The Disaster in Afghanistan Was Predictable — And It Was Predicted
The Taliban is going to completely retake the country. Everyone will look back on this, as they looked back on Obama’s complete withdrawal from Iraq, and say it was a mistake. “Why didn’t anyone predict this? Why didn’t they tell us?”
I am predicting it.
I told you so.
This wasn’t even a tough prediction. It was the most obvious thing on Earth.
We didn’t have to keep a large presence there. We had sustained zero deaths since February of 2020. Now we are leaving behind people who helped us, to be beheaded at the hands of the medieval monsters of the Taliban.
Trump did the same to our Kurdish allies and he planned to do exactly this, so nothing would have changed if he had been in charge. It’s a horrible shame that Biden couldn’t handle this better than Trump would have.
An utter, disgraceful disaster.
I wanted to call my friend, who had me take my first college class with him when we were both stationed overseas, when I graduated from law school (very late, after a lot of life happened), to tell him thanks for pushing me ahead in life.
But I was not able, as he didn’t make it back home (more than a decade ago). A lot of sacrifices have been squandered. It makes me so angry.
dustin (4237e0) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:12 amOnce Objective Gecko failed, the space for building a country was never going to happen. That was the day to start planning the exit from Afghanistan, the only object at that point should have been in planning to block al-Qaeda from escaping to Pakistan. Targeting the few Taliban leaders, and getting the f-out. Some people were allies of convenience, but we had few friends, very few partners with any power, and no actual government.
So the choice to stay for 2 decades to create a country where it hadn’t been ever before, if we were to stay for another 2 or 6, 3 months after we leave…
Colonel Klink (Ret) (1367c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:22 am‘This was predicted.’
Indeed:
“You bought him. You own him.”
______
This was always going to end this way. Any savvy West Point professor, Imperial War Museum instructor in London, retired Soviet general or reader of a few well quilled Kipling pieces could have “predicted” this:
Afghanistan is where empires go to die.
Add America to the list. Conservatives, Libertarians, weepy lefties, and especially idiot war profiteering, rightie-nitwit-neocons like Liz Cheney and her fellow travelers have zero grounds to whine about any of this, about debt or deficits ever again, too:
–The United States has spent $2.26 trillion on the war [charged to Uncle Sam’s credit card], which includes operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan- which does not include funds that the U.S. is obligated to spend on lifetime care for American veterans of this war, nor does it include future interest payments on money borrowed to fund the war.
Compared to this:
-America’s costs for the Manhattan Project -developing the atomic bomb- totaled about $21.6 billion thorough 1945 in today’s dollars. -source, https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapons/
-The original twin-tower World Trade Center cost about $3.7 billion in today’s dollars. -source, NYT
-The entire Vietnam War cost the U.S. $1 trillion in today’s dollars– and it was paid for via taxes and program cuts. -source, history com.
-Over 801,000 people have died due to direct war violence, and several times as many indirectly. Over 335,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting 37 million — the number of war refugees and displaced persons. The U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $6.4 trillion dollars. On Uncle Sam’s credit card. -source, watson.brown.edu/costsofwar
-Adjusted for inflation, the entire Second World War against the Axis Powers, cost the United States roughly $4 trillion in today’s dollars.-source, history.com
–The Marshall Plan – the European Recovery Plan of 1948-1951 cost roughly $130 billion in today’s dollars. – source, eurobserver.com
-Adjusted for inflation, the War of 1812 cost the U.S. about $1.6 billion in today’s dollars.
-Adjusted for inflation, the cost of the 1917-1918 U.S. participation in World War 1 was about $334 billon in today’s dollars.
-The Apollo program– to send Americans to the moon- cost the U.S. $152 billion in today’s dollars -source, forbes.com
Bought or sold any Afghan War Bonds lately?
Nope.
Credit card wars are best fought in America- by direct mail.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:48 am“We are staying, the embassy is staying, our programs are staying… I would not necessarily equate the departure of forces in July, August, or by early September with some kind of immediate deterioration in the situation.” Secretary Blinken in June.
To claim nothing would have been different under Trump is a very strange comment.
Does this also apply to $5/gal gas, the border being overrun and possible vaccine passports?
Obudman (a4a3d0) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:50 amWe went into Afghanistan for the right reason: to destroy al Qaeda and kill Osama bin Laden, the former accomplished fairly early on, the latter too much later. But when we got there, we saw women oppressed, and girls banned from education, so our oh-so-sensitive Western liberalism was affronted, so we tried to make a conglomeration of fractious tribes into Sweden or Denmark; is it any surprise that we failed?
My older daughter spent the fall of 2017 at Bagram Air Base. She told us that she was startled the first couple of nights, as she heard stuff go boom. Apparently the Taliban was lobbing mortar shells, which the military called IDF — indirect fire — into the buffer zone surrounding the base. It never hurt anyone or anything. After a few days, she learned how to sleep through it.
But think about that: the fall of 2017 was after we had been in Afghanistan for sixteen years, and we couldn’t even secure the ground around the air base enough that the Taliban couldn’t get within mortar range of the buffer zone. Seven years under the younger President Bush, eight years under Barack Hussein Obama, and a year under President Trump, and we hadn’t secured even the area around Kabul.
By then we were training Afghan forces to defend their own country, but we never called it ‘Afghanization,’ because it was too close to ‘Vietnamization,’ and we all know how that worked out.
Afghanization was to turn the country back over to the Afghanis. Well, we’re doing just that, and they are getting back exactly what they had before we went in.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:53 amImagine if you will that President Clinton had not turned down the offer from the Saudis to turn over Osama bin Laden to us in 1996, or our Secretary of State had the Albright idea that we had to notify Pakistan in advance before we sent cruise missiles to blow up Mr bin Laden’s campsite in Afghanistan. We might have saved the approximately $2.7 trillion burned in Afghanistan and the $1.92 trillion spent in Iraq.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:01 amWe could have, we should have, prepared our departure far better.
As long as we maintained our presence — willing to use air power against Taliban in the open field — the country would have held. We could have taken several months to bring those people who had helped us, and their families, to relocation areas in the US and other willing nations, such as Canada. We have the resources and the ability to move 100s of thousands. It’s not like US airlines are doing anything, after all.
Then we leave with the rear guard.
I believe that we had to leave at some point, but we should have done better by the people who helped us than we did in Vietnam. Instead we managed to do far worse.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:02 amColonel Klink (Ret) (1367c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:22 am
They did escape, at Tora Bora. The big mistake was trusting Pakistan. The United States relied on Pakistan to guard their side of the mountain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora
Pakistan later turned over to the U.S. many people who weren’t al Qaeda or were fringe people.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:02 amWe might have saved the approximately $2.7 trillion burned in Afghanistan and the $1.92 trillion spent in Iraq.
What-if games are tricky. For all you know, bin Laden was a moderating influence on his hotheads.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:03 amExactly. It must be very confusing for Trump defenders to see Trump critics able to be critical of a not-Trump and even an anti-Trump.
For example, Benjamin Wittes:
Trumpists took the posture that Trump must always and everywhere be defended, even when he did things they had excoriated other people for doing. Whatever Trump did could not be wrong – “Let Trump be Trump!” – and his critics must anti-American.
Others took the position that certain thing are right or wrong, good or bad, regardless of who does them — and the Trumpers all chortled about the weak losers who cared about Muh Principles.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:10 amOn Twitter:
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:14 amMr M wrote:
What a shame there’s no easy sarcasm tag!
I know that you’re too smart to have meant that seriously, but I’m going to treat it as though you did, and ask the obvious question: how much less moderate could they have been?
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:19 amI’ve not seen anybody make that claim. But it’s a weird proposition to claim that Trump’s own specific plan — which Trump defenders were not previously criticizing to any noticeable extent — would have worked out much better if Trump were still president.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:24 amI also recall a lot of Trumpers saying it was totally unfair to blame Trump for everything bad that happened while he was president. And saying it wasn’t our business to try to affect the future of faraway places.
In the worst year in Afghanistan, 2010, the U.S. suffered 440 troops killed in action. So far this year in Chicago, 480 people have been shot to death.
When will the U.S. begin its withdrawal from Chicago?
https://theothermccain.com/2021/08/15/afghanistan-and-chicago/
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:28 amTrump would have fought back.
It was leaked, and Trump was chastised, for talks through background channels with the Taliban and I’m sure information conveyed as to what was going to be unacceptable. There is no way Trump would have lost face like this. You can’t have it both ways. Its either Trump self centered hubris (what is in this for me and makes me look good) or not. At least very least Trump would be blowing their stuff up so he wouldn’t look bad or weak.
There are still US troop with the Kurds in Syria (not all of the Kurds, as a nod to the Turks) There are troops today with the Kurds in Iraq. Trump left them there after saying he was leaving. Thats why I think Trump would have been different, because you are right that Trump is narcissistic and doesn’t like losing face.
Lets face it. Biden is weak. The people running things for him are tough on Americans, weak asses on the foreign stage. You think Iran didn’t notice what weak Biden did on its eastern doorstep? Iram is reporting 600 COVID deaths a day right now, 33% of its people are below the poverty line. This coming year is a good time see just how weak Biden is.
Putin probably already knew he could reannex some more territory anytime without Biden doing more than making up a few hash tags (#BringBackOurGirls), but now, he might as well execute his plan and take it all
Little rocket man will start popping more missles past Japan further out to sea
Weak people like Biden find weaker people to make a statement with so look for him to to have Africom drone a few rebel tents at a water hole in Saharan Mali.
If I was Iran, I would test Israel from Syria, Lebanon, maybe get the Palestinians in Gaza to fire rockets and see what type of response Biden gives to Israel. Specifically I’d look to see if Biden re-arms Israel’s depleted munitions or buckles to the Tlaib winf of the Democrats.
Last, I read that the US told Afghan interpreters and their families to come to the Kabul Embassy. Then closed it. Now they are going to have to go to ground inside Kabul. Many will die.
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:30 amMaybe Border Czar Harris could slow the flow at the southern border enough to make room for a few Afghani’s. Many will be tortured and killed. Americans will die. people in NGO’s, private security, maybe some CIA.
I know that you’re too smart to have meant that seriously, but I’m going to treat it as though you did
I did, but not as a statement about bin Laden, but a statement about our knowledge. Bin Laden was not the person who came up with the 9/11 scheme, nor was he the mastermind of its execution. For all we know he could have been reluctant to commit to such an attack on the US, with all its power.
We just don’t know, and asserting that killing him would have stopped something planned and executed by others is just wishful.
I’m not even sure that killing baby Hitler would have changed much. Maybe it would have been Ernst Röhm who’s the monster now.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:36 amWhen will the U.S. begin its withdrawal from Chicago?
It pretty much has.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:38 amThis would have ended like this for any CiC in the Oval. But President Plagiarist does deserve blame for not stepping up like JFK did after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when he greenlit a plan inherited from Ike’s people- and took responsibility publicly, as Kennedy did at his presser, as the ‘responsible officer of the government.’ It actually helped his credibility.
Instead, ol’18-wheeler Big Guy hides in the garage and issues a cowardly press release trying to blame “predecessors” for inheriting a policy. He’s in charge now. And…
He’s a bum.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:38 amUK defense secretary a few days ago:
The Trump deal left the Taliban in a stronger position than it had held in many years. The Trump administration also pressured the Afghan government to release 5,000 prisoners, likely to do battle again.
I didn’t hear any Trumpists worrying that it might be unwise — only praising the negotiating genius of the Great Patriotic Hero.
Now they’re basically saying “Oh but he would have backtracked on his own deal! He would have continued the Forever Wars just like the Neocons we hated up till now!”
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:45 amHe never met a bully he wasn’t intimidated by. Trump had no fight when it came to foreign policy.
dustin (4237e0) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:51 amSing it, 18-wheeling-Convoy-Big Guy…
“West bound and down, loaded up and truckin’,
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:53 amWe’re gonna do what they say can’t be done.
We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there.
I’m west bound, just watch ol’Joey run…”
“Worse than Trump”
Words I never expected to see. So the progression is now
Reagan > HW > Clinton > W > Obama > Trump > Biden
Reaganomics!
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:59 amTo claim nothing would have been different under Trump is a very strange comment.
Does this also apply to $5/gal gas, the border being overrun and possible vaccine passports?
Excellent points, all!
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:01 pm19. “UK defense secretary…”
Pfft. So blows an ‘expert’ on “where empires go to die.”
“British invasions of Afghanistan: 1838–1842, 1878–1880 and 1919
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Afghanistan was invaded three times from British India.
The First Anglo-Afghan War of 1838–1842 was conducted with the intention of limiting Russian influence in the country and quelling raiding from across the border. Within four years the British were expelled. After the Indian Mutiny, the British launched a second invasion, the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–1880, for much the same reasons but did not attempt to maintain a permanent presence. A third conflict broke out in 1919. It lasted for three months, from May to August, and ended in a compromise that saw Afghanistan reassert its independence and control over its relations with other countries while agreeing to a border with British India known as the Durand Line.” – source, wikihardcheeseoldboy.com
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:02 pm@22. Nah. He’s a 70’s guy. President Plagiarist makes Jimma Carter look and sound like Lincoln. But for this performance, the part of ‘Billy’ will be played by ‘Hunter.’
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:05 pm1… so many bright and good people had everything taken from them.
A terrible waste.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:06 pm14… sad but true. Not much handwringing, it’s just CHIcagotown…
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:09 pmDoes this also apply to $5/gal gas
California would still have had $5/gal gas. It’s about $3/gallon most other places.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:09 pmHarris says she had key role in Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal decision
How long before we hear that she urged caution?
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:13 pmJust last month…
“There’s gonna be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.” – President Plagiarist
IDIOT.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:13 pm@29. ROFLMAOPIP
Do hope she flies to the Pakistan/Afghan border “to see for herself…” and on the way, finally visit Europe at last!
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:15 pmLooks like Michael Flynn should’ve been listened to when he spoke of our military lying about the alleged progress in Afghanistan.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:18 pmLETTER FROM KABUL: ‘I Believed in the U.S. But That Turned Out to Be Such a Big Mistake’
There’s a lot of panic and fear in the city. There is a curfew, so it’s completely empty and quiet in the streets of Kabul right now.
So many journalists are calling me. I’m scared for their lives. It’s the worst night of my life for me and thousands of others.
It turned out to be against the expectations of everybody. We thought the Americans would not ditch us, which seems to be the case right now.
We could never have imagined and believed that this would happen. We could never imagine we could be betrayed so badly by the U.S. The feeling of betrayal… I dedicated my life to the [American] values.
There was a lot of promise, a lot of assurance. A lot of talk about values, a lot of talk about progress, about rights, about women’s rights, about freedom, about democracy. That all turned out to be hollow.
Shorter version: https://memes.yarn.co/yarn-clip/fc2c385a-58ff-4127-932a-9f7b606e3c1c
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:19 pm“I’ve not seen anybody make that claim”
OP:
“Trump did the same to our Kurdish allies and he planned to do exactly this, so nothing would have changed if he had been in charge.”
WSJ Today:
“Biden overruled his top military commanders–Gen. Frank McKenzie, Gen. Austin Scott Miller, and Gen. Mark Milley–who recommended the US keep 2500 troops in Afghanistan while stepping up diplomacy to try to cement a peace agreement.”
https://twitter.com/ksadjadpour/status/1426924944282247169?s=20
Politico today:
“Vice President Kamala Harris confirmed Sunday that she was the last person in the room before President Joe Biden made the decision to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.
Harris says she had key role in Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal decision”
https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2021/04/25/harris-afghanistan-biden-withdrawal-decision-484581?__twitter_impression=true
The amount of cover some people are throwing for Biden right now just hit 11.
Obudman (a4a3d0) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:19 pmCNN airing video of Taliban wandering around Afghan presidential palace…
looking for Nancy’s podium, eh?!
Form a committee, dear!
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:20 pm“Cal would still have $5/gal gas”
Keep telling yourself nothing would be different.
Gas prices hit 7-year high, up 40% since the beginning of the year
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/gas-prices-hit-7-year-high-up-40-since-the-beginning-of-the-year-aaa-says/ar-AALRllX
Obudman (a4a3d0) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:24 pmPity; another decade or so would have done the trick. Its their freaking country; if they like the 5th century so much– and all those people turning tail tells you they sure as hell do — they are entitled to it. Not one American life more. I’m off to Saigon next year, Covid permitting. They never recovered from the loss of our beneficence, did they?
J Dal (adf12f) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:37 pmIf the Afghan government had deserved to survive, it would have. Or at least put up a harder fight. But if its troops didn’t have the grit or determination of the defenders of Thermopylae, Masada or Bastogne, it’s hard to see why we should have continued to try to provide it for them, after 20 years of effort.
What is happening and will happen is still a tragedy. Pity the Afghans whose trust in us has been betrayed and who will soon die horrible deaths. Pity every Afghan girl who wants an education. Pity anyone who transgresses against the Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic law — I’m no expert but it appears the list of capital offenses is pretty long.
It’s easy to start handing out blame for what’s happening. Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden, and the military and intelligence leaders who advised them, all deserve some. Obviously we mishandled our withdrawal — that’s the understatement of the year. Not me, but probably many commenters here have some good ideas about how we could have handled it better.
Maybe some of the blame also devolves on the American people. How many of us paid much attention to Afghanistan after 2001, or after bin Laden’s death? I plead guilty to thinking about it as little as possible. If we had focused more on Afghanistan and what we were trying to accomplish there a few years ago the government would have adopted a more rational policy and the present debacle might not be happening. Perhaps it wasn’t all a total waste, as at least Al Qaeda hasn’t had an Afghan safe haven for the last 20 years.
But for now, as tempting as it is and will be to get into the game of Trump shouldn’t have done this and Biden shouldn’t have done that, I mourn all those who are suffering and dying over there.
RL formerly in Glendale (fda61c) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:42 pmMeant to say in #38, “the government “might” have adopted a more rational policy…” Can’t assume it would have.
RL formerly in Glendale (fda61c) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:48 pmhttps://www.historyplace.com/speeches/ford-tulane.htm
‘This speech was given by President Ford amid the international turmoil surrounding the end of the Vietnam War in April 1975. On the very day the President gave this speech, 100,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were advancing toward Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital. Meanwhile, leaders from around the world, and the North Vietnamese themselves, waited to see how the United States would react to thepending collapse of South Vietnam, which the U.S. had fought hard to preserve.
The answer came from President Ford during this speech in which he declared the conflict “a war that is finished as far as America is concerned,” and urged the young Americans in his audience at Tulane University to look towardthe future instead.
A week later, Saigon fell and South Vietnam surrendered to the North Vietnamese.Vietnam was thus unified under a Communist regime that remains in power today.’
Where the fvck is Idiot Biden?
Hiding. Blaming predecessors.
He’s a bum.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 12:54 pmObudman, try to read the blog before you do your driveby
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:01 pmWhen special ops are riding horses on a wooden saddle with 90# packs, one realizes early preparation was a disaster. Backs were toast. They had to have leather saddles flown in from ranches in Wyoming. This was and is on booosh.
mg (8cbc69) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:06 pmPity the Afghans whose trust in us has been betrayed and who will soon die horrible deaths.
If we had started an orderly withdrawal a couple months ago, while promising death from the skies to any Taliban who came out of their hills, we could have brought out all those people. There are so many spare aircraft right now that a month would have been plenty of time. THEN you call in the rear guard. As it is, we’ll be lucky to extract the Americans.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:06 pmThis was and is on booosh.
Other than dropping H-bombs, which the US was treaty-bound not to do, what would you have had Bush do? And do you think he told the quartermasters what to pack?
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:09 pmspecial ops
You mean photo ops. The ones with the keffiyeh scarves, right? Those clowns? Posing for Christiane Amanpour? Or did CNN bring in a new batch from Actors Equity?
nk (1d9030) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:15 pmTrump bypassed the Afghan government in his negotiations with the Taliban. The Afghan government did not sign the deal.
Trump claimed that the Taliban was “ready” and “eager” for a ceasefire, and that the Taliban “wants to make a deal.” As usual, he was supremely confident of his ability to do what no one else could have done: “They didn’t want to do a cease-fire, but now they do want to do a cease-fire,” Trump told the troops. “It will probably work out that way… We’ve made tremendous progress.”
