Tunisian Revolution and the Middle East--And Now, The Withdrawal From Afghanistan (M.E.T.)

[No Excuses]

This is a good decision and I am glad they are reversing course on policy here.

 

 

[tshile]

I’m not putting link. You can find it yourself. But yes people clung to Air Force planes and then we’re seen falling from thousands of feet up in the air. 
 

as for comparing us to Canada? If Canada gave a **** and was so more sympathetic they would have done that 2 months ago. Spare me their day late dollar short PR move. 
 

it was time to go. This was always going to end this way, without some serious recommitment and retooling of strategy. And everyone pretending to be shocked either abdicated their civic responsibility of paying attention to what our county was doing in a 20ish year war with another country, or is just pretending to care cause it’s the led topic at the moment. 
 

As frustrating as it is to watch the Biden administration screw this up so bad, watching and listening to people act like they’re surprised is equally as frustrating. Where have you people been for 20 years? Did you just get bored?

 

Did you just forget?

[DCSaints_fan]

6 hours ago, Rdskns2000 said:

Afghan has defeated both old Soviet Union and the United States.  Is China the next country spend years there; only to leave like the USSR and USA did.

No, China is not that stupid.   There's pretty much zero strategic interest in Afghanistan.  They do have that belt and road initiative, but there is no need to involve Afghanistan.

[visionary]

 

 

[visionary]

 

 

 

 

 

[The Sisko]

[tshile]

Counter point- you’d think someone in charge of winning presidential campaigns would be well versed in the country we’ve been waging war in since 2001

[PeterMP]

15 hours ago, No Excuses said:

 

 

Imagine trying to argue that a robust asylum system and taking in more refugees would have made it easier for the Taliban to overtake Afghanistan

I don’t even know what to do with such a contrarian, galaxy brain analysis.

 

Obviously, military intelligence got the situation in very bad (based on what we are being told (which isn't shocking due to the insular nature of almost anything associated with the national defense).).

 

And right now (or over the last few days) taking more refugees wouldn't make it easier for the Taliban take over.  But the flip side of that is there isn't the time or stability to get that many people out over the last few days.

 

But getting all of the people out that people are talking about getting out would have required weeks of planning and coordination.  If 6 weeks ago you were planning the exit of US forces and started making arrangements that everybody that has worked to support us and fight against the Taliban, that you were making it more likely the Taliban was going to take over would be a credible fear/argument.  And that's why it isn't done.

 

People are looking at the situation with 20/20 hindsight and misrepresenting the situation.  You can't get out everybody that has supported us and everybody that we'd like to get out and maintain any sense of control or leaving a country that has any chance of success behind.  

 

(This doesn't just happen when the US withdraws from places that are military failures.  This has essentially happened time and time again through out history.

 

The only way for this to have worked would have been to sacrifice more US troops to cover the withdraw of the Afghans, and then people would be screaming about how we were allowing more US troops to be killed in country we were already leaving.

 

The Soviets suffered huge loses during their withdraw from Afghanistan and didn't even really worry about taking many collaborators with them.  History is full of stories of retreating forces and collaborators with those retreating forces being punished.  It is because there is no good way to be the retreating force and actually protect people.  You can call it what you want, but it is reality.)

 

The people that did get out we should absolutely assist and that includes bringing them here (if that's what they want and if not working with them to get them some where they want to go).  But these sort of scenes have been repeated through history for a reason.  People act like some how what has happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan are abnormal and represent poor planning.  They aren't.  They are the norm for military withdraws.

Edited August 16, 2021 by PeterMP

[TradeTheBeal!]

Trust the process.

 

 

[Dan T.]

It was never going to end well.  Yet every other President kicked the decision down the road. 

 

It is painful and awful to see the denouement of this disaster.  Considering the basic decency and humanity of Joe Biden, you know its tough for him.  But Biden, who knows all too well what it's like as a father to lose a son, decided that no more U.S. parents were going to lose a child in a war that was unwinnable.

