Sounds like grounds for full economic sanctions on the Taliban and getting other middle eastern nations to follow suit.
Afghanistan 2021...
- Thread starter noble cane
- Start date
We’re too busy pretending the Taliban are our buddies. I say “pretending” as I hope we’re not naive enough to believe as much. Currently don’t have much faith in anyone involved in foreign policy or military decisions at the moment as they relate to the Taliban
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Oklahoma will take in the 3rd most refugees of any state, behind California and Texas. Tulsa alone will take more than most states. Charities and religious orgs in the area are really taking ownership
Meanwhile…
Recently, John Bennett, state Republican Party chairman, voiced his concerns over the screening process, going so far as to tell Oklahomans to call their elected officials and tell them not to allow refugees into the state.
Exactly what I said would happen and thankfully a lot of good hearted people are ignoring him.
These posts capture the dilemma well. Say 'screw you and starve" or try to do something to help women and children who will starve and be abused? Trying to help means working with the Taliban. There are no easy choices and whatever one does will be attacked.
20 years of "nation building" was not a good idea and a 'no nation building" was part of several presidential platforms. Give Trump some credit for at least beginning to pull out. He screwed up the negotiations and handed off a bad deal to Biden, but in the end they both saw we had to go.
20 years of "nation building" was not a good idea and a 'no nation building" was part of several presidential platforms. Give Trump some credit for at least beginning to pull out. He screwed up the negotiations and handed off a bad deal to Biden, but in the end they both saw we had to go.
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No helping was what we did for a long time. I was proud of it. “Working with the Taliban” means occasionally providing some brief relief for a family or two while legitimizing the butcher regime that we handed them to. You don’t have to nation build to not hand over women and little girls to rapists and abusers. Your guy. Your choice to do this to them. Own it.
This policized blame game blocks learning from one’s mistakes. The US went into Afghanistan to take out AlQuaeda bases and teach his Afghan supporters a lesson. That morphed into yet another fruitless, expensive foray of sending uniformed US troops into a country where they don’t know the culture, religion, language, can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, and are generally considered infidels and invaders by most of the population. Like VN we propped up a government that sounded good to us, but not to most of the country and spent trillions for a decade or two only to leave behind a mess. Meanwhile the officials we propped up took off with whatever cash they hadn’t already siphoned off.
No country has ever suceeded in domesticating Afghanistan. The Brits failed miserably as did the Russians and now us.
Reagan was smart; he demonstrated his military chops by sending Marines to ’rescue’ students from a medical school in Grenada. No muss, very little fuss…and affordable.
No country has ever suceeded in domesticating Afghanistan. The Brits failed miserably as did the Russians and now us.
Reagan was smart; he demonstrated his military chops by sending Marines to ’rescue’ students from a medical school in Grenada. No muss, very little fuss…and affordable.
Luckily I never argued in favor of “domesticating Afghanistan” so not really sure why you keep bringing that up as if that’s what anyone said. Thanks for playing though.
Glad we're still getting people out, but it was obvious at the time that our govt had no idea how many people were actually left behind
Official report is out on the Afghanistan withdrawal cluster. Certainly doesn’t paint the Admin is a flattering light as expected. Appears no one in the Admin could grasp the actual situation on the ground in the weeks leading up to the withdrawal.
We need to remember that this withdrawal and succeeding control of the Afghanistan was negotiated by the Trump administration. Yes Biden carried it out per the terms of the agreement so there is shared blame but let's not pretend to imply it's all Biden's fault
Reading the linked story the decision to withdrawal isn’t brought up as an issue. The actual withdrawal plan (Biden) and failure to listen to the military people on the ground caused chaos and lost lives. Our military people’s warnings and advice were repeatedly ignored per the report. Guess one can blame Trump for the decision to leave Afghanistan but I don’t recall any opposition from the left of that decision.
I hope we can move away from this blame game crap. I can't speak for @drboobay, but I don't care if it was Trump or Biden's decision to withdraw. It was botched and poorly handled. I'm not replying to you TU_BLA to single you out. I rarely come to this board anymore, but I just happened to see your reply, which triggered me (because I'm SOFT!!!11).
The rest of my post is unrelated to TU_BLA, and instead me ranting on US war tactics like an ignorant civilian.
How we, as a country, handled it led to many innocent lives lost and tens of thousands, if not more, individuals in Afghanistan at significant risk of being harmed or murdered by the Taliban.
I'm not naive to think all the innocent losses could have been avoided. However, what played out felt like something out of a fictional war novel/movie where a country botches something so severely that some super-powerful individual has to come to save the day (Jack Reacher, Mitch Rapp, Jack Ryan, etc.).
Hindsight is 20/20, and it is too late to fix what problems we caused in the withdrawal. I hope we can learn from the mistakes made and not repeat them in the future.
It is appearing more and more likely that we will deploy troops in a clash with Russia, and that concerns me because it has the potential to be a much larger war than what occurred in Afghanistan.
This possible war hits hard at home for me. My cousin's husband was stationed in Germany for at least two years about two weeks ago. My cousin and their 1-year old daughter are now there with him. So, should we deploy troops, he will almost certainly be deployed into the middle of it.
Just as I feared my cousin's husband received his notice of deployment today.
I pray that he's able to stay safe and return home to my cousin and their daughter.
I hope your cousin is conventional forces and will just be shifting in Europe and not some type of special ops.
He is part of conventional forces, the little detail I was given makes me assume he's being deployed as part of the NATO Response Force (https://www.militarytimes.com/news/...response-force-activation-amid-russia-attack/). They mentioned he'd be going to Poland, but I don't know any further details.
Hopefully your cousin doesn’t have to see any action but if he does may he make many good communists
Just a reminder that although we did end up evacuating something close to 100,000 random afghans, the plan was to not evacuate anyone. The plan was to leave all of our allies behind. We processed virtually none of their visas. It was only the cluster**** in Kabul that led to the administration deciding to evacuate people so they could claim some kind of success……which ultimately led to the death of 13 marines
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Still cant figure out the thinking behind abandoning Baghram and moving to the airport...
“We stand we the Afghan girls and their families.” No we did until 2021. Now we make statements saying “bad Taliban”
We have either really naive or really stupid people in charge of this country. Maybe both.
Meanwhile Afghanistan reinstates its mask mandate..
www.nbcnews.com
Afghanistan's Taliban rulers order women to cover up head to toe
“We want our sisters to live with dignity and safety,” said Khalid Hanafi, acting minister for the Taliban’s vice and virtue ministry.
www.nbcnews.com
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