Trump and Pompeo legitimized the Taliban and gave it 5,000 more fighters. It wasn’t the Trump faithful who were saying his plan didn’t look realistic or well thought out. It was the eeevil NeverTrumpers who were saying that.
Trump praised Biden’s announcement of his plan to withdraw, but thought it should be sooner.
It’s perfectly possible to say that Biden did the wrong thing without making the unfounded and even counterfactual claim that Trump would have handled it all in exactly the right way.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:25 pm#38 — good comment, RL.
Very few of the people who say “Your guy shouldn’t have done that!” have a demonstrably better idea of what should have been done instead, in the long run. I tend to avoid making pronouncements on what should be the policy, particularly in a troubled place like Afghanistan, because I don’t have the answers.
What bothers me is partisan double standards and hypocrisy, and the not-very-honest effort to turn Biden’s blunder into an argument that Trump was right all along and everything would be fine if we had let him steal the election and everybody who doesn’t like him is a terrible person.
Trumplandia cares about Afghanistan only as an instrument to bash Trump critics.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:37 pmThe libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:53 am
They didn’t know how to use the mortars.
The Taliban, by 2021 did have some people who did know how to use weapons. but they were in prison. The Taliban’s top priority, militarily, and diplomatically, was freeing those prisoners. The fact that their top negotiating priority was freeing their people should have told the U.S. negotiators all they needed to know about the Taliban’s intentions.
The Afghan army had a number of well trained reliable units. In one story I read, a city (Kunduz) was about to come under attack. About a dozen members of the elite unit were sent on the walls on top of Kunduz prison. They knew that some prisoners had cell phones and would tell the Taliban outside. The city was not attacked.
Oh, we had secured it. But we lost it again. We hadn’t secured Afghanistan
No, it’s worse.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:39 pmBack in April: Republicans Split On Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal, With Some Calling It ‘A Grave Mistake’ And Others In Support
Watch for both of them now to claim they were against it all along.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:50 pm> Gas prices hit 7-year high, up 40% since the beginning of the year
Of *course* they have. People who know the industry who were paying attention knew last year that this would happen.
[a] the lockdowns and the general reduction in travel and economic activity which would have happened with or without the lockdowns caused a massive collapse in demand which drove oil prices to unprecedented lows
[b] this meant that a lot of wells were losing money — it was costing more money to produce oil than the oil could be sold for.
[c] many of the oil losing wells were shut down, because selling at a loss is not good economic decision making
[d] this resulted in a contraction in supply
[e] demand has rebounded. supply has *not yet* rebounded. prices have skyrocketed
[f] this will cause wells to be brought online, which will cause prices to stabilize and fall
this is the *normal oil industry economic cycle*. once step [a] happened every subsequent step was inevitable.
aphrael (4c4719) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:50 pmThey had a different deal:
https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N20/060/93/PDF/N2006093.pdf?OpenElement
BuDuh (7bca93) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:54 pmMr g wrote:
Were there some alternate quantum universe in which President Trump had been re-elected — and if there is, can I go there? — and we had the technology to peer into it, maybe we could verify the truth of your statement. Alas! we have no such technology, so your statement is pure speculation.
The problem is simple: perhaps had Mr Trump been re-elected, he could have conveyed what was going to be unacceptable, but there’s little reason to believe that a Taliban, flush with the momentum of victory, would have cared, or agreed to it, or could have kept individual units from breaking any agreement.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:56 pmthe disaster of biden’s presidency was predictable— and it was predicted
JF (e1156d) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:58 pmSo many women and children on the precipice. These people know what the Taliban does to exact conformity, and they know what they do to little boys and women. What an awful spot for them to be in. And they are already prepared for the inevitable awfulness to come.
Dana (174549) — 8/15/2021 @ 1:58 pmPresident Biden as ordered 1,000 additional troops into Afghanistan – raising the total number being sent now from 3,000 to 4,000. The State Department is telling American to “shelter in place.”
The civilian airport in Kabul is coming under fire, but the U.S. military has not engaged, hoping that the Taliban can be persuaded to leave them alone while they get out or maybe that it is a incidental or a mistake.
Bagram Air base has been surrendered to the Taliban. Afghan president Ashraf Ghani has fled the country.
Nobopdy in the government has applied Bayesian analysis to an assessment of the situation (i.e. if previous predictions were wrong adjusting the prediction)
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:02 pmMr M wrote:
President Bush was right to go into Afghanistan to root out and destroy al Qaeda, but that’s the extent of it.
Quite frankly, we could have used nuclear weapons to clean out the caves in which al Qaeda and the Taliban hid in Tora Bora, and should have, because not doing so allowed them to survive. If you are going to wage war, then wage f(ornicating) war!
Do I think he told the quartermasters what to pack? Yes, actually, I do. Perhaps not specifically, but he was the Commander-in-Chief, and he set the parameters as to what the military could and could not do. In the end, the Commander-in-Chief is always responsible.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:03 pm“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Saturday voiced her concern for women and girls in Afghanistan as the Taliban closes in on control of the country. In a statement releaed Saturday evening, Pelosi called on the international community to protect women and girls from the “inhumane inhumane treatment by the Taliban.”
Memo to Nancy:
As much as you and Convoy Joe wish it was the 1970s, it ain’t. ‘American feminism’ is neither a key nor essential component of United States foreign policy. Best you concern yourself w/t the ladies walkin’ along Market Street first. Now why don’t you get Joe and the boys in the House some $15/pint ice cream.
“You got a hide like an alligator and a heart like a marshmellow.” – ‘The Streets of San Francisco’ ABC TV, 1972-1977
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:06 pmMr Finkelman wrote:
Oh, bovine feces! Mortars are among the simplest weapons, and soldiers can be trained on them in short order. They simply didn’t have the range to get beyond the buffer zone, or were using the mortar fire as a psychological weapon, enough to upset a few people, and to let the Afghan civilians know that they were not defeated, but not enough to draw out American personnel to kill the Taliban.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:13 pmMike Pompeo is partially blaming Ashraf Ghani, as corrupt ad not interested in negotiating.
The position of the Afghan government was actually pretty clear, They wanteed the United States to confront Pakistan.
https://www.dw.com/en/afghanistan-pakistan-taliban-ties/a-58191507
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/pakistan-taliban-us-troop-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-by-shashi-tharoor-2021-06
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:14 pmThe libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:13 pm
Could be. But you should not assume competence.
A would be they were not close enough B would be they wanted to avoid combat.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:17 pmWe installed the government and trained the Afghani army…maybe not the best we could. We also knew that the army was not ready to withstand a Taliban attack….hence all of the intelligence predictions of an eventual Taliban takeover….and our military commanders’ reticence to leave, fearing an eventual slaughter. We can debate whether we should have come in….killed key people in 2001….then got out. But the reality is that didn’t happen. We stuck around long enough to win some…maybe not enough….hearts and minds, such that some Afghanis bought into our commitment and a vision without the Taliban’s heavy boot. That sets up a moral commitment to not let it all collapse. The deal Trump/Biden made set few conditions on the Taliban. It simply turned its back on the people who counted on us. Trump set it in motion…..and Biden now owns it. Not a proud scenario for the U.S.
AJ_Liberty (ec7f74) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:19 pmNot sure who this guy is, but he makes a decent point.
BuDuh (7bca93) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:28 pmThe much nicer Dana wrote:
Sadly, they didn’t woman up enough to squeal on the Taliban, to let American forces know where they were hiding, so that we could go and kill them.
But let’s tell the truth here: while things might have been better for women and children in Kabul, out in the tribal controlled villages things were not that much different for women than they were under the Taliban. We’ve all heard about the bacha bazi boys, and women have always been second-class citizens — if second-class isn’t, itself, too optimistic a characterization — under Islam in general, and Islamic tribal regions more specifically. The restrictions under which women were put under the Taliban were horrible to our ‘first world’ sensibilities, but how much worse were they than how women are treated under the non-Taliban Islamic regions?
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:28 pmTrumpalumladummiedingdong bootlicker notices a big goof up:
Heckuva job, Joe.
BuDuh (7bca93) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:34 pm<blockquote while stepping up diplomacy to try to cement a peace agreement.” Thus business about a peace agreement is and always was delusional at best.
Ket’s leave out any deal that could be justified as not a compromise with evil.
They didn’t even get an agreement like Colombia did with the FARC.
They didn’t get an agreement like Marshal Petain did with Nazi Germany
They didn’t get a safe haven for the government like Chiang Kai-shek achieved with Mao Tse Tung
They didn’t even get a substantial number (though not enough) refugees to flee like in South Vietnam.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:35 pmMr Finkelman wrote:
Well, you are absolutely right about one thing: I have assumed competence in a group which has managed to survive and thrive while under assault by the United States military, all the while hampered by a lack of supplies, no air force, and a serious deficit in artillery.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:40 pmAfghan president flees country as Taliban move into Kabul
‘As the insurgents closed in Sunday, President Ashraf Ghani flew out of the country. “The former president of Afghanistan left Afghanistan, leaving the country in this difficult situation,” said Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council. “God should hold him accountable.”’ – abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/
Good grief. Lordy… have President Plagiarist fly out of the country to seek asylum – or get committed to one– in Ireland.
“So let it be written, so let it be done.” – Pharaoh Rameses II [Yul Brynner] ‘The Ten Commandments’ 1956
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:47 pmBiden announces counter strike strategy:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AvgOYmKCm2c
BuDuh (7bca93) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:49 pm@61.More Neocon creamed-chipped-Cheney-on-toast.
Four administrations of both major political parties; Bush, Obama, Trump and the Plagiarist– gave the MIC-shilling-Pentagon brassholes- fronting for Neocon war-profiteers like Liz Cheney- all the resources they needed– $2.26 TRILLION– charged to the country’s credit card no less– and over 20 damn years to get the job done.
And they blew it.
Only the war profiteers won. Might doesn’t make right if the mutton-munchers won’t fight for their on country. The blame for this disaster lays squarely on the Pentagon brassholes of the U.S. Military. And your kids will be paying for it for the next 100 years.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:02 pm@90. Piss on Nancy and her worries over Afghan girls and gals. American women and girls dodging rapists, beatings and gunfire in San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, NYC, etc.,.. while playing in their yards, shopping for ice cream or just walking down the street are her priority. Not the babes in Afghanistan.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:17 pm^70
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:18 pmWhen President Obama announced the end of the American combat mission, there was still a significant force in Afghanistan.
As I understand it, there were still 2,500 troops remaining when Biden announce his bugout. So, when were the 8,300 others withdrawn? (Assuming Craig Whitlock has his number right. He has, from what I have read of his book, a set of fixed conclusions, which you can deduce from his use of the word “quagmire”, and the title of his book. But I have no reason to think he is wrong about that number.)
But those 2,500 were, apparently, enough to deter the Taliban from major offensives, and keep the morale of the Afghan army and police force high enough, despite terrorist attacks, to keep civil society going for almost all of its citizens.
We had a stalemate, not a defeat.
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:19 pm45- scarves and cnn
mg (8cbc69) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:27 pmlmao
Pelosi’s statement reminds me of the “Bring back our girls” campaign. It got enormous publicity, but almost no one mentioned that Boko Haram had, over the years, kidnaped more boys than girls. There is, in that article, a significant detail on their resurgence:
Letting terrorists out of prison, or not keeping them there securely, are both bad ideas.
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:28 pmThe quartermasters were ill prepared for riding with Karzi.
mg (8cbc69) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:29 pmWhat’s even more astonishing about this -aside from the speed of the collapse- is that the Taliban secured victory virtually without a fight; essentially without firing a shot. The multi-billion-dollar-financed-ASF, coddled, coached and trained for two decades, just abandoned their U.S. cache of expensive weapons and didn’t bother to fight. Even the French couldn’t drop their rifles any faster.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:31 pmChristiane Amanpour actually called this ‘a day of infamy.’ She’s nuts. Even FDR managed to speak to America and Congress within 24 hours of Pearl Harbor.
Where the hell is Hidin’ Biden?????’
He’s a bum.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:34 pmTaliban in the presidential palace, and in the streets of Kabul.
U.S. processing some visas at the airport.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:36 pmDCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:31 pm
The French weren’t quite so afraid of being killed by the opposing army.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:38 pmThe libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 2:40 pm
The competence is all at higher levels. And not Afghan in all probability.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:40 pmApril 30 1975/ august 15 2021. The helicopters on the roof of the us embassy again. In 2022 I had a bunper sticker on my car Iraq arabic for vietnam. Now I will need one for afganistan. What language do they speak? Biden a bum? I don’t see you heading to defend kabul.
asset (0befd0) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:42 pmWe had a stalemate, not a defeat.
If you’re spending billions and putting it on your credit card to stay in somebody else’s hotel which they own, not you, it’s not a stalemate.
It’s a losing situation; a defeat.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:42 pmBiden a bum? I don’t see you heading to defend kabul.
Don’t see Daughter Darth headin’ there either. But you can see her in the air-conditioned studios of ABC News, Washington.
So he’s still a bum.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:45 pmFor competence and competence:
Jinping/Putin 2024
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:48 pmHere is a press conference that didn’t age too well:
https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/2576490/pentagon-press-secretary-john-f-kirby-holds-a-press-briefing/
BuDuh (7bca93) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:54 pmhttps://www.nysun.com/editorials/obituary-for-afghanistan/91620
The war is not over yet, though.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/15/2021 @ 3:57 pmI don’t pretend to know what the best long-term policy for Afghanistan would have been. But it’s interesting (if predictable) to see the sharp about-face by some people who not long ago were saying we should bring American troops back to America ASAP and let people in other places sort out their own problems.
There are some people who appear to have taken one or another position long ago and stuck to it regardless of partisan alignments. Others just found a convenient tool for bashing everyone who didn’t worship their idol.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:02 pmWhen you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
nk (1d9030) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:09 pmAnd the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier. — Rudyard Kipling
Max Boot wrote the book on small wars. So his latest opinion is worth reading:
(No, I hadn’t read that column, when I posted earlier #73.)
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:21 pmMemo to Nancy:
As much as you and Convoy Joe wish it was the 1970s, it ain’t. ‘American feminism’ is neither a key nor essential component of United States foreign policy. Best you concern yourself w/t the ladies walkin’ along Market Street first. Now why don’t you get Joe and the boys in the House some $15/pint ice cream.
It’s the Global War On Slut Shaming, DCSCA.
Two points:
1. We ain’t doing the women and children of Afghanistan any favors by killing their fathers, their brothers, their sons, and their husbands; and
2. More poignantly, the Taliban rose up to protect the women and children of Afghanistan from the rampages of the bandits who took advantage of the post-1989 chaos when both the Soviets and the CIA bugged out.
nk (1d9030) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:24 pm#85 For those who think “Czar” Putin is competent, this thought: Is it in Russia’s best interests to be friends with the United States, or enemies?
With all Russia’s problems, alcoholism, a declining population, corruption, and so forth, the Russian nation needs decades of peace and harmony for healing, not conflict.
Putin is often tactically clever, but he is an idiot when it comes to the strategy he has been pursuing.
(Is the same true for “Emperor” Xi? Possibly. I am still thinking about that question.)
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:29 pmQuite frankly, we could have used nuclear weapons to clean out the caves in which al Qaeda and the Taliban hid in Tora Bora, and should have, because not doing so allowed them to survive. If you are going to wage war, then wage f(ornicating) war!
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty had a codicil. It said the the Nuclear weapons states would not use nuclear weapons against any nation not possessing same (or allied with such a country). The fact that subsequent presidents have ignored this treaty, and the two nations that signed then reneged, and let it become a laughingstock does not change that. Except that North Korea and Iran are no longer protected by the codicil.
If we simply throw aside a treaty that we proposed, and served our interests, just because it has become inconvenient, we are no better than Hitler and Stalin.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:30 pmBoot is irrelevant.
He’s a Neocon.
______
@89. Meh. So true. Biden should just plagiarize Kipling. It reads better than this tripe:
“There’s gonna be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.” – President Plagiarist
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:33 pmOTOH, we can use nuclear weapons against Pakistan.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:34 pmAs expected, all the usual suspects are lining up to praise Biden for his “courageous withdrawal.” Only problem with that narrative is that this cowardly betrayal sacrificed so many of the Afghans who trusted us.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:37 pm… Bravely bold Sir Robin
Rode forth from Camelot.
He was not afraid to die,
Oh brave Sir Robin.
He was not at all afraid
To be killed in nasty ways.
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin.
… He was not in the least bit scared
To be mashed into a pulp.
Or to have his eyes gouged out,
And his elbows broken.
To have his kneecaps split
And his body burned away,
And his limbs all hacked and mangled
Brave Sir Robin.
… His head smashed in
And his heart cut out
And his liver removed
And his bowls unplugged
And his nostrils raped
And his bottom burnt off
And his penis
Brave Sir Robin ran away.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:38 pmBravely ran away away.
When danger reared it’s ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Swiftly taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat.
Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin!
@91.
She is woman;
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:40 pmHear her bore;
With 1970s folklore…
#77 “Even the French couldn’t drop their rifles any faster.” Those who have that opinion of the French should read this article on the 2e Division Blindée:
Leadership matters.
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:42 pmTake up the Feminist Man’s burden—
nk (1d9030) — 8/15/2021 @ 4:50 pmSend forth the best ye breed—
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Bravest of the brave, Sir Robinette!
FIFY
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 5:19 pmThis didn’t have to happen, if the people and government of Afghanistan had any will at all. They didn’t. Sorry, but I can’t countenance having a perpetual American presence there to ensure the Taliban didn’t take back the country.
Maybe we hadn’t had any causalities since February 2020 but that doesn’t mean we should remain. We are not the world police and any foreign endeavor – even if it doesn’t cost American lives – means American men and women are stationed away from home for an extended period of time. And the American taxpayer foots the rather large bill.
Biden could and should have handled this differently – his haughty pronouncements look like he has no idea what is going on there and hasn’t since he was elected. But in the end, it is the right thing to do.
Hoi Polloi (998b37) — 8/15/2021 @ 5:27 pmHalf a Boy and Half a ManHalf a Brain and Attention SpanYou’d better run
You’d better hide
You’d better lock your house,
teh Taliban outside
Here come the twenty first century’s latest scam
He’s got half a brain and attention span
A drooling fool… yeah he’s a tool
And his left don’t know what his right hand’s doin’
Vlad Putin got him eatin’ out of the palm of his hand
Cuz he’s got half a brain and attention span
Ya best be fleet up on your feet
Or else the RPGs gonna clear the streets
They never made no provisions or original plan
With half a brain and attention span
When his half brain do his thinkin’
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 5:50 pmIn the middle of the night
Then his mouth do the talkin’
Baby, let me tell you
Nothing comes out right
102.This didn’t have to happen, if the people and government of Afghanistan had any will at all. They didn’t. Sorry, but I can’t countenance having a perpetual American presence there to ensure the Taliban didn’t take back the country.
The MIC-shilling, neoconning Pentagon brassholes knew that, too. This all on them.
As ABC News’ Martha Radditz reported tonight, at the ground level, U.S. grunts told her years and years ago the frigging mutton munchers, “couldn’t read, couldn’t write, couldn’t drive or shoot yet we’re expected to have them learn to operate sophisticated equipment.”
Hell, even NASA could train monkeys to ride and operate push-pull levers on a Mercury spacecraft to get a banana pellet as a reward.
This failure is all on the Pentagon brassholes shilling for neocon-war-profitters like the Cheneys.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 5:59 pmGen. Mark Milley
White rage: resign you bastard.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:00 pmCBS News
BuDuh (7bca93) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:01 pmBiden outs Doha CIA station chief while sitting alone and confused in front of a TV
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:05 pmhttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8254SVXMA8WFPh?format=jpg&name=small
FYI… for those confused souls, here’s what an insurrection looks like…
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1426974607203086340?s=20
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:08 pmHow soon before the 3rd Trump impeachment trial starts? After all, he “inspired” the Tabilan with his mean tweets.
rcocean (fcc23e) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:17 pmGee, only 65 mentions of Trump. So far.
rcocean (fcc23e) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:17 pmOne of the reasons the French fought less well in 1940 than they did in 1944 and 1945 is that the nation had been bitterly divided by politics and religion — and by sneer and smear activists across the very wide political spectrum.
