I’m kind of hoping for some massive scandal involving Cheney and Bush but what do I know
I wasn’t happy that he blamed the Afghans
The last sentence is spot on. If someone else wants to play the role of the U.S. in a fight for independence, our role is to be the France in that fight.
On the search for OBL: after he escaped Kandahar, he was hiding out in Pakistan with the benefit of the Pakistani government. It’s why when we did the raid to kill him, we didn’t tip off Pakistan ahead of time: they would have tipped off OBL so he could escape.
A lot of books will be written about the entire saga. There’s a lot of details I think the American public doesn’t know. (Also a lot of details the American public will be told and ignore for their own partisan reasons.) The bottom line is that we had a bad policy (go into Afghanistan) terribly implemented (we didn’t really kill the Taliban, we enabled corruption in the Afghan government), and after 20 years we finally made a good decision (it’s time to get out of Afghanistan) and implemented it terribly (we picked up and left behind everyone who had helped us that was going to be sought out by the Taliban once they swept back into power).
Learn from those mistakes. Do better next time. Quit repeating history.
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The wall-to-wall coverage of this really annoys me. It’s not that it isn’t a big story because it is, but ICUs are full and that actually affects Americans.
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The Afghans are clearly hugely to blame, how do you not blame them in part?
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This will have much worse and longer term affects than the Delta COVID wave.
The abandonment of Afghans who worked with us in good faith and the pictures coming from Kabul will hurt US standing internationally for decades. China is already taking advantage and making noises about Taiwan. This is not some popularity issue with the do nothing EU crowd. This will hurt us badly every time we make promises to back up an ally when asking them to take a stand against someone. Especially any place we haven’t been allied to since the cold war.
The Taliban taking back over was almost inevitable. It didn’t have to be this bad. This sh** show is due to a complete lack of planning, communication, and understanding of the realities on the ground in regards to the military pull out. We should have stayed until the people who helped us had been evacuated, told our allies in time for them to plan, and gotten our diplomatic staff out BEFORE the military forces left.
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Mostly because we the US were responsible for tearing down their old government and setting up a new one. I mean had we not even had gone there we wouldn’t have this crisis. That’s not to say Afghanistan wouldn’t be a shithole today without us, but the specific crisis happening right now is our fault.
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The Washington Post published 2000 pages of documents illustrating how f*cked Afghanistan has been for 20 years and over 3 different presidential administrations. I don’t really buy that it didn’t have to be this bad. 20 years. Trillions of dollars, Endless brainpower and manpower. If everyone out there claiming it “didn’t have to be this bad” actually had a better idea, there would have been like 6 or 7 Nobel Prizes in it for them at this point.
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I’m still waiting to hear back why my “give the Taliban a trillion dollars for Osama” idea would have backfired.
Sure, we teared down their previous oppressive regime, gave them huge gifts for decades and then stopped giving them gifts and it’s our fault that we ever enabled their reliance on our gifts. We get blame for that. But the fact we’re even willing to accept some blame is a nicety, it’s their own country. Where is their ownership?
Well the Taliban retook ownership. The country wanted them there in the first place. That’s why people joined their army and took control, because they saw the group as the best option among alternatives.
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I mean, you may as well say Crimea “wanted” to be Russian. There wasn’t exactly a vote.
I’ll also push back on the “Afghans working in good faith” thing. Some did of course. I’m not gonna paint with too broad a brush here. But if the billions of dollars we were cutting checks for were going to ANA soldiers that actually existed, the country probably wouldn’t have fallen so easily.
This is in no way saying that the US is “good” and Afghanistan is “bad”. It just is what it is. And what it is is a bad situation that we’ve spent trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives keeping out of our news media. One thing I hope will come from this is an appreciation from voters for the political capital it takes to actually end a war.
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yeah, but i think the point is, we used people over there to help out on our side and now abandoning them, and since they are traitors to the taliban, they will get killed. we need to get on giving them all visas to the us.
anyway, i was surprised that msnbc is hating on biden for these actions and not praising him at all, at least from what i’ve seen. i didn’t watch it that much.
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The Kurds might like to add some words here.
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this is obv disastrous and possibly lethal for those Afghanis who worked in good faith w the US.
Weirdly, the taliban takeover was so fast as to nearly be immediate - if it was really inevitable I am sort of amazed at how little destruction took place to bring them back to full control. Like this could have been 3 yrs of civil war that reduces the whole country to rubble, but it was more or less not that. There’s still time for the rubble making and all the senseless deaths under a brutally repressive regime. But for the argument that “it couldn’t have gone worse” I can envision outcomes far worse than this transition that happened almost as fast as throwing a switch.
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Twenty years ago the Taliban was willing to take on the world and couldn’t really manage their own country. I doubt they would have taken the deal. Going into Afghanistan was a legit task (U.N. supported maybe? I’m not gonna bother to look).Staying in after the first two years was the problem. Mission creep (helped along by the contractors) created this mess.
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True. I will say that Turkey being an ersatz US ally who hated the Kurds made that situation much less straightforward.
Getting all the civilians out, including the Afghans that were helping us, would be an announcement that we are leaving.
We have the same __ show.
It’s much more straightforward once you understand one side was offering the chance for $$$ for personal gain, while the other side offered loyalty to the nation (after having been shit on once previously) - and, the person making the decision values one of those two things significantly more than the other.
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