Afghanistan

mickeyrat

Merkin Baller said:

Bentleyspop said:

https://twitter.com/laurenboebert/status/1427275592383205382?s=19

What does this even mean? 

thinks she's being cute

Halifax2TheMax

tempo_n_groove said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

Bentleyspop said:

https://twitter.com/laurenboebert/status/1427275592383205382?s=19

Maybe she’d like to answer the Taliban’s call and join their/there/they’re government?

Taliban aren't going to be stopped unless genocide is committed.  Being called out on using Their wrong really bothers you still?  

Can’t call me out on it now, though, can you? And no, it never really bothered me. At all. Thanks for your concern.

Ledbetterman10

mickeyrat said:

 This is the complete thought for going forward, what followed was the bar against that. she is calling out hypocrites.

• But the attacks on Biden for the withdrawal from Afghanistan do raise the important question of when it is in America’s interest to fight a ground war. Should we limit foreign intervention to questions of the safety of Americans? Should we protect our economic interests? Should we fight to spread democracy? Should we fight to defend human rights? Should we fight to shorten other wars, or prevent genocide?
  
  These are not easy questions, and reasonable people can, and maybe should, disagree about the answers.
  
  But none of them is about partisan politics, either; they are about defining our national interest.

Most of the criticism of Biden I've seen has been about the way this withdrawal has been handled, rather than criticism for actually withdrawing. I think mostly everyone agrees that we should be out of there (should've been long ago). But images of hysterical, fearful people holding onto commercial airplanes as they try to take off is going to draw criticism. And it hasn't been just from right-leaning Americans. I've seen the BBC, Australian news, and an editorial on CNN being critical. 

As for the Taliban taking complete control, there's blame to go around. Biden said yesterday that America trained 300,000 Afghan troops. Talk about a failure. I wonder if those troops folded out of fear of the Taliban, or because they'd rather obey (or even join) the Taliban than be American's little pet project military. And the Taliban was able to take over without resistance. Apparently, at least according to Rachel Maddow's report last night, once Trump brokered that deal to withdraw, the Taliban began negotiating (by negotiating, I mean threatening with violence) local jurisdictions to give up power, which they did. Then it went bigger cities, then providences, and ended in Kabul the other day. Not sure how the Biden administration didn't know this was happening over the past year (or did know and just let it happen). Judging by some of the military higher-ups that have been giving press conferences in the past few days, they seemed pretty clueless. 

Meltdown99

Let’s not over think think this.  The Taliban are just a bunch of criminal thugs, nothing more…they will be sending the Americas p,entry of heroin in the years ahead

The Afghan Army was well trained they choose not to fight…

if even 1/2 of the military age men picked up a gun and fought the Taliban, then I could see the US offering up air support?  But in the end they choose not to…

All foreign aid needs to seize or your just supporting terrorist…

gimmesometruth27

my thoughts on why the afghan army did not put up much of a fight:

1. someone paid them to stand down.
2. most of the afghan military are men. they realized that as men, their lives were not going to change that much under taliban rule.

my thought is maybe the afghan army's views on society and government is not that different from the taliban's. maybe they did not want to have to fight the taliban over womens' rights?

just  thought i had this morning.

Meltdown99

gimmesometruth27 said:

my thoughts on why the afghan army did not put up much of a fight:

1. someone paid them to stand down.
2. most of the afghan military are men. they realized that as men, their lives were not going to change that much under taliban rule.

my thought is maybe the afghan army's views on society and government is not that different from the taliban's. maybe they did not want to have to fight the taliban over womens' rights?

just  thought i had this morning.

Well said…

gimmesometruth27

also, saw this yesterday. this is reported to be the taliban driving bumper cars at an amusement park in kabul yesterday. again, i am not sure if this is true because i have never heard of the source, but it had me like "is this really happening??".

https://twitter.com/NewsForAllUK/status/1427367923132346368?s=20

Meltdown99

A possible super spreader event…

Ledbetterman10

https://twitter.com/MaddowBlog/status/1427451027004006405?s=20

https://twitter.com/Another_Europe/status/1427609042415915009?s=20

tempo_n_groove

gimmesometruth27 said:

my thoughts on why the afghan army did not put up much of a fight:

1. someone paid them to stand down.
2. most of the afghan military are men. they realized that as men, their lives were not going to change that much under taliban rule.

my thought is maybe the afghan army's views on society and government is not that different from the taliban's. maybe they did not want to have to fight the taliban over womens' rights?

just  thought i had this morning.

