Thanks for playing Avoid the Question! And what prizes does Sam win today Carol?
Question on that, and for the airlift, whose airspace do we use?
As far as I know it’s ‘We’re America (FUCK YEAH!!!) we’ll use whatever airspace we fucking want to.’
I do think that the misuse of the coalition over the last 20 years will be what makes other countries think twice before joining us in another war, much more than the nature of the withdrawal will.
I’m assuming Sam won’t respond to any of my factual questions, or if he does he will avoid the ones in which he clearly made stuff up–but I already knew my own answers to most of them.
We had high ranking Defense Department officials in Congressional hearings back in May who answered questions about a lot of this. They made clear we would not continue any permanent air presence in the country. The reality is due to Afghanistan being land locked, you could never maintain operational, day to day air support of ground troops without bases in country. The route to get planes into Afghanistan was always circuitous because we can’t fly through Iran obviously. We’d often stage out of Romania, then transit across the Black Sea, over Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan. That’s fine to maintain logistics and to keep a presence in the country, and worked for 20 years. But you can’t easily fly close combat support missions over a route like that, particularly not with helicopters which were a very important support element while we were in Afghanistan.
No one who knows anything about how military force works assumed we were continuing close air support of Afghan infantry because it defies simple reality. No one thought we were staying in Bagram because we specifically said we weren’t. It’s not actually that complicated.
I don’t honestly see that it does, for one the coalition bears some element of responsibility as well. Like the collective West had a hand in shaping the occupation of Afghanistan.
Additionally, the actual invasion of Afghanistan was in response to us invoking Article 5 of NATO. I actually have essentially zero doubt that NATO would not respond to a legitimate invocation of Article 5 by us in the future. Why? Because the entire reason the European allies after WWII wanted to get NATO negotiated was to “keep American in, Russia out, and Germany down.” That first one is important. The implicit understanding of NATO is that “an attack on one, is attack on all.” But let’s be honest, the real understanding is an attack on one is an attack on the United States, the world’s most powerful country with a massive nuclear arsenal. If an attack on Estonia means you’re also attacking Luxembourg. Well, no one much gives a fuck about that. If NATO didn’t answer an America Article 5 invocation NATO would no longer exist. And about 6-12 months later neither would a number of Baltic States, and that would likely just be the beginning.
There’s also an implicit assumption that the United States regularly corrals NATO into taking coalition actions that otherwise, NATO wouldn’t want to do. There actually is not much history of this. Basically, the only significant conflict that meets that definition is the invasion of Iraq, and it was less effective than other NATO coalitions precisely because many of our allies didn’t believe in the mission.
But every other significant action (NATO or otherwise) in which the United States has been part of a coalition of states, at least since the Vietnam War, has either been heavily supported by those States because the action itself was intrinsically beneficial for their interests or because they actually openly advocated for and pressured the U.S. to get involved. The reality is our allies often act in concert with us when it is to their benefit, and frequently do not when it is not to their benefit. Exceptions exist, for example the United Kingdom has had our back several times when it really didn’t have a good reason to have our back. But countries like France, Italy, Spain, Germany et al. have a long history of not getting involved with American actions that don’t suit their interests. That hasn’t changed.
https://www.reuters.com/world/excerpts-call-between-joe-biden-ashraf-ghani-july-23-2021-08-31/
Said Biden to Ghani,
"You clearly have the best military, you have 300,000 well-armed forces versus 70-80,000 and they’re clearly capable of fighting well, we will continue to provide close air support, if we know what the plan is and what we are doing. And all the way through the end of August, and who knows what after that.
We are also going to continue to make sure your air force is capable of continuing to fly and provide air support. "
None of that was true. The U.S. pulled out all maintenance workers and foreign maintenance contractors, leaving the Afghan forces unable to maintain and fly their aircraft. And air support of Afghan army units ended long before August 31.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-army-collapse-taliban-11628958253
So is your claim then, not that Biden promised to continue air support indefinitely but only til the withdrawal? If so he lived up to that claim. We continued to provide air support basically until the end, see for example here it being announced we were even increasing air strikes temporarily at the end of July of this year:
U.S offers further air support to Afghan troops amid Taliban offensive | Reuters
It may be a good narrative for you to say we ended air support “long before” 8/31, but that simply isn’t reality.
It seems they edited out the part where he promises the air support would come from Bagram.