Do we have similar sneer and smear activists in the United States? Sure, and some are open about their desire to divide and weaken us — if the wrong person is in office.
Some are even happy at American losses, and losses for the civilized world. They don’t even say something perfunctory about regretting the terrible consequences before celebrating those losses.
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:18 pmJoe Biden did all of this for a talking point.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:25 pm40,000 to 60,000 Afghans who were loyal to the US are struggling for Visas.
I wonder if this guy who was loyal to the U.S. will get a visa. After all, he was so highly regarded by us that he got a Green Beret court martialed.
nk (1d9030) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:26 pmDCSCS wrote:
In the military, you have two choices: you can top out your career as a Lieutenant Colonel or Commander, or you can go along to get along with the civilian leadership. Yes, the brassholes went along with what the frequently changing civilian leadership wanted, because they wanted to retire with three or four stars, but civilian control of the military has been something we have enshrined for 2½ centuries now.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:27 pmHelluva thing, Sammy.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:27 pmHe thought it wouldn’t make any difference – not right away, anyway. Because how much could these 2,500 troops be doing?
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:27 pmMr Miller wrote:
Perhaps, just perhaps, a quarter of a generation of the fathers of the French soldiers of 1940 having been slaughtered in the mud and the mire of World War I France might have had something to do with it. Perhaps, just perhaps, the French soldiers who did survive didn’t have the greatest of war stories with which to inspire their sons as they grew up.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:30 pm““We are not withdrawing, we are staying, the embassy is staying, our programs are staying … If there is a significant deterioration in security … I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday.”
—- Sec of State Anthony Blinken on July 7, 2021
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:32 pmThe degree of cluelessness exhibited by members of the Biden administration is cause for deep concern.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:34 pmLike I mentioned in another thread, there’s plenty of blame to go around, and Biden was the one who chose surrender, but this…
We really had one job, and that was to prevent the Taliban from returning to power. And file this under “success having a thousand fathers while failure is an orphan”.
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:38 pmPerhaps, just perhaps, …
Irma la Douce could not offer the same kind of Resistance as Natasha Pulemetchitsa? 😉
nk (1d9030) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:42 pmWhenever Trump wanted to drop bombs, threaten foreigners wholesale, and kill foreign generals, he did it, and usually to great diplomatic effect, or perhaps you’d like to get a Suliemani for his opinion on his willingness to eliminate people he didn’t like?
The Taliban are going wild and the Afghanis are surrendering en masse because they all know what a Biden-led Democrat administration promises for them…and it ain’t friendship, support, or peace.
In any case, the war was indeed between two sides with different values. On one side you had a cult of deranged fanatics who forced women to cover their faces and locked them in their homes, destroyed statues, chopped off kids’ body parts with the full support of society and medicine, and placed dissidents in solitary confinement.
Angbander (35e836) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:49 pmBut the Taliban were obviously no angels either.
Is this just some vague principle you have or is there a reason? If it saves more American life and honor to remain than to leave, then I’d stay 10,000 years no problem. If anything it’s an advantage.
Leaving a vaccum just means China and Russia and Iran go in there. It’s not like the Taliban just coordinated this thing without help. This is the cold war we’re losing.
When there are real consequences, we need to carefully consider whether the costs are worth it. Sometimes the answer is yes.
dustin (405b0b) — 8/15/2021 @ 6:55 pmIn the military, you have two choices: you can top out your career as a Lieutenant Colonel or Commander, or you can go along to get along with the civilian leadership
Three: resign.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/15/2021 @ 7:08 pm#118 other Dana – Sure. But the British losses were about 70 percent of the French — and didn’t have the same effect. Nor did the truly horrendous Serbian losses, somewhere between 16.7 and 27.8 percent of their total population, have the same effect. And so on.
(Incidentally, you should correct your arithmetic. About 8,660,000 French men served in the armed forces during World War I; about 1,150,000 died in the conflict. That doesn’t come out to “a quarter” on my calculator, even assuming a fairly narrow definition of a generation.)
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/15/2021 @ 7:10 pmor perhaps you’d like to get a Suliemani for his opinion on his willingness to eliminate people he didn’t like?
So Trump took time out from licking Putin’s and Erdogan’s ankles to have one man drygulched. With three drones, from miles away. What a feat! He should have given himself a Noble (sic) Prize. (And it’s Soleimani, BTW.)
nk (1d9030) — 8/15/2021 @ 7:26 pmVideo of Kabul airport
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8254SVXMA8WFPh?format=jpg&name=small
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/15/2021 @ 7:36 pmIs this just some vague principle you have or is there a reason? If it saves more American life and honor to remain than to leave, then I’d stay 10,000 years no problem. If anything it’s an advantage.
At some point, the “occupy foreign land forever” faction is going to have to crack open a history book (preferably, one written before the vacuous intellectual rot of the New Left settled in to academia), and read about what happens to great powers as they become increasingly complex, lose energy, become mired in second-guessing and hyper-self-criticism, and eventually fall apart.
I’m sure there were Senators in Rome who thought the same about Britannia before 383, but ultimately every great power comes to an end. We’ve had about 30 years of largely feckless, peurile leadership in this country, helped along in no small part by the fatuous worship in mass media of peurile “youth culture” and unfettered hedonism. We only got through the upheavals of the late 60s and 70s relatively intact because there were still enough people around who believed in America and didn’t feel the need to flagellate themselves over its perceived shortcomings or those who came before them. Now that terms like “civic nationalism”–a concept that was considered the cultural consensus as late as the mid-60s–are considered the domain of “fascists,” it’s really just a matter of time before the whole thing breaks apart. I’ll be absolutely stunned if the US goes another 20 years at this point without dissolving.
Leaving a vaccum just means China and Russia and Iran go in there. It’s not like the Taliban just coordinated this thing without help. This is the cold war we’re losing.
If the Taliban coordinated this with anyone, it’s their sponsors in Pakistan. Russia isn’t going to make the same mistake twice (and if they do, they deserve the same failure that happened before), Iran is far too focused on struggling with Saudi Arabia in the Middle East to worry about the Taliban, and if China is dumb enough to send their military into the country, then let them waste all that money trying to bring the country to heel like we did for nearly 20 years.
The ONLY reason we sent troops into the country in the first place was because we demanded that the Taliban give up Bin Laden, and they told us to get bent. If they had actually turned him over, we don’t even worry about trying to import western democracy to a land that doesn’t actually want it, the last 20 years doesn’t even happen, and we save about $2.5 trillion.
Factory Working Orphan (2775f0) — 8/15/2021 @ 7:37 pmAfghanistan’s military collapse: Illicit deals and mass desertions
The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s military that allowed Taliban fighters to walk into the Afghan capital Sunday despite 20 years of training and billions of dollars in American aid began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s lowest-ranking officials.
The deals, initially offered early last year, were often described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a U.S. official.
Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces, according to interviews with more than a dozen Afghan officers, police, special operations troops and other soldiers.
………
The Taliban capitalized on the uncertainty caused by the February 2020 agreement reached in Doha, Qatar, between the militant group and the United States calling for a full American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some Afghan forces realized they would soon no longer be able to count on American air power and other crucial battlefield support and grew receptive to the Taliban’s approaches.
“Some just wanted the money,” an Afghan special forces officer said of those who first agreed to meet with the Taliban. But others saw the U.S. commitment to a full withdrawal as an “assurance” that the militants would return to power in Afghanistan and wanted to secure their place on the winning side, he said. ……
Rip Murdock (431d14) — 8/15/2021 @ 7:38 pm…….
…….[N]egotiations in the western province of Herat yielded the resignation of the governor, top Interior Ministry and intelligence officials and hundreds of troops. The deal was concluded in a single night.
……….
And as Taliban fighters closed in on the southeastern province of Ghazni, its governor fled under Taliban protection only to be arrested by the Afghan government on his way back to Kabul.
………
This was a planned rout. If the Afghan Army didn’t think their country was worth fighting for, why should the US?
You lost me “occupy foreign land forever”, FWO, because it wasn’t an occupation. 2,500 American troops in a country of 38 million isn’t an occupation, and it’s a phraseology well used by sloganeering Democrats.
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/15/2021 @ 7:43 pmNow, that’s interesting: The Taliban endorsed Trump for president.
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/15/2021 @ 7:47 pmI think my earlier response to the host said it all.
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/15/2021 @ 7:48 pmThe US still has troops with the Kurds in Syria and Iraq, made a concession to a NATO “ally” in order to deconflict a zone.. As for Putin, 500 Russian Mercenaries with the Wagner group would have agreed that Trump was Putin’s bootlicker if they weren’t all dead because Trump greenlit American troops to defend themselves. Putin took the shot and did not counterpunch militarily. Instead he stole the 2020 election from Hillary again.
You lost me “occupy foreign land forever”, FWO, because it wasn’t an occupation. 2,500 American troops in a country of 38 million isn’t an occupation, and it’s a phraseology well used by sloganeering Democrats.
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/15/2021 @ 7:43 pm
Doesn’t matter. Taking and holding land has required a considerable investment in manning and logistics going back to the Bronze Age.
Because it’s not just 2,500 troops. It’s everyone at Al Udeid, Al Dhafra, Ali Al Salem, Prince Sultan, and all the other outposts and air bases scattered throughout the region.
It was obvious to me back during my first CAOC tour, and even more so during my second one three years later, that this was the inevitable result of our time there. It was just a question of the actual date that it took place.
Factory Working Orphan (2775f0) — 8/15/2021 @ 8:04 pm“From the looks of Afghanistan I guess you don’t really need the F15s or nukes to take on the US govt after all.”
—- Austin Petersen
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/15/2021 @ 8:23 pmDaily Beast says Biden Administration effectively crippled Afghan Air Force by removing and disallowing contractors entry which kept them from performing maintenance on the aircrafts.
They were supposed to help the Afghan mechanics via Zoom, which I guess went as well as Zoom for 1st grade during COVID went.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/taliban-at-gates-of-kabul-as-afghanistan-collapses-without-us-support
“The country’s mostly U.S.-provided air fleet was dependent on foreign contractors to assist with maintenance. As the U.S. withdrawal took hold, the Biden administration refused to allow contractors into the country to service the aircraft, effectively grounding some of the Afghan Air Force at the same time as the U.S. had withdrawn direct air support to Afghan forces.
In the interim, Afghan air crews were forced to get creative. Maintenance personnel had to rely on Zoom calls with American experts in order to figure out how to maintain the aircraft left behind by the Americans, according to the source.”
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/15/2021 @ 9:09 pmThis may be a repost of what Sec State/Foreign Policy expert in Residence that is not named Vindman said earlier today with commentary from Justin Baragona in bold
“President Biden is intent on avoiding a Saigon moment, a reference of course to the hasty and humiliating U.S. evacuation from Vietnam. But with this troop surge to airlift Americans out of Afghanistan aren’t we already in the midst of a Saigon moment?” Tapper wondered aloud.
“No, we’re not. Remember, this is not Saigon,” Blinken responded, as diplomats were literally being airlifted from the embassy at that very moment. “We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission. And that mission was to deal with the folks who attacked us on 9/11. We have succeeded in that mission.”
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/15/2021 @ 9:15 pmNo, Kabul is not Saigon and Saigon is now called Ho Chi Minh City, but thank you Mr Secretary of Resident genius Blinken for clearing up that those two cities are not the same.
Nothing spells Success like ending a mission in collapse and failure
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/15/2021 @ 9:21 pmStill lost me, FWO. We’re not “holding land”, we were helping the legitimate Afghan hold theirs until Biden surrendered. Are we “holding land” in South Korea? If we’re “holding land” in Iraq, how come we’re doing a conditions-based phase-out? Why is Afghanistan the exception?
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/15/2021 @ 9:23 pmDefiant and defensive, a president known for empathy takes a cold-eyed approach to Afghanistan debacle
……… President Biden over the weekend first offered compassion for those left behind.
“Our hearts go out to the brave Afghan men and women who are now at risk,” he said in a statement late Saturday as insurgents closed in on Kabul.
But then Biden pivoted to the cold calculation behind his decision to pull the plug on a mission that has cost more than 2,000 American lives.
“One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” Biden said. “And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.”
It was a harsh and bracing assessment from a president better known for misty-eyed empathy. It reflects an increasingly defiant and defensive tone from Biden and his aides amid criticism that Biden is condemning a U.S. partner to brutal rule by Islamist fundamentalists and opening the door to new terrorist threats.
………
The White House line was firm. There is no military solution in Afghanistan and Biden will not allow more Americans to die in that cause, U.S. officials said. That is a view supported by public opinion polling, and it bears echoes of former president Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda.
………
U.S. officials pointed out that Trump initiated the withdrawal with the same rationale of preventing needless American battlefield deaths.
Biden refused to extend a futile mission that lacked American public support, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday shortly before the government in Kabul folded.
“And by the way, from the perspective of our strategic competitors around the world, there’s nothing they would like more than to see us in Afghanistan for another five, 10, 20 years,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It’s simply not in the national interest.”
Rip Murdock (431d14) — 8/15/2021 @ 9:31 pm………
Still lost me, FWO.d
Doesn’t matter if you buy it or not. That’s the reality, and you’re in denial about it because you thought the US had an obligation to keep a puppet government propped up that melted like a snowcone in Phoenix despite nearly 20 FREAKIN’ YEARS of us waiting for them to get their house in order.
We’re not “holding land”, we were helping the legitimate Afghan hold theirs until Biden surrendered.
Bull. What do you think Bagram, the countless FOBs, and Khandahar Air Bases were?
Are we “holding land” in South Korea?
Yeah, we are. Have you head of Osan and Kunsan Air Bases? Camp Humphreys (where I happened to serve for a year)? We have 15 bases in South Korea alone.
This event is simply the latest crisis event overseen by a decadent, sclerotic, venal, intellectually stunted political/media class and a corporatized, risk-averse military, all propped up by a rotten, self-worshipping, low future-time oriented society. People better buckle up, because the dot-com bubble popping and 9/11 were just the kick-off for an age where our so-called betters are going to be completely unable to grapple with.
Factory Working Orphan (2775f0) — 8/15/2021 @ 9:51 pmChina does not want to see the USA in Afghanistan for another 20 years. They definitely don’t want to see that the USA always has its friends’ backs. they love that Taiwan is realizing something important right now.
I firmly believe the politican common sense here is far from what Americans actually believe. Everything is framed to hide it, but we do not want that guy who spent 20 years helping us to get shot in the head because Biden didn’t find a long term deployment “acceptable.”
Trump is not the president and this is not about Trump. It is hard for Nevertrumpers to stay on target, and impossible for Trump fans to do it, but this isn’t about explaining whether or not our fantasy of what woulda coulda shoulda happened is better or worse with trump. It doesn’t matter. Biden’s leadership is Biden’s responsibility, and this is a screwup history won’t forget.
dustin (b41806) — 8/15/2021 @ 9:53 pmThis is about the stupidest thing ever written.
BuDuh (7bca93) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:09 pmYou’re right, buduh, it is very stupid. But we live in stupid times.
dustin (6d3e52) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:28 pmThe war in Afghanistan was lost when the objective shifted from defeating al-qaeda to installing and propping up a friendly Afghan government. The blame lies with the following:
1. The Bush administration for perpetrating this bait-and-switch.
2. Congress for not rescinding the AUMF once this was obvious.
3. Subsequent presidential administrations for continuing the sham.
Trump was correct in planning to pull out. Biden is correct in pulling out. My criticism is that he’s failing to properly protect our local allies.
Davethulhu (aa6793) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:31 pmThis isn’t about the generals. Four presidents have placed impossible missions on them, and they alone deserve the blame. Each of those presidents was worse than the last, and we are reaping our reward for electing them. It’s too bad that the educated Afghanis are now going to die at the hands of the incel goatherders.
Afghanistan’s future will continue to be “bad luck.”
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:41 pmThe means to keeping the Taliban out of power. If the situation were based on actual conditions instead of a politically contrived timetable, they would’ve stayed for that period and no more. The USSR may be gone, but Russians are still a threat, so our NATO bases are the means to keeping Putin’s expansionism in check.
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:01 pmIf keeping 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan is all it took to keep the Taliban in check, and Islamic terrorists demoralized, we should have done it. Shame on Trump and Biden.
Feel free to go all strawman, and claim that we couldn’t create a functioning democracy there. I’m not arguing that. My point is that a stalemate was acceptable. It wasn’t costing us much in blood or treasure to remain.
norcal (a6130b) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:04 pmPodhoretz (let’s see if his name can be invoked without “neocon” attached to it):
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:04 pm@149 Exactly, Paul. It was a race to the bottom between Trump and Biden to be the one who could claim to end the war. Not that there was much war going on, mind you, but it still makes a great campaign slogan, right?
Congratulations, Biden. You own this disaster.
Former Defense Secretary Bob Gate was so right about Biden:
“I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Biden is a trademark political hack.
norcal (a6130b) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:10 pm“In so acting, Biden has cast the future of American foreign policy into the worst state of disrepair since the last helicopter-carries-people-to-the-airport-to-flee-the-country scene 46 years ago.”
I wonder if Podhoretz thinks we should have stayed in Viet Nam.
Davethulhu (aa6793) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:16 pm@151 Vietnam wasn’t a breeding ground for people to attack the U.S., and it couldn’t have been stabilized by 2,500 troops with virtually zero deaths.
norcal (a6130b) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:22 pmDo you have the numbers?
BuDuh (431674) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:28 pm“Vietnam wasn’t a breeding ground for people to attack the U.S”
Neither is Afghanistan. The 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudi Arabian. Al-qaeda isn’t the Taliban, and isn’t geographically confined.
Davethulhu (aa6793) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:30 pmThe numbers were around $50b a year in military and aid money.
Biden seems to have forgotten that the enemy gets a vote, and I remember this quote:
Withdrawing and disengaging from the theater didn’t end a damn thing.
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:36 pm@153 About $50 billion per year:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-47391821
No combat deaths since February 2020:
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/537871-us-goes-year-without-combat-death-in-afghanistan#:~:text=The%20last%20U.S.%20combat%20deaths%20in%20Afghanistan%20were,gunman%20wearing%20an%20Afghan%20army%20uniform%20opened%20fire.
norcal (a6130b) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:36 pmThe 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudi Arabian.
Don’t forget the most important Saudi Arabian–bin Laden, welcomed and coddled by the Taliban.
norcal (a6130b) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:38 pm@149.Podhoretz (let’s see if his name can be invoked without “neocon” attached to it)
Not a goddamned chance: first line from his wiki bio: ‘Norman Podhoretz is an American neoconservative pundit’…
He’s irrelevant; $2.26 trillion times over.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:21 am@148. @153. My point is that a stalemate was acceptable. It wasn’t costing us much in blood or treasure to remain.
I do-posted at #3; Start w/$2.26 trillion- on the cuff no less- and work your way down the comparison list.
Bought any Afghan War Bonds lately????????
Nope. =mike-drop=
And neocons wonder why their ideology is deader than the oxygen tanks and fuels cells aboard Apollo 13.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:33 amWrong Podhoretz. Better pick up that mic.
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:48 am146.’This isn’t about the generals.’
Like hell it isn’t.
Those MIC/neoconning-Pentagon brassholes were handed the resources by four administrations- from both parties- totalling $2.26 trillion to date – charged to Uncle Sam’s credit card– and 20-plus YEARS to get the damn job done.
And they blew it.
The only folks who made out in this for two-plus decades are the neocon-Liz-Cheney-war-profiteering crowd– while your kids will be paying off the debt and interest on it for this idiotic waste of blood and treasure for the next 100 years.
“These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world– and then we fvcked up the endgame.” – Charlie Wilson [Tom Hanks] ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ 2007
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:05 am@160. My error. But same conclusion: your Podhoretz ‘has contributed to a number of conservative publications,’ including National Review and the Weekly Standard.
A neocon. =mike-bounce=
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:11 amAnybody have a problem sending dubya, dick, liz and the rest of the neo-cons to defend the embassy in kabul or has it already been named bin ladin city yet?
asset (7ac905) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:24 am@150. Congratulations, Biden. You own this disaster.