I pretty n=much said the same thing.  They have zero desire to change as a country/peoples.

brianlux

mickeyrat said:

brianlux said:

IN today's Letter, Heather said:

"But none of them is about partisan politics, either; they are about defining our national interest."

But then goes on to imply that it is partisan by, though not stated, she seems to be talking about Republicans here:

"It strikes me that some of the same people currently expressing concern over the fate of Afghanistan’s women and girls work quite happily with Saudi Arabia, which has its own repressive government, and have voted against reauthorizing our own Violence Against Women Act. Some of the same people worrying about the slowness of our evacuation of our Afghan allies voted just last month against providing more visas for them, and others seemed to worry very little about our utter abandonment of our Kurdish allies when we withdrew from northern Syria in 2019. And those worrying about democracy in Afghanistan seem to be largely unconcerned about protecting voting rights here at home. 

Most notably to me, some of the same people who are now focusing on keeping troops in Afghanistan to protect Americans seem uninterested in stopping the spread of a disease that has already killed more than 620,000 of us and that is, once again, raging. "

But I've also read that many Democrats are criticizing Biden for pulling troops out of Afghanistan (his reasoning seems sensible to me), so isn't Heather contradicting herself a bit here?

God, what a mess!

the preceding 2 paragraphs are what she refers to as nonpartisan, not what comes after that sentence.

Yeah, OK, I see that now, thanks.

So here's another couple of questions my sleep deprived brain doesn't seem to be able to zero in on- what is she hinting at here?  Where is she going with this:

"While a lot of U.S. observers have quite strong opinions about what the future looks like for Afghanistan, it seems to me far too soon to guess how the situation there will play out. There is a lot of power sloshing around in central Asia right now, and I don’t think either that Taliban leaders are the major players or that Afghanistan is the primary stage. Russia has just concluded military exercises with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, both of which border Afghanistan, out of concern about the military takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban."

curmudgeoness

gimmesometruth27 said:

my thoughts on why the afghan army did not put up much of a fight:

1. someone paid them to stand down.
2. most of the afghan military are men. they realized that as men, their lives were not going to change that much under taliban rule.

my thought is maybe the afghan army's views on society and government is not that different from the taliban's. maybe they did not want to have to fight the taliban over womens' rights?

just  thought i had this morning.

Yes, it's thought that they were paid. Washington Post had an article about this over the weekend.

There also was an interesting Twitter thread yesterday from someone who did two military tours there in 2008-2010. She said it was obvious then that the situation was hopeless, and she used the opium crops as an example. Each year, she said,  US forces needed to decide how to handle the opium farmers. Choices:

1) Do nothing and let them export their crops -- then the Taliban will shake them down for their profits.

2) Burn their crops, whereupon the farmers give up join the Taliban.

3) Give them wheat seeds and fertilizer; then the farmers sell the fertilizer to the Taliban, who use it to make IEDs.

Gern Blansten

curmudgeoness said:

gimmesometruth27 said:

my thoughts on why the afghan army did not put up much of a fight:

1. someone paid them to stand down.
2. most of the afghan military are men. they realized that as men, their lives were not going to change that much under taliban rule.

my thought is maybe the afghan army's views on society and government is not that different from the taliban's. maybe they did not want to have to fight the taliban over womens' rights?

just  thought i had this morning.

Yes, it's thought that they were paid. Washington Post had an article about this over the weekend.

There also was an interesting Twitter thread yesterday from someone who did two military tours there in 2008-2010. She said it was obvious then that the situation was hopeless, and she used the opium crops as an example. Each year, she said,  US forces needed to decide how to handle the opium farmers. Choices:

1) Do nothing and let them export their crops -- then the Taliban will shake them down for their profits.

2) Burn their crops, whereupon the farmers give up join the Taliban.

