We all get to choose who we blame. The bottom line is there is no democracy in Afghanistan without a US military presence backing it. We just proved that big time. Republicans were willing to stay there forever I think. Biden didn’t want us there. Trump came along and decided to pull the troops out. He’s the only Republican who could have gotten away with that. At his rally less than 8 weeks ago Trump was bragging how he was the one that got us out of Afghanistan against the wishes of Democrats and that it would be nearly impossible to stop what he started.
The withdrawal has been a mess. The Afghan troop collapse really F’ed the withdrawal plans. On the US side they have been presented with a set of challenges trying to get people out. Biden has taken a serious hit from this. Anyone that needs to get out headed for the Kabul airport. The Taliban decided to surround the airport and have been keeping people from entering. There have been beatings and people shot trying to enter the airport.
We saw the scenes of people climbing on airplanes and falling to their deaths.
The day after the US sent in US military and have regained control of the airport runways etc. but, the Taliban still control access to the airport. The US has countered the Taliban by staging people that need to get out outside of the airport in undisclosed places and have been picking them up by chinook helicopters and taking them to the airport where military aircraft have been flying them out. They were getting about 1000 people out a day to start. Now they are over 5000 a day.
They Pentagon has ordered commercial airlines to help evacuate people from Afghanistan. The military flies them out of Kabul to undisclosed safe airports where they switch to commercial.
The evacuation has been a mess but, they have really stepped up efforts to get these people out.
As far as taking the blame for leaving in general both Presidents have taken credit.
Re: World Politics
Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2021 10:09 pm
by Nodack
The reason all those Visas for the Afghans that worked for the US were tied up in limbo for so long? They were being deliberately halted because certain people in the Trump administration didn’t want them in the US and sabotaged the process.
Pence aide blames Stephen Miller for 'devastating' visa system for Afghans https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 228495002/
WASHINGTON – A former aide to former Vice President Mike Pence blamed racist views of a top Trump administration official for the inability of many translators and other allies to get out of Afghanistan before the U.S. withdrew troops.
Olivia Troye tweeted that Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to former President Donald Trump, teamed up with “enablers” to undermine anyone trying to get the allies out by “devastating” the special immigrant visa system at the departments of State and Homeland Security.
“Stephen Miller would peddle his racist hysteria about Iraq & Afghanistan,” tweeted Troye. She described Pence as “fully aware” of the problem.
A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration violated the law by failing to promptly resolve visa applications for thousands of Afghans and Iraqis who worked for American troops and diplomats, and ordered the government to fix the delays.
U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan of Washington, D.C., said the government offered no convincing explanation why it has failed to abide by 2013 legislation requiring authorities to deliver a decision on visa applications for Afghans and Iraqis within nine months. Instead, many applicants — who risked their lives working for U.S. troops or other government agencies — have had to wait for several years to get an answer on their visa requests, the court said in the ruling handed down on Friday.
Re: World Politics
Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2021 1:07 am
by Flagrant Fowl
Explain to me how the guy who was born on third base and routinely cheated everyone in the business world before he became POTUS would've done anything better than what we've seen from the Biden administration over the last week.
Objectively, no one can explain how it would've happened because there isn't any evidence of Trump being able to do it in his entire life.
"The man understood optics." is the most hilarious thing I've read in a while.
Re: World Politics
Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2021 9:59 am
by Nodack
The Trump admin sabotaged the program designed to expedite getting them out for years. I have my doubts how much effort he would have put into getting them out in the last few days. The military leaders that told Biden the Afghan troops should hold out for roughly 18 months would have told Trump the same thing.
Things are getting dicey. We have the Taliban and the US military in very close quarters with thousands of civilians between them. We just had a firefight at the airport between forces. It’s only a matter of time before things escalate.
“the Islamist group is believed to have gained includes hundreds of thousands of assault rifles, thousands of armored vehicles, dozens of aircraft, tanks, artillery, sniper rifles, night-vision goggles and much more.”
I am pretty sure that after the US is gone that a lot of that military hardware that the Taliban confiscated will suddenly stop working in the middle of the night.
Re: World Politics
Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2021 12:00 pm
by Nodack
They were getting about 1000 people out a day to start. Now they are over 5000 a day.
About 16,000 people have been evacuated out of Kabul on 28 military flights and 61 coalition aircraft in the past day, Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor, deputy director of the Joint Regional Operations, told reporters at the Pentagon.