This should surprise you; can’t blame Biden for this– it was always going to end this way no matter who was in the Oval when the plug was pulled.
What he does deserve blame for is how it collapsed. His July 8 comment: “There’s gonna be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.” simply reaffirms his Peter Principled skill set for the gig he now holds. Once a senator; always a senator: the job is too big for him.
What our mealymouthed mick should have done is immediately delivered a speech to the nation- and the world- then hold a balls out presser, take hard questins and full responsibility “as the responsible officer of the government”– just as an earlier mick, John F. Kennedy, did after the Bay of Pigs debacle- a plan he greenlit handed to him from Ike’s people. By doing so, it actually enhanced JFK’s credibility. Instead, President Plagiarist blamed his ‘predecessors’ for an inherited policy by press release, perched alone, stunned in a Camp David sitroom, staring at TV screens.
Up thread, posted the speech President Ford delivered at Tulane as Vietnam fell in 1975. It’s a safe bet 18-wheeler Joe has his people perusing the text of it for word nuggets to lift when he finally does speak to the country. Watch for lines appealing to the young, to look to the future… and that America’s participation in this war is over.’
Ever a plagiarist: he’s a bum.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:41 ambooooshes design margin was so great that incompetence and corruption and stupidity didn’t matter only to learn what the Greeks knew – after hubris inevitably comes nemesis.
mg (8cbc69) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:08 amJust in-
mg (8cbc69) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:45 amGoats on the run in Afghanistan.
The means to keeping the Taliban out of power.
Playing the Euphemism Game doesn’t change the reality. It’s still occupying foreign soil (backed by the occupation of a chain of multiple bases on other foreign lands) for the purposes of foreign policy.
If the situation were based on actual conditions instead of a politically contrived timetable, they would’ve stayed for that period and no more.
As linked upthread, even the military admitted that there was no coherent plan. Guys on the ground reported that they were giving sophisticated military tech to soldiers who could barely grasp how to operate it properly.
The whole freaking point of training this army and providing them with all this weaponry was to enable them to engage the Taliban with overwhelming force and ensure that they never held more than a certain percentage of the country’s territory. Yes, we had an actual baseline for territory they could control that would still allow for us to pull out. The implication that we were going to stay there indefinitely–or “as long as it takes,” which is effectively the same thing–was NEVER part of the plan. That the army couldn’t execute that defense, after 20 YEARS of us trying to get them capable of doing so, is on them. The inability to acknowledge that lack of capability is on us.
The USSR may be gone, but Russians are still a threat, so our NATO bases are the means to keeping Putin’s expansionism in check.
If we pulled out of Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and England, the entire European continent wouldn’t collapse within 3 months, and those countries have armies invested in the survival of their country and their people that they’d put up an actual fight in the event that Putin was dumb enough to mount an invasion. The two situations aren’t even comparable on a strategic level, much less an operational one.
The neocons and the last remnants of the Bush Republicans are having to face a reality that they have been avoiding since getting the lunatic idea in their head around mid-2002 that they were going to “bring democracy to the Middle East” (a delusion shared by the neoliberals, incidentally, when the Arab Spring kicked off, and that’s now looking like a color revolution strategy cooked up by the Obama administration that ultimately backfired on them, too). They treat foreign policy like progressives treat domestic policy–as some whacko version of SimCity where the actual motivations of real people don’t really matter. Just plunk in some services and tweak your simulation conditions, and everything remains settled and calm. And now that this 20-year experiment is collapsing in front of them, much like progressives and the soaring crime rates and social dysfunction of their deep blue urban havens, they’re mainlining copium and pointing fingers at everyone except their own well-intentioned but ultimately misguided visions.
Factory Working Orphan (2775f0) — 8/16/2021 @ 5:02 amDoes anybody else wonder where the Taliban will get help for their troops with PTSD and mTBI? Will they fly them out to Pakistan? Qatar? Or, best case scenario, make sure that the medical facilities in Afghanistan continue to function? That last would be a small measure of grace.
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 5:27 am“So Trump took time out from licking Putin’s and Erdogan’s ankles to have one man drygulched.”
Yes, the only man whose influence and position was actually important to the ongoing Iranian resistance. NOOO UR SUPPOSED TO DO A BIG CONVENTIONAL WARINOOO THAT MAKES US BENNIES…
“With three drones, from miles away. What a feat! He should have given himself a Noble (sic) Prize. (And it’s Soleimani, BTW.)”
Big beneficial moves with tiny risk and investment…it’s like Trump actually cared about the well-being of both the troops and their finances, and had the exact opposite mindset of the generals and State Department hacks who prolonged the status quo to no benefit to anyone but themselves. No wonder they(and you) hated him!
“Does anybody else wonder where the Taliban will get help for their troops with PTSD and mTBI? Will they fly them out to Pakistan? Qatar? Or, best case scenario, make sure that the medical facilities in Afghanistan continue to function? That last would be a small measure of grace.”
Nice to see that nk wastes no time caping for the feelings of America’s enemies on the Iranian, Afghanistani, or domestic side.
Howard Mujahidean (8ccaa1) — 8/16/2021 @ 6:09 amMr Montagu wrote:
Was that really our job? If it was our job, the only way to prevent it, with certainty, was to find them all and kill them.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/16/2021 @ 6:42 amI guess there is some truth that the military takes on the whimsies of its Commander-in-Chief.
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 6:46 amUnder Bush, they were cowboys out to suppress the hostiles and bring law and order to the frontier.
Under Obama, they were police and social workers out to improve the quality of life in the ghetto.
Under Trump, they were button men bodyguarding drug deals and carrying out the occasional hit for the connected guys.
Under Biden? I think he just wants them not to make too much noise while he naps.
They, the military, themselves? Thinking is not included in their MOS.
ChiComs say, “thanks, Joe Biden!” for helping to make the U.S. look as weak and ineffectual as you possibly could.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 6:53 amLori Lightfoot’s noblest constituent wrote:
What, would you have preferred that President Trump had sent in a squad of Special Forces in to do the job, possibly getting some or all of them captured or killed? Killing your enemies with the least possible exposure to getting your own forces killed is the only reasonable way to do things.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (160996) — 8/16/2021 @ 6:56 amGood post. This is what the majority of American’s wanted. The US fully out of Afghanistan ASAP. Since our politics is dominated by dishonest and childish thinking now those people are busy trying to figure out how to turn this into a political cudgel.
This was a bad policy, support by both Trump and Biden. The plan created Trump was bad and Biden has executed it badly.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:00 amWe are not at war with Iran. The Soleimani hit was murder by stealth under every law in the world.
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:00 amThe plan created Trump was bad and Biden has executed it badly.
Yeah… Biden’s hands were tied, back-to-the-wall. What else could he do.
You can’t make this up…
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:02 amSoleimani finally learned there’s a heavy price to be paid for exporting terror and killing or maiming U.S. troops.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:07 am@145 Davethulhu (aa6793) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:31 pm
Absolutely this.
whembly (e2380c) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:15 amThe airport is the linchpin…
“Watching the Deputy National security advisor tell us they are confident they are going to evacuate 30k people is world class gas lighting. How many helicopters are required? The math is not on your side.”
—- Mike Lyons
“Kabul’s airport is not secure, the U.S. military is operating in an extremely dangerous environment. One suicide bomber, one plane & the U.S. military has a massive crisis. Aside from U.S. casualties, it would have to to clear desperate Afghans from the tarmac, likely with force.”
—- Bill Roggio
“You want to talk about intelligence failures and failures of leadership? The U.S. military should have foreseen the problem of leaving Kabul as your evac point. I warned people about this. Bagram had to stay open.”
—- Bill Roggio
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:18 amMike Lyons
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:27 am@MAJMikeLyons
·
Aug 15
“Awaits peaceful transfer of power”. Is that mostly peaceful? Only a few executions and hangings?
@176, As usual you ignore anything that doesn’t support your point. In this case you ignore the criticism of Biden that you quoted and pretend I’m making excuses for him. I’m not, I’m criticizing him for his role in how this went badly. He’s president and he executed this, he owns that.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:39 amI agree completely. We need to allow out allies to find new homes if that’s what needed to keep them safe. Here if necessary.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:41 amWe can resettle them in Orlando. Have they reopened the Pulse nightclub?
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:44 amhttps://www.wsj.com/articles/afghans-tell-of-executions-forced-marriages-in-taliban-held-areas-11628780820
So far nothing else seems to be happening. The peple trying to get out seem to have been unmolested. The regular Taliban soldiers are not doing much.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/us/politics/biden-taliban-afghanistan.html
But that’s it so far. and the forced marriages seem to be confined to rural areas.
But what will happen when the Taliban begin to impose order?
In Kunduz, government employees are not showing up for work, and the Taliban mayor has been gradually getting more harsh – increasingly threatening them more to get them to show up for work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-kunduz.html
Nobody believes the Taliban, and they are afraid, of course, that at least some of them might be killed for collaboration, if not right away, maybe after a while.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:44 amIt was the military leadership’s responsibility to develop a plan for disengagement and the Biden Administration’s responsibility to ensure they had one.
EPIC FAIL on both counts. Afghans now report that the Taliban is going door to door (not selling cookies!) and we’ll see whether the inevitable horror stories are dispassionately reported by what’s left of the media.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:46 am@183, Weather wise Texas might make more sense.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:48 am@185, Could be. Could also be that such a plan was rejected for cost. Not just financial, but the political cost of putting in forces with sufficient capability to defend the withdrawal as the Taliban pushed to seize territory.
This is a situation where effective congressional oversight would be good. But that won’t happen until the GOP controls one of the houses.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:51 am164. DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:41 am
The plug didn;t need to be pulled. And eventually the external situation could change.
The Peter Principle doesn’t mean that the top job is best filled by someone for whom it is his first job, on the grounds that different jobs need different capabilities, and trying to have someone competent at all these different jobs reduces the probability that someone in the top level job would be competent, although it could be used to argue that – it’s that someone will be promoted until he finds himself in a job where he is incompetent, so a lot of positions will be filled by incompetent people. Not that everyone in every position will be incompetent.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:57 am153. norcal (a6130b) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:22 pm
There were no U.S. combat troops in Vietnam in 1975 and hadn’t been for two years – Congress, with its enhanced post-Watergate Democratic majority, decided to cut off military aid on the grounds that the people in Vietnam were suffering from an unending war.
The peace treaty had included conditions for determining when North Vietnam violated it, but there was no Plan B. No exit strategy from the peace treaty if it didn’t work.
The United States maybe might have bombed a little, but the president of the United States was barred by Congress from using any military force
In Afghanistan, there was absolutely no pressure from Congress to end this thing.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:06 am182. Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:41 am
Tied up in paperwork. Some probably made worse by Trump, I would guess. The Bden Administration planned on the basis that they had 18 months to get them out.
Even American citizens wanting to be airlifted have been told to resubmit paperwork (since apparently, it’s been burned) and not got to the airport on their own. Which advice may turn out to be badly wrong.
Some Democratic members of Congress seem to be very concerned that the troops will leave before they get everybody out after taking out only the American citizens and a few important people.
I think there’s at least 100,000 people they want to get out.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:11 amThis is actually completely unknown, unless you have access to the actual withdraw plan that one administration shared with the other. I assume that things like this are kept a little more secret than the UN outlines of the proposal.
From the Lyingest Liar from Liarsville:
You can find this at his website.
In later posts he discusses the removal of citizens prior to the removal of the military.
Now, we all agree that he is the dumbest buffoon ever, so with that stipulated, we still have the problem of proving the Orange Bastard didn’t leave Biden a plan that differs from the mess we see now?
Does anyone have that proof? When will this Administration make themselves available to the press, and will the press ask?
BuDuh (ae23b2) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:12 amFor that, they would have to have anticipated the Afghans not being able to hold it.
Donald Trump says he would have destroyed Bagram.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:14 amThis should be interesting…
Colonel Haiku (0c588c) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:15 amElias is Elijah in Islam, not to mention Persian, so don’t go thinking that the Taliban mayor in Sammy’s 184 is Greek.
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:32 am@191, https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/03/17/us-troop-withdrawal-afghanistan-trumps-deadline-weighs-biden/4667248001/
Trump’s plan was that we’d cut a deal with the Taliban. We leave completely by May 1 of 2021 and they’d promise to be good. It didn’t work that way.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:48 amGood grief, another mostly peaceful protest?
BuDuh (6f6dfa) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:51 amAre you under the impression that the previous administration left a USA Today article as the exit strategy for the incoming administration?
Now I really hope the press asks the relevant questions.
BuDuh (6f6dfa) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:53 amTrump’s plan was one less technologically-advanced Muslim state that Israel and the monarchies would have to worry about in the near future.
There! I said it!
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:56 amIt is, and our work wasn’t done. That army was built from scratch, and they still relied on our airpower and other resources for operations. Instead, we became a fair-weather ally and betrayed, just like Trump with the Syrian Kurds.
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:57 amTrump in July:
In April, Trump and his allies (such as Josh Hawley) were saying that the problem with Biden’s withdrawal plan was that it should be done by May 1, as Trump wanted. The deadline was the imperative.
The people who showed concern about provision for interpreters and other Afghan helpers were people who had expressed doubts about the wisdom of the deal Trump made with the Taliban last year.
The most intellectually consistent commentary I’m seeing comes from the conservative-leaning people who were willing to be publicly critical of Trump. A few think that both Trump and Biden were right on withdrawal. Many others are scorching Biden (for carrying out Trump’s plan with no more foresight than Trump showed in negotiating it, or in the Syrian withdrawal).
The hacks are the ones claiming, without evidence, that the result we’re seeing would never, ever have happened under Donald the Great.
The idea that Trump had an airtight deal that “ensured the Taliban would never dream of taking our Embassy” etc. is farcical. It’s a claim originating in Trump’s “I alone can fix it” mentality and his belief that he had personally charmed and intimidated the Taliban as no one else could do.
Trump and Pompeo told us that the Taliban were “tired of fighting” and really wanted to make peace. Were they lying, or were they deluded?
Biden was reckless and foolish. Trump’s after-the-fact claim that he would have done it much, much better is as hollow as his claims that he reads the Bible more than anyone else and he knows more about warfare than all the generals and 1/6 was a “lovefest” with a lot of “hugging and kissing” and zero threat, and his general pattern of saying whatever serves his ego at the moment.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:00 amInteresting read on the deal
https://twitter.com/thomasjoscelyn/status/1427239389579591684?s=21
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:02 amIt was our job, or at least it should’ve been. The Taliban had their chance two decades ago and they showed us who they really were.
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:02 amThis is (or was) a guerilla war. The Taliban weren’t set-pieces on a battlefield, and we have rules of engagement. I agreed with Trump when he loosened the ROE after Obama’s control-freak ways, but we’re still tasked with avoiding civilian casualties as much as possible.
I think there were a lot of secretly negotiated surrenders. The Taliban would use some “elders” really on their side as interlocuters.
The soldiers would abandon their posts without notifying their higher level commanders in exchange for being allowed to live, leaving their weapons behind, and sometimes some cash.
The Taliban seem to have honored such surrenders because they wanted their “intermediaries” to have credibility. The Afghan president also left without telling anybody saying he didn’t want a city of 6 million people to be destroyed.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:08 amBiden was the President who withdrew the troops with the results we have seen. Biden, I believe, promised a withdrawal that would not put our friends and allies in that country in a position where they are lucky if they are merely promptly executed. He didn’t follow through — whether through stupidity or mendacity or senility…who knows? Maybe we will hear when the memoirs start coming out.
Trump said he would withdraw. I doubt he made any promise on how it would work out because I doubt he really cared. Is that really better than Biden? Probably not for the Afghanis.
Who should we blame? And how much should we blame them? Good question. The will of the US people was to get out of Afghanistan and we did. Don’t we want our leaders to do what we want?
Appalled (1a17de) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:08 am@204, Agreed this is what the US people wanted. It’s not going to fit into a partisan stick no matter how much we want it to.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:10 amAnd now a ramp up of many horribly monstrous actions taken against people that will be seen by no one.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:15 amWhere is joe cellar?
mg (8cbc69) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:15 amWhere is heels?
194. The name of the Taliban-appointed mayor of Kunduz is Gul Mohammad Elias. He was not a civilian. The New York Times also describes him as “insurgent-commander-turned-mayor”
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:17 amThe first question you should ask: Who’s the President when this occurred?
That’s who you should blame for this botched withdrawal.
There is no giving Biden a pass on this. Irrespective of whether the plan was in place, he was not obliged to withdraw the technical support, and especially air capabilities, upon which western powers have spent 20 years training ANA to rely upon but not to run themselves and therefore ensure the government would fall in short order. He was under no obligation to order the withdrawal in such a way to leave billions of dollars of equipment in Taliban’s hands. He flatly lied to the public only a few weeks ago claiming a Taliban takeover was unthinkable (as did Johnson and I’m sure many other leaders).
That recommitting troops or delaying withdrawal would be politically difficult is not an excuse. He had the power to prevent the chaos we’re now witnessing and any declaration to blame the previous administration(s) is simply partisan spin.
whembly (e2380c) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:21 amI have a friend still there. A kind soul. He worked for the U.S. Army because he thought we were offering his country a chance at something better than what they’d had all his life (he was seventeen when our Army arrived).
A few weeks ago he wrote me of the death threats, by phone and in person. His little girl asked if the bad men were going to kill them and he said no, the Americans will protect us. Now he’s in hiding, and the people who swept into his city yesterday are asking for him by name.
I wrote him an e-mail with no hope he’d see it soon. He wrote back yesterday. Thanking me.”
—- JPS
Colonel Haiku (0c588c) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:21 am206. Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:15 am
Word will get out, and even some video, like in Syria, but it may be possible to ignore it.
The Taliban want to fly their official leaders from Doha (where the United States is still trying to get some remaining Afghan leaders to agree to a peace agreement) to the hitherto civilian airport.
But it is now controlled by the U.S. military.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:22 am“We are not at war with Iran. The Soleimani hit was murder by stealth under every law in the world.”
I’m shocked, SHOCKED to find that murder of leaders, organizers and financiers by stealth is a common consequence of murder of troops by proxy (does nk think one is okay and one isn’t? Is he heavily involved in cheering for the first and invested in assuring himself a clear conscience and a clean record? Has he disclosed any financial or familial involvement in the same? Inquiring minds want to know!)
B….BUT ONLY UNACCOUNTABLE AND “UNPOLITICAL” INTEL AGENCIES ARE ALLOWED TO DO THAT! THE US SHOULD NEVER ASSERT ITS INTERESTS AGAINST THE MONEYMEN BEHIND WAR, ONLY THE SOLDIERS IN THE FIELD! DOING OTHERWISE IS…BARBARIC! UNCONSCIENABLE! AN ABSOLUTE BETRAYAL OF THE GLOBAL BEST PRACTICES IN CIVILIZED WAR PROFITEERING!
Howard Mujahidean (8354ef) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:23 amWhembly, Biden owns his part in this and he could have done things differently. (I think he should have) He probably should have announced that the US doesn’t cut and run and increased our military presence. That’s what you’re saying right? You’d have supported sending more forces to Afghanistan to ensure a more orderly withdrawal?
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:26 am“ The most tragic thing about Joe Biden’s cascade of failures is what it reveals about the man and his leadership team as a whole. He never had the capability to anticipate the problems which now overwhelm him and still less appears to possess the capacity to improvise a solution. Reality, so long kept at bay by the media narrative, is now inside his OODA loop and pulling ahead. What began with the border crisis was joined by the covid outbreak. The trillions of dollars in stimulus turned on him to become inflation. Without a pause Afghanistan came out of the box months ahead of his scenario. Now with stunning speed, Kabul has almost fallen. Before he can react to one thing, yet another challenge emerges. Each time the loop goes round he is further and further behind.”
—- Richard Fernandez
Colonel Haiku (0c588c) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:27 amhttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/world/asia/afghanistan-talibal-jalalabad-falls.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/us/politics/biden-taliban-afghanistan.html
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:29 am“[Biden] never had the capability to anticipate the problems which now overwhelm him”
I actually give him credit for showing everyone what a REAL insurrection looks like.
