Well Biden now has his own Saigon to his name

I'm not shocked about the speed of the Taliban takeover at all. When the US invaded, it split the Afghan population into those that resisted the invasion, and those that cooperated with the Americans, with a large swath of the population being able to be swayed in either direction. The ones who resisted now have the upper hand and the moral high ground, because they are seen as liberators of the country from the occupiers. The cooperators are in big trouble. That the resisters are also Islamic theocratic nuts who want to throw the country back into the middle ages doesn't matter at this point. It will only matter once the Americans are gone, who were always seen as illegitimate.

 

Don’t ya love the faux outrage over US troops leaving Afghanistan? There is only one reason for this “outrage”….Biden. And to be fair, if it was Trump who withdrew troops the Left would be “outraged” over that.
Both sides are so transparent in their partisanship.

 

we stood them up for 20 years at the cost of more than 2300 American lives, more than 22,000 injured Americas and more than 1 trillion dollars that we just added to our kids debt they will have to deal with.

If they cannot run themselves after 20 years, they never will.

One thing that never occurs to most Americans, they just might want the religious nut cases in charge

 

A simple truth that's easy to forget. The Taliban are fighting for king and country.

Although I would suggest that a reasonable, but relatively small number of Afghanistanis think of the US as liberators from a tyrannical group of religious nutjobs. Unfortunately this membership appears to be too small.

 

Oof, that's damning. I'm not saying you're wrong, but still...

 

Yep, an army we gave the best equipment to and trained for 20 years. They just walked away and let the Taliban come on in....it is almost as if they want the Taliban in power

 

They certainly had the US running around like a headless chicken for a while. And troops from all your allies were pulled into this as well.

 

What advice did he ignore?

 

I'll defend Team Joe by acknowledging that what's unfolding now in Afghanistan was inevitable, and it's necessary. The Baid Aid needed to be ripped off, and there was no viable strategy for making it go smooth and painlessly.

That said, Joe was a DC politician for basically the entire time it all unfolded, and slogged onwards. It all happened on Joe's watch. Joe was the #2 man for the full 8 years while the Obama admin was lying their asses off and perpetuating the slow-motion Afghanistan trainwreck.

U.S. officials misled the public about the war in Afghanistan ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com › afghanistan-papers
Dec 9, 2019 — The Afghanistan Papers. See the documents More than 2,000 pages of interviews and memos reveal a secret history of the war.

Afghanistan Papers - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Afghanistan_Papers
The Afghanistan Papers are a set of internal documents from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) obtained by The Washington ...
The documents reveal that high-ranking officials were generally of the opinion that the war was unwinnable, but kept this hidden from the public.

Then there's the fact that Team Joe has bumbled this horribly, and Joe has made himself look every bit the clueless incompetent he truly is.



And, the cherry on top, as this is coming to a spectacular crashing finale-

Afghanistan spiraling toward humanitarian crisis as Taliban ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com › world › 2021/08/14
27 minutes ago — Afghanistan is spiraling rapidly toward a humanitarian catastrophe, international officials say, as tens of thousands of people flee their ...

Joe runs and hides in the presidential vacation rest home.

Joe Biden heads to Camp David for the weekend...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk › news › article-9891849
17 hours ago — President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden left Friday afternoon from Delaware for a long weekend at Camp David, as the president's planned ...

Go ahead and point your shame shame blame blame finger at Trump, because you HAVE TO obey your programming, but please don't pretend like Joe Biden isn't up to his eyeballs in the Afghanistan dumpster fire, because that would be embarrassing.

Please don't embarrass yourself.

 

Thanks for the articles.

You're obviously an intelligent and educated guy. You could actually be a great contributor if you weren't so partisan.

(I'm not saying I'm perfect).

 

a 300.000 man army (was it really that many?) defeated in weeks by a militia of religious fanatics. would another generation of training have better prepared them to defend their own women and poppy fields? another century?

it reminds me of the u s trained iraqis laying down their american provided weapons and joining isis, and certainly the "peace with honor" provided by our fully vietnamized allies in ho chi minh city.

the failure belongs to a bipartisan multigenerational foreign policy that does not regard war as a serious matter. i predict that we have still not learned this lesson.

 

Yes, BIden voted as a Senator for the authorization of use of force in both GWB's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. That makes him complicit. However, GWB bears the main responsibility, because he initiated the invasions and was the driving force behind them.

Did you vote for GWB? Did you support the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq?

In reality, every president who followed GWB was given a losing hand on the Afghanistan issue.

 

Thread win!

