I’m definitely in favor of not sticking to an arbitrary 8/31 deadline purely based on it being a nice round date
Is 8/31 arbitrary or is that something already pre-negotiated? I thought that was part of the Trump-era Taliban deal, but I might be confusing that with something else. From what I’ve seen, the Taliban isn’t willing to extend whatever deadline exists. OK, shit happens. Sucks that we’re doing this as a last-minute rush thing, but I have a feeling if we had a deadline of 9/11, 10/23, 11/17 or 12/31 it would be that way too: people would piss around until the last couple weeks, then say “OK I’m ready to get the fuck out” and try to head for the exits with scores of other people having the same thought.
If the argument at this point is “stick around longer” there has to be an explicit statement of what we’re trying to accomplish and how we’re going to measure success, and whether we have an end date for that if we don’t have success in a certain time frame. Hint: “at least 20 years” isn’t realistic. Neither is “go get all the bad guys.” Neither is “get every last _____ out” because we could easily be there for months and years yet for a variety of reasons, some (most? all?) out of our control. That committment also needs to explicitly acknowledge “this is going to cost us more military lives” and we argue how many we’re willing to give to achieve whatever goal we’re trying to accomplish.
May 1 was the deadline Trump set with the Taliban last year.
Biden extended it to 9/11.
Then some time in between Biden said something about 8/31 and the Taliban have kind of said be out by then.
At least that’s my recollection.
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I think there IS an explicit statement of what we’d like to have:
Get out the Americans, and the Afghans who we’ve given visas to.
Maybe not the Taliban at all. There are rival, militant Islamic groups that may not be thrilled with Taliban preeminence. From the NYT.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombings. But the night before, a senior U.S. official warned of a “specific” and “credible” threat at the airport by an affiliate of the Islamic State, the Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, and Western governments began urging people to leave the area.
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It’d be also kind of nice to get our military equipment (helicopters, Humvees, weapons, uniforms, etc) out of Afghanistan - but that might be a bit tougher to do now that the Taliban has possession of everything.
OK, but again - is that “however long it takes” or “look, you’ve got ____ time to get here?” Honestly, it’s not like Biden dropped a bombshell that we were getting out in 30 days. This was announced a while back, it was signaled through the agreement with the Taliban last year. We weren’t hanging around another 20 years.
Plus, didn’t the entire “give visas to Afghans” thing get scuttled last year? So based on who had visas to come over on 1/21/21, there were damn few (if any) Afghans with visas to be brought over. The ones we’ve issued since? I think we’re trying. Maybe could (should) have started earlier, done better. Again, this cannot be some open-ended mission. At some point, we have to be out. When you tell someone “we’ll be out by _____” and they tell you they’re not granting an extension, I don’t know how “well, stay anyway until everyone is out” is a real solution that doesn’t create bigger problems.
What are you implying? Of course the Taliban isn’t behind the terrorist attacks. The Taliban want to help the Americans get out.
This is an important thing to note. The Taliban might hate us, but they’re tolerating us to get what they really want. If they really wanted, they could be making life incredibly bad over there for us - but, since we’ve done a quid pro quo, they’re not going after us. Afghans who helped us? Yeah, they’re all targets - but the U.S. military isn’t in their sights by any stretch.
Daesh in whatever form we’re calling it hates us. And, they hate the Taliban. Which, based on my understanding of recent American tactics, should make the Taliban our friends. At least until the threat from Daesh is gone, in which case we can go back to the Taliban being our enemies.
I think this entire board probably understands that the Taliban and ISIL-KP are not the same thing, and are in fact, enemies of each other.
Maybe this is how we should advertise the covid vaccine.
Yeah, I was definitely hoping it would be a lot less. I guess is is getting good at making those things. Besides being a packer airport generally.
“The entire board?” I’ll bet “no” on that.
“A majority of this board?” I’d be more inclined to believe that, but I’d still go for a poll on it.
Not sure I would call 72 dead minor.
Yeah I’m not sure what you do to stop suicide bombings and in a crowded packed area they can do a lot of damage.
WOAH, they are now saying death toll from bombing is 170.
Well, the thing they were hoping for was that the Taliban would do some screening before letting people close to the airport gates where the US would then do additional screening. Not sure counting on the Taliban is a great strategy whether they are the sworn enemies of ISIS-K or not.
My understanding is that in that part of the world the saying goes “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
Got no idea how that works when everyone is the enemy of everyone else.
The Pentagon has also revised their statement: It was a single explosive blast - just one bomb attached to a suicide bomber, not two bombs (the second one being at a nearby hotel), as they themselves had previously stated.
Dumb question: what’s the difference between a translator and an interpreter?
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That’s an interesting question, according to the interwebs translators focus more on written translation while interpreters focus more on oral translation.
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