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I think the pics that will come in the next few days will be quite a bit worse . .
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Leaving Vietnam vs AFG
- Thread starter jmcquate
- Start date
skybert
Skybert
If I were the Chinese leadership, I’d be blasting the videos and pics of what’s happening to Taiwan and all the pacific nations and say “the United States will abandon you,and you will be punished for any support you’ve given them”
skybert
Skybert
You know it.
I know someone, a Biden fan, who taught school in Kabul for a year. She is getting calls and emails from former students tearfully begging that she get them out. The girls she taught are now young women, with a record of having attended an International Christian school. Awfully tough.
A serious question. How do you all think the trump withdrawal plan would have differed from what we’re seeing? I never got the impression that there was a specific plan proposed aside from a target date for leaving. And no, I’m not being an apologist for the current administration. I think this was terribly managed and it’s sickening the way it is playing out.
A serious answer:
Difference in outcomes? Managed withdrawal versus a disastrous, shameful retreat characterized by complete and utter chaos. Excuse me, *retrograde.
We were going to leave eventually. I don’t think this was the way to do it. When this (links below) is your public messaging about the situation, this CANNOT be the end result.
“Make no mistake that we remain committed to helping the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government going forward,” Austin said. “We are doing what we said we're going to do in terms of putting the pieces in place to ensure that we can provide that support.”
Milley says Talibanâs takeover in Afghanistan is ânot a foregone conclusionâ as group gains ground while US withdraws
Though there’s “clearly a narrative out there that the Taliban is winning,” Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the group is far from overthrowing the Afghan government.
Top US general downplays Taliban battlefield gains
The top general in the U.S. military on Wednesday downplayed recent battlefield successes by the Taliban in Afghanistan, stressing that most of the district centers controlled by the insurgents wer…
thehill.com
So what begins? I asked a serious question and you’re trying to turn this into a political debate. This isn’t Biden versus Trump, this is a legitimate question of how we should have managed this withdrawal. I even said I might have missed something with regards to Trump’s withdrawal plan because I didn’t see anything specifically outlined that indicated a managed withdrawal. I’m honestly asking to be educated here.A serious answer:
Difference in outcomes? Managed withdrawal versus a disastrous, shameful retreat characterized by complete and utter chaos. Excuse me, *retrograde.
We were going to leave eventually. I don’t think this was the way to do it. When this (links below) is your public messaging about the situation, this CANNOT be the end result.
“Make no mistake that we remain committed to helping the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government going forward,” Austin said. “We are doing what we said we're going to do in terms of putting the pieces in place to ensure that we can provide that support.”
Milley says Talibanâs takeover in Afghanistan is ânot a foregone conclusionâ as group gains ground while US withdraws
Though there’s “clearly a narrative out there that the Taliban is winning,” Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the group is far from overthrowing the Afghan government.www.stripes.com
Top US general downplays Taliban battlefield gains
The top general in the U.S. military on Wednesday downplayed recent battlefield successes by the Taliban in Afghanistan, stressing that most of the district centers controlled by the insurgents wer…
The country is going to descend into a medieval-stone age shithole and the Afghans who could have put up a fight but chose not to out of naïveté or whatever reason are going to regret their choices.
Stavrides had a sound bite where he said maybe we shouldn't have tried to mold the Afghan army like a mini me of us, but make it more like the Taliban. True in hindsight, but the hindsight for the now failed Afghan army is that we routed the Taliban, twenty years ago, and we since taught the Afghans a lot of our way of fighting and gave them all kinds of equipment. Why the Afghans would choose to face the Taliban on equal terms on their primitive warfare, well, the historians and war colleges can study that great question for the next couple decades.
There's the futility of us trying to push western democracy and our values, but the other half of it is Afghanistan has had a generation now to take advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime, and with a few exceptions they turned it down.
Stavrides had a sound bite where he said maybe we shouldn't have tried to mold the Afghan army like a mini me of us, but make it more like the Taliban. True in hindsight, but the hindsight for the now failed Afghan army is that we routed the Taliban, twenty years ago, and we since taught the Afghans a lot of our way of fighting and gave them all kinds of equipment. Why the Afghans would choose to face the Taliban on equal terms on their primitive warfare, well, the historians and war colleges can study that great question for the next couple decades.
There's the futility of us trying to push western democracy and our values, but the other half of it is Afghanistan has had a generation now to take advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime, and with a few exceptions they turned it down.
It seems like it's a real clusterfuck in Kabul right now but at least the memes are good.
Hey dude, you’re the one who used politician’s names. My issue is with the military and intelligence leadership for not understanding that this could happen. So they either lied about it, or they were grossly incompetent. Someone needs to be held accountable.
If you want to go the political route, President Trump met with Taliban leadership and his priority seemed to be a negotiated withdrawal. Do you not remember the heat he took for negotiating with the Taliban?
Afghan conflict: US and Taliban sign deal to end 18-year war
President Trump says it is "time after all these years to bring our people back home".
www.bbc.com
The US exit from Afghanistan was a foregone conclusion. HOW that exit was going to happen, the five W’s if you will, was up in the air. Now we know. Would it have happened differently under Trump? I don’t know. I’d like to think it couldn’t be worse than what’s currently happening.
P.S. Even President Biden is blaming Trump. I mean, it’s worked for everything else so far, why not this too?
Trump accuses Biden of not "following the plan" his admin left on Afghanistan
"An endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me."
P.P.S. I deleted my “and thus it begins” comment, but yeah, newsflash: this is going to get political.
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This was always going to be the outcome. If we’re looking to point fingers, Bush and his admin got us into this mess, and a long lineage of senior military leadership sustained the delusion that we were perpetually on the cusp of turning the corner. One presumes that this could have been done more gracefully, but it needed to be done.
I was today years old when I learned the State Dept had a massive air wing.
Aviation Support - United States Department of State
The Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Office of Aviation (also known as the INL Air Wing), oversees a combined fleet of more than 110 active airplanes and helicopters operating in some of the most challenging, remote, austere, and dangerous environments in the world...
www.state.gov
No one knows what withdrawal would have played out under Trump. Biden has fucked it away big time and has a shameful disaster on his hands. The most shameful thing in my opinion is that we were there for 20 years. And a decade after killing bin laden in Pakistan. When I was there it was obvious that we were leaving, we weren’t fighting to win, and Afghanistan was a backward shithole that would crumble without us. We still stayed another eight years.
Regarding that last bit, we don't seem to have a very good historical track record of promoting folks who look at a tasker from higher and go "no chance, Paddles." It's more likely that that person gets fired, the next person steps in, and they take the message to Garcia and get the credit. Do that for 30 years and for good and bad, I'd think it starts to become second nature.