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the US population is shielded from the consequences of these decades-long foreign wars. The ones who lost loved ones in these wars are only a tiny percentage of the overall population. That's why these kind of foreign policy mishaps will continue. Who cares how many people in far away countries die because of those policies? It's not our problem. As I said, we don't feel the consequences.

 

Agreed.

Yes.

Yes. It was the "nation building" crap that came after that I opposed. I thought it would be a matter of "Go in, scramble some eggs, and then get out." Seemed like a good idea at the time, but, viewed through the Retrospect-O-Scope, that's certainly debatable.

The 20-year-war crap. No, that was never anything that I ever supported.

And some played their hand so dirty it made us lose harder. (See: The Afghanistan Papers)

And Trump was the first to seriously put in motion plans to break the cycle and fold his cards.

 

Of course we haven't, it's not "who we are"(who's young enough to remember the sickening donation commercials.) We haven't had an effective foreign policy, possibly since Richard Nixon(and that was a decade+ before my time). To give context to our pentagon's failures.

 

the other thing that is happening just like when the US trained Iraqis laying down their American provided weapons and joining ISIS is that the Taliban is getting all those American provided weapons. My son showed me a video of the Taliban with brand new Blackhawks just sitting in hangers that the Afghan army walked away from, leaving them for the Taliban. Thanks to our stupidity they are now better armed than they ever have been.

We as a country suck so much at learning from our past mistakes.

 

Your points are valid, but the Taliban can fly a helicopter about as well as a fish can ride a bicycle.

 

they don't have to land the damn things.

seriously. they can learn to fly helicopters or trade them for weapons they can use from their saudi and paki sponsors.

 

The purpose of this thread seems to be to make a political point against Biden, and that doesn't seem fair. It's a fair point to blame Biden for the way the withdrawal was handled; we left a lot of equipment and facilities behind that will fall into the hands of the Taliban, as well as people we intended to take with us we just sort of left in the lurch and are only now figuring out how to get them out. This all could be that Biden really is as dumb as he looks and really did think that the Afghan government and army was going to last (inconceivable in my mind but who knows what sort of briefings the administration was getting?) as he stated last month.

So yes, our departure is very Saigon like, and this is going to go down in history as a major rout and humiliation of the United States. But is Biden the reason?

Yesterday I was in the car and listening to NPR ( I know, I know!) and they were interviewing GEN Petraeus. It was unlike any NPR interview I've heard. Usually when they interview someone who is in the club and an accepted member of the Establishment, the "questions" are simply prompts for the interviewee to get out their approved talking points. This time the nice NPR lady asked real questions.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/13/1027...scusses-the-talibans-resurgence-in-afghanista

She got this out of him:

CORNISH: But are you saying all of this is - this has all happened after you've left? Like, what responsibility do you bear for how this is playing out now? Was this ever a mission that could have been successful?

PETRAEUS: Well, I think you have to understand that you could never win in Afghanistan.

We've had general after general for 20 years telling us that things were getting better, things were improving, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and now it's clear that they lied the entire time. I sat in the drive way waiting until that interview ended; I was so angry at what I had heard.

I know the Democrats are wrapped up in their ridiculous 1/6 Commission, but if they would like to investigate a real scandal, they should subpoena every General who testified before Congress that things were dandy and charge them with lying to Congress and I'm sure a lot of other criminal activity will come out of this.

 

If you want to argue that this is the best of all outcomes, be my guest. The Taliban sure appreciates all the nice equipment we were nice enough bring in and then leave for them. MWRAPS and Humvees are difficult to get into this remote region, but, the US taxpayer managed it. Yay Biden!

Now Biden is going to pay them not to sack our embassy before we bug out? Maybe they can use some of the proceeds of that US taxpayer money to buy some of Hunter's "art"?

"In July, when Joe Biden announced that he would be pulling the U.S. completely out of Afghanistan, he said: “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

Damn that Biden can read the stitches on a fast ball!

 

Biden is following the Trump Admin timeline, did you miss that part? I thought Trump in 2016 ran on pulling out of the middle east and Afghanistan?

 

For once we agree. I've been hearing about how the evacuation of Afghan translators has been poorly run to date. It's inexcusable.

 

Carpet bombing is ancient technology.
Franks did it. Follow the path he used when he was the Commander.

We can see immediately the Biden plan is failing very fast.

 

Biden wanted to erase every accomplishment by Trump so do not think this befuddled orange man is following Trump.

 

You go in, you destroy the enemy and their progeny, you win. The US has not been willing to do that for quite some time.