Obudman (a4a3d0) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:36 amIf you go over to The Bulwark, you’ll see that the dastardly NeverTrumpers aren’t giving Biden a pass at all (though elsewhere you’ll find some who think withdrawal regardless of consequences in Afghanistan was the best choice). They didn’t tether their standards of right and wrong to a personality cult.
The intellectually dishonest people are the ones making the evidence-free claim that Biden’s failure proves that Trump was right all along, and using it as a cudgel against people who were saying last year that Trump’s deal with the Taliban was foolish and would empower them without imposing any serious conditions or deterrence.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:39 amIf Democrats had done what Trump and his fanatical loyalists did in an effort to overturn an election and keep the loser in power right here in America, you would probably call it an insurrection and wouldn’t insinuate that what happens in Afghanistan somehow nullifies it.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:43 am213. Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:26 am
Biden did both.
he Biden Administration announced it is increasing its military presence in order to cut and run.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1027498370
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:46 am#52
Thanks for the response
I took a leap of faith into my crystal ball?
We do that a lot here on Trump. Trump is (insert bad character trait here) so, Trump (will commit sin/blunder). Fair enough.
The Taliban might have carried their momentum forward, unstoppable with Trump in charge, but that is in someone elses crystal ball, not mine. (Mine is a magic 8 ball. Amazon $8.99)
Biden so far has “sent B-52’s”. Where were the explosions? I’m confident in my assessment of Trumps character. He would be so angry at being embarrassed by the Taliban that he’d have been blowing things up the past 10 days and Magic 8 ball says: maybe the Afghan Army might have fought back with US air cover.
Biden is so weak he is incapable of embarrassment. Its a feature now. Biden’s underlings look like soap bubble blowers and none of our adversaries should be afraid of them, or of our military serving under them. A twitter guy posted the LGTBQ flag captioned: The Embassy in Kabul spent more time on Pride Month than it did on the Taliban. Not true. It only appears to be true from the results. What will happen after Sunday’s defeat at the hands of the media, is a bunch of explosions. Biden will emerge from Camp David with the smell of mapalm in the morning still lingering. He’ll tell the Taliban that they are in for the Corn Pop treatment and then have a little oatmeal and take another nap. Not to give aid and comfort to an enemy, but they should/will ignore him.
If I was Xi, I’d seriously be looking at Taiwan. Putin will be looking to do whatever he wants short of taking Poland. Shot callers are turning all lights to green.
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:52 amThe plug didn’t need to be pulled.
Except it did, Sammy. 20 years; $2.26 trillion on the credit card.
Going in circles, no place fast is what the $150 billion ISS does.
“Our power isn’t infinite. We have limits.” – JFK [William Devane] ‘The Missiles Of October’ ABC TV, 1974
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:54 amBiden will address the nation later today… perhaps he’ll announce his plans to quickly (for him, at least) to cry havoc and unleash his army of TikTok Influencers on teh Taliban’s ass.
Don’t give up hope… yet…
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:03 amPut a bullet in that “Sunk Cost” excuse once and forever.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:05 amTrump on what he would have done (a bit contradictory)
It sounds like he would have openly surrendered Afghanistan and he was not going to let the Taliban portray it as a victory. And he was not going to not let people get slaughtered. I think by “people” he means Americans, or people under specific American protection, and he also means while the Americans were still there. He says he would have evacuated the civilians before the military, not the other way around.
https://nypost.com/2021/08/15/joe-bidens-defeat-will-echo-for-eternity-devine
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:05 amMoranda Dvine about Mike Pompeo
The Taliban n fact did not take one provincial capital until eight days before Kabul so they must have thought that deal might still be in force, or close to it.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:07 amit wasn’t an occupation. 2,500 American troops in a country of 38 million isn’t an occupation
Except it was. And it was more than just “troops”- there were U.S. civilian personnel, contractors and associates, etc.,… they’re clogging the airport now trying to get out.
20 years, $2.26 trillion on the cuff. Time to cut this off- and it was always going to end that way.
_______
At least Convoy Joe hasn’t offered or given fleeing Afghan President Ashraf Ghani into the U.S…. yet. If he does, watch the Taliban grab some American hostages someplace in the world.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:11 amThat seems arguable. He’s a legitimate military target with a record of attacks on Americans, the blood of our soldiers on his hands, and there was no sign of him letting up, in a country where we still have an AUMF.
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:13 am223.Put a bullet in that “Sunk Cost” excuse once and forever.
“The American Express Card… don’t leave Afghanistan without it!” – Uncle Sam
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:13 amThis is not Saigon. It’s Ho Chi Minh City.
Desperate Afghan falls from US Plane
https://twitter.com/i/status/1427208737769627652
When bodies rain from the sky, its a bad day
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:14 am163.Anybody have a problem sending dubya, dick, liz and the rest of the neo-cons to defend the embassy in kabul or has it already been named bin ladin city yet?
Cameo-them up, put them in Chinese made chutes and let’em jump in– ‘Squealing Eaglette’ Lindsey Graham can lead the team… ‘course the reliability of them there Shanghai chutes is questionable…
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:21 am#224 —
So, per Trump, we would have gotten all our people out safely and blown up the bases and the embassy. Any natives who helped out the US? Probably out of luck, given Trump’s well known dislike of admitting refugees.
Provided Trump executed on his promises, it would have been a better result. Was execution ever a Trumpian strong point?
Nevertheless, this is Biden’s failure. Trump has plenty of his own failures to take credit for so no sense laying this at his doorstep.
Appalled (1a17de) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:22 am#225
Sounds like a high leverage position Trump deal. Cue discounting replies.
One thing Trump did realize was the tremendous amount of leverage that was at his disposal as President. This board hated tariffs, but there is no doubt China felt pain and modified behavior.
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:26 amThe biggest problem for Trump with leveraging Putin via US natural gas sales to Europe was the Democrats. Europeans know that Democrats are so reflexively anti-fossil fuel that if Democrats regained power their gas would be cut off and they would not have the Russian source either.
But for a while it squeezed Russia’s income stream
If the US did that in the beginning maybe we wouldn’t be in this position now.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:29 amWithdrawing and disengaging from the theater didn’t end a damn thing.
It was Trump who had to end it, by ending ISIS. Now they will reform in the Afghan Caliphate. Some future president will have to deal with this again.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:30 amDCSCA
=mike-bounce=
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:31 amPresident Plagiarist to address the nation at 3:45 PM EDT. Which telegraphs a late lunch of a 15 minute word salad coming.
Look for ripped off rhymes similar to these from another presidential address as fleeing choppers filled the skies half a world away…
“Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned. As I see it, the time has come to look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the Nation’s wounds, and to restore its health and its optimistic self-confidence…
So, I ask you to join me in helping to write that agenda. I am as determined as a President can be to seek national rediscovery of the belief in ourselves that characterized the most creative periods in our Nation’s history. The greatest challenge of creativity, as I see it, lies ahead…
We, of course, are saddened indeed by the events in Indochina. But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world.”
President Ford, Tulane University, April 23, 1975
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:34 amThe Soleimani hit was murder by stealth under every law in the world.
So was killing bin Laden. Were you against that, too?
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:36 am231… Teh Five Stages of Grief:
* denial and isolation
* anger
* bargaining
* depression
* acceptance
You’ve covered at least 3 of the 5 in your comment. Best wishes on you personal journey!
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:39 amYour personal journey
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:39 am#227 and earlier “We are not at war with Iran.”
Perhaps. But the Iranian regime has certainly been conducting a low-level war against us, ever since the overthrow of the Shah. (There may have been a break of a few years after the demise of Saddam and his regime.) Where they can, they use proxies, as they have, mostly, in Iraq.
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:41 am@234. It’s the MIC/neoconning Pentagon brassholes, Kevin. Every excuse in the book- Stop the war…. not now, spring, summer, fall, winter.. it’s raining… Westmorland-101. Resignations, court-martials or tranfers to permanent latrine orderly duties in Antarctica are long overdue.
It’s called White Rage. 😉
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:41 amQuestion: How many 8yo girls need to be “married” to jihadist dirtbags before Biden feels shame? How many teachers need to be executed? How many schools razed and books burned? How many families have to see the men taken out and shot wo their women can be shared among the victorious rabble?
All this is on Biden. Every last life.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:41 amIf I was Xi, I’d seriously be looking at Taiwan.
Maybe Indochina if that goes well.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:45 amBiden always was a weak sister. I doubt he could stand up to Canada.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:45 am@213
Absolutely.
whembly (e2380c) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:50 am“This isn’t Saigon.” – SoS Antony Blinken, 8-15-2021
Except it is:
https://www.wsj.com/video/watch-people-cling-to-us-air-force-plane-leaving-kabul/E79F1019-C709-4182-A26D-D8F28529C258.html
IDIOT.
“Bayonets!” – Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain [Jeff Daniels] ‘Gettysburg’ 1993
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:50 amWhembly, good man.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:53 amQuestion: how many different chemicals will it take for Dementia Joe to get through his excuse-fest this PM?
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:55 amFemale CNN reporter shocked that the Taliban disrepected her.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/08/16/taliban-afghanistan-take-over-ward-pkg-newday-vpx.cnn
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:56 amIn some quarters, yesterday was “the day liberal-neocon imperialism was defeated once and for all,” though perhaps was some discordant expression of concern for the plight of the women who have just lost the benefits of liberal-neocon imperialism.
Among the (Trumpian) New Right there’s been a lot of fulminating against “liberal-neocon imperialism” over the last few years too. I saw one right-wing sage (forget who) telling us we should have understood that maybe “Afghanistan doesn’t want feminism.” (i.e. Afghan women must be looking forward to their wholesome antifeminist future.) Others in the anti-liberal-neocon-imperialist branch of the right are purporting to be morally outraged that liberal-neocon imperialism was so abruptly ended in Afghanistan as their America First agenda was advanced.
There’s a whole lotta intellectual inconsistency out there.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:59 am@213:
Absolutely, here, too.
This was a willful and calculated tragedy. Biden clearly didn’t give a F.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:00 amIf you know that there’s two factions inside the White House, then you know why it’s gone silent.
Only two? There’s a lot of seats on that Politburo, and right now everyone is blaming everyone else.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:01 am#231
“So, per Trump, we would have gotten all our people out safely and blown up the bases and the embassy. Any natives who helped out the US? Probably out of luck, given Trump’s well known dislike of admitting refugees.”
More of a “not sure if it gets this far under Trump, but certainly not in 10 days without the US firing a shot”
1. Per Pompeo
2. People out in an orderly fashion without hearing Taliban heavy weapons in the background because anyone operating heavy weapons would go boom into pink mist. Biden, no pink mist and they are in Kabul. When does the pink mist start? Nevermind, I already know. It starts as theater just before Joe emerges.
3. Blown up bases. Certainly not leaving intact aircraft behind. We have troops specifically tasked with Airbase recovery operations and aircraft tasked with destruction of same. Biden. No bombing of captured airbases and aircraft. Too late to start now.
4. Embassy. No. Assumes Taliban gets this far under Trump. This would infuriate Trump. Can you imagine how a narcissist of Trumps magnitude would take that? He’d risk getting impeached for the US internal equivalent of war crimes before letting that happen (And they would try to impeach him, but in the end no)
5. Immigration not sure if it gets this far under Trump, but I’d expect him to try to foist them off on the Australians.
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:01 amIn some quarters, yesterday was “the day liberal-neocon imperialism was defeated once and for all,”
And these isolationists will be in ascendancy until the next Pearl Harbor, at which point they’ll blame someone.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:03 amQuestion: How many 8yo girls need to be “married” to jihadist dirtbags before Biden feels shame? How many teachers need to be executed? How many schools razed and books burned? How many families have to see the men taken out and shot wo their women can be shared among the victorious rabble?
All this is on Biden. Every last life.
Not our problem. It is a problem (as it always has been) for the Afghan people to solve.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:04 am#238
Well, glad I am doing better than the typical Trump enthusiast (post-1-6 version), who lands on denial and proceeds to anger and then stays there.
Appalled (1a17de) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:05 amDCSCA: $2.26T, $2.26T, $2.26T…Uncle Sam’s credit card….War bonds, War bonds! Brassholes, Brassholes, Brassholes….Now Where’s My Stimulus Check!!!
(ROFLMAO)PIP
AJ_Liberty (ec7f74) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:08 am248.Question: how many different chemicals will it take for Dementia Joe to get through his excuse-fest this PM?
Chemicals?
Here are two stone-cold sober recommendations to service his plagiarizing habit:
[ ] 1. ‘I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.’ – Lyndon Johnson, 1968
[ ] 2. ‘I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.’ – The Big Dick, 1974
Choose, “Mr. President.”
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:10 amSo was killing bin Laden.
Erm, no. OBL was covered by both the Afghanistan AUMF and the Patriot Act as an unlawful combatant, and whatever U.S. and international criminal laws as a wanted fugitive terrorist.
Were you against that, too?
Moot point, since I think that kidney failure had killed him long before that and Zero Dark Thirty was Wag The Dog II, a Hollywood production in every respect.
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:14 am#244
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:15 amFirst Jill would have to point Joe towards Canada, hand him his 16 Font note cards and then after saying “they wipe my butt. Macron” Joe would be off for an afternoon tapioca while awaiting a subservient call from Canadian hardman Justin Trudeau that never comes.
@258. ROFLMAOPIP indeed: more Neoconning MIC/brasshole-protecting bullsh!t; serving up more creamed-chipped-Cheney-on-toast, eh AJ.
You must be an Afghan, too. My late grandfather was a banker. The institution’s code: ‘pay yourself first.’
=mike-drop=
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:17 amIt was Yoram Hazony who said:
As if the new freedom & opportunity & dignity that Afghan women enjoyed under liberal-neocon imperialism were merely an imposition by the decadent West.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:17 amAfghan security forces’ wholesale collapse was years in the making
In the summer of 2011, Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV made a round of public appearances to boast that he had finally solved a problem that had kept U.S. troops bogged down in Afghanistan for a decade. Under his watch, he asserted, U.S. military advisers and trainers had transformed the ragtag Afghan army and police into a professional fighting force that could defend the country and keep the Taliban at bay.
“We’ve made tremendous strides, incredible progress,” Caldwell, the head of the U.S. and NATO’s training command in Afghanistan, told the Council on Foreign Relations in June 2011. “They’re probably the best trained, the best equipped and the best led of any forces we’ve developed yet inside of Afghanistan. They only continue to get better with time.”
Three months later…… he said the Obama administration’s decision to spend $6 billion a year to train and equip the Afghan security forces had produced a remarkable turnaround. He predicted that the Taliban-led insurgency would subside and that the Afghans would take over responsibility for securing their country by the end of 2014, enabling U.S. combat troops to leave.
……..
……..U.S. military officials privately harbored fundamental doubts for the duration of the war that the Afghan security forces could ever become competent or shed their dependency on U.S. money and firepower. “Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane,” an unnamed former U.S. official told government interviewers in 2016.
Those fears, rarely expressed in public, were ultimately borne out by the sudden collapse this month of the Afghan security forces, whose wholesale and unconditional surrender to the Taliban will go down as perhaps the worst debacle in the history of proxy warfare.
…….
Senior U.S. officials said the Pentagon fell victim to the conceit that it could build from scratch an enormous Afghan army and police force with 350,000 personnel that was modeled on the centralized command structures and complex bureaucracy of the Defense Department. Though it was obvious from the beginning that the Afghans were struggling to make the U.S.-designed system work, the Pentagon kept throwing money at the problem and assigning new generals to find a solution.
……..
…….. U.S. military trainers who worked directly with recruits said the Afghans suffered from other irreconcilable problems, including a lack of motivation and a corrupt chain of command that preyed upon its own soldiers and police.
Maj. Greg Escobar, a U.S. Army infantry officer, spent 2011 trying to straighten out a dysfunctional Afghan army unit in Paktika province near the border with Pakistan. The first Afghan battalion commander whom Escobar mentored lost his job after he was charged with raping one of his male soldiers. The commander’s replacement, in turn, was killed by his own men.
Escobar said he came to realize that the whole exercise was futile because the U.S. military was pushing too fast and the Afghans were not responding to what was, in the end, a foreign experiment. “Nothing we do is going to help,” he recalled in an Army oral-history interview. “Until the Afghan government can positively affect the people there, we’re wasting our time.”
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:20 am……..
But perhaps the biggest hardship was having to teach virtually every recruit how to read.
……..
And who was defense secretary during this time? The “brilliant” Robert Gates.
Question: How many 8yo girls need to be “married” to jihadist dirtbags before Biden feels shame? How many teachers need to be executed? How many schools razed and books burned? How many families have to see the men taken out and shot wo their women can be shared among the victorious rabble?
The first and last sound like what “our allies” did before the Taliban went in and hanged them for it. Is there credible evidence that the Taliban also did it?
And, yes, how many teachers have been executed and how many schools razed and books burned is something we all should know, I think. How many?
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:21 amThe Biden Bunch/liberal feminists have been silent about Islamic abuse and oppression of females for a long, long time.
Not even the usual empty platitudes.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:23 amBiden campaigned on “ending the divisions” and “I couldn’t do worse.” He’s already failed on both.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:24 amWhat’s worse than Hazony, in way, is the people who very recently were saying “America First! No more Forever Wars! Bring all the troops home now! We have no business imposing our ways on another country!” but are now — as a nakedly political ploy — excoriating the course of action they were demanding.
I’ve read that DJT and the GOP and assorted allies have been busy deleting evidence that they were promoting what they now decry, as political expedience demands.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:25 amGreatest threat to America:
[ ] Climate Change
[ ] Taliban
[ ] Covid-19
[ X ] Neocons
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:27 am#256
Wait.
Didn’t the Afghan Taliban give al-Qaeda and Bin Laden safe harbor to plan, finance and launch attacks on US soil?
That makes it our business to blow some people and things up, shoot some others.
Our business is not “you broke it you fix it” Powell Doctrine. Fixing it is an Afghani problem. Afghanistan was broken long before we showed up. Nation building is a failure in the Middle East, a giant waste of blood and treasure. Please stop.
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:30 am@264. Exactly.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:32 am“Grant us victory, O Lord, before the Americans get here.” – Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig [John Mills] ‘Oh! What A Lovely War’ 1969
So, nk, you think the Taliban are a moderating influence in Pakistan and the defenders of women and girls?
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:33 amThe plan is to let Taiwan fall.
mg (8cbc69) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:34 amSee here:
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:34 amhttps://mobile.twitter.com/aliamjadrizvi/status/1426955674236424195
Erm, no. OBL was covered by both the Afghanistan AUMF and the Patriot Act as an unlawful combatant, and whatever U.S. and international criminal laws as a wanted fugitive terrorist.
And the Iranian was in Iraq directing operations against Americans. I don’t see your distinction.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:34 amWhat’s the Vegas line on the mealy-mouthed mick announcing he’s taking ‘a leave of absence’ or outright resigning??
Move over, Howdy Doody, it’s 25th Amendment Time!
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:35 amThey may shrink from saying it’s “Islamic abuse,” as I noticed long ago. But there has not been radio silence on abuse of women in particular places under Muslim rule. The claim that women there might prefer to be brutally subjugated is not exactly a staple of Biden/liberal discourse.
Meanwhile, there are branches of conservative-world who have either cared or not cared, as the interest of blame-casting demands.
I’m not out here trying to say “my side is righteous and wise but your side is reckless and evil.” I’m observing how some people are trying to deny or cover up the position they took not very long ago. Because I didn’t tether my judgment to a personality cult. And I freed myself from the imperative of always defending one party no matter what.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:37 amIs there credible evidence that the Taliban also did it?
Disregarding your “credible” weaselword, yes. In fact they are doing it now. Of course you can disregard it all as “not credible” but that’s just shutting your eyes to unpleasant facts.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:37 am@267. You do know his go-to line is: “I’m sorry.”
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:38 amLiberals were likely to say those abusive customs were “tribal,” not “Islamic.” As if they couldn’t be both.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:39 am[X] Hale-Bopp II Comet
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:39 am266.The Biden Bunch/liberal feminists have been silent about Islamic abuse and oppression of females for a long, long time.