[tshile]

Also. It seems clearly possible, to me, that while the public face of this is “woah, well, we didn’t think they wouldn’t put up any fight and just hand it over”….. that for the last however many months/years the behind closed doors conversation was something along the lines of: we’ve decided there’s nothing we can do to make these people fight for their country when the time comes, so, it’s time to cut our losses

 

I understand why the administration would take that path. It certainly doesn’t look good to come out and say “we’re leaving because this is a lost cause, just wait within 2 weeks of us leaving the taliban will have full control and the president will have fled the country”

 

but it is frustrating that such a path basically makes the administration a piñata for everyone. 
 

hard to know where the line between incompetent strategy re: Afghanistan and incompetent pr strategy falls, when you’re not privy to those discussions. 

[Renegade7]

Probably the main thing Biden can be faulted for is not getting folks out that we said we would before Taliban took over.

 

Leaving was fine, the take over being ugly, what is it supposed to look like?

Biden talking at 3:45, hope its a newsconference and not a speech

[PleaseBlitz]

At a certain point, probably over a decade ago, this became a quagmire with no real benefit from staying.  It's long past time to get out.  

[Dan T.]

The other thing I haven't heard talked about is that the U.S. announced months ago that we were pulling out, so Afghanis had months to arrange to leave if they so chose, correct?

[Renegade7]

Just now, Dan T. said:

The other thing I haven't heard talked about is that the U.S. announced months ago that we were pulling out, so Afghanis had months to arrange to leave if they so chose, correct?

 

That's where the visa and refugee system being sabatoaged by Trump comes into play.  I dont understand how that works enough to say anything other as its not as simple as getting on a plane to come here because we promised they could, thats a process that apparently took too damn long.

[tshile]

Yeah, the whole visa issue popped up on the npr podcasts I heard for at least the last 3-4 months 

[Renegade7]

 

[PeterMP]

  

1 hour ago, tshile said:

Also. It seems clearly possible, to me, that while the public face of this is “woah, well, we didn’t think they wouldn’t put up any fight and just hand it over”….. that for the last however many months/years the behind closed doors conversation was something along the lines of: we’ve decided there’s nothing we can do to make these people fight for their country when the time comes, so, it’s time to cut our losses

 

I understand why the administration would take that path. It certainly doesn’t look good to come out and say “we’re leaving because this is a lost cause, just wait within 2 weeks of us leaving the taliban will have full control and the president will have fled the country”

 

but it is frustrating that such a path basically makes the administration a piñata for everyone. 
 

hard to know where the line between incompetent strategy re: Afghanistan and incompetent pr strategy falls, when you’re not privy to those discussions. 

 

I suspect they hoped that in some parts of the country there would be (more) resistance.  Remember, when we went into Afghanistan the Taliban didn't truly control the whole country.  One of the old war lords was brought back into north Afghanistan to help fight the Taliban last week (and pretty much ended up immediately fleeing).

 

It seems like the Taliban has more control than they did in 2000.  Things would look a lot better if there were areas of the country that were showing 2000-level resistance.  But us staying and trying to control the whole country for a 2000-like situation doesn't make much sense.  

 

Any chance of any success (even some sort of draw with a 2000-like situation) required publicly being optimistic.  And that excludes making plans with evacuate tens of thousands of Afghanis that have cooperated with us.

 

(Which does raise the question as to what we're going to do now.  Assuming that there becomes some localized resistance to the Taliban, are we going to assist them and antagonize the Taliban?)

 

(Though the deal that is linked that has been struck with the Taliban to allow for evacuations will make things better.  There will still be people that want to get out that can't.  But if the deal is real and honored, things will look a lot more organized.)

Edited August 16, 2021 by PeterMP

[The Sisko]

18 hours ago, TryTheBeal! said:

Just a reminder that Afghanistan is literally the size of Texas and there are no roads, or factories, or crops.

 

Looking forward to Taliban Infrastructure Week!

I assume you were trying to inject a bit of levity. That said, this attitude is one of the bigger reasons we weren't ever going to win in Afghanistan or in most asymmetric warfare conflicts.

 

16 hours ago, PeterMP said:

 

In general, I'm for us being more sympathetic to people looking for a better life and coming here, but:

 

1.  That's a pretty preposterous way to estimate what is a good number of people for a country to take in as refugees.  That sort of logic leads to things like there is a classroom with a 100 students in it and one with 50 and so since the classroom with 100 people has more people it should get more additional students.

 

Canada's a bigger country with fewer people.  It isn't unreasonable that they take in more refugees.  (Now, admittedly even that's simplistic because you can get into the suitability of the land for human inhabitation.)