From Biden’s July 20 press conference:
The question was in reference to his opening remarks, where he said,
That also turned out to be a lie, because there are many Americans still there, and if anything, the State Department has been impeding their attempts to leave, or at least not helping. And most of the Afghans that were promised safe harbor were abandoned. Some arrived at the airport gates days before the U.S. left (as instructed by Biden), and were not allowed into the airport
.
Note that missions continued to operate after Bagram was closed, despite Sam’s misunderstanding, Bagram was not the only mechanism we had to offer temporary air support as we ended our military involvement in the country. If we had promised long term, indefinite air support, then I would probably agree that carries with it an implicit air base (or likely bases) in the country, because logistically you don’t want to fly missions where the pilots have to fly hours just to get into Afghan air space every sortie. But for the last couple months, it’s probably fine.
Here’s another article that talks some about our continued air support in 2021, up through at least August 10th was the last time I believe DoD released any kind of statement about it–note that doesn’t mean our last airstrike was on August 10th, that was just the last time we reported one. However Ghani fled the country a few days later and Kabul fell on the 15th. After that, what Afghan military and government was left to offer air support toward? We literally were offering American air power until the government actually fell.
US, coalition airstrikes in CENTCOM region plummet amid withdrawal plans (airforcetimes.com)
So let’s continue to reiterate simply reality:
Trump made it clear over 1.5 years ago we were withdrawing from Afghanistan.
Biden reiterated this multiple times.
Biden specifically laid out his plans for withdrawing our military in April of this year, and said in later commentary that the “air campaign would end on August 31st.”
Nothing happened that was not previously promised. Sam can disagree with our decision about Afghanistan, you can’t make up lies that we have claimed we were actually going to stay when that never happened.
Why don’t you take this personal shit to the pit? Lord knows there are enough Sam Stone hating threads for you to choose from.
CLOSE air support. It’s a very different thing from flying helicopters over the city or bombing a supposed ISIS-K terrorist.
It looks like you’re admitting your previous claims were wrong. Biden specifically does not commit to get every SIV holder home. He commits to “do everything that we can.”
Let’s also look at the claim you made:
Biden also promised that he wouldn’t leave until every American and SIV holder was out of the country. That may have given other countries a false sense that they had more time to get their own people out, since no one thought a complete evacuation coild happen by Aigust 31. They were right, but unfortunately for them Biden lied.
So from your own quote, Biden did not promise that we wouldn’t leave until every SIV holder was out, and he didn’t even promise we wouldn’t leave until every American was out. He promised every American who wants to get out, will and he said he would do everything we can to get the SIV holders out.
Now as to talk about the very small number of American citizens remaining in the country (virtually all of whom are from Afghanistan originally and are still in the country because they are involved in efforts to get ineligible extended family members out of the country on U.S. papers they aren’t eligible to receive), you can’t even say Biden lied about that yet. We are still getting them out. It didn’t become a lie just because on 8/31 some of them were still there, it becomes a lie if we abandon them there, which so far there is no evidence we have done. We remain involved in getting all of them out of the country.
Taliban lets plane carrying Americans and other foreign nationals leave Kabul - CBS News
You’ve said a number of inaccurate things, and continue to do so. You then post “cites” that actually don’t confirm the inaccurate claims you make, or in some circumstances (like previously about the claim that Biden promised we wouldn’t leave until every SIV holder was out of the country) the cite actually disproves your claim.
I’m sorry if it hurts your little feelings that someone is calling you out for being dishonest and saying things that aren’t true. Maybe stop making baseless claims? Or can you help yourself?
If you actually want to argue we should have continued our forever war in Afghanistan, be a man and fucking argue it. Don’t sit around here crying about minutiae of the withdrawal that really means nothing, especially when most of the things you’re crying about are frankly easily disproven.
We continued air support into August, that means air support of Afghan infantry units engaged in fighting. Your use of the term “close” means nothing here unless you can establish that a) such support did not continue into August and b) Biden promised a specific form of air support in the first place.
In before ‘Biden implied the air support would be close!’!
Telling someone on April 14th about something happening five months later IS advance notice.
Grab them by the airport?
FWIW NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who obviously is a Norwegian and has no particular reason to lie for the Biden Administration, is saying that “voices in Europe” that claim they were not consulted about the withdrawal are not being honest. He says he was in the meetings in which these discussions occurred.
Stoltenberg: European allies were consulted over Afghanistan – POLITICO
While I don’t agree with the OP’s premise, this DOES seem like a misstep: France Recalls Ambassadors to U.S., Australia Over Submarine Deal - WSJ