They have obviously been able to ramp up operations.
Re: World Politics
Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2021 3:55 pm
by Flagrant Fowl
I served in Afghanistan as a US Marine, twice. Here’s the truth in two sentences
One: For 20 years, politicians, elites and D.C. military leaders lied to us about Afghanistan.
Two: What happened last week was inevitable, and anyone saying differently is still lying to you.
This guy is support for the point I was trying to make last week. Besides seeking revenge against Al-Qaeda for 9/11, the entire military operation in the Middle East has been a grift for evil, greedy (mostly American) people.
World Politics
Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2021 1:29 pm
by 3rdside
3rdside wrote:If this result was inevitable then it’s possibly better to look at it in terms of a political move, that he’s just carried out a Trump policy, giving the GOP crazies one less thing to shout about.
Could have been handled better I’m sure, but the genesis of fault is the Bush administration, with one bad decision following the other from there from all subsequent administrations.
Trump’s role in the current fiasco sounds pretty damning but again, this is all on Bush.
At risk of sounding like I’m swaying in the breeze, this from Ambrose Evans Pritchard in the Telegraph, providing detail to my original comments above:
History may just vindicate Biden over Afghanistan
China and Russia ultimately have more to fear from the Jihadi destabilisation of Central Asia than the US
Joe Biden inherited Donald Trump's deal with the Taliban to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan
It is not easy to defend anything about Joe Biden’s tragically-bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, nor to argue that the long-term damage to both America’s strategic interests and Western credibility is probably negligible. But I will take a stab.
One thing you learn covering foreign affairs for more than 40 years is that quick judgments based on emotional scenes invariably lead to false geopolitical conclusions.
The President told White House reporters on Sunday night that “history” would vindicate his decision to wind back decades of imperial overstretch, cutting American losses in an intractable corner of the world, and ending a 20-year war that has diverted $2 trillion of taxpayer money from more pressing strategic priorities.
He also stated that China and Russia will view the US withdrawal with some concern, belying the reflexive Schadenfreude of their press.
He may be right on all counts. In the short run there is almost nothing that can be done to reverse a diplomatic disgrace of the first order. The West can at best retrieve a degree of honour by delivering on its promise to evacuate those Afghans under its direct responsibility.
One can hardly but be moved by the courage and generosity of British and Nato troops on the ground. This has a poignant dignity that is not entirely lost on the world. The Telegraph’s surreal diary of soldier "A" from 16 Air Assault Brigade’s 2 Para is a remarkable exhibit.
Between Sunday, August 15 and Friday, August 20, Britain evacuated more than 2,400 people, 599 of them UK nationals
Between Sunday, August 15 and Friday, August 20, Britain evacuated more than 2,400 people, 599 of them UK nationals CREDIT: BEN SHREAD
The long-run is another matter. It was conventional wisdom in 1975 that the infamous Saigon helicopter lift was the final humiliating blow for a spent hegemon in ineluctable decline. Instead the US retreat from Vietnam had the unexpected effect of accelerating the end of the Soviet Union.
It tempted Russia to overreach with its own invasion of Afghanistan and with arms-length revolutions in Latin America and Africa, which were to become ruinously expensive as the Reagan Administration bled Moscow dry by the proxy insurgencies (Reagan Doctrine).
The US rearmed. Its economic and technological depths came through. Within a decade the Pentagon had 14 aircraft battle groups and was preparing its Star Wars missile defence. It was the Soviet Union that fell apart, ushering in a quarter century of US world hegemony.
On the face of it, the Vietnam war was a far greater reversal of fortunes than a 20-year failure in quixotic state-building in the Hindu Kush. It occurred during the Cold War in a struggle with a Communist ideology of universalist appeal. Taliban obscurantism is a niche taste.
In the mid-1970s, America had just smashed the Bretton Woods financial system and was already struggling with the Great Inflation. It faced two Opec oil shocks that exposed a critical energy dependency. Today the US is the biggest combined producer of oil and natural gas in the world.
The oil “intensity” of GDP has in any case fallen by two thirds since then, and will go into free fall as electrification accelerates. Oil supply is no longer a primordial concern for the US. Semiconductors are more important, and the US dominates the global ecosystem of chip technology – even when wafers are made in Taiwan.
