There has been “preventable loss of human life” every day of the last 20 years.
I’m not arguing that it’s awful . . . I just think that if one is going to point to one particular corner of a war as representing a “serious failure” beyond the entire cluster, then a more meaningful definition of “serious failure” might be useful.
I think they’re thinking is that they basically have control of the country and are seeing that we can’t pack up our shit fast enough, so why do something that would demand a course reversal. They are also probably looking ahead toward the post-US Afghanistan and may be angling to curry favor with Russia, China, and neighbors in an attempt to break international sanctions and possibly even expand trade. It’s going to be difficult to run a country of 38 million people on a budget of $1 billion.
Russia or China would probably be thrilled to help them export opium products to North America.
There are also rare earth minerals and opportunities to run pipelines to different parts of the continent. The Taliban wants greater legitimacy. They will absolutely settle scores, but they might be selective and discreet about how they do that.
As awful as the Taliban are, they don’t want ISIS running around the countryside. It is too early to divine exactly how Taliban 2.0 will turn out, but I can entertain a hypothesis that proposes the Taliban may be a little careful in how it utilizes the likes of Al Qaida as well. In the end, what regimes want is power, control, money, dominance.
No, you’re repeatedly telling me what my position is. And - oh look - you’re doing it again:
I literally explained what my position was. And here you are telling me that it’s something different. Again. Even after you said that nobody could know except me.
Do you even read what you write?
I asked if you’d called for previous presidents to resign. Which is a “review” of what you’ve done. Which nobody would know but you.
I could, I suppose, take the same approach you’ve done in this thread and simply assert your position - say, “You don’t actually care about Afghanistan; you’re just looking for any feeble excuse to demand Biden resign because you don’t like him. Prove me wrong!” - but that wouldn’t be a very constructive approach.
But I suspect you know that already, which is why you keep misrepresenting both what I’ve said and what you yourself have said.
Oh look - further misrepresentations. I specifically answered that question:
But here you are, claiming that we weren’t answering the question and that we couldn’t answer “no”. Again - you’re ignoring what I actually said and then claiming without basis that my position is something entirely different.
One of us is continuing to deflect to avoid admitting they hold an untenable position, and it’s not me.
This is an interesting discussion. Personally, it would never occur to me that someone should resign as President when something bad happens Bad things happen all the time. Mistakes are made. Situations are difficult, and this was especially so.
Absent gross incompetence (which I don’t see here), we pick up the pieces and move on. Carter had his failed rescue mission, GWB was alleged to have missed warnings of the 9/11 attack. Ford had Saigon. (I think it was Ford–too lazy to google) Our presidents are elected to do the best they can. Failure doesn’t require resignations. Staying in office doesn’t mean “no consequences.”
There was no prospect at all of the US getting out of Afghanistan with no casualties and no fuckups.
None.
There was no prospect of anti-Biden people failing to complain about the pain from ripping the bandage off and blaming him, rather than the long list of people who caused the injury that required the bandage in the first place.
Right now there are a bunch of pundits and know-nothings pontificating about what has just happened from the safety of ignorance and hindsight, who think they not only know better than all the real experts but that the real experts got it so wrong they should have been hung drawn and quartered. And those pundits and know-nothings know this from a few days of sitting in their armchair reading a few things.
A few days after any complex incident, the volume of detailed, from-all-angles information available to the general public is close to zero, IME. So should I at this time form the view that the pundits and know-nothings probably have it right and all the real experts have it wrong, or the other way around? So hard to decide…
This is all just noise and wild gesturing from the those who would have made noise and gestured wildly if someone stubbed their toe getting on a plane out of Kabul.
I predict that Afghanistan will no longer be a news topic in three weeks or less.
Looks like Bush’s next painting is a winner!
I think the biggest issue the Taliban is going to have is can they actually govern Afghanistan. They were never really able to do so before we went in, they had military suzerainty over it, but lacked a lot of the institutions and bureaucracies of a state.
It sounds like the person that will likely run the Taliban Afghan state is a moderate by Taliban standards, but what will his control be over guys with guns on the street? Discipline was never that high among the Taliban to begin with, and as an insurgent group, individuals and groups within it were generally expected to act autonomously most of the time. That isn’t a great format for a leader in Kabul issuing commands and expecting them to be followed. There is talk that the Taliban is putting word on the street that its guys are not to abuse civilians, and that there’s a mobile app civilians should use to report abuses. But again, how and with what regularity is the Taliban going to be able to investigate and act when its guys step out of line? Remember for an irregular force too, say a guy gets rough with a civilian and a higher up punishes the guy. But the issue is that guy has friends and maybe family/tribal members who serve in the Taliban with him. Are those going to say “well, he acted out, so be it” or are they now going to harbor resentment that might grow with time?
We actually had been in early talks with the Taliban before 9/11 to be involved in building a pipeline across the country (they were more than receptive), one of the hang up issues though is the Taliban didn’t really have the sort of institutional control over the whole country to make such a project feasible. A lot of that would have to change.
The easier way to run Afghanistan is sort of the old feudal model, the Taliban sits on top with control of the big cities and most of the military power, but leaves much of the country to its own devices. That limits the scope of what they need to do, but it also limits their ability to stop local conflicts from erupting, and it limits somewhat their ability to stop their members (who have all sorts of different tribal affiliations–we often call the Taliban a “Pashtun” group, but there are lots of Pashtun tribes, and tribe > ethnicity > country for these people) from getting into personal vendettas and other entanglements.
I remember articles from years ago where US soldiers expressed their frustration when training their Afghani counterparts. Even something relatively simple, like how to use their rifles effectively, was an exercise in frustration as most of the Afghan’s had no interest in aiming at their targets preferring to spray & pray which just wastes a lot of ammunition. Even getting them take the initiative to go get much needed water without relying on someone else to deliver it to them was like pulling teeth. It makes sense that nobody was surprised the Afghan government collapsed it was just a surprise it happened so quickly.
I’d just like to note that the excellent Washington Post in your link is one (Part 5) of a six part series. I’m thinking the whole thing may be worth reading, links to the other articles are embedded at the end of the article.
And, FWIW, the Taliban insurrectionists are complaining that Twitter is violating their “freedom of speech” by not letting them have an account.
Maybe they will team up with the other religiously conservative insurrectionists and file a class action lawsuit.
Maybe they can get accounts on Parler.
Nah, Parler is old news. Gettr is the place to be.
No, that’s you, dumbass.
There’s no doubt that Afghanistan has been a hot mess since day one - Biden doesn’t own the failure of Afghanistan. But there’s also no mistaking the fact that this is rapidly turning into a political disaster for him in terms of optics. The Taliban has blocked access to Kabul’s airport. They can take hostages, and I wouldn’t put it past them to use US hostages as bargaining chips to see if they can get some concessions on sanctions. A total clusterfuck in the making. He would be getting into the Jimmy Carter zone.
Legit misread that as Griftr.
Trump would have handled the withdrawal more in keeping with the American ideals we all cherish:
Yes, hundreds of Afghanis would still have been scrambling after the last C-130, but it would have showered them with #10 envelopes containing COBRA forms.
And rolls of paper towels.