Yeah, that’s not remotely what that person is saying.
Could get very ugly in Afghanistan with the U.S. military withdrawal, but after almost 20 years, too many American lives lost and billions of dollars spent there, I think the President probably made the right call.
I’ll put money on the Taliban taking Kabul in the next six months. They’re already seizing more and more territory from Afghan securlty forces.
There won’t even be enough pushback for a civl war. Sure, civil wars aren’t the grooviest of things, but it illuminates the ease with which the Taliban will take over.
Yeah, the Afghanistan War has long since stopped being about winning than about not losing. It’s eerily similar to Vietnam in that regard.
If the Taliban recaptures Afghanistan, but the U.S. successfully inflicted tens of thousands of casualties on them in the past twenty years, maybe it’s an acceptable trade-off. One can only hope they won’t use it to host another terrorist group though.
I was actually wondering about what we accomplished in twenty years there, what with thousands of Americans dead or disabled, thousands of Afghans dead or disabled and hundreds of billions (trillions?) spent. To put it in camping terms, are we leaving it a better place than it started?
America is just the latest of a line of empires for whom Afghanistan is a graveyard. We never had a hope of “leaving it a better place” than when we arrived.
I have to admit, the incompetence and corruption of the Afghan government just pisses me off. After all this time and blood and treasure we’ve spent to try to help them, and how awful Taliban rule was the first time, and knowing full well how many of them will be up against the wall if the Taliban wins again, and they still can’t effectively counter the mullahs? Grrrrr.
Yes, it is the Afghans fault. /s
Did I say it was all “the Afghans” [sic] fault? No. But if it falls once more to the Taliban, the Afghan government’s incompetence and corruption will almost certainly be a factor. It is their country, to win or lose, to keep or not.
The Washington Post has a pretty in depth article up this morning on Tracy Stone-Manning’s nomination to lead the Bureau of Land Management. As discussed upthread, the major sticking point with her nomination is that as a student she was involved with an environmental group, some members of which “spiked” trees that were to be harvested. According to those involved she was not aware of the spiking before it happened, however she did type and mail a letter afterwards to officials to warn them that the trees had been spiked. She later testified against the spikers in court.
I’m a bit torn on this one. All seem to agree that Stone-Manning had no personal involvement in or awareness of the spiking, and was a voice for moderation within environmental groups. And when she found out, she did ensure that officials were warned of the spiking so that no loggers were injured.
Still, as Sen Barrasso says, she didn’t cooperate with investigators until she got caught. After the spiking, she was aware that specific individuals within the movement were engaged in potentially deadly activities. She found out about this spiking, but what about the next one?
Getting back to the present, I think it’s likely her nomination is toast. The only Republicans who might have backed her (Collins and Murkowski) come from states with large logging sectors. Murkowski’s already said she’s opposed. So you need every Democrat on board, and Joe Manchin seems to take pride in antagonizing environmentalists (this is a man who literally shot a copy of the cap-and-trade bill for a campaign ad).
I suspect you’re right.
Here’s an interesting and very detailed post-election analysis of Biden’s (and Trump’s) typical voters, and how the election was different in 2016, 2018 and 2020:
The war for Afghanistan’s future was probably lost when the U.S. decided to invade Iraq and divert resources that could have been spent on building Afghanistan. Even so, a cursory review of history suggests that the odds on a successful nation-building experiment in Afghanistan would have been long had we decided to give that effort our full, undivided attention.
Interesting numbers in that piece. Among others, I underestimated the Gen X support for Biden and overestimated the support for him from Silents.
There was no hope of ‘building’ Afghanistan. It’s less a country than it is a giant region of competing warlords and lawlessness. You can’t just ‘build’ a country out of that.
The U.S. was right to invade Afghanistan, but they should have just kicked the asses of the Taliban and said, ‘Right. Now that you know what we can and will do, shape up or we’ll come back and do it again.’ Nation building was never an option, as there is no nation there to build.
“And write it a hundred times by daybreak, or I’ll cut your balls off.”
Exactly. But we didn’t have to make them conjugate a verb first.
It’s all about the Benjamins, baby:
“For-profit” institutions are not the only problem:
Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.
Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.
Net Neutrality may be restored. White House Executive Order Poised to Restore Net Neutrality