President Joe Biden is slated to announce on Wednesday that he will have all U.S. troops withdrawn from Afghanistan by September this year, pushing back the May 1 deadline ex-President Donald Trump had negotiated with the Taliban in 2020.
Disappointing to abandon them, things will get a lot worse there, particularly for females.
no doubt
but Iâm glad itâs not going to be some 20 year old E3âs responsibility
Declare victory and go home. What we should have done in 2002 (yes, itâs been that long), is round up the top 100 power players we could find, whether they be government officials, warlords, druglords, tribal leaders or whatever, stand them up in front of a kangaroo court, then execute the lot of them. Yes, we would have executed a bunch of innocent people among the guilty.
But we would have ended up killing a lot fewer innocent people than what we did do. And it would have been more effective than what we did do; the lesson in Afghanistan and other failed states would have resounded for a generation: permit successful terrorist training camps to operate within your borders, America comes in and kills the lot of you.
But Bush the lesser couldnât plan an afternoon bbq for 3 neighbors, let alone understand the import and history of âthe graveyard of empiresâ. And Cheney et al had their eyes on The Prize (h/t Yergin), an oil-rich middle-east colony.
Will another two decades of US military intervention help when the first two decades apparently did not solve the problem?
Foreign policy by premeditated mass murder. Seems to me that we have seen this play before. Doesnât sound very âAmerican,â now does it?
Us being there, even minimally now, is one of the few things holding even a tenuous bit of survival for folks.
Greatly fear that there will be a bloodbath in the wake of our departure, if it happens as laid out in plans.
Cue histrionics about never giving a timeline
From Stephen TannerâŚAfghanistan (pp. 323-324)
Second, Americaâs goals in Afghanistan following the attacks on September 11, 2001, became muddled. George W. Bush, who decried ânation buildingâ in his 2000 presidential run, appeared to go fuzzy once he had a nation of his own to build. The almost bloodless (for the U.S.) fall of the Taliban left the Bush administration with a desperately poor, war-weary people who appeared eager to accept for the first time in their history Western democratic and free-market principles as a basis for regenerating their state.
This perception was not an illusion, and the U.S. had at least two years to demonstrate that the power of its ideals could translate into tangible benefits for the Afghans. Supported by its many alliesâin effect, the entire world in the immediate aftermath of 9/11âthe U.S. might indeed have created a new precedent by setting up a prosperous democratic state in the center of Muslim South Asia.
As it developed, however, Bush had another project on his mindâinvading Iraqâand the Afghan project was deprived of both a serious reconstruction effort and the armed force necessary to support it.
Canât agree with this approach, even if I were to accept what you say about it.
Try studying real history, not the bowdlerized stuff you get in high school. Or would you rather spend 19 years blowing up wedding parties and traveling families with drone strikes?
Whatever the reality, it is sad. Obama wanted out and so did Trump but it never happened. I agree with,
âThe President has been consistent in his view that there is not a military solution to Afghanistan, that we have been there for far too long,â White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a press briefing on Wednesday.
Hopefully âtroopsâ will not mean everyone⌠just troops. 
It had better mean everyone. Take just the troops out, those who remain are future hostages and victims of atrocities. And we get sucked back in.
Contractors ainât staying back in any significant numbers without military cover.
So could see us rotating a few hundred special forces through at a time, then we can do the technicality dance about the definition of deployedâŚ
We are not abandoning them, we are getting kicked out.
Weâre abandoning our allies to be slaughtered by the taliban.
Not a fan of abandoning allies.
RightâŚCheney, the POTUS.
Out âalliesâ are a bunch of losers that in 20 years could not get their shit together.
Is this a recipe for US military intervention in every trouble-spot? People are dying in Myanmar, for example, and even in China. What about their survival?
In Afghanistan, suppose youâve identified a benefit of our military ⌠presence. What about the cost, the opportunity cost, the unintended consequences, and so on?