 

2.  There is a fundamental issue with arranging for people to leave ahead of time and creating a situation where that essentially causes a situation where the Taliban can take over more readily.  If everybody that is willing to work to prevent the Taliban from taking over already has left, then you make it easier for the Taliban to take over.  By making it more difficult for people that are willing to work to prevent the Taliban from taking over, you make it more likely that's what they'll invest their time and energy in and make it less likely the Taliban will take over.

 

(It is clear people didn't expect the Taliban to take over this quickly and that appears to be a military intelligence issue, but the idea that we should have extracted everybody that's worked with us and generally against the Taliban when we decided to pull out would have guaranteed a Taliban take over.  20/20 hindsight says that would have been better, but most people thought there was a chance of at least a portion of Afghanistan being relatively stable and free of the Taliban.

 

Things like brain drain are real issues for any 3rd world nation and might long term make problems worse in those countries.  Short term good for us and the individuals that come here.  But for the larger population, it might be bad.)

If Canada can take in X number of refugees, we can almost certainly take in X * n of them. We simply have more capacity, a bigger economy, and what's more, we have a **** ton of unfilled jobs that employers have been bleating about for months now. Of course there's all the "They took 'ur jerbs" foolishness to deal with, but capacity of the US to resettle a good number of these folks isn't really the issue.

Sorry, but your #2 point is circular logic and it's not the real reason the military didn't put up a fight. It's coming out that the Taliban negotiated the takeover with local leaders all over the country. It has been a well known tactic in Afghanistan's history for fighters to switch sides when things look like they're going the other way. I'm sure the govt. soldiers knew they weren't going to be able to beat the Taliban and the locals could see the govt. soldiers weren't going to be an effective fighting force. So the local leaders, probably including the soldiers met with the Taliban, promised not to fight them and hand over their weapons when the time came. From the Taliban's end, other than in certain cases like collaborators, it was against their interests to slug it out and have large scale reprisals. The predictable result was *POOF* resistance gone. Now, I expect the reprisals will come a bit later, after the Taliban has consolidated things. But for now, as a  local or a govt. soldier, it's probably your best shot at surviving and more importantly avoiding having your family killed to just knuckle under and say you secretly supported them all along.

As for the brain drain, that's one of the truly tragic parts of this fiasco that's guaranteed to happen one way or the other. One way is that many will leave the country. The rest will simply have their knowledge made ineffectual or pointless by the typical authoritarian subjugation and control. Even worse, for educated women it will probably be handled by marrying them off to a life of "Cover your face and make me a sammich before I have to beat you...but only lightly. You should just be content with not being one of the ones they chose to make an example of. Now shut your Sheerpira hole and make me that sammich!"

 

[Renegade7]

I respect Biden for owning this capital L.

[Nerm]

21 hours ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

Yes.  It is tough right now.  I feel like the last 20 years I am watching get flushed down the toilet.  Think about how much so many have put into this effort.  Aside from the obvious deaths and wounds, think about all the dads that missed the births of their children, holidays away from the family, etc.  And I’m just a couple of days, what we just spent the majority of the beat years of our lives has been flushed away.

 

If anyone knows a vet, probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to check in on them.

I do a lot of Veterans' mental health evaluations, so I tend to meet with one or more Afghanistan Veterans a week.  It is going to be a very tough time for so many people.  Many of the soldiers were struggling with issues related to direct combat experiences, which was common regardless of which war the person had been in.  With Afghanistan, I found translators, who did not engage in combat, would develop severe mental health concerns more often than other conflicts.  So much guilt related to what would often happen to villagers and their families after the translators convinced them that they would be protected.  I can't imagine what it would be like to watch videos of children being burned to death or beheaded because their parents believed you (personally) after you built a relationship with them to convince them that they would be safe.  This whole situation is horrific.

[visionary]

 

Trying to protect his right flank...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[visionary]

 

[tshile]

4 hours ago, Renegade7 said:

I respect Biden for owning this capital L.

All I could think today is “this is why no one else wanted to end it”

 

the people on the runway is going to be a thing forever 

[Barry.Randolphe]

4 hours ago, visionary said:

 

 

 

I'm assuming the reason there are so many young men on this transport is because they helped the US in some way (translators, informants, etc)....because if not, this looks like Cal from Titanic jumping on the lifeboat when they were asking for women and children first