3) Give them wheat seeds and fertilizer; then the farmers sell the fertilizer to the Taliban, who use it to make IEDs.

Interesting....I saw a take from a former contractor that said they would engage in firefights with the Taliban and recognize troops they had recently trained among the dead. 

I can't say this exit couldn't have been done better but we need to get out of there.  

curmudgeoness

Gern Blansten said:

curmudgeoness said:

gimmesometruth27 said:

my thoughts on why the afghan army did not put up much of a fight:

1. someone paid them to stand down.
2. most of the afghan military are men. they realized that as men, their lives were not going to change that much under taliban rule.

my thought is maybe the afghan army's views on society and government is not that different from the taliban's. maybe they did not want to have to fight the taliban over womens' rights?

just  thought i had this morning.

Yes, it's thought that they were paid. Washington Post had an article about this over the weekend.

There also was an interesting Twitter thread yesterday from someone who did two military tours there in 2008-2010. She said it was obvious then that the situation was hopeless, and she used the opium crops as an example. Each year, she said,  US forces needed to decide how to handle the opium farmers. Choices:

1) Do nothing and let them export their crops -- then the Taliban will shake them down for their profits.

2) Burn their crops, whereupon the farmers give up join the Taliban.

3) Give them wheat seeds and fertilizer; then the farmers sell the fertilizer to the Taliban, who use it to make IEDs.

Interesting....I saw a take from a former contractor that said they would engage in firefights with the Taliban and recognize troops they had recently trained among the dead. 

I can't say this exit couldn't have been done better but we need to get out of there.  

I agree. Leaving was inevitable, the outcome probably would have been the same regardless of timing. The "how" is the really problematic part; interpreters and other allies needed to be expatriated before this happened. An explanation for that has been offered, but right now it feel inadequate, to say the least.

David Frum has an essay in The Atlantic this morning, positing that the only conclusive, "positive" way we could have gotten out of Afghanistan once we went in looking for al Qaeda is if bin Laden had been found in late 2001, thereby effectively ending our rationale for being there. Since he was Bush's speechwriter at the time, it's an interesting perspective.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/bin-laden-2001-end-war-afghanistan/619767/

Gern Blansten

There is also the political angle that no POTUS wants to be the "weak" leader that tucks their tail and retreats

Halifax2TheMax

Gern Blansten said:

There is also the political angle that no POTUS wants to be the "weak" leader that tucks their tail and retreats

“If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.”

mrussel1

Gern Blansten said:

There is also the political angle that no POTUS wants to be the "weak" leader that tucks their tail and retreats

Daniel Larison (historian at Yale and general anti-interventionist) wrote the other day 

It doesn’t say much for our political culture that it takes far more political courage to end a pointless war than it does to start one.

tempo_n_groove

So Biden follows through Tumps plan to pull out and now he gets blasted for it?  I'm sure Trump would have been killed for this too.  

Everyone as American tax payers should be angry that we spent 20 years there and didn't make a friggin dent.

Ledbetterman10

tempo_n_groove said:

So Biden follows through Tumps plan to pull out and now he gets blasted for it?  I'm sure Trump would have been killed for this too.  

Everyone as American tax payers should be angry that we spent 20 years there and didn't make a friggin dent.

Even worse, we've basically paid for the Taliban's military bases, armored cars, weapons, etc. that have bee left behind. I can't imagine how much money it takes to construct a military base, but those constructed for the so-called Afghan military are now the property of the Taliban. 

tempo_n_groove

Ledbetterman10 said:

tempo_n_groove said:

So Biden follows through Tumps plan to pull out and now he gets blasted for it?  I'm sure Trump would have been killed for this too.  

Everyone as American tax payers should be angry that we spent 20 years there and didn't make a friggin dent.

Even worse, we've basically paid for the Taliban's military bases, armored cars, weapons, etc. that have bee left behind. I can't imagine how much money it takes to construct a military base, but those constructed for the so-called Afghan military are now the property of the Taliban. 

This kind of reminds me of the part in Braveheart when The Irish go out to fight the Scottish and when they get out there they embrace and shake hands at the chagrin of the English.