Afghanistan 2021...
- Thread starter noble cane
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If you’re feeling generous please consider donating to No One Left Behind as soon as possible. They’re still buying flights to get people out. There’s probably at most a few days left to get anyone out
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Keep in mind that Biden followed through on a Trump deal that had already been set in place when he came into office. Taliban had no incentive to negotiate Biden
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It’s the same type of thing you saw after North Vietnam to Saigon. Obviously, it’s despicable, hopefully it will erode public support for the new regime before they can fully consolidate power.
Some wars (revolutions) have to be started by the people of the country before outside intervention can actually be productive.
biden to send 5000 more troops to Afghanistan. Someone needs to explain to him that withdraw mean. take away
Why are all these troops we’re hearing about, all at home with their families? Hard to defend your country when you’re all sitting in different places.
It was apparently an awful wast to try and train and arm them if they were all going to run home and hope the Taliban would ignore them.
Tough to fight when all your intelligence, mechanics and technical people needed to use your military assets abandon you and now you have no intelligence and your weapons don’t work. Just a poorly planned withdrawal under the misconception the Taliban would play nice. We were completely unprepared for what has transpired over the past few days for whatever reason. Im not arguing the Afghan army would have fought but basically taking away their high tech weapons insured they would be ineffective. Hopefully the Taliban doesn’t figure out how to use them because we simply left them behind. Seems to violate one of the first lessons you learn in warfare
Yeah that’s a real brain buster there
While I do wish the ANA weren’t lazy pos’s all the time and saw the same glory in martyrdom that the Taliban do, it ain’t exactly hard to empathize right now
If it was such a bad deal, why didnt Amtrak Joe ditch it like all the other Trump policies?
When the world collapses you fall back and protect the one thing that doesnt abandon you... family.
Its tough to take a tribal culture and turn them into fire breathing nationalists in 20 years...
The Taliban “negotiate” with no one. Trump’s deal was stupid. My friends and I made fun of it a lot. It was easy to make fun of it when it seemed like a dumb campaign promise that would never happen. Even easier to make fun of when Trump lost and we were told “the adults were back in charge.” Sorry, but the Taliban violated that deal several times and so did Biden when he extended the deadline to 9/11 for cheap political symbolism. He’s the president, he changed/reversed plenty of Trump policies on a dime, and just a few weeks back he was trumpeting withdrawal as his decision. Just like Trump dropping the Kurds, Biden owns every bit of how this was handled and the fallout..
I'm old enough to remember very well the Fall of Saigon. How once we finally extricated ourselves from that morally putrid situation at the cost of 58,000 American lives, the NVA rolled over the fake South Vietnamese Army like a snail in the road. There was no South Vietnamese Army. It was a facade propped up by the US that disintegrated the moment we left. We could have probably stayed there for 20 more years, at the cost of 50,000 more lives, and held on to the fiction that the South Vietnamese were fighting their own fight. Now, the scenario has repeated itself. We've lied to ourselves that the Afghan Army, whatever that is, has been trained to defend their country as we rightfully leave the unwinnable disaster we got ourselves into. The minute we leave, the Afghan "Army" folds like the stinking phonies they were all along. Bin Laden is dead. 9/11 was perpetrated by 15 Saudis and no Afghans or Iraqis. Bush II, Obama, Trump, and now Biden knew all along that this was a loser, just like Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon did in Vietnam. Biden didn't lose Afghanistan. Nobody wins in Afghanistan. The people just want to be left alone. Btw, the most liberating time for women in the history of Afghanistan was when the Soviet-backed Socialist government was in power. The one that we helped take down by backing the mujahadeen, which included Bin Laden and thousands of his Islamic cohorts. The Taliban said all along that they just needed to wait us out. To them, it is a Long Game. Just like it was in the early 20th century against the British, or in the 1980s against the Soviets. Nobody wins in Afghanistan.
Since 2015 we’ve averaged roughly 1 combat death a month in Afghanistan. We haven’t been doing much there for a while besides provide intel and air support, which is where we have an edge over everyone anyway. We simply haven’t been at war there in a meaningful sense in some time. This wasn’t a choice to end a war. This was a choice to stop supporting a vital ally.
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But that's the thing, we're hearing about them being captured in their homes, drug out in the street and shot. We didn't hear about firefights as they defended their family. They weren't actually protecting anyone. Protecting your family would mean establishing a perimeter with other people and defending that perimeter. That is what people have been doing for centuries. That's what happened in the ancient near east. What happened in the days of knights. Heck, it happened when they circled wagon trains. What you don't do is retreat somewhere that you are all basically individually alone with your families.
Of course, you would probably prefer to get your families away from the direct line of danger and then defend the area so they could eventually return, but you at least group together with the people of your military and defend strategic locations, choke points, defensible high ground, etc... It's funny that the Taliban can hold out for 20 years, but these guys couldn't hold out 3 months.
