Afghanistan

[Alf'Omega]

Of for “F” sakes. Get back in the clown car.

Get with the program or “F” off yourself you weenie little man. No real man comes on the internet to anonymously act like an alpha male badass. And you talk about canned responses? Just about everything you respond to amounts to nothing more than a cut and paste of your previous responses, "bla bla bla piss boy, Screw you, bla bla."

Now, Trump didn't evacuate anyone in four years, but he did send home 95% of the troops before Biden took over which meant any evacuation would be either 1) way short on man power or 2) be in need of more troops returning. If Biden had sent more troops in to evacuate people a month ago, the idiots on the Right would be whining about how he's breaking his promise to bring all the troops home. We tried to make due with what was there before sending another 5,000 troops to secure the area and facilitate the evac. And while you can moan about Biden blaming Afghans, the fact is if anyone betrayed anyone, they're the ones who betrayed the USA. How could this be seen any other way? We did our part, they didn't do theirs. Period.

We've been holding them by the hand for the past two decades at the tune of $95 billion per year. We've given them food, supplies, medical care, education, defensive weapons etc. and when the time came - which was no secret, everyone knew for more than a year this time would come - for them to fight for what we believed they appreciated and valued, they laid down their weapons and welcomed the Taliban.

Just think of the logic here. If the existing Afghani gov was truly that concerned with the Taliban coming in and raping their women and murdering their children, why in the world would they lay down their weapons and welcome them in? What's the logical explanation here. Either they're the most cowardly group of people in the history of the world, or they sincerely felt the country was better off under Taliban control. After all, it was the Taliban who negotiated with Trump, not them.

But you only see these journalists interviewing people who appear to be trying to leave, they're not interviewing members of the groups we trained to ask them what their reasoning was.

[Alf'Omega]

Your point being, presumably, that any comparison of the relative efficiency of the Trump and Biden administrations in organising mass evacuations under emergency conditions can be no more than hypothetical, because it was never attempted under Trump?

That point is not without value, but of course a Trump evacuation might (just might) have been hugely better than what we are seeing now, because ... well, one never knows I suppose.

The miscalculation may come from the military and intelligence services. Good planning is hope for the best while planning for the worst. They don't appear to have prepared for the worst case. I would want to know if the Military wanted to implement a plan for the worst and if the white house rejected it since they may have felt it was unlikely. That would be poor planning. Now given the incompetence of the Trump administration, I see no reason to think they would have done better then the Biden administration.

There is no doubt this could have been better executed,. A White House spokesperson said they had numerous contingency plans set up and they acted according to how the situation played out. They had thousands of troops in the region on standby if they were needed, and apparently they were. But no one predicted the Taliban overrunning the existing government within days. What I have a problem with now is the media going out of their way to find something to trigger an emotional response. The Left is trying to guilt Biden into remaining in Afghanistan by focusing on children suffering at the airport, and the Right is just doing what the Right always does, pretending they really give a rat's ass about the suffering of minority foreigners. Who would have ever thought FOX News would be spending so much time worrying about the suffering of Muslims no less! Well, if it means it will hurt Biden, there is no hypocritical line too big to cross. We saw how much they cared about Syrians whose children were washed up on shore. We saw how much they cared about the Kurds who were literally betrayed and abandoned by the Trump administration. Actions like these will guarantee future tensions with that region as our actions are making the Taliban's claims about us appear credible. The Taliban has convinced many people in the general population that we're the enemy who is just trying to enforce our unholy ways onto them.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Qultellus on this thread:



- Doc

[Res Ipsa]

More on stranding our friends in Afghanistan. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428 ... 79361.html

[canpakes]

What a mess.

Imagine if that same crowd of Afghans was at a land border with the US. Would we set up a ‘Remain in Afghanistan’ policy?

[Jersey Girl]

More on stranding our friends in Afghanistan. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428 ... 79361.html

The airlines are going over to help as part of the Civil Air Reserve Fleet to provide shuttle after people fly from Kabul to Qatar to other locations. I don't know that the airlift/evacuation efforts are the primary issue. It looks like getting folks through the checkpoint is the biggest problem. Anyway the order to specific airlines is all over the news today.

I don't know what Biden can do to fix the checkpoint issue. This is one area where, so far as I can tell, he really screwed up by not having a contingency plan in place.

[Alf'Omega]

So much for the myth of the "Liberal" media.

This morning I saw a CNN headline saying something to the effect that the Taliban is refusing to allow Afghans to leave the country. That would have been a staggering development, and the host had a journalist on the ground in Kabul on the air to explain the issue. The journalist said that this was actually based on a mistranslation of what the Taliban leader had actually said. He said the Taliban said they discourage Afghans from leaving the country and they urged them to stay because they are needed to help rebuild the economy. That's quite different from "Taliban Refuses to Let Afghans Leave." So later this evening I'm thinking this must have been corrected throughout the day but lo and behold, the CNN website has this same headline on the front page.

I go to bbc.com and they're translating a Taliban leader asking the US to "please don't encourage Afghans to leave the country."

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-politics-58320221

[Jersey Girl]

So much for the myth of the "Liberal" media.

This morning I saw a CNN headline saying something to the effect that the Taliban is refusing to allow Afghans to leave the country. That would have been a staggering development, and the host had a journalist on the ground in Kabul on the air to explain the issue. The journalist said that this was actually based on a mistranslation of what the Taliban leader had actually said. He said the Taliban said they discourage Afghans from leaving the country and they urged them to stay because they are needed to help rebuild the economy. That's quite different from "Taliban Refuses to Let Afghans Leave." So later this evening I'm thinking this must have been corrected throughout the day but lo and behold, the CNN website has this same headline on the front page.

I go to bbc.com and they're translating a Taliban leader asking the US to "please don't encourage Afghans to leave the country."

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-politics-58320221

That head line has been on CNN all day. It's always best to check other sources as you clearly pointed out. I often begin at CNN to try to get an overview of what's going on and then I go on to other news locations to find out more and in an effort to root out primary sources. In the case you posted about, what a difference it made!

[Atlanticmike]

Maybe if Jim Crow Joe would have pulled the American civilians out along with the weapons before the military left we I wouldn't be going through this crap. “F” common sense right??

[Alf'Omega]

Maybe if Jim Crow Joe would have pulled the American civilians out along with the weapons before the military left we I wouldn't be going through this crap. “F” common sense right??

You mean the military Trump pulled out before inauguration day? Like, all but 1,500 troops had departed. How many civilians did Trump evacuate again? In November he said all troops would be out by Christmas. How many civilians did he get out first? Thus far, Biden has evacuated more than 70,000 civilians in just the past couple weeks. That's 70,000 more than Trump did during the four years he kept talking about getting everyone out.

The fact is the Afghans laying down their weapons like scaredy cats was something no one could have predicted. That is the only reason we're even stressing about this. Their cowardice isn't Bidens fault, but Trump negotiating with the Taliban instead of the Afghan government we helped create probably sent a loud message to them that says "we know the Taliban really runs the show."