Afghanistan

[canpakes]

[canpakes]

Well, this was bad optics.

With the Taliban taking control of Afghanistan and troops deployed to help evacuate U.S. personnel and Afghans who assisted coalition forces, attention has turned on the visa system for those who helped U.S. forces.

The U.S. has already evacuated 2,000 people under the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program. That program has capacity for 34,500 more applicants, but this may not be enough.

On July 22, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to provide 8,000 more visas under the SIV program for Afghan interpreters, contractors and other U.S. allies who may be vulnerable as the Taliban seizes the country.

The House voted in favor of the resolution H.R. 3985, introduced by Representative Jason Crow, by 407 votes to 16.

All the "nay" votes were Republicans and the bill was sent to the Senate, though it has yet to be passed by that chamber.

The Republicans who voted against the resolution were:

Andy Biggs of Arizona,
Lauren Boebert of Colorado,
Mo Brooks of Alabama,
Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee,
Jeff Duncan of South Carolina,
Bob Good of Virginia,
Paul Gosar of Arizona,
Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia,
Kevin Hern of Oklahoma,
Jody Hice of Georgia,
Thomas Massie of Kentucky,
Barry Moore of Alabama,
Scott Perry of Pennsylvania,
Bill Posey of Florida,
Matthew Rosendale of Montana,
and Chip Roy of Texas.

[ajax18]

Not really comparable examples for many reasons, not least of which is that those countries want us there. And we aren't there as an occupying force. I think it should go without saying that the anti-American sentiment in that region has more to do with our military presence there. The manifesto from Osama bin Ladin which he used to justify 9/11 made it clear that this was the case. They seem themselves not as the aggressors, but as the "freedom fighters."

I'm reminded of these meme:

iran-bases.jpg

I'm just saying that the cost of keeping the military in Afghanistan indefinitely is around a 0.5% of the current national annual budget.

[MeDotOrg]

Afghanistan is being presented as a hopeless cause from the beginning because it's a convenient excuse for 20 years of incompetence from both sides of the political spectrum.

tl;dr - Bush2 shoulda forgot about Iraq, put about 300,000 military and civilians into Afghanistan, and we occupy it for a couple of hundred years. That’s how you “win” the war in Afghanistan. It’s a long-term protectorate basically.

- Doc

As a country, Afghanistan has never posed a huge threat to its neighbors. Air Force? Tanks? For both the Russians and the Americans, Ideology was the been the dangerous export from Afghanistan, until the asymmetrical warfare success of 9/11.

In some ways Afghanistan's identity as a country is that it is NOT a country: that no one group or tribe has primacy. Tribal alliances and autonomy, rather than a common political ideology, are what define the people.

Germany and Japan were different. These were technologically advanced countries with strong central governments and armies. When their governments signed treaties ending the war, there weren't large pockets of independent resistance. The decentralization of Afghanistan, along with constantly shifting tribal alliances, required exactly what you said: A large civilian and military occupying force with a commitment of decades.

We didn't make that commitment.

[Alf'Omega]

Not really comparable examples for many reasons, not least of which is that those countries want us there. And we aren't there as an occupying force. I think it should go without saying that the anti-American sentiment in that region has more to do with our military presence there. The manifesto from Osama bin Ladin which he used to justify 9/11 made it clear that this was the case. They seem themselves not as the aggressors, but as the "freedom fighters."

I'm reminded of these meme:

iran-bases.jpg

I'm just saying that the cost of keeping the military in Afghanistan indefinitely is around a 0.5% of the current national annual budget.

Which is ten times more than we spend towards food stamps.

[Moksha]

The Republicans who voted against the resolution were:

Andy Biggs of Arizona,
Lauren Boebert of Colorado,
Mo Brooks of Alabama,
Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee,
Jeff Duncan of South Carolina,
Bob Good of Virginia,
Paul Gosar of Arizona,
Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia,
Kevin Hern of Oklahoma,
Jody Hice of Georgia,
Thomas Massie of Kentucky,
Barry Moore of Alabama,
Scott Perry of Pennsylvania,
Bill Posey of Florida,
Matthew Rosendale of Montana,
and Chip Roy of Texas.

Glad I read the whole post, otherwise I would have assumed it to be a transport list for Outer Darkness.

[Atlanticmike]

I think fairly soon the Taliban will be recognized and set up governmental operations for all of Afghanistan. Russia, will succeed at working with the taliban and supplying them with weaponry including the help they need to start an air force. They'll help the Taliban with securing the country until they have a fighting force so large America won't think about ever stepping foot in Afghanistan again.

Consider that it’s one thing to give them economic and military aid, and quite a different thing to get a Taliban Air Force shaped up into an efficient sort of operation that would pose a serious threat to existing powers.

Russia will be happy to keep Afghanistan as a client state, but I won’t bet that they’ll be entrusting the Taliban on their own with what it would take to do so.

Remember that Iraq had a military of considerable size going into Desert Storm, but that didn’t stop it from being relatively easily neutralized by tactical and technological advantages possessed by the allied forces.

No different than what we did with building up the Afghani military.

And you just saw how well that worked out.

I know a guy who did 6 tours of duty over there and said the Afghani military was probably 10 to 15% taliban.
The Afghani military was never going to put up a fight against the taliban.

[Morley]

Beyond being tragic in how it is ending is that these things don't actually end. How we tie a chapter of history up influences the chapters that come after it. Whether we should have left now, a year from now, or held on forever is only one debatable issue involved. I don't disagree with the claims that the failure of the national government to hold together as soon as the scaffolding of US support was removed shows further investment was not going to change that outcome.

But the claim the Afghan government would be undermined if we pulled out the people who supported us while we were there so we couldn't execute a large-scale extraction mission in advance of the withdrawal undermines that argument while also undermining our credibility to both our other assets in problematic parts of the world, nations struggling with authoritarian threats or being pressured to look to Beijing for support they can count on, and off the generation of Afghans who just watched us walk out the door and close it behind us. Families left behind because our visa program was not set up to get them out, people who worked with our troops but had difficulties due to complications and bureaucratic indifference...these carry blowback.

It's wrong to think this is resolution. And as I said in the OP, I think it highlights just how unserious, self-destructive, and faux-principled we are as a nation. We can't be bothered to be informed, and when crap like this goes down we respond with precanned partisan gobbledygook.

Thank you for starting this thread. Most of all, thank you for this post.
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[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I just saw on the news 72% of Americans support a withdrawal. I have a feel the GQP will quickly shift to another distraction since this one doesn’t have legs.

- Doc

[Morley]

The Taliban claims it is not the Taliban of 1994 and wants international recognition suggesting a best case scenario of it becoming a client state of Pakistan.

(my bold)


This is unlikely. I was in Pakistan in 2007 when Musharraf was president. At that time, Taliban-like factions and religious fundamentalists were the government's greatest concern, and I doubt anything has changed much since then. Pakistan has a hard enough time controlling its own religious extremists without taking on those of a country even more dysfunctional than theirs.
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