalent of turning one of Canada's provinces (the wealthiest, most American like, actually) into "North Florida".

So now we have Florida, Sweden, Singapore and Alberta. Who will shake off "the Narrative" next?

• N.B. Notice how the second article says, "doctors" – would that include any of the tens of thousands of physicians and medical researchers around the world who have gone on record opposing the "vaccines"? Hmmm? Or just a few medicos the paper contacted?

Tumble-Down Biden

Look, my friends, as Joe Biden's fraudulent Regime falls all over itself as Kabul falls to the Taliban, with people falling of escaping American aircraft, as one Afghanistan mayor waits for her own "fall" – she's that country's first woman mayor, says she's waiting for the Taliban to come and kill her: "27-year-old Zarifa Ghafari is the first-ever female mayor of an Afghan city. She has survived three assassination attempts. Now she sits and waits for the Taliban to come kill her."

And that Biden reveals America to be a freak-show disaster, China now is advancing on Taiwan. (Note, the Global Times is a Chicom regime mouthpiece.) And as all this is unfolding, demonstrating that the the Biden/Obama 2.0 regime is a hopeless collection of Keystone Kops, well, can anyone believe Biden is going to have any success forcing national mask and lockdown mandates on the U.S.

Meanwhile, reports from Israel and the U.K. show unequivocally that the "vaccines" don't work, for example, the Pfizer one is only 39% "effective".

So, Joe, who even had to be photo-shopped in his center of power, is clearly an unmitigated disaster. Joe is no one and nothing, but we all knew that. (Even Obama used to say the same.)

Now, who will come out of the woodwork and try to lock us down again? Justin Trudeau? 

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