So we have this cartoon today :
Speaking from experience?
My experience is of limited use; it was 16 years ago and I was a very junior soldier who rarely knew even what operation I was part of at any given time, let alone how it fit into our operational picture or our strategy.
But if they have given up Kandahar, Kabul is not far behind.
This is a rough thing to watch, even if I thought Iâd given up hope ten years ago.
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Based on posts in Reddit, the Afghan armyâs running away.
Yeah, um, they do that a lot.
Current situation in Kabul right nowâŚ
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Welp, this was wildly optimistic.
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It happened quicker and sooner than everybody expected. Like the Spanish Inquisition.
I pity the women, girls and children who got left behind.
I think we should move the Afghanistan discussion over to a new message because as Jeff Foxworthy once said, the only way to describe it is with the word âclusterâ in it.
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I was literally at the center of this chat and did not do that because I am also not very aware.
I re-watched War Machine on Netflix yesterday night. Itâs always been more cringe than funny for me, mostly because it was more insightful than comedic. âWe did all of the winning we were ever going to do here in the first six months. Now weâre just making a mess.â
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Meanwhile, America rediscovers (yet again) that we have been in Afghanistan since 2001.
I thought Iâd given up hope like 10 years ago, but it still hurts to watch it all turn to ashes.
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Thatâs gotta burn man.
Apparently we are going to be bombing all the crap we didnât already get out. Plus the lend lease stuff I guess.
I still donât get why everyone was so against Trump doing this but Biden does it even more haphazardly and its ok. When obviously it isnât ok.
In Kabul they are destroying documents and American flags and other symbols ahead of time privately before they are overrun.
I donât know of anyone who thinks this is okay. I am mystified that some people thought it wouldnât happen this way. The only reason it didnât happen much sooner is because no one wanted to be the one to own it.
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It is so frustrating watching the US do this generation after generation to countries. We go in and say weâll make it all better and eventually we just bail.
Vietnamese, Kurds, Cubans, Ukraine, Afghans, Hong Kong⌠Last time we almost toed the line for an ally like that was Korea, and Iâm sure everyone in South Korea is worth it.
I donât know if there was a great way to end this, but rushing troops in to protect troops we are withdrawing seems to be a reactive way to go about this. I also think maybe we should have done this 15 years ago. Hit hard, push the Taliban back, then let the country try to pull itself together. Though it really seems like itâs been the Taliban and itâs like running the country for centuries, just different tribes.
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Why did the US send troops in to Afghanistan?
In hindsight, maybe that was the wrong thing to do, and that other ways and means would have worked better.
But religious zealots will ignore logic and reason, and tend to be violent only to have their side enforced as âit always worked for usâ.
The news coming out of there now is heartbreaking.
Bwahaha.
Our govt is totally out of touch with reality.
They now want to institute a NHI (national healthcare) as well as basic income, and the taxpayer will have to cough up.
Problem is, the taxpayer base is something like 1 taxpayer for 8 freeloaders. Totally unsustainable.
As Sandor Clegane wouldâve said : âfuck offâ.
If they implement it, then I will just resign and take my lumps with the bank etc clamouring for their money, Iâm not going to slave for a pittance only to be taxed to death.
Yeah. Totally. 
There is a LOT of blame being flung around now. âHow could we have gone from âIt should be over a year after we leave before thereâs any problemsâ to âWell, that escalated quicklyâ?â âItâs Bidenâs fault.â âItâs Trumpâs fault.â
Republicans want to impeach Biden, including invoking the 25th Amendment. âItâs shows heâs incompetent and impairedâ, âHe made too-rosy statements that didnât account for realityâ or somesuch. The page showing support for being in Afghanistan has been deleted from the Republican National Committeeâs website, but they say thatâs misleading because theyâre in the process of moving content to a new website. As of today, most or all of anything from before 2021 appears to be gone from the GOP.com website. They seem to have been extremely selective in whatâs been kept.
Trumpâs saying the Taliban knows he wouldnât have put up with this and this only happened because Biden didnât follow his plan he had for dealing with this. To me, thatâs another of his âIâm your saviorâ tactics.
Others are putting this squarely back on Trumpâs shoulders, saying recognizing the Taliban and giving them legitimacy set this in motion. The Doha agreement in February 2020 is being called âa surrender agreement with the Talibanâ, a âweak agreementâ that gave them too much and it hurt the Afghan government. Though Trump said he would withdraw troops, he never actually planned to. It was simply a âplayâ to get Afghanistanâs president to negotiate a power-sharing deal with the Taliban.
Iâm going to have to watch that movie Sig mentioned. That seems to be closer to reality and in line with the other things Iâve read or listened to.
- The U.S. tried to build a U.S.-style military for a government that didnât exist. The corruption of the government was never replaced by one where the population would be taken care of instead of those in power.
- The three U.S. administrations before this one didnât bring the troops home.
- The focus should have been on counter-terrorism instead of counter-insurgency and nation-building.
- John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, says we did the same thing with Afghanistan that we did before and weâre going to keep doing it in the future unless we actually start learning what we need to change.
I think this is going to go down in the history books as a lesson in going there for the wrong reasons and the sunk cost fallacy. We stayed because of how much we spent before and we had to keep supporting it to get our return on investment (the Afghan government changing to better support the population). The Afghan government didnât change, so no matter who was the U.S. president, it was always going to be messy when the troops were recalled.
That being said, there are indications that Afghanistan was better off for the U.S. being there. It just never went further to where it really needed to be.
That inherent messiness in withdrawing troops is why no one touched it before. What president wants to be the one to open that can of worms?
In this case, Joe Biden opened the can. Itâs not popular, his ratings have taken a big hit (but are still higher than the former guy), and heâs getting the backlash I mentioned before. In terms of how fast the Afghan government collapsed, I think that can be attributed to once the announcements of when NATO troops and U.S. troops would be withdrawn, the Taliban knew they just had to wait a while and theyâd be golden.
For his part, Bidenâs sticking by his decision. âHereâs what I said in the past. There was an agreement already in place, I made a commitment and weâre going forward with it.â That does involve moving some troops back in while evacuations are under way.
Now, if President Trump had been re-elected and actually planned to withdraw the troops this year, I think it would have turned out the same way. The difference would be heâd be blaming everyone else instead of taking responsibility for it, like heâs done countless times in the past. âI got bad briefings.â, âItâs so-and-soâs fault and theyâre fired.â, etc.
Would Democrats then be pushing for an impeachment and/or invoking the 25th Amendment like Republicans are doing for Biden? If so, that would be impeachment #3 for the big DT.
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