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anthk

Mob with guns would be useless against the Iranian Guards which are pretty much elite commandos.

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Goat herders with guns in Afghanistan kicked the U.S. army out of their country.

But could they do the same to goat herders with bigger guns, drones, bombs, etc?

Pretty sure Iranians with 3D printed guns would not be able to kick their own army out of Iran.

This isn't really accurate. The Northern Alliance entered into an agreement with the US to secure the country. An insurgency sprang up and we fought it for 20 years before giving up. Since this is now after the fact, we can safely say the Taliban ran the insurgency the whole time.

The Taliban are a military and political group compromised of an ethnic minority in Afghanistan. It's not even that the US lost to "goat herders with guns". We failed to secure a small country against a well organized, armed minority.

No. Pakistan supported an insurgency group for 20 years.

No insurgency like that can exist without foreign support in some form, usually from governments but it can be from resource export.

And the reality is nobody has ever defeated a foreign sponsored insurgency. Some have ended because the sponsor quit sponsoring them, but that is not the same thing as defeated.

I don't really think it's news that the Taliban are sponsored by Pakistan. We've known that longer than I've been alive.

The point is we were actually fighting Pakistan.

Nobody has ever defeated a foreign-funded insurgency, other than by the funding going away. It's no surprise we didn't accomplish what nobody else has, either.

This is akin to arguing that the USSR fought the US in Afghanistan. It's known that we armed and helped the various groups active there at the time. It's also pretty well established we had only a handful of people on the ground there at any point in time. Had the USSR actually fought the US at this point in time, the resulting combat would have been the most significant combat engagements of the 20th century.

Everyone knows Pakistan funded the insurgency. Pakistan has no interest in actually running Afghanistan. It's a buffer state for them. The US has no real interest in trying to get Pakistan to stop this. It's a failure of domestic politics that we didn't drop pack up a few weeks after it became obvious Bin Laden was not there.

To be fair, those "goat herders" were previously trained and armed by the US to fight Russian forces, so it's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison

Afghanistan is a landlocked country on the other side of the planet, the soldiers didn't grow up with knowledge of the terrain, they had no knowledge of the language, culture, customs or social networks, no one locally (with few exceptions) wanted them there, and crucially they only lost once they left, and when they left, there were no penalties for the people who started the war; no US politicians were in any danger whether the war was won or lost, no land was lost, and no truly important geopolitical goals failed.

On the flip side in any domestic insurrection, the soldiers know the terrain, language, customs and culture of the people, the supply lines are nothing (rather than having to airlift materiel and people thousands of miles, you drive them on regular roads), the infrastructure supports espionage, most people support the regime and will collaborate to return to stability (since they voted for it), the regime never leaves (you can leave Afghanistan, you can't leave your own country or it ceases to be a country), and if you lose, you lose territory and/or politicians run the risk of violence. The stakes are why these comparisons are never relevant.

But at the same time a domestic insurrection means your enemies have direct access to all of your most important infrastructure and logistics and supporting economy. It might be expensive to fly or float materials and people over to the middle east, but you don't gotta worry about 1000+ miles of pissed off insurgents potentially around every bend and tree or mixed into your own military or logistic personnel.

First the russians tried. They were not goat herders. They failed.

Then the americans tried. They were not goat herders. They failed.

The pattern is clear.

What's the commando to civilian ratio in Iran?

Let's do some napkin math: Iran has about 94 million people. Iran's IRGC alone has a personnel count of 125.000 [1], of which about 2-5000 are estimated to be the elite of the elite ("Quds Force"). Together with the Basij (anywhere from 100-600k) that alone is a sufficient amount of force. And on top of that come maybe 400-500k of the regular Iranian Armed Forces [2], as well as about 260k active police+100k police reservists.

So, if one sees the whole of IRGC plus Basij as the "commandos", they alone form an active elite of about 0.5%, if one sees the entirety of the military+police we're looking at easily 2-3 million units, so up to 2%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Revolutionary_Guard_Co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Republic_of_Iran_Armed...

The Iranian guards, along with most of the armies in the second and third tier powers don't have elite anything. Please see Desert Storm, etc. Most of them ran. The ones that didn't were destroyed.

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