Yet oil supply does still matter to China and rising Asia. The anomaly of the last decade is that strategic and military positioning does not yet fully reflect this. In a sense the US has been doing China’s work for it by trying to uphold stability in the Middle East (badly, you might say) and patrolling the oil supply routes.
Without wishing to be crudely reductionist, America’s step-by-step disengagement from the Middle East is happening because successive US presidents think the region is no longer central to the national interest.
By the same token, America has been doing China’s work for it in Afghanistan. Taliban strongholds harbour many of the estimated 3,500 Uighur fighters from the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, said to infiltrate Xinjiang through the Wakhan corridor.
China and Russia both face irredentist Islamic movements on their soil – unlike the US – and ultimately have more to fear from the Jihadi destabilisation of Central Asia. Iran is at daggers drawn with the Taliban over the persecution of the Hazara Shia, already being murdered again according to Amnesty International. Is a Taliban victory really in the interest of any of the surrounding powers?
The chorus of vituperative attacks against Mr Biden over recent days mostly ignore one large salient fact: the US sold the pass 18 months ago when Donald Trump signed the Doha withdrawal agreement giving the Taliban everything they wanted, with fig leaf conditions that cannot plausibly be enforced. The US gave up its chief bargaining chip.
As Kate Clark from the Afghanistan Analysts Network wrote in this newspaper, the errors compounded as the months went by. The Trump Administration yanked away US air support. It compelled the Afghan security forces to adopt a punch-bag defensive posture that left it passively vulnerable to attacks.
Donald Trump's US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban's peace negotiation team in Doha in 2020. The result was a withdrawal deal dressed up as a peace agreement
Donald Trump's US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban's peace negotiation team in Doha in 2020. The result was a withdrawal deal dressed up as a peace agreement
The Taliban exploited this impunity to murder off-duty military, judges, lawyers, and government officials in a systematic terror campaign. Is it any wonder that the governing system melted away? Europeans now complaining so indignantly were right to object in February 2020 at Mr Trump’s pretence of a peace deal, but they have since had 18 months to prepare the evacuation of those under their care.
It is true that there have been no Nato deaths in Afghan action since the Doha deal, but that is because the Taliban had no interest in disrupting an arrangement that was so perfectly to their liking. All they had to do was to run out the clock.
Had the Biden White House torn up the deal – as Tony Blair wanted, with grand talk of Western “strategic will” – there most certainly would have been a fresh wave of attacks. It would have required yet another troop surge by the US military, and another open-ended strategic commitment, to put Humpty Dumpty back together by that late stage.
America’s democracy had no conceivable appetite for this. Mr Blair may call this an “epoch-making retreat” that parades our humiliation, but the language is more than a trifle disingenuous.
The Nord Stream 2 undersea pipeline will allow Russian gas to be pumped directly to Germany
The Nord Stream 2 undersea pipeline will allow Russian gas to be pumped directly to Germany CREDIT: ANDREY RUDAKOV/BLOOMBERG
That is not to acquit Mr Biden for the sins of this episode. It may well cost him his presidency in this Twitterised television age, and perhaps it should, though I cannot help noticing Western media silence over a parallel debacle in Ukraine that may ultimately prove as dangerous in geopolitical terms.
Mr Biden’s deal with Angela Merkel to let the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline go ahead gives Vladimir Putin what he wants. It diverts flows from the Ukrainian to the Baltic route, depriving Kiev of its self-defence leverage. Chancellor Merkel’s pledge that Russia will face sanctions if it tries to use the pipeline has no credibility. Berlin has been in political collusion with Gazprom from the beginning.
One can understand Mr Biden’s decision on Nord Stream 2: he wishes to avert further damage to US relations with Germany; he does not want to push Putin further towards alliance with China – a “reverse Kissinger” strategy, if you like.
The Biden doctrine is that the US is today confronted by a wolf warrior regime in China openly bent on world domination – the modern equivalent of Khrushchev’s “we will bury you”.
It is a contest between two incompatible systems and philosophies. All else is essentially irrelevant. Side shows are a distraction and squander scarce resources.
If he is right on that elemental point, history may just judge his Afghan withdrawal to be “the logical, rational and right decision to make”, as he put it. Edifying, it is not.