Not a good time for them to bring up ‘bitch-slapping.’ 😉
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:41 amWhat’s the Vegas line on the mealy-mouthed mick announcing he’s taking ‘a leave of absence’
Jan 21, 2023.
22nd Amendment.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:41 amSo, nk, you think the Taliban are a moderating influence in Pakistan and the defenders of women and girls?
Way different than your initial assertion which I addressed. So I won’t address this one because I’m afraid of what your next one will be.
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:43 amObudman (a4a3d0) — 8/15/2021 @ 10:50 am
Trump would have, he says – and whether he could actually have achieved this, or even tried ard to, is another question:
1. Intimidate the Taliban so that they no longer will support any terrorism.
He thought he had achieved that.
2. Insist no American forces be attacked as long as they remain. On pain of massive military retaliation. Compared with: Not taking part in the fighting at all, so long as they are left undisturbed.
Trump believed he achieved that.
3. Till a final settlement is reached, the Taliban are to take over no provincial capitals.
Also accomplished.
4. Negotiate an agreement where the Taliban can peacefully take over or have a role in the government.
5. Abandon all attempts to promote human rights in Afghanistan or oppose Islamist rule.
6. Destroy all U.S. bases and equipment in Afghanistan, leaving the Afghan government soldiers only rifles. Per Trump’s plan they won’t need more since a peace agreement will have been achieved.
7. Reduce the size of the embassy to the size of the embassy, say, in Tajikistan, if there is embassy to remain any at all.
8. Take out most remaining Americans, but few Afghans. Give other western countries time to take out any of their people that they want to, also.
9. Take out remaining troops (on a scorched earth basis) only after the other things are done.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:58 amThis is a disaster but I feel better listening to POTUS explain to the American public his plan to go forward and deal with this…
Hoi Polloi (ade50d) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:59 amNo flights are landing or taking off from the airport near Kabul because people have rushed the tarmac or may attempt to in the future. Seven people have died, either from attempting to cling to an aircraft or being run over. Many came because they heard a false rumor that Canada was taking people without visas out of the country,
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:02 pmBiden won’t answer all questions, and some of what he does say or promise may prove to be wrong within a very short period of time. (Why should his ability to foretell the future suddenly get a great deal better?)
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:04 pmBiden campaigned on “ending the divisions” and “I couldn’t do worse.” He’s already failed on both.
Actually his policies and proposals (with exceptions of crime (mostly a state/local issue) and immigration are pretty popular with the public.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:05 pmWhen 1970s Convoy Joe was already well into his first term as senator from Delaware, vividly recall sitting w/t guys sipping flat frat beer watching NBC News’ special report, in the middle of the day, w/John Chancellor and David Brinkley report on the fall of Saigon. ‘Course a lot of the coverage was just phoned in audio w/slides and day-old film- and the famous wirephotos of choppers on the embassy roof– no direct satellite video at the time– but the audio reports were breathless and conveyed pure chaos. Later came the films of choppers in the skies- and of sailors shoving them off carriers into the sea to make room for more. Recall discussing how many small towns across America could have used just one of those helicopters for medivac purposes. Instead, they’re dumped into Davy Jones’ Aerodrome.
You’re reliving Rotary Phone Joe’s 1970’s, kids. A nasty virus, gas lines, malaise, ineptness, inflation and incompetence. Except there ain’t no Reagan in your future.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:05 pmSpeaking of which, CNN reporting that Biden also has a crisis at the southern border. More illegals coming over the border in decades.
I thought Harris had a plan – she went to Guatemala and told everyone to stop coming.
So glad the adults are in charge…
Hoi Polloi (ade50d) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:05 pm9. Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/15/2021 @ 11:03 am
bin Laden only wanted to attack the World Trade Center. The Pentagon wasn’t his idea.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:06 pm‘bin Laden only wanted to attack the World Trade Center. The Pentagon wasn’t his idea.’
Hitler only wanted to attack Poland. World War II wasn’t his idea. =eye-roll=
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:09 pmYes, it’s all Trump’s fault.
It was Trump who decided in 2002-04 to permanently occupy Afghanistan and do nation building. Sarcasm off.
DN (c704b7) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:13 pm275. Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:34 am
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:17 pmAnd the USS Cole. And the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. And bombing trans-Pacific airliners.
Hoi Polloi (ade50d) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:17 pmAs a matter of fact, Hitler did intend to start World War II, knoeing full well what it meant.
He listened to the British threat and stopped the attack on August 26 and then decided to go ahead and did September 1, 1939. Because he was a health nut and thought he’d be too old to start it and enjoy life s few years later.
bin Laden was not opposed to attacking the Pentagon. But it wasn’t his idea. That came from the Taliban or its sponsors.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:23 pmTalking about Canada, Trudeau just dissolved Parliament and called for new elections, hoping to get a majority this time.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/federal-election-2021/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-2021-federal-election-1.5547999
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:27 pmBiden’s address on the situation in Afghanistan was scheduled to begin at 3:45 p.m. ET, according to NBC News. Also just now on WCBS radio 880 am. It’s 3:31 now.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:31 pmI’m not out here trying to say “my side is righteous and wise but your side is reckless and evil.”
Well, bless your heart. That distinguishes you from other lefties.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:41 pmBiden is just waiting for his last IV infusion to complete before he hits teh stage…
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:44 pmThe only thing that’s true about What Would Have Trump Done? vs. What Biden Did is that Trump and his sycophants would have tried a lot harder to keep him from looking bad.
But you know what? The Taliban would still have done things their way. And only their way. Like they did in 2001 and in the 20 years that followed. (And in the next 10,000 years against The Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition if Dustin should have had his way. 😉 )
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:45 pmSammy? Facts only, no rewriting of history please!
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:45 pmIf the strategic genius’s plan to get all our troops out of Afghanistan by Christmas last year hadn’t been thwarted by the Deep State, the present disaster would never have happened!
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:46 pmNeocon Karl Rove is still pushing ‘nation-building’ on Fox.
Reached an age where patience with canned pork like him is near an end… it’s time for some Doyle Lonnegan house cleaning in America’s major political parties.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:46 pmDon’t ask, don’t tell: Teh Spartans.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:46 pmChrist Almighty, the idiot-in-chief is late for his own announced speech. Probably will be for his own funeral, too.
Can he even read a watch anymore? Will Nurse Jill and Queen Kamala be in the room w/him, too?
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:50 pmThe speech hasn’t started yet.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 12:55 pmA liar… and a bum.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:03 pmTrump supporters finally accepted the fact that Biden is the president. Even the ones who were saying that Trump was secretly running things.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:03 pm“Speaking on morning television programs, senior members of Biden’s national security team sought to shift blame for the collapse of the Afghan government on the country’s defense forces, which they said lacked the will to defend their country against the Taliban.”
—- CNN
Wow… it appears that perhaps they’ve determined blaming DJT won’t resonate with the American people – or even with their media colleagues – who know better.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:05 pmPuddin’ Joe is blaming Trump. lol
Joe is such a ninny.
Hoi Polloi (ade50d) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:05 pmBiden blames Trump, but says he made the decision to follow through with Trump’s deal with the Taliban. Now taking credit for it.
Which is it?
He’s an idiot.
Hoi Polloi (ade50d) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:06 pmHe’s coming close to Whisper Mode!
Hoi Polloi (ade50d) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:07 pmI told ya… Biden claims his hands were tied and his back to the wall. No choice but. After blaming everyone else… the S of a B.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:07 pmIs he limiting it to accepting his 10% of the blame?
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:09 pmLOL. He said he talked to Afghan President Ghani to clean up corruption and seek a political settlement with Taliban…a couple of months ago.
A bit too late, Joe.
Hoi Polloi (ade50d) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:10 pmNow he’s blaming the Afghanis’ lack of willpower. Well, okay, then.
Joe, say a prayer for Trump and light a candle for him every Sunday! Nobody else could have made you President.
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:11 pmJoe throwing the Afghan government and military under the bus, a couple of weeks after saying the Afghan troops were competent and loyal.
Hoi Polloi (ade50d) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:12 pmWhispering mode… listening to him, he is unfit for office, which they know. Watch for a push for a Harris presidency, with Alfred E. Neuman as her VP.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:13 pmThis is incredible. “The Afghans deceived brilliant me but Trump, the dolt, should have seen through their ruse.”
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:14 pmIt reminds me of a scene in Days of Thunder when Robert Duvall told Tom Cruise to go hit the pace car.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OIe1KtfpDzw
Biden has blamed just about everyone and everything.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:18 pm“… graveyard of empires.” He plagiarized you, DCSCA!
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:19 pmHe blames Trump, but pats himself on his back at the same time. He is truly and idiotic politician. Senile to the point of brazen inanity.
Hoi Polloi (ade50d) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:20 pm“THE BUCK STOPS WITH ME!!”
“…and no questions at this time please..”
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:21 pmHe’s utterly clueless.
Word salad, word salad, word salad; senator sh!t-shoveller; terrorists all over– Antarctica, Altoona, Hoboken– Scranton! He learned the hard way- blame others: it’s Trump’s fault! It’s Afghanistan’s fault! It’s Ghani’s fault! We spent over 2 TRILLION, not one trillion, not including post war costs you lying POS.
It’s not about your decision whether to stay or leave, you lying imbecile- it’s about HOW YOU PLANNED TO LEAVE. You didn’t. Resign you incompetent mealy-mouthed mick. I believe to ‘my core’ you’re an incompetent, plagiarizing pool of festering puss. You were in 1973, you were in 1988 and you are today. Now run away from the free press.
Congratulation Jimmy Carter; I’m damn near 70 years old and this idiotic Irish jackass has won your crown as, by far, the worst American president in my lifetime.
Do the country, the planet, the Catholic faith a favor, Joe: just DIE.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:21 pmWhat an empty, self-serving, ill-conceived address.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:21 pmActing too much like his predecessor, again.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:23 pmYou sure obsess about Trump, Rad, despite your claims of neutrality above.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:25 pmYup. Staying was untenable. Not planning how to leave Afghanistan when Trump started making it happen, after you promised to make it happen, make you a foreign policy failure.
Democrat strategists will ensure to hammer home this was the right choice, but blame Trump at the same time.
Don’t buy it. Biden and his exit strategy fell asleep at the wheel.
Meanwhile, border crossings are surging. Another strategy that is failing.
But hey, at least he beat COVID and inflation isn’t eating away people’s purchasing power.
Hoi Polloi (ade50d) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:27 pmLet him be judged, Radegunda. He has been found wanting.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:27 pmGood to know that “self-serving” is now a bad thing again.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:28 pmMaybe I am misunderstanding what you aren’t tethered to.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:28 pmI will post the transcript when it is available, Rad. That should streamline your whatabout marathon.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:30 pm327.What an empty, self-serving, ill-conceived address.
Just incredible, wasn’t it. It’s behind the gymnasium time.
Even CNN’s Axelrod agrees w/me that he should have at least been more Kennedyesque-post Bay of Pigs in this speech. He’s a bum.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:34 pm“I’ll do my job and take responsibility. I won’t blame others.”
—- Dementia Joe Biden on June 4, 2020
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:34 pm334… that should be most helpful!
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:36 pmInside Reach 871, A US C-17 Packed With 640 Afghans Trying to Escape the Taliban
A U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III safely evacuated some 640 Afghans from Kabul late Sunday, according to U.S. defense officials and photos obtained by Defense One.
That’s believed to be among the most people ever flown in the C-17, a massive military cargo plane that has been operated by the U.S. and its allies for nearly three decades. Flight tracking software shows the plane belongs to the 436th Air Wing, based at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The C-17, using the call sign Reach 871, was not intending to take on such a large load, but panicked Afghans who had been cleared to evacuate pulled themselves onto the C-17’s half-open ramp, a video posted late Sunday showed.
Instead of trying to force those refugees off the aircraft, “the crew made the decision to go,” a defense official told Defense One. “Approximately 640 Afghan civilians disembarked the aircraft when it arrived at its destination,” one defense official said.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:36 pm……..
You think US economy class is packed…….
From the AP Whitehouse correspondent:
Must be easier to keep the reporters away from him when he is there.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:37 pmA U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III safely evacuated some 640 Afghans from Kabul late Sunday, according to U.S. defense officials and photos obtained by Defense One.
Doesn’t include the Afghans clinging to the plane’s fuselage who fell off and plummeted to their deaths, does it.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:39 pm“It should be noted that Liz Cheney pushed the “blame Trump” ploy the hardest of any commentators over the weekend and it fizzled out completely before the weekend was over.
So now she reverts to criticizing Biden and, if I was of a machiavellian bent, I would think Liz was trying to curry favor with Kamala who, as we speak, must be rubbing her hands together in glee!
This is it! This is the one! This is the event that will expose Joe’s dementia so thoroughly that not even DOCTOR DR Jill DR DR DR DR DR Biden, who happens to be a doctor, just so you know, can no longer hide it!! And then, just as with Willie, I’ll be in!!!
But there is another side to this as well.
Why, this might represent the end of DR DR DR DR DR Jill Biden’s (who is a doctor, in case you were not aware of that) run as a modern day Edith Wilson (who, though the first lady, was most assuredly not a DOCTOR DR DR DR like DOCTOR DR DR Jill, who is a Doctor, in case you hadn’t heard that before).
And if you think Jill Biden, who is a Doctor, (like, a real Doctor! Whoopie said so! On TV! So its real!) isn’t thinking about ways to get her Weekend at Bernie’s husband all the way to 2024 so that she can step in and run in his place in 2024, well, then you are experiencing a real failure of imagination and in understanding human nature.”
—- Drago
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:41 pmAnd don’t think that there won’t be domestic repercussions right here at home. What drug dealers and sex traffickers would trust the Justice Department’s Witness Protection Program now?
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:44 pm#332 — I have said that Biden has been reckless and unwise. As have pretty much all the NevetTrumpers whom the Trumpers trashed over and over for their temerity in criticizing Trump when it was warranted, including the way he empowered the Taliban with his “deal” — as many people said at the time.
The NeverTrumpers are showing themselves to be reasonably consistent. The AlwaysTrumpers — not so much.
I’ll add that the failure to take care of the interpreters in a timely matter is unconscionable — but that issue could hardly have been on the minds of Trump and his flacks when they were saying in mid-April that the withdrawal should be finished by May 1.
In July, Trump was boasting that the Afghan withdrawal was all his doing, and he said the Biden administration was simply unable to stop what he started even though they wanted to. Trump claims credit for anything when it’s opportune, and blames everyone else when anything goes wrong. And Trump apologists have been solidly behind him in the “blame everyone but Trump” game. Now they’re trying to memory-hole their own prior positions re: Afghanistan and spinning airy tales about how it would all have gone well in the hands of their hero — who is known for being impulsive and for blindsiding the generals and policy people by tweeting out a new policy with no actual plan behind it.
The reflexive Trump-apologists have no ground to chastise anyone else about taking accountability.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:45 pmHe spoke at 4 pm. He went on a while. His argument for withdrawal was that the status quo was not stable. The ceasefire with the Taliban expired May 1. (he doesn’t explain why it continued after that)
His choice was either leaving or doubling down and he couldn’t ask more American soldiers to die.
There were two missions in Afghanistan: One to degrade al Qaeda and kill (get maybe) Osama bin Laden and one to make Afghanistan a better country. The first succeeded.
We must pay attention to the national security dangers of the present not the past. Since 2001, it has come from many countries and we take care of that without boots on the ground. Places like Somalia, Yemen, Syria.
We are not abandoning human rights – in fact human rights is a key element of U.S. foreign policy.. We will press for it like we do in other countries. Meanwhile we are getting all people who support human rights out of the country.
The Afghan leaders did not unite, nor did they wish to negotiate with the Taliban. And their army didn’t fight.. He made the right decision.
There was no good time to withdraw but he didn’t want to pass this along to a 5th president. The same thing we are seeing now could have happened 5 years ago, or 15 years in the future.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:46 pmAnother post about Trump. Unsurprising.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:47 pmDoesn’t include the Afghans clinging to the plane’s fuselage who fell off and plummeted to their deaths, does it.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:48 pmDifferent flight.
This speech was classic senatorial-sh!t-shovelling- he believes he can talk his way, with bluster and bullsh!t, through the mess of his own making, as all senators believe they can do.
“The buck stops here” don’t buy much credibility these days thanks to your inflation, Joe.
IDIOT.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:48 pmI’d wager the Taliban “generals” that 0bama freed in trade for Bergdahl are heavily involved in directing the door-to-door round-up of security forces, pilots, teachers…
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:51 pm@346. Meh. C-17s, NBA teams, Afghan refugees and pallets of Middle East bound cash all look alike. 😉
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:51 pmUS reaches deal with Taliban on evacuations: report
……..
The deal was reached in talks in Doha, Qatar, between senior Taliban officials and Gen. Frank McKenzie.
The two sides apparently agreed to a “deconfliction mechanism” in which operations at the airport in Kabul are permitted to continue without interference from the Taliban.
…….
Defense Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Monday that he would not discuss the specifics of McKenzie’s conversation.
“But I can tell you that the general was very clear and firm in his discussions with Taliban leaders that any attack on our people or on our operations at the airport would be met swiftly with a very forceful response, and I think I’ll leave it at that,” Kirby added.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:53 pm……..
The U.S. military temporarily suspended operations at the Kabul airport due to Afghans rushing on to the airfield. Around 3,500 U.S. Embassy personnel are still waiting to be evacuated at the airport, CNN reports.
……….
Biden going back to Camp David. Senior CBS correspondent David Martin said the Afghan forces depended on close air support, medevac ability and even food supply and that was withdrawn. They felt abandoned. Instead of no man left behind it became every man for himself.
Someone said Afghan forces found themselves attacked all over the ountry – the Afghan air force could not move people around and it’s hard to get around otherwise.
The Afghans to be evacuated will somehow have to make it to the airport by themselves.
Flights are now coming into the military portion of Kabul airport said a female CBS correspondent in a secret location in Kabul..
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:54 pm343… I’m told your pink slip/title is in the mail…
Colonel Haiku (0c588c) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:56 pmHe’s flying back to Camp David to continue vacationing.
Must be nearly ice cream cone and blood transfusion time.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 1:57 pmYou could smell his self-righteous Irish anger boiling just under the surface as he gave that speech. The ghost of Corn Pop is waiting for him behind the gymnasium.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:00 pm323.“… graveyard of empires.” He plagiarized you, DCSCA!
Me ‘n’ Corn Pop await him behind the gym, nk.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:02 pmIt was Trumpers who started the theme that the Afghanistan debacle proves that supporting Trump was right all along and bad things would never have happened under him and the people who don’t like him are terrible people. So some people who remembered the criticism of the Trump-Taliban deal when it was struck started finding all the evidence that Trump and his fans wanted a faster withdrawal — until the moment it became politically opportune to pretend they didn’t.
Trump has deleted statements from his website demonstrating his approval of Biden’s plan to fulfill the Trump plan. And Trump apologists — who never thought it was fair to blame Trump for anything — are pretending to be the side that’s all for accountability.
Again: the most intellectually consistent voices I’ve seen on this issue are the people that you, among others, were constantly criticizing for the sin of not liking Trump.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:06 pmI don’t think I’ve ever seen you respond to my posts that aren’t about Trump — only to ones about Trump. Unsurprising.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:07 pmWill the taliban have all those vehicles electric by 2030?
mg (8cbc69) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:11 pm“Again: the most intellectually consistent voices I’ve seen on this issue are the people that you, among others, were constantly criticizing for the sin of not liking Trump.”
Yes, consistent voices that kept pressing the Russia Collusion and all the other nonsense well after all that was put the lie to. Four years of consistent nonsense.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:12 pmIt amuses me.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:13 pm“It should be noted that Liz Cheney pushed the “blame Trump” ploy the hardest of any commentators over the weekend and it fizzled out completely before the weekend was over…
She’s in the canned ham aisle w/Karl Rove, too; reached an age where patience with canned pork like these swine is near an end… time for some ‘Doyle Lonnegan’ house cleaning in America’s major political parties.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:14 pmFirst transcript of Biden’s remarks by REV com – made by machine – will be improved by human:
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/joe-biden-speech-transcript-on-afghanistan-taliban-takeover
Sammy Finkelman (02a146) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:18 pmWill the taliban have all those vehicles electric by 2030?
