So you subscribe to the, “So long as there are people in need in the world who we aren’t helping, we should refrain from helping any of them” school of thought. I used to hear that from my crazy right wing relatives.
The left used to be about internationalism, foreign aid, helping refugees, intervening in conflicts for humanitarian reasons, and opposing jingoist ‘America First’ rhetoric. I guess they’ve gone nativist just like the Trumpist right.
By the way, this was Trump’s policy you are defending. Biden is just finishing it in a particularly ham-fisted and damaging way. How does it feel being on the same side as the MAGA crowd? Strange bedfellows indeed.
But staying wasn’t really helping. Just delaying the inevitable. And I’d welcome the endorsement of this strategy from Trump and his idiots, but not surprisingly they’re taking the political road with the issue.
Were pulling the bandaid off, rather than keeping it on long after the wound began to fester. And good. It was long past time.
No, the ‘end game’ could have been an international peacekeeping force of indefinite duration, or an American peacekeeping force.
There is lots of precedent for this. Cyprus has had a peacekeeping force since 1964. Canada maintained a force of 25,000 soldiers there for 30 years. If we could afford it, the U.S. could.
The UN currently has over 100,000 soldiers keeping the peace in numerous countries. SIX of those peacekeeping missions have gone on for more than 25 years. Peacekeepers have been in Cyprus for 56 years.
There was clear precedent for maintaining a peacekeeping force in Afghanistan indefinitely. That instead it is simply being abandoned to maybe the worst actors on the planet is an indictment of the U.S. and leaders of both parties. And that’s the way the world will see it once the carnage is clear, and that will be used by America’s adversaries to peel away support for America.
True, and there was bipartisan support for paying the taxes that war and occupation requires. Yet since 2001, we’ve had two multi-trillion dollar wars and occupations, and taxes on the rich have gone down while expenditures and national debt have gone up.
If conservatives are so concerned about wanting to protect women and wanting to throw their superman capes over a puddle so they can walk…maybe they can put their money where their mouth is.
There is also a huge difference in that all three of these countries have stable longstanding governments that their citizens are motivated to defend. Afghanistan has never been able to have a stable government form in all of our time there. Given how quickly things are disintegrating, it begs the question how much control Kabul even had over much of the nation to start with.
The last twenty years have been a harsh lesson in how much we are able to solve the world’s ills. Nobody is saying that we shouldn’t support humanitarian causes or try to work for good. But there is a limit to how many resources we are willing to devote to it, particularly ones that may get people killed.
The American people want Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security checks and a humongous military budget… and they want to pay for it with tax cuts. This is the base problem of everything facing our nation today.
‘Peacekeeping’ is not nation building. It doesn’t matter if Afghanistan never becomes a stable country. What matters is whether s reasonable force can keep the peace and keep a lot of innocent people from dying. As I said, peacekeepers have been in Cyprus for 56 years. I believe over 100 Canadian soldiers have died there.
Saying that peacekeeping in Afghanistan is useless because if the peacekeepers leave Afghanistan will revert to lawlessness is like saying that having police in a city is useless because once the police leave there will be lawlessness anyway. It totally misses the point.
If you really believe that the the allied forces were doing an excellent job of keeping the peace there, you’re sadly mistaken. There’s been non-stop conflict on the ground, even if that doesn’t get reported every day in the news. Afghanistan has been far from peaceful. The US-allied forces were not really that successful in keeping the peace; they had been successful in keeping the Taliban from gaining control of provincial capitals, but they were under pressure. Have been for at least the past 10 years.
I find this to be a flawed analogy. The situation that we have had in Afghanistan is more like if people living in Dallas had to pay for a police force in Phoenix as well as their own in Dallas, and did so for twenty years. After that amount of time, it would not be unreasonable for people in Dallas to say “hey, why can’t these Phoenix people handle their own police?”
To derail the Afghan thing further, there’s grave concern about the welfare, in particular, of their 250 female judges.
In this evening’s PBS segment, a couple of judges on the internet speak out, knowing they can’t really hide wany more, as well as a personal i-view with a third judge - Vanessa Ruiz (not to be confused with the stunning new addition to the PBS newsanchors) with some very sobering, grim comments about there being really no plans in place to get them out, what with poor communication and access. Really, the clock is ticking on them. Harrowing shit.
By latest count there’s 5,000 troops deployed to Kabul to rescue embassy and airport folks, but none, as far as I know, for the outlying towns where most of theses judges apparently are, and unfortunately the AP article doesn’t address that particular issue.
Afghanistan is something like 30 times the size of Cyprus, both in population and land area, with a lot more difficult terrain than that island (and much, much more difficult logistics to keep forces supplied).
But if the UN wants to use half its budget occupying the country, go right ahead. I’m just glad we’re finally getting out.
The annual cost of keeping 10,000 US troops in Afghanistan was around $50 billion while the annual cost of keeping troops in Japan and South Korea is apparently just $8.5 billion.
I don’t think there were any easy decisions in this situation and the Taliban takeover is going to be a humanitarian disaster but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect the US government to pump $50 billion every year into Afghanistan year after year, decade after decade especially when there is 70% support for withdrawal from the US public.
Your fevered imagination of “the left” was in favor of those things, but really, much of it is about empathy, which is ideologically neutral. And the landscape has shifted in the last half century. “The left” is more aligned with pragmatism, somewhere just shy of utilitarianism, employing thought processes rather than 3x5 cue cards when dealing with troublesome situations.
Yeah? Then why was he picking boogers for 4 years while he had an actual opportunity to move forward on it? It was an empty talking point, nothing more.
Peace keeping does not mean allying with one side and fighting the other. Peacekeeping can not be done by interested parties. Peacekeeping can not be done until there is a peace to keep.
I understand Americans not knowing this because they have no experience with it but Canada has a proud history of peacekeeping so you have no excuse.
Biden will be fortunate to get US embassy staff and forces out of Kabul without any major incidents or embarrassments. Unfortunately, a lot of the Afghans we promised to evacuate are probably going to fall into Taliban hands. I hope that some measure of mercy is granted but this is the Taliban we’re talking about, which has spent 20 years being chased into all corners of Afghanistan with the help of many current officials in the Afghan government and military. It’s more likely that this will end up being a bloodbath.
Another critical difference is that the US had basically reached diplomatic resolutions with Germany and Japan. We effectively oversaw a true reformation of Japan and Germany’s politics, and we didn’t have to contend with domestic resistance there. In South Korea, we were defending them - and still are - against a hostile neighbor. These are not really good analogues for the situation in Afghanistan, where we were occupying a highly tribal society in a war-torn state, and the Taliban was always giving us formidable resistance.
Hey, I was going by the estimates of the U.S. ‘Intelligence Community’, which just a few days ago said that it was very unlikely that Kabul would fall in the next few weeks. And Joe Biden three weeks ago said that he was fully confident that the Afghan Military was up to the task and would keep the Taliban at bay. He didn’t think Kabul would fall at all.
My worst-case scenario assumed they’d all be wrong. I had no idea they would be THAT wrong. It’s shocking and embarassing that the President and his advisors could be so clueless about the consequences of such a momentous decision.
The scenes today from Kabul are sickening. It’s like a repeat of Saigon. Airplanes can’t take off from the airport because throngs of terrified people have overrun it and no one is providing securiy. B-29 bombers are on their way to destroy American aircraft still there at abandoned air bases, as someone fucked up and didn’t organize the flying out of U.S. attack aircraft. People who were promised a safe exit from the country are being refused.
This was all avoidable. It’s a giant mess. I guess Barack Obama was correct when he said, “You can always count on Joe to fuck things up.”