Re: World Politics
Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2021 1:34 pm
by 3rdside
And this from Michael Cohen (a slightly random person to quote tweet but he is a very astute individual ..):
Re: World Politics
Posted: Thu Aug 26, 2021 3:11 pm
by 3rdside
John Hulsman - very good, including more appropriate comments about Tony Blair than mine were!
My quick take on Afghanistan is that I'm glad we're getting out, and while I find the deaths and violence tragic, I would rather suffer that briefly than stay there and continue wasting time, money, and lives by continuing to occupy the country. Biden hasn't done a perfect job with the withdrawal, but they've evacuated a whole bunch of people by now. I think a lot of the attacks on the job he's doing are in bad faith being done by partisans who are eager for an excuse to tear him apart, and by media sources eager to show that they aren't cheerleaders for Biden/Dems. I don't think the Afghanistan issue will be important in the 2022 / 2024 elections.
Re: World Politics
Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2021 7:25 am
by Indy
it is a disaster, and it was always going to be a disaster. Not just when Trump signed that agreement, but once we invaded under Bush, and then kept pouring money and bombs and drones and soldiers into it under him and Obama, and Trump. You can't nation-build and leave and expect it to be anything less than a disaster unless the new regime is leading with an iron fist, and that is usually the problem we are trying to 'fix' when we nation-build.
Re: World Politics
Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2021 2:24 am
by Nodack
The war in Afghanistan has ended. 20 years.I was just thinking back and seem to remember us discussing 9/11 and debating the Iraq and Afghanistan wars here. Maybe not exactly here but with mostly the same bunch of guys. Too bad we can’t go back and take a look at some of our comments from back then.
Re: World Politics
Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2021 8:36 am
by Indy
Only a few days away from the 20th anniversary.
Re: World Politics
Posted: Thu Sep 02, 2021 3:52 am
by virtual9mm
US is de facto allied with the Taliban now. Barf...
Re: World Politics
Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2021 9:23 am
by Nodack
I don’t feel like the US is allies with the Taliban at all. I feel like we had a temporary truce. The US wanted out. The Taliban wanted us out. Both sides were willing to hold off hostilities while we got out. We still have people there so we will continue with the truce to help ensure we get as many out as we can. I don’t think the US or the Taliban are under any illusions that we are allies.
Re: World Politics
Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2021 3:22 pm
by Indy
Well, we did give them a list of people we wanted them to ensure the safety of as they got to the airport. I think that is one reason V9 said 'de facto' allies. We treated them like one.
Xi's crackdown is remaking Chinese society https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/a ... 445407.php The orders have been sudden, dramatic and often baffling. Last week, "American Idol"-style competitions and shows featuring men deemed too effeminate were banned by Chinese authorities. Days earlier, one of China's wealthiest actresses, Zhao Wei, had her movies, television series and news mentions scrubbed from the Internet as if she had never existed.
Over the summer, China's multibillion-dollar private education industry was decimated overnight by a ban on for-profit tutoring, while new regulations wiped more than $1 trillion from Chinese tech stocks since a peak in February. As China's tech moguls compete to donate more to President Xi Jinping's campaign against inequality, "Xi Jinping Thought" is taught in elementary schools, and foreign games and apps like Animal Crossing and Duolingo have been pulled from stores.
"I do believe we are seeing a profound transformation of society, especially given that the government has implemented definitive and strict regulatory measures in such a short amount of time and in so many different industries," he said.
The scope and velocity of the society-wide rectification has some worried China may be at the beginning of the kind of cultural and ideological upheaval that has brought the country to a standstill before.
Last week, an essay by a retired newspaper editor and blogger described the changes as a response to threats from the United States. "What these events tell us is that a monumental change is taking place in China, and that the economic, financial, cultural, and political spheres are undergoing a profound transformation - or, one could say, a profound revolution," wrote Li Guangman.
Re: World Politics
Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2021 7:56 pm
by Nodack
FBI releases first secret 9/11 file: Saudi embassy official let two hijackers stay at his apartment and helped them in LA before the attack, was 'facilitator' for Al-Qaeda and distributed extremist Muslim literature https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... rs-LA.html
FBI releases first secret 9/11 file: Saudi embassy official let two hijackers stay at his apartment and helped them in LA before the attack, was 'facilitator' for Al-Qaeda and distributed extremist Muslim literature https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... rs-LA.html
So the only person tied to a government was a Saudi, and we decided to kill a million people in Afganistan and Iraq because oil (and especially the Bush family/admin's ties to oil).