Even better! They will be goat-drawn by 2022.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:19 pm338. mg (8cbc69) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:11 pm
No, but by keeping Afghanistan poor and not well connected with the rest of the world, they will reduce carbon emissions in Afghanistan in 2030 from what they otherwise would be.
And then maybe no war or airplanes too.
Of course there may be the factor of Chinese mining operations if that happens.
Sammy Finkelman (02a146) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:22 pmI stand fully behind my decision.” -President Plagiarist 8/16/2021
Uh-huh…
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:26 pm“As the man in charge, I of course accept full responsibility. But not the blame. Let me explain the difference. People who are to blame, lose their jobs. People who are responsible do not.” – Richard Nixon [David Frye] ‘Richard Nixon: A Fantasy’ 1973
Will the taliban have all those vehicles electric by 2030?
Mutton to it.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:27 pm“ Trump listened to his generals. Milley said no, so the afghan pullout didn’t happen under trump’s watch.
And the one time he contradicted his DOD secretary Mattis on the kurds and troop withdrawal in Syria back in 2018, nothing happened! The kurds are still alive! 😂
Obama overruled the generals on Iraq in 2011 and unilaterally pulled the troops out. Obama created ISIS and the destruction that followed.
Trump, even tho he wanted to bring the troops home from afghanistan, listened to the generals and was conditions based.
Biden just followed Obama’s ISIS playbook.”
—- J. Marzan
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:28 pmHe plagiarized you, DCSCA!
That didn’t start with DCSCA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_of_empires
https://web.archive.org/web/20170829132644/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/world/asia/afghanistan-graveyard-empires-historical-pictures.html
And Joe Biden attributed it to “history”
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/16/us/politics-news#biden-taliban-afghanistan-speech
Or maybe:
Sammy Finkelman (02a146) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:32 pmAs the song says he’s all gone they are still there. A year from now no one will care a about afganistan.
asset (ebda6b) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:33 pm“I am much more optimistic about the outcome here, as long as the Afghan security forces continue to do what they’ve been doing… if they continue to do that next year and the year after and so on, then I think things will turn out okay in Afghanistan.”
—- Mark A. Milley, Army lieutenant general and deputy commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, September of 2013
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:35 pmThe flaw in Biden’s reasoning is that he assumes that the Taliban would never agree to a permanent U.S. presence in Afghanistan – by agree I mean without fighting it the way the Soviet Union agreed to leave West Berlin alone or Castro’s Cuba Guantanamo – but would agree to other non-Taliban groups.
He premises, without saying so, that the reason the non attacks on U.S. forces persisted past May 1 is that the United States was still committed to withdrawal.
Sammy Finkelman (02a146) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:36 pmwait til those refugees find out about our systemic racism
JF (e1156d) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:37 pmMITCH mCcONNELL:
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/mitch-mcconnell-briefing-speech-on-afghanistan-transcript-august-16
Sammy Finkelman (02a146) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:39 pmI guess you have to laugh when you can’t refute what I’ve said.
There’s some strong stuff against Biden coming from the evil globalist neocon Bill Kristol, as from a bunch of other RINO traitors and Deep State hacks who wouldn’t bend the knee over the past several years. It must be confusing to the people who said they had totally lost all credibility by not joining the cult.
There are some amusing mental gymnastics on the side of those who were saying not long ago that getting out of Afghanistan ASAP was exactly the right thing to do — and should happen faster — when they could frame it as their own guy’s brilliant patriotic plan.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:44 pmA difference in policy is one thing. The Biden Administration’s breathtaking level of incompetence since he was installed in the White House last January is quite another.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:46 pmI barely understand what you try to say.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:48 pmCharlie Kirk and Stephen Miller, among others, are doing what they can to publicize American racism and say No more refugees.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:53 pmThe Lefty Victory Mince. It is usually employed when all hope is lost.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:53 pmI’m sorry about your condition.
Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:54 pmMe too.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:55 pmAfghanistan Is Your Fault
Kabul has fallen. Americans will now exercise their usual partisan outrage for a few weeks, and then Afghanistan, like everything else in a nation with an attention span not much longer than a fast-food commercial, will be forgotten. In the meantime, American citizens will separate into their usual camps and identify all of the obvious causes and culprits except for one: themselves.
……..
Afghanistan was different. This was a war that was immensely popular at the outset and mostly conducted in full view of the American public. The problem was that, once the initial euphoria wore off, the public wasn’t much interested in it. Coverage in print media remained solid, but cable-news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off quickly, especially once a new adventure was launched in Iraq.
……..
And now those same Americans have the full withdrawal from Afghanistan they apparently want: Some 70 percent of the public supports a pullout. Not that they care that intensely about it; as the foreign-policy scholar Stephen Biddle recently observed, the war is practically an afterthought in U.S. politics. “You would need an electron microscope to detect the effect of Afghanistan on any congressional race in the last decade,” Biddle said early this year. “It’s been invisible.” But Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden all ran on getting out of the war, and now we’re out.
What the public does care about, however, is using Afghanistan as raw material for cheap patriotism and partisan attacks (some right and some wrong, but few of them in good faith) on every president since 2001. After the worst attack on U.S. soil, Americans had no real interest in adult conversation about the reality of anti-terrorist operations in so harsh an environment as Afghanistan (which might have entailed a presence there long beyond 20 years), nor did they want to think about whether “draining the swamp” and modernizing and developing Afghanistan (which would mean a lot more than a few elections) was worth the cost and effort.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:57 pm……..
Biden’s policy, of course, is not that different from Trump’s, despite all the partisan howling about it from Republicans. As my colleague David Frum has put it: “For good or ill, the Biden policy on Afghanistan is the same as the Trump policy, only with less lying.”
……..
Biden was right, in the end, to bite the bullet and refuse to pass this conflict on to yet another president. His execution of this resolve, however, looks to be a tragic and shameful mess and will likely be a case study in policy schools for years to come. But there was no version of “Stop the forever war” that didn’t end with the fall of Kabul. We believed otherwise, as a nation, because we wanted to believe it. And because we had shopping to do and television to watch and arguments to be had on social media.
……….
From April 2021…
“You were critical last year of President Trump’s decision to reduce the troop levels in Afghanistan because you said it was an incoherent policy,” CNN’s John Berman pointed out to the Senate majority leader. “How do you feel now about President Biden’s decision?”
“I think President Biden has come up with a careful and thought-out plan,” Schumer replied. “Look, John, the president doesn’t want endless wars. I don’t want endless wars. And neither do the American people. And it’s refreshing to have a thought-out plan with a set timetable instead of the president waking up one morning, getting out of bed and saying what just pops into his head and then the generals having walked it back. So I think this is a careful, thought-out plan.”
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:03 pm@379 glad to hear you’ll be letting them use your spare bedroom
JF (e1156d) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:05 pmA year from now no one will care a about afganistan (sic).
A year? Try six months.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:06 pmLooks like “95% agree with Biden” is today’s pre-loaded social media macro targeted directly at the sheep.
Obudman (cef237) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:08 pm@383 nothing encapsulates the nevertrump psyche quite like “(fill in the blank) is your fault”
looks like nichols still hasn’t gotten over the kavanaugh nomination
JF (e1156d) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:13 pmThis just in… teh White House has designated an envoy who will be in the air in a few hours, traveling to Afghanistan to negotiate certain aspects of an agreement with the Taliban…
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1424809139927146502?s=20
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:14 pm“I think President Biden has come up with a careful and thought-out plan,” Schumer replied.
Another canned Kosher ham.
Paging Doyle Lonnegan!
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:16 pmKinzinger. Another pork chop for ‘ya, Doyle.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:28 pmhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbS3nV3hZrY
Wooohooooooo! “Bums Away!” Now some scrawny Afghan towelheads know what felt like for Americans plummeting to certain death from the World Trade Center.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:38 pmCharlie Kirk and Stephen Miller, among others, are doing what they can to publicize American racism and say No more refugees.
As opposed to this dumb-assed-mick?!?!?!?!:
“The United States has no obligation to evacuate one — or 100,001 — South Vietnamese,” Mr. Biden said, in an April 1975 meeting at the White House with President Ford. -source history.com
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:55 pmAnd Cuomo smiled
mg (8cbc69) — 8/16/2021 @ 3:56 pm@386. A year from now no one will care about afganistan (sic). A year? Try six months.
Uh-huh…
Like nobody cares about the fall of Saigon. Or Pearl Harbor. Or Hamburger Hill. Or Pork Chop Hill. Or Khe Sanh. Or Iwo Jima. Or Mazeroski’s home run winning the 1960 World Series for the Pirates over the Yankees….
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 4:09 pm“As my colleague David Frum has put it: “For good or ill, the Biden policy on Afghanistan is the same as the Trump policy, only with less lying.”
Sounds like something that one-trick Canadian Fatboy would say .
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 4:11 pmThe Afghanis will remember. Their descendants will be singing songs about it thousands of years from now.
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 4:14 pmSounds like something that one-trick Canadian Fatboy would say .
Canadian bacon.
More pork for you, Doyle!!!
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 4:15 pm394… no smile, just some gas from his *casu martzu, mg…
*casu martzu (Sardinian pronunciation: [ˈkazu ˈmaɾtsu]; literally ‘rotten/putrid cheese’), sometimes spelled casu marzu, and also called casu modde, casu cundídu and casu fràzigu in Sardinian, is a traditional Sardinian sheep milk cheese that contains live insect larvae (maggots).
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 4:15 pm356. Radegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:06 pm
Proof of dishonesty.
And Twitter deleted his tweets from before.
This is the POTUS – not the famous personal – account archive
https://twitter.com/potus45?lang=en
But Twitter won’t allow the archived verson of realdonaldtrump to be available through Twitter
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/07/twitter-national-archives-realdonaldtrump-479743
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/16/2021 @ 4:20 pm“ If Democrats had done what Trump and his fanatical loyalists did in an effort to overturn an election and keep the loser in power right here in America, you would probably call it an insurrection and wouldn’t insinuate that what happens in Afghanistan somehow nullifies it.”
On the contrary, I would call it exactly what the Jan 6 circus was, trespassing and rioting by a clueless, lawless mob used by the msm and other idiots as a gift wildly overblown meme.
And I would happily take one more of those by libs in exchange for the rioting, destruction, looting, assault, murder, storming of govt. buildings and private businesses that resulted in loss of life and billions in damages, abandonment of civil order/societal norms and a crime wave that in many communities (mostly poor and minority) continues to this day. Jan 6 on the other hand was over in a few hours and condemned by just about everyone. The summer riots on the other hand were cheered on by the media and even physicians gave them a social distancing pass.
Obudman (cef237) — 8/16/2021 @ 4:21 pmAnd Cuomo smiled
Gorbachev laughed out loud.
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 4:25 pmI remember years ago when my old man would go to the Mideast from London and have to try to do oil business deals w/these half-assed mutton-minded towelheads for months on end.
They’re carpet bazaar hagglers from top to bottom on every aspect of life and property.
After hours of jabbering, he and his staff would have to literally get up from the conference table, pack up the papers, leave the office and open the Land Rover doors before the towelheads would run up to the vehicles and say “-Okay, vee deal now!” He’d get back home to London after a month of dealing w/them, mix himself a J&B and soda– then literally and wholly out of character hurl his American Tourister briefcase [which I still have] across the living room in the flat out of total frustration, swearing his head off. All of the Mideast is mutton and camel dung sauteed in pigsh!t. The place should have been used for atomic testing instead of Nevada and New Mexico decades ago. Wasting any American treasure, blood and lives defending any of them in that region is just idiotic.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 4:35 pm@370. “I am much more optimistic about the outcome here, as long as the Afghan security forces continue to do what they’ve been doing… if they continue to do that next year and the year after and so on, then I think things will turn out okay in Afghanistan.”
—- Mark A. Milley, Army lieutenant general and deputy commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, September of 2013
White Rage:
[ ] resign
[ ] court-martial
[ ] pistol in the drawer
Choose.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 4:46 pmOne thing this boosh debacle has taught us – America is in need of change.
mg (8cbc69) — 8/16/2021 @ 4:59 pmOur attempt to export Western values might have worked better if we had believed in them.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 5:15 pmAmerican Military Generals remind me of the Washington Generals…
mg (8cbc69) — 8/16/2021 @ 5:46 pm“My lefty friends are too stunned to regurgitate the latest line that it was Trump’s fault because the pell mell fleeing and meltdown of Kabul are too hideous to ignore. It’s a complete debacle.
I’m sorry the comparison with Trump at this point is jarring. The last guy to attack our embassy wound up being shipped home to Iran in a UPS box. Here we just left billions of weapons behind to be sold or reused against us. How long before a Stinger missile takes out an airliner?
I will say this about the speech, Biden was smart to run away as he is no longer capable of answering questions that haven’t been scripted and written down for him. A trained seal would be more useful for us at this point.”
—- Gk1
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 6:04 pmThe Hooters Administration.
Boobs.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 6:11 pmThe incompetence, impotence, and insane lack of preparation should be key indicators of Biden unfitness for the office. They also call into question the abilities of military brass, the Pentagon, the State Dept., this ridiculously disinterested media, and others.
This all-around fu*k-up will haunt the U.S. for decades.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 6:14 pm“My son has a friend from Ranger School in 1BDE 82nd Airborne now at the airport. He sent my son a screenshot of a text from his former interpreter relating that the Taliban were now in his town, and proceeding with a list of names and biometric data to capture and kill all former interpreters and others associated with the US effort. Brave people who wanted something better for their country are being hunted and killed because Biden couldn’t give a damn to select people who can think and plan. Yeah, it’s all Trump’s and the Afghans’ fault—now back to my vacation.”
—- G. Pinfold
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 6:15 pm“
“I stand squarely behind my decision”
But there were two decisions: whether to get out, and how to get out.
“And though he wants us to believe they “planned for every contingency””
It is to laugh. So what would things have looked like if they hadn’t “planned”? Did they think to include parachutes for people clinging to airplanes?
Anyway, we’re triply f*&%ed: stuck with the indelible memory of the disaster, stuck with hapless, hopeless Biden, and stuck as a country exposed to the world in its ineptitude.”
—- anon
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 6:18 pm@404 that was 7 years ago.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/16/2021 @ 6:20 pmTaliban joe will be bringing in the covid infected from overseas as well as across the Rio Grande.
mg (8cbc69) — 8/16/2021 @ 6:37 pm@413. So?
White Rage Redux:
[ ] resign
[ ] court-martial
[ ] pistol in the drawer
[ ] grenade down pants
Choose.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:04 pm410.The incompetence, impotence, and insane lack of preparation should be key indicators of Biden unfitness for the office.
The law firm of Blarney & Malarkey agrees.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:08 pmWhite Rage Redux:
[ ] resign
[ ] court-martial
[ ] pistol in the drawer
[ X] thermite grenade down pants
Choose.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:15 pm“Freedom is messy and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things; they are also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here.” – Donald Rumsfeld, damned dead Neocon, 4/03
So is failure.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:23 pmDo a search of the variety, value and amount of U.S. weapons and munitions you’re stuck paying for that the ‘organized’ departure planned by President Plagiarist left for the Taliban… and you’ll vomit more than 18-wheeler Joe ever has at his favorite choke & puke.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 7:50 pmWade Miller 1️⃣7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣
@WadeMiller_USMC
In case anyone is wondering how what is happening in Afghanistan is possible… in May of this year,
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:05 pm@SecDef Lloyd Austin identified climate change as the #1 issue facing the military. #2 was countering violent extremists in the military. #3 was team work with allies and agencies.
Brave people who wanted something better for their country are being hunted and killed because Biden couldn’t give a damn to select people who can think and plan.
No, Biden had them all right. He just didn’t give a sh1t.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:30 pmA GOP Congress would impeach. And it may in 2023.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:31 pm#418 In her “Children: Pro or Con?” Fran Lebowitz mentioned this as one of the cons:
As anyone who knows children can add, children are also prone to repeating arguments endlessly, childish name calling, and low-level forms of identity politics.
They are, often, “pre-rational”. But they are children, and so we should try to teach them to think in a more adult fashion.
But what should we do with adults who haven’t gotten beyond those stages? Recommend they read Kahneman?
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:32 pm#418, #419, and hundreds of others.
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:36 pmUpside for MIC lobbyists: maybe the Taliban will end up demonstrating just how effective American weapons and munitions are in the hands of a genuine fighting force.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:53 pm@422. Surely you noticed his Irish is up now. Sugar high.
Ice cream can do that.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:57 pmBiden only said “The buck stops here” because they safety pinned it in a note onto his jacket and sent him off like he was in school trouble again.
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:00 pmI think Bidens Secret Service nickname is “broken arrow”. Lower case intentional
steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:02 pmNo, Biden had them all right. He just didn’t give a sh1t.
That does not compute. It’s one thing to say, and I’ll totally agree, that when it came down to it the U.S. commander in Afghanistan needed to be told which foot to put in front of the other, but that should not be so. He and his staff should have known how to plan and carry out an orderly evacuation and withdrawal.
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:19 pm@428. Actually, Biden’s SS code name is ‘Celtic.’ Make of it what you will.
‘Stonehenge’ seems more fitting.
Harris’s code name is ‘Pioneer.’
Named after an old turntable, perhaps.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:24 pmFour-star clowns who gave away the circus, that’s what we have. Probably pissed that with the wars winding down they couldn’t look forward to as large rake-offs from the armaments companies when they retired as their predecessors had gotten over the last 20 years.
nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:25 pmArrest Liz Cheney.
Charge: Neoconning without a license.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:26 pmEveryone says that “only” 2,442 American military were killed in Afghanistan, but the toll of course much higher. More US contractors were killed than US troops. From the Total Cost of War Project:
US Military: 2,442
Rip Murdock (431d14) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:26 pmUS DOD Civilians: 6
US Contractors: 3,486
Other Allied Troops: 1,144
Afghan National Military and Police: 66,000-69,000
Civilians: 47,245
Journalists and Media Workers: 72
Humanitarian Aid Workers: 16
More US contractors were killed than US troops.
Halliburton?!?!
Some clouds have silver linings. 😉
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:29 pmHas the Afghan Railway turned the profit Amtrak has yet to see?
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 10:31 pmI note that report doesn’t list the number of Taliban killed. It also seems to conflate Iraq operations in the total.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:02 pmSome clouds have silver linings.
So, Americans killed and you call it a “silver lining”? Most people would be ashamed of that.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:03 pmSong lyrics. Uncle sam has got himself in a terrible jam way down yonder in … He’s all gone their still there.
asset (0f0479) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:32 pm@437. Zero tears for war profiteers.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:41 am@437. Postscript; These guys aren’t ‘volunteer’ military, conscripts or ‘the Seebees’, Kevin; these private contractors hires are like mercenaries you’d hire out of Soldier of Fortune; they don’t sign up to plant the America flag but collect the American dollar. They’re recruited by corporate and usually quite well paid for the risks- [thanks to Neocon Liz and her war profiteering chums]- to go into harms way and if they get tagged and bagged, tough- the next of kin gets the bank account. No sympathy for ‘Halliburton’ and ‘Blackwater’ types. They’re in it for the dough. They knew the risks chasing the almighty buck. Outsourcing -privatization – of what was once basic government services grew very popular in the 1980s thanks to you know what: Reaganomics.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 2:07 amMemo to Joe:
“There’s gonna be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.” – President Plagiarist, July 8, 2021
https://img.jagranjosh.com/images/2021/August/1682021/us_evacuation_from_kabul_saigon_comparison.jpg
IDIOT.
“We’ll be travelin’ along, singin’ a song, side-by-side…” – ‘Side By Side’ Harry Woods, 1927
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 2:43 amWe didn’t make it out of the post itself and into the comments before we got a “but Trump”.
Biden has been POTUS for how long? And while this is going on he’s on vacation?
At what point does anything become his responsibility? He endorsed this plan several weeks ago claiming this wouldn’t happen and the best he has now is that it shouldn’t have happened this fast.
