Yeah of the people evacuated I have no idea how many were critically endangered due to assisting US troops.
It just seems a lot more people have been evacuated than initial news reports were letting on and the casualty reports (besides the folks who fell off the plane) have appeared to be minimal so far.
I’m not saying the Taliban hasn’t committed atrocities or that they won’t going forward, I have no illusions on that account but those would have happened in any Taliban takeover whether that was now or 6 months from now. And while it does look like Taliban leader do want to play nice getting foreign Nationals, including Americans out as quickly as possible, it doesn’t look like they have the same feeling about Afghani people who may have helped us. Also while Taliban leader may want one thing for optics on the global stage, it’s unclear how well that will translate down to Taliban soldiers on the ground.
Holy shit, are you serious? Your initial post was something like “It’s a win for Biden if we get the Americans and the Afghans out”.
We were still in the process of getting Afghans out, and the Taliban suddenly cut it off and said “No more”, with no fight back from us. Stranding those people looks like total shit to anyone who might want to do business with us in the future, and is a massive blow to the trustworthiness of this country.
The Taliban seem to have had major trouble getting their lower-ranked soldiers to do what they want them to do from the start. I totally agree with you that the Taliban leadership wants the Americans out, and is even willing to help them to get out. But if they can’t get their foot soldiers to follow orders, I think that is perhaps the biggest risk to getting all Americans out who want out.
Probably. Id expect the taliban are going to have to play nice until we actually leave.
Many Afghans are trying to leave. Not all of them were necessarily translators or others who helped us during the war. What is our responsibility to them?
You keep throwing the strawman out there… no one (that’s being serious) is claiming all Afghans who want to leave should be able to leave. It’s those that you mentioned, such as the translators and the interpreters who have visas (and for some reason we were WAY slow in processing those visas for several months before this) who should be allowed to go. The Taliban had been turning them back, but we’ll how that plays out in the coming days.
Not an excuse. The capacity was there, we just didn’t act in time on the visas, and the Afghans may be paying the price for that. (if the Taliban don’t even let the ones with visas through anyways, then OK, moot point)
As in, the number of Afghans with visas that are likely to be left behind? AFAIK the State Department hasn’t released that, but I’d be curious to know it if someone could point me there. They did say today that there are about 1500 Americans left, but I think everyone on here agrees that all of them should be able to go. (I say “all of them”, but of course I’m sure there will be some that fall through the cracks, but I think that’s beside the main point)
Update to that 1500 number… it sounds like only about 500 of them actually want to leave, so I think we’ll be able to get (almost) all of them out, and even after August 31, the Taliban will help get them out. The news did mention the civilian evacuees will soon have to ramp down as the military drawdown ramps up.
I don’t know that I’d say that. I think we’re going to see a lot of Afghans with visas left behind, but it’s such a fluid situation right now that I think it’s hard for anyone to make a lot of predictions on. (see above post)
I thought I heard? We-- as in both Trump and Biden didn’t want to rush Afghans out the door because the president of Afghanistan didn’t want to appear weak to the Taliban. Is that right?
The craziest thing to me is that, as I understand it here, we personally freed the founder of the Taliban, and let him reconquer his country.
He was the guy that we negotiated with, because he was the only one who would talk to us, and he didn’t tell us anything promising.
Like, letting the terrorists win was the plan all along, and not only that but specifically the very same guy we dethroned 20 years ago. And all we asked? was that he not kill us all that fast?
The details of how poorly our withdrawal went are also terrible of course, but the whole game we were playing seems totally nuts.