LongTimeLurker

How far do you think you would have needed to travel from the centre of Kabul to reach areas where that wasn't happening? The expression Potemkin village comes to mind. Show the western media the story they want to broadcast to keep the narrative intract so the money keeps flowing into the networks of corruption and patronage propping the whole system up. Meanwhile when is something "utterly transformative" going to happen for millions of women and girls in Saudi Arabia? Maybe maintaining the petrodollar cycle and plundering third world resources through offshare tax havens is really what drives the west geostrategically with everything else being window dressing to convince the plebs we are the good guys?

This is the sort of post that can come back to haunt you but bear in mind that VoL and Edinburgh Uni are still around this season. Things have to go catastrophically wrong to be dragged into the relegation zone given how drastically far off the pace they are. If you are looking at a rebuild season to go through some pain after some signings didn't work out as part of the process of putting together the basis of a younger squad for the next 3 to 5 seasons this is a relatively safe one for that sort of thing.

Suspect the thinking on that may be related to always forcing the three leagues to get their seasons finished on time.

Where Oban would wind up depends only on which league would accept them into membership. The line of latitude is only applicable to a relegated Club 42 and appears nowhere else in the various rules and regulations. It would be nice to think a WoS AGM will always do the right thing on accepting remote Argyll & Bute clubs but that hasn't actually been put to the test yet where Campbelltown Pupils are concerned. They are only in a temporary division four through provisional board level approval. WoS Division 4 may not be around next season and its member clubs still need to receive AGM approval to be accepted into the fold at Division 3 level next season.

Russia has significant Muslim populations in parts of Siberia and especially along parts of the Volga. Taliban style theology slowly spreading northwards towards their soft underbelly is their nightmare scenario after the Chechen war experience when one of the former ASSRs suddenly went full Sharia law on them. Also bear in mind that the Soviet occupation is still very much in living memory for the leadership generations in both Kabul and Moscow. Not saying that Russia won't try to get a slice of the action but think a lot of people still have a cultural bias that prevents them from taking Pakistan seriously as the major player from here on.

Think the big winners in all of this are Pakistan and that still potentially provides a way in for Western multinationals down the road. The Sunni vs Shia thing makes relations with Iran awkward to say the least for the Taliban. All three neighbouring stans are still in secular post-Soviet mode and will not be keen on having co-ethnics across a porous border very much in Islamist mode at this point. That's not a recipe for borders wide open to trade. Russia will be aligned with the stans to a significant extent rather than Kabul and still has a significant military presence in Tajikistan to help defend its borders. China's border has no direct transport links so is basically irrelevant.

Checked it out on Google maps. There is only one runway shared by the civilian and military traffic. Maybe people are too young to remember but the Bing Crosby song I mentioned above was the secret signal used to tell American citizens in Saigon that it was time to skedaddle and make their way to the airport.

Americans don't use it that much strangely enough.

More than likely but as they start to get most of the troops out the numbers balance on who is still left inside the airport perimeter starts to tip so it isn't just the Taliban they need to worry about given they are already having major issues on how to keep the runways clear. Don't forget also that the Americans have told their citizens to remain in place at this time and not attempt to travel to the airport. Why didn't they have a secret signal sorted like "White Christmas" being played on AFRN?

More to the point maybe how easy will it be to get the last NATO troops out of there if they don't. In Saigon, South Vietnam was still somewhat functional at least in the immediate surroundings when the last choppers and planes were leaving. Unlike the NVA, the Taliban haven't waited on the outskirts to allow the Americans to leave first and it's difficult to understand how Biden & co didn't see that scenario coming as rapidly as it did.

Not quite last flight out of Da Nang stuff yet but definitely getting there:

Nobody said it had to be fair...

The secularist portion of the Afghan population was pretty much obliterated by the CIA backed mujahideen so who exactly were Bush and Blair allied with twenty years ago? Various drug lords and non-Pashtun war criminals that were basically only in it for the money. A bit like the second Iraq war and the Libyan and Syrian civil wars that followed a simplistic narrative was concocted for the western news media that didn't have much to do with what was actually happening on the ground.

Hopefully it's closer to the Saigon scenario than the Phnom Penh one. After the Uzbek militia in Mazar-e-Sharif ran away and Jalalabad and the road link to Pakistan fell yesterday it clealy wasn't going to take 30 days any more.

Think hanging around after engineering the initial regime change was more about keeping Iran hemmed in if it served any larger geostrategic purpose. The west completely lost interest after the Soviet withdrawal when all the jihadist nutter factions they had armed battled it out in the aftermath so it is debatable whether it ever really did though. That disinterest helped create the conditions that made the Taliban look like a better alternative. Pakistan worries about a lack of strategic depth against India so tend to be keen on the Taliban providing a stable Pashtun dominated regime that brings Afghanistan firmly into its sphere of influence. If Osama had behaved himself and poppy production had been kept in check Washington would probably have been fine with that. Russia has some influence in Tajikistan but has no huge desire to move back into the five stans for demographic reasons ( i.e. too many Muslims unlike Belarus and the Russophone parts of Ukraine). In Syria there is a gas pipeline angle that explains their level of interest in propping up Assad. Afghanistan isn't really on their radar in strategic terms. China's border with Afghanistan is very short and extremely mountanous. Basically only there for Victorian era Great Game reasons when Afghanistan formed a buffer state. China's way in to all the mineral wealth will be indirectly through Pakistan whether by land or sea. Given their policies in Xinjiang they are unlikely to get too close to the Taliban.

It could be worse. It could be High Valleyfield.

Mainly the former will be the dominant influence now along with China to a certain extent given Pakistan's role in its belt and road initiative. All part of the shift to a multipolar world that has been gathering steam ever since western attempts at regime change in Syria unravelled. Botham can't Imran Khan.

The Afghan intervention was always a farce. Let's put a bunch of drug lords and war criminals in charge and pretend we are creating a democracy. Anyone disagrees we'll round em up, put em in a field and bomb the b*****ds. All that remains now is for some latter day Sandy Gall from whatever western country was sensible enough not to get involved to send the news reports describing what happens after the last American chopper has left. That's unlikely to be pretty...

Maybe worth bearing in mind that Shotts Bon Accord won the SJC about 10 years back and are one of the Lanarkshire clubs that are most likely to draw a decent crowd when they are doing well as they are somewhat distant from the four local SPFL clubs and the Old Firm in an almost in West Lothian sort of way.

They embarked on a course of ethnic federalism under a formerly Hoxhaist rebel group from Tigray in 1991 just as Yugoslavia was starting to completely unravel. What could possibly go wrong...

Slightly too young at the time to remember anything about it but resigning from the league and merging with Clyde for about a week in 1970 would be impossible to top as the craziest move by Accies. Fortunately Jan Stepek & co stepped in to save the day.

2 from 3 champions go up would be enough to do the job most years for the EoS and WoS champions given how weak the SoS is in comparison and it's definitely very much feasible.

John Brown as well maybe but Kevin Harper would probably be the more sensible option after what he did with Albion Rovers. Hopefully you'll still be in complete disarray for the Bo'ness United game this weekend though.

They only need to be better than Edinburgh Uni over 34 games if an HL club isn't promoted with an LL catchment Club 42 club relegated, so it isn't mission impossible for them. The problem they have is that this looks like a season where the top of the HL could be significantly stronger than the top of the LL. Have a sneaking suspicion that Club 42 is going to be Edinburgh City on the back of a squad revamp and stadium move gone wrong. Time will tell obviously.