NBC reporter Richard Engel does not agree with this assessment
Who here thinks we would be pulling out now if Clinton or Biden or Saunders (I would give the highest probability to Saunders but that would still be way below 50%) had been president from 2017-2021?
Iâm not sure what youâre suggesting here. It was inevitable, but the pullout happened because there was no choice, the Taliban had taken over.
I will say that one thing I think definitely could have been improved before the Taliban took over was faster processing of visas for Afghans at the State Department. But Iâm not sure that really matters anymore, now that the Taliban arenât even letting Afghans get to the airport.
How much had the Taliban taken over when Trump issued his ultimatum that the US would pull out?
I suspect that virtually any non-Trump president would probably have escalated the war as the Taliban started gaining strength. Eventually (term 2 if any had gotten there) there would have been a drive to withdraw, but I doubt it would have been seriously discussed before 2022 at the earliest.
Ah, so youâre just suggesting that Trump likely stopped kicking the can down the road on it? I can go with that, it had been complete crickets up until that point on Afghanistan; youâd almost have forgotten we were there.
But what does that really change? I think the same problem would be facing the US whenever it finally did decide to withdraw. Or if not that, eventually some other world power like China pressuring us to get out that so that they themselves could then infiltrate.
Trump made a deal with the Taliban and agreed to leave by May 1 in exchange for the Taliban pinky promise of âhey weâll be nicer.â
Since the clusterfuck started I heard they have evacuated 89,000 people. That seems pretty good no? Do I have my numbers wrong.
I wonder if the date really is âarbitraryâ as much as it is a date-certain promised in return for an agreement for the Taliban to back off their aggression towards the US and allies.
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The nominal number isnât the main point right now. Americans will likely be able to get out, Iâm pretty convinced of that, even if it takes one of those infamous âtroop surgesâ from like 06 or 08 to do so. The Taliban leadership seems to want to help the Americans get out; they just need to get their shit together with their lower ranks so that they can allow safe passage for Americans.
The problem is all of those Afghans that helped us out, like the interpreters and the translators. We told them we would be there for them, and that promise is getting broken. The world sees that, and will remember that. That is the real scar here that the US now will have to be handicapped with for good.
Of course there was some negotiation to it, but from what I heard in that interview, it wasnât a realistic deadline and one that gave the Taliban way too much power.
That seems like a Case moving goal posts and fail Afghanistan government problems.
I think the point being made by people who defend Biden, is that when you lose a war, there is never a clean break in the history of ever, so why are they holding him up to this higher standard? They claim a clean break isnât possible.
Iâm not even sure what this sentence means⌠grammar errors?
We have always said that we would try to get the Afghans out that helped us. We are headed for failure on that.
Everyone on here knows that the government of Afghanistan had major problems. Maybe if they wouldnât have been so damn corrupt and paid their troops, the troops would have fought instead of switched sides to the Taliban.
Thatâs my point. This seems to be a massive failure of the Afghanistan Government and army in allowing the Tailiban to take the country so swiftly with little to no resistance in a matter of just a few weeks.
If the Afghans canât protect their citizens even long enough to evacuate, how and why should this be deemed a massive failure of the skeleton US force that was there?
Was the Afghan government running extra flights to allow anyone who thought they were at risk to get out out before the collapse?
I think it would have been more appropriate to be more forceful in our negotiations with the Taliban to ensure that the Afghans who had visas to get to the US should have been allowed to go to the US, and we show some teeth to the Taliban as they seem to continually restrict passage of Afghans more and more. We seem to be giving in to the Taliban left on getting the Afghans out.
The Afghan government didnât give a shit about its own citizens, their president embezzled millions of dollars and ran, and somehow the UAE is totally letting him get away with it. I donât get at all why the UAE is harboring him. (unless they took the money from him and were happy with that, I donât know)
Are you proposing a strong military escalation to enforce evacuations?
Iâve gone back and forth on it, to be honest. At minimum, I was NOT happy at all with us pulling some troops out yesterday. We may need those troops if the Taliban start giving us problems. There was no upside to pulling them out with Americans still left in the country.
If the Americans arenât all out by the deadline, and Americans are having trouble getting out, I think the military should be used as a response in order to get them out. The rest of the world would have no problem with that.
I thought there might have been a possibility to get the Afghans with visas out in that matter if push came to shove, but Iâm convinced that is off the table now, and that the Afghans are doomed.
Arenât we getting some/ many out? Is failure anything below 100%? I heard biden make that promise but is that something we had always promised?
The numbers and descriptions I have seen make it hard to get a clear picture. I saw one article that seemed to indicate that 87,500 people had been evacuated but 89,000 had been transported.
Looking at it, it reminded me of when the first gulf war started and they talked about sorties. I thought those were counting how many planes went out on bombing runs and they seemed like a lot. Then I saw an article that split out the sorties by what they actually were and it seemed like it allowed them to double count a lot and include a lot of things that you wouldnât really consider part of the war effort. But their definitions allowed them to count them. And based on what they were counting, it made sense but based on what was being reported it didnât make as much.