A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
Sunday saw the Afghan government collapse as the Taliban took over Kabul with a stunning speed that caught the U.S. government, which had been working to evacuate its embassy personnel and American citizens over the past few days, completely off guard.
Sorry Afghanistan, but we shouldnât have been there in the first place and yet the US hangs on thinking they can make a difference. Not our problem and itâs way beyond time to be gone.
Re: Texas, looks like theyâre going to need some major infrastructure in that building. What? They donât get rain in Texas?
Sadly, the blame for the debacle will fall in the Biden administration. The RNC has already erased their praise for T**** in his negotiation of this withdrawal, so they are already re-writing history on the subject. Bidenâs earlier vow that this wouldnât be a debacle will be used against him and the Dems in 2022 and 2024, just as âyou can keep your doctorâ continues to be used against the Dems.
Yes, Biden was right to continue the withdrawal, but someone in the Pentagon totally misjudged the impact and this will be a historical failure, much like the fall of Saigon.
I think Iâve seen a half dozen admin reps decry any attempts to characterize the fall of Kabul as similar to the fall of Saigon. From what I hear of the chaos and scrum to get on planes and get the hell out of Afghanistan it seems a perfectly apt comparison. The only thing missing is pushing helicopters off the decks of aircraft carriers.
There are no graceful exits from something like this, ever.
Biden might not be judged harshly for pulling out of Afghanistan, but he will be judged harshly if he and his advisors and the military donât safely extricate our citizens and allies from the country.
Hardest thing in the world to do is cut your losses. Everybody knows the sunk costs fallacy, but itâs still almost impossible to resist it.
Every empire on the continent, back to Alexander and before, has tried and failed to conquer Afghanistan. https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/why-is-afghanistan-the-graveyard-of-empires/
We could stay another hundred years, sacrifice a million soldiers and 10 million civilians, bomb them back to the stone age, and we will still fail.
Itâs not called the Graveyard of Empires for nothing.
Also, we have learned nothing from Vietnam.
The inability of Afghan security forces to defend their country has played a very powerful role in what weâve seen over the last few weeks.â
It is not just the last few weeks. It is the last few decades. This isnât a new development. Despite the training and weaponry, the Afghans were simply incapable of defending themselves. Again, Biden is right, but the optics are more than horrendous.
Graceful, maybe not, but intelligent and orderly given the time to judge the situation and plan accordingly seems the minimal responsibility of our military and leadership.
Since when is âReady, fire, aim!â the way to do things?
$2 Trillion thatâs your complaint, what about the lost lives?
George Orwell would be proud of the RNC after all we have always been at war in Eastasia.
It ends the way the last âforeverâ war endedâŚin total loss. Expect to hear the Biden blame game all day today but did he do something that was not in Americaâs interests? If we spent another trillion and stayed 10 more years does anyone think it would end differently? What Biden seems understood and the political and military leaders of the last 20 years did not is changing Afghanistan is impossible. To do that you have to change the Afghan people and that is impossible. You canât rely on courage, patriotism and honor in a people whoâs DNA does not code for those traits. We learned that, or at least I hope we did, when the Army we trained and supplied and fought with for 20 years threw down their arms and ran when the defense of their country was given to them. The defense of their families and their way of life. They donât do that there.
Biden did what should have been done 20 years ago and every year after that. âone more yearâ and âsurgeâ are careerist military bullshit. Theyâd have us fund that party for 100 years if they could get away with it. Thank God we finally had a President that saw thought that and that the war was BAD for America and left the Afghan people to their inevitable self driven fate.
No more Americans die for NOTHING. No more billions spent for NOTHING.
Over 801,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence, and several times as many due to the reverberating effects of war
Over 335,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting
37 million â the number of war refugees and displaced persons
The US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $6.4 trillion
The US government is conducting counterterror activities in 85 countries
The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the US and abroad
I wonder what it will take to remind the American people that W started this war, T**** signed the agreement to get out and Biden did what was agreed to.
The GOP should own this war but they wonât and the American people will never hear that from any resource.
@garrybee but there is never enough money to help with social programs, amirite???
I think 30% of American people are ouf of their minds, and we need to worry about that instead.
And I wouldnât doubt that the someone has made a ton of money by investing in the military industrial complex.
Didnât Dear Orange Leader have a secret plan to defeat ISIS and the Taliban? How is it their still around? Weird.
Itâs almost as if we should never have been there in the first place.
Thanks, Obama!
Assuming by allies you mean Afghan citizens who helped the US, you can be sure that this will not include all of those that it should.
Iâll raise you at least 10%.