It seems to me like they weren't trained sufficiently over the years, or they were relying on the perpetual protection of their bigger meaner brother.
Air support, intel, and special operations still costs a ton of money. Moreover, the money for the war in Afghanistan was largely financed through borrowing. You want to work on funding prosperity in America? You have to let go of nation building halfway around the world.
The budget for Afghanistan in 2021 was 7x what was just authorized for cybersecurity initiatives in the 1 Trillion dollar infrastructure bill.... and I can tell you that there are certain pieces of cyber infrastructure that, if attacked, would present a much more significant level of risk (at least for the time being) than Afghanistan would.
I get that you’re basically a foreign policy paleocon, but I’m just not so those arguments don’t really resonate with me. They do with a lot of people though and that’s part of the reason both Trump and Biden went down this path. Isolationism has short term and long term cost though. We’ll see how it goes I guess.
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I agree. So why were we there 20 years trying to do it? Seems like a poor strategy by Bush for 7 years set us up for failure and no president wanted to bite the bullet and leave.
I empathize with the people that will suffer there. Just as I empathize with the people who were harmed in Saigon after we left, and the people that were harmed in wars that we're not even in. (Russia in Crimea for example).
That's exactly why I think we shouldn't have prolonged this one. Prolonging it, just made it worse on everyone. It made the Taliban even more ingrained and resentful. It cost us a bunch of money. And since the Taliban feel so resentful against people who cooperated with the US, the more time we were there, and the more allies we gained, meant more eventual harm to a greater portion of the population. Was it worth if for the commoner there to live in a slightly more advanced society for 15 or so years if it means they might be killed or their family harmed as a result?
So many on the tarmac there making frightful decisions. I almost wish there was a way we could have a booth there handing out M14’s and explosives. There are enough people there that they would make up a sizeable fighting force. If only they were more interested in fighting for their livelihoods and their homes rather than making every attempt for the US to take care of them.
The world is full of people wanting the US to take care of them. See our southern border. I do feel for the Afghans knowing they face torture, rape and murder in mass over the next week. Curious why we didn’t follow the advice of our military leaders and keep our military presence in place during negotiations. Seems like a reasonable course of action as it at least allows you to negotiate from a position of relative power compared to the debacle we are now witnessing. We have people over there who have worked with us for the last 20 years. We owed it to them to ensure their safe exit from the country knowing what was in store for them when the Taliban took power
Wow... you sound just like me when i said we should arm all the Syrian refugees and send them back... what changed?
Very good article and talks about loyalty and betrayal. I’m general against being the world police or savior of all the downtrodden. There are exceptions though when it comes to those who help you. This is historic.
www.theatlantic.com
Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy
Our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, and staked their lives on us is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided.
Remember we went to Afghanistan to keep it from being a safe haven for our enemies.
If that meant a longstanding military presence it seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
Unfortunately we are giving up what we accomplished. This is from our self interest perspective. We cannot put our heads in the sand.
If that meant a longstanding military presence it seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
Unfortunately we are giving up what we accomplished. This is from our self interest perspective. We cannot put our heads in the sand.
We hadn’t given the Syrians 20 years and billions of dollars to try and convince them to suck less.
Also, I think they would probably be slaughtered because they have little military experience.
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The excuse making today from the administration is going to be something to behold.
Btw today my woke company wouldn't allow me to post a link to a charity that helps fly afghan interpreters out of the country because they deemed it "too political", just in case you're wondering how much these corporations truly give a shIt about "people of color."
Btw today my woke company wouldn't allow me to post a link to a charity that helps fly afghan interpreters out of the country because they deemed it "too political", just in case you're wondering how much these corporations truly give a shIt about "people of color."
That wasnt how you framed your initial argument.. you were going to hand out guns to a mob and tell them to fight..
That wasnt how you framed your initial argument.. you were going to hand out guns to a mob and tell them to fight..
I said ‘almost’. I was being slightly facetious. It wouldn’t actually work. The people would just try and take the easy road and force their way onto our planes.
I do think we should be able to expect more from the citizens of a society that we clearly benefited for 20 years.
I found it incredibly funny that there were thousands of people flooding that airport, but people were still lugging around suit cases and travel pillows like they were going on vacation. I’m sure some aren’t thinking clearly, but it shows some level of selfishness.
I said ‘almost’. I was being slightly facetious. It wouldn’t actually work. The people would just try and take the easy road and force their way onto our planes.
I do think we should be able to expect more from the citizens of a society that we clearly benefited for 20 years.
I found it incredibly funny that there were thousands of people flooding that airport, but people were still lugging around suit cases and travel pillows like they were going on vacation. I’m sure some aren’t thinking clearly, but it shows some level of selfishness.
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