People who voted for Biden did so because why? Wasn’t anything better than Trump? But now the excuse seems to be “well, Trump would have done the same thing”.
When character matters we got Mr. Hides in Basement. When competence matters we got “this wasn’t my plan, I was just going with the one from the guy that didn’t win the election”.
frosty (f27e97) — 8/17/2021 @ 2:44 amhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T1txBRoQxQ
mg (8cbc69) — 8/17/2021 @ 2:57 amhttps://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/08/16/emboldened-china-warns-taiwan-the-islands-defense-will-collapse-and-the-u-s-military-wont-come-to-help-n1470121
mg (8cbc69) — 8/17/2021 @ 3:12 amchina owns the biden family
This is the fall of Saigon and the Iranian revolution rolled into one.
mg (8cbc69) — 8/17/2021 @ 3:25 amjoe Cellar says your welcome
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:57 pm
This is utter and complete BS. “We” didn’t believe any such thing. It’s only been a few weeks since Biden admitted he believed this and anyone with any critical thinking skills should have laughed.
It’s also textbook gaslighting. This isn’t a problem because “we” wanted to shop and watch TV. It’s a problem because we’ve got a media that systematically lies and engages in agenda driven propaganda and we’ve got a political class that is both thoroughly corrupt and incompetent.
This is a sad and pathetic attempt to defect criticism from Biden and attach it to the people who should be holding him accountable.
frosty (f27e97) — 8/17/2021 @ 4:10 amRadegunda (33a224) — 8/16/2021 @ 2:44 pm
It’s not confusing. It’s the expected response from this sad group of grifters. It’s interesting that there’s still a point where at least some lies are just to obvious to tell with a straight face.
That it took this level of f’upery for them to give even this meager level of criticism doesn’t redeem anyone’s credibility and the near constant references back to Trump as if to hedge further undermines the credibility restoring criticism of Biden.
I’m guessing we’ll be back to “the true conservative’s case for Biden’s policy on X” by the end of the week.
frosty (f27e97) — 8/17/2021 @ 4:30 amTrump stuck himself into the debate by declaiming that he would have done it right. He made it about him. Because the posing poseur who poses is always trying to make everything about him. He always wants to be the the center of attention. Then bride at every wedding, the baby at every christening, and the corpse at every funeral. So f*ck him, and f*ck the horses’ asses he rides on (and you know who you are).
nk (1d9030) — 8/17/2021 @ 5:10 am403. DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/16/2021 @ 4:35 pm
Here it is limited to big purchases like cars and houses. And maybe what he had to deal with was worse even than that. Because with a car and a house you can probably accept their first price.
Like car dealers.
But didn’t these business deals involve even more money than a new car?
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 6:10 amThis is probably a source that gets discredited out of hand but I will post it anyways just because I believe he is right on the money with the video clip that he linked:
Hopefully it creates a discussion regarding the content.
After watching the embedded video segment I have concluded that the administration was crystal clear to congress that they had total control of the situation. If there ever was a moment to blame Trump for the bad hand he dealt them, this was it. Instead they took complete ownership of their own withdraw strategy.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 6:22 amWhat reason does any victim of British predation, which is just about every person in every place the British have been to, have to trust the British in anything?
nk (1d9030) — 8/17/2021 @ 6:33 am427. steveg (ebe7c1) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:00 pm
Don’t be silly.
Because if he didn’t say “the buck stops here” he’d be criticized – he’d already been criticized – for not saying it. Similarly, he said the loss (or its speed) was not predicted, and that the scenes we have seen were “gut wrenching” and even personal.
But still he was, in the words of a Wall Street Journal editorial:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-to-afghanistan-drop-dead-taliban-11629151994
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 6:33 am420. Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:05 pm
Actually, the #1 issue was faulty intelligence. But no one could rate it #1, because then it wouldn’t be the #1 issue.
429. nk (1d9030) — 8/16/2021 @ 9:19 pm
There’s no way that Biden would have given the Afghan government forces no chance at all.
He was not going to openly turn over Afghanistan to the Taliban, unlike perhaps, Donald Trump, or so Trump now seems to be claiming:
https://nypost.com/2021/08/15/joe-bidens-defeat-will-echo-for-eternity-devine
Biden was shooting for an agreement with the Taliban – at least a transitional government.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 6:45 am@453 and others…
All this talk about knowing what Trump would’ve done is a bit silly imo….
Trump is a braggart and tries to talk a big game about “the plan”, even if its the most ridiculous plan. One thing it ought to be recognized is that when the military or his groups of leadership pushes back, many time he’s willing to change on the fly based on their recommendations if for nothing else, to mitigate a catastrophe like the one we’re seeing now.
In short, we really don’t know what Trump would’ve done in Biden’s shoes and any guess as to what would’ve happened is simply that – a guess.
whembly (0ae2ca) — 8/17/2021 @ 6:56 amWhembly, I really wonder how the decision making process went and how political it was. Trump’s initial plan to have everyone out by May 1 was a joke and Biden rightly changed it. What he changed it to has worked terribly.
I wonder how much he was hedged in by commitments and actions from the previous administration and how much they felt the pressure to move quickly so that they could claim to be following what the previous administration had done? Doing so gave them 2 things
1. Being able to show that the surrender was supported by both Trumpers and the left.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:07 am2. Being able to share blame with the previous administration.
This is the core of Biden’s argument:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/07/08/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-drawdown-of-u-s-forces-in-afghanistan
What he announced was that the date would be postponed. The Taliban did not follow through on their claim that they would then be free to attack U.S. forces – because they wanted a withdrawal, obviously. But Biden thought he still needed to have a withdrawal in the works, and was robably pleasantly surprised by the patience of the Taliban.
Taking casualties: Possibly a few casualties, which is also possible now.
U.S.military tactics since at least the Gulf War in 1991 have been to always strive to stay out of the range of the enemy’s weapons, while being close enough for them to be in range of yours. It worls very well. If closer was needed, they used Afghans. The danger was from suicide bombers or IEDs.
Civil war: A catch phrase. Democrats have been opposed to participating in a “civil war” ever since it was claimed that the Vietnam War was a civil war. This is Biden going back to his political roots. The fact is, without foreign backing by Pakistan’s rogue military, or some part of it, the Taliban would have been as defunct as the Shining Path in Peru, with what’s left of it being a criminal organization, like the Mafia.- SF]
And what a=have they done now? Of course, this is supposed to be only very short term, and the Taliban, presumably, willl not want to extend the U.S. stay or have some of their forces get bombed.
So he says.
Of course one possible reason the threat emanating from Afghanistan was low was because the Taliban were busy fighting a war and not in control. Now maybe they want to end this war, too and won;t do this any more.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:10 amBiden’s hands were tied, his back to the wall. He had no choice. He had to F-up.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:11 amFrosty wrote
What did you think would happen when we retreated? We know what Patterico thought because he put it in writing ahead of time. But I’ll take your word for whatever you say your expectations were.
Personally I find the way things worked utterly unsurprising.
I also expect that most people will stop caring about this pretty quickly. Unless we have troops there the US doesn’t pay much attention to Central Asia. There will be a few people who talk angrily (and rightly) about betraying our allies in the region. But most of the people I see talking about that now are being dishonest. They don’t support doing anything that would help, and their belief in supporting our allies as a principle starts and stops when their political advantage.
FWIW, I would support sending in a sizable troop deployment to pull out the people who helped us and want to leave. I also think we should find a decent place for them to live, with schools and other facilities while we separate legitimate claims from fraudulent ones. I would put a time limit on this refuge camp of about year while we found places for them to seek asylum.
That should have been done before we pulled out, but it wasn’t.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:17 amAt the end of the year I’d settle everyone that was believed to not be a safety risk in Arkansas and Colorado. 50/50
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:23 amDid you ever get a copy of Trump’s administration’s actual plan? Or are you still going off the proposal that the UN endorsed?
I have searched and searched and I still haven’t found the actual drawdown specifics that would have been drafted for each department in the US Government.
BuDuh (23901c) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:27 amI note that report doesn’t list the number of Taliban killed. It also seems to conflate Iraq operations in the total.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 11:02 pm
Not knowing if you actually looked at the report, it does list “opposition fighter” deaths at 52,000, noting that “ Neither the US or NATO have released figures on the exact number of anti-government insurgents killed. From July 1 through November 5, 2019, Afghan National Defense Forces reported killing 10,259 militants/insurgents/terrorists and reported killing 10,091 from 6 November to 13 April 2021. They did not report any data for the period of May through August 2020.”
“Opposition fighters” would include the Taliban as well as individual warlord militias allied with the Taliban.
I only summarized US and non-combatant deaths.
Rip Murdock (431d14) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:27 amThe Six Stages of Biden:
Incompetence
Inadequacy
Impotence
Incapacity
Ineptitude
Incontinence
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:30 amWould you expect any less from DCSCA?
Rip Murdock (431d14) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:31 am422. Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/16/2021 @ 8:31 pm
You don’t impeach for maladministration, although you may want to call attention to it – that’s government oversight – and there’s blame – and faulty intelligence – that belongs to Republican Administrations. They would like a Pearl Harbor/911 or at least Benghazi type investigation, with focus on the role of the president of the United States. And it wouldn’t be too careful about accuracy.
It’s all for partisan reasons. But that’s better than doing nothing to find mistakes.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:36 amAt the end of the year I’d settle everyone that was believed to not be a safety risk in Arkansas and Colorado. 50/50
You are a cruel person, Time123. Resettle the nearly most conservative Muslims in the world (and the general population of Afghanistan is, the Taliban just being more militantly so) to one state guaranteed to be Islamophobic and to another where they’ll never get a wedding cake baker’s license?
Californy is the place they oughta be. Besides the obvious reasons, it’s the secondmost sheepherding state in the U.S. and with the Afghans it might even pass Texas which is the firstmost.
nk (1d9030) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:38 amFWIW, I would support sending in a sizable troop deployment to pull out the people who helped us and want to leave. I also think we should find a decent place for them to live, with schools and other facilities while we separate legitimate claims from fraudulent ones. I would put a time limit on this refuge camp of about year while we found places for them to seek asylum.
That should have been done before we pulled out, but it wasn’t.
I agree, but the collapse would have started earlier if the US started an airlift before our troops left. The minute we started bugging out our Afghan employees everyone would figure out we were leaving, and the panic would begin. You can’t hide transporting thousands out of country and not make those remaining worried. It was a no-win situation.
Rip Murdock (431d14) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:39 amAt this point it’s probably safe to assume that what you can find is what existed on paper to support having all US troops out by May of 2021. It wouldn’t be out of character for his administration to have not produced the detailed work you’re looking after making the agreement with the Taliban.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:42 am…… Did you ever get a copy of Trump’s administration’s actual plan? Or are you still going off the proposal that the UN endorsed?
I have searched and searched and I still haven’t found the actual drawdown specifics that would have been drafted for each department in the US Government.
Which probably means the Trump Administration hadn’t started planning. All we have is the Trump-Taliban Peace Agreement.
Rip Murdock (431d14) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:43 am@466, I imagine it would have needed a lot of bombs. Make the option “Fights lots of marines” or “Let the US retreat in peace”
I’d so like to point out that I’m not a military specialist and every problem has a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:45 am@459 meaning, states you don’t live in
JF (e1156d) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:52 amTime and Rip, I am seeking clarification.
Do you both believe that the actual specific drawdown/withdrawal plans would normally be part of the public record?
Maybe you can point me to the specific plans that Biden utilized. In the video I posted above Biden’s Defense Secretary said they were following their plan.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:53 amThis fellow highlights how bad and needless this action by the Biden administration is:
https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1427375809359138823?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1427375809359138823%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Falthouse.blogspot.com%2F
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:54 amI think President Biden has come up with a careful and thought-out plan… the president doesn’t want endless wars. I don’t want endless wars. And neither do the American people. And it’s refreshing to have a thought-out plan with a set timetable instead of the president waking up one morning, getting out of bed and saying what just pops into his head and then the generals having walked it back. So I think this is a careful, thought-out plan.”
—- Sen. Chuck Schumer
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:59 amIt was until it wasn’t.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:59 amNo battle plan, and that includes retreat and withdrawal, survives contact with the enemy and the Taliban were not going to do anything that minimized their triumph. They were going to milk the rout of our social justice warriors to the maximum. For the morale of their troops and to demonstrate their strength to the people. So there’s that, too.
nk (1d9030) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:00 amNK, You’ve got me all wrong. I was looking for states with mountains and something to offer culturally. AK is socially conservative and CO values diversity. If there were a socially conservative state that valued diversity that would be perfect but I don’t think there is one. CA & Texas would be good also. So in this fantasy land we can do 25% each.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:02 am@475, your disrespect for the men and women in uniform is jarring. I know some people feel this way but it still feels odd to run into.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:05 am@470, I’m find if the state I live in accepts Afghan refugees.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:07 amIndeed, no words needed.
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:12 amIf we – God forbid – end up with a hostage situation, the Biden administration will be over.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:12 amWhat this administration was most concerned about was the optics of a chaotic evacuation. Well, they’ve got what they were most concerned about by failing to do what was required when we could’ve done it.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:25 am@464
From a partisan tactical purpose, Democrats are stuck with Biden unless he dies.
Gameplay this out: Biden is removed/step down/dies and Kamala becomes President. She picks her VP which requires a simply majority in the House/Senate.
There’s no VP to break the tie in a 50-50 Senate. So, the VP must be someone that would get 1 of the Senators to break rank. Not really a given. So what happens? Stalemate, until a more moderate Democrat is selected.
If this happens after the ’22 election and GOP regains House/Senate. Buy lots of stock of popcorn because it’d be fugly.
In the meantime. Nothing momentous would get passed in Congress and kiss the radical Democrat’s plans good bye.
Hence, Biden is here to stay.
whembly (0ae2ca) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:28 am#437 – “So, Americans killed and you call it a “silver lining”? Most people would be ashamed of that.”
Not if they are fans of “Czar” Putin and/or “Emperor” Xi.
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:31 amBuDuh @471-Time and Rip, I am seeking clarification.
Do you both believe that the actual specific drawdown/withdrawal plans would normally be part of the public record?
Having worked in DoD, no, they would be classified. Why make public your plans for withdrawal to the enemy (and the government that depends on you for its survival)?
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:42 amThe
SixSeven Stages of Biden:Incompetence
Inadequacy
Ineptitude
Impotence
Incapacity
Incoherence
Incontinence
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:42 amIt is odd for me to have a disagreement with you. 🙂
I believe it is an absolute that the same “conservative” group that voted for the infrastructure bill will have a few members ready willing and able to “do the right thing to move the country forward.” And, additionally, I don’t think there is such a thing as a moderate Democrat.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:43 amThank, Rip. That should put to rest the notion that anyone knows what plans the previous administration left in the care of the current administration.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:44 amBiden’s appalling speech on Afghanistan merits a 25th Amendment discussion
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:55 am
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:00 amOf course the Trump DoD ham strung the Biden transition team, so we don’t know if the Trump DoD shared those plans (assuming they existed). Hopefully the plans will be released as part of any Congressional investigation.
@487 – I don’t think so… those “conservative” groups voting for the infrastructure bills are playing the hand that’s given to them. They feel like they don’t have choice, but to play the game and try as best as they can to mitigate the extreme aspects of these bills, no matter how small.
If my scenario were to happen, where by the VP is in flux and the 50-50 Senate is in flux. McConnell will hold the power and the rest of the Senate would be glad to take the brunt of the criticism. I see it as another “Merrick Garland” not getting a vote 2.0 sort of thing. McConnell took ALL of the blame, and on purpose. I think he’d relish that, and the Democrats KNOWS it.
whembly (3bda0a) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:05 amThis administration is a disaster on every front. It was as predictable as it is disgusting.
NJRob (eb56c3) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:06 amWithin your link is an update that explains what took place, Rip.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:07 amTyler Rogoway
@Aviation_Intel
Cutting the power and running away from Bagram Air Base weeks before the final pull-out goes down as one of the strangest military decisions I have ever seen. Choosing a single point of failure, an airport with one runway, for such a sensitive mission. Just beyond strange.
Tyler Rogoway
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:07 am@Aviation_Intel
When this happened, we couldn’t figure it out. It was so weird. Moving to exclusively leveraging Kabul International seemed so bizarre. This is beyond the intel failure that they would waltz out of there and the Taliban would remain far over the horizon. Absolutely nuts.
But no more mean tweets, Rob!
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:08 amand the Democrats KNOWS it.
Sure they knows it, but it’s what they don’t knows that could fill a soccer stadium .
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:10 am@475, your disrespect for the men and women in uniform is jarring. I know some people feel this way but it still feels odd to run into.
I do confess to a paucity of respect for men and women in uniform (other than nurses’ uniforms) (I mean, like, you know, if the girls can do it …?), but in the instance of my comment 475 “social justice warriors” was derision of the mission and not the people.
nk (1d9030) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:13 amYou don’t impeach for maladministration,
The Founders beg to differ.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:23 amBiden officials: Trump left bare cupboard on Afghanistan
…….
…….[T]wo Biden officials who spoke with Axios on Monday on condition of anonymity bristled at the criticism coming from former President Trump and his administration in the wake of the Taliban’s rapid sweep across Afghanistan and capture of Kabul.
“There was no plan to evacuate our diplomats to the airport,” a senior national security official told Axios about the preparations they inherited from the previous administration. “None of this was on the shelf, so to speak.”
…….
Biden officials said that Trump’s team during the transition, was slow to brief them on key details and context behind the 2020 peace agreement signed in Doha.
That Trump-era deal between the U.S. and the Taliban called for a withdrawal of troops by May 2021.
Separately, Trump, after losing the election, signed a secret memo to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan before Biden took office, as Axios’ Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu reported. But after some Trump officials became aware of “an off-the-books operation by the commander in chief himself,” they eventually persuaded Trump to keep some 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.
…….Trump effectively didn’t have a plan to bring all Americans including troops, contractors and diplomats home safely. One said that created “headwinds” and “unnecessarily increased” the degree of difficulty for the new administration.
“The entire policy process had atrophied,” one of the officials said. “It was really manifest here.
“On the one hand, they set a May deadline for withdrawal,” the official said. “On the other hand, there was no interagency planning on how to execute a withdrawal.”
……..
Related:
Trump’s war with his generals
……..
(Acting Defense Secretary Christopher) Miller probably couldn’t act on his own authority to execute a total withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan because he was serving in an acting capacity. If this was for real, (retired Army Col. Douglas) Macgregor told (the head of the Presidential Personnel Office John) McEntee, then it was going to need an order from the president.
The one-page memo was delivered by courier to (Acting Defense Secretary) Christopher Miller’s office two days later, on the afternoon of Nov. 11, 2020. The order arrived seemingly out of nowhere, and its instructions, signed by Trump, were stunning: All U.S. military forces were to be withdrawn from Somalia by Dec. 31, 2020. All U.S. forces were to be withdrawn from Afghanistan by Jan. 15, 2021.
……..
Top military brass, including Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, were appalled. This was not the way to conduct policy — with no consultation, no input, no process for gaming out consequences or offering alternatives.
A call was quickly placed to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. In turn, Cipollone notified the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien. Neither Cipollone nor O’Brien had any idea what the order was or where it had come from.
Neither did the office of the staff secretary — whose job it was to vet all the paper that reached the president’s desk. Yet the paper bore Trump’s distinctive Sharpie signature.
The U.S. government’s top national security leaders soon realized they were dealing with an off-the-books operation by the commander in chief himself.
………
(Secretary of Defense Mark) Esper did his best to stay away from the White House through the rest of 2020, but his clash with the president over Afghanistan worsened as the election neared.
In response to a Trump tweet calling for serving troops to be home by Christmas, Esper sent the president a classified memo warning conditions in Afghanistan were not appropriate for a precipitous withdrawal. A rush for the exits, he argued, would break faith with allies, increase the likelihood of green-on-blue insider attacks, open the door to terrorism, embolden the Taliban, and undermine the government in Kabul.
……..
Trump administration officials did not brief congressional leaders or key U.S. allies ahead of a Nov. 17 announcement by Miller that the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan would be reduced from 4,500 to 2,500 by mid-January.
To America’s allies and lawmakers of both parties this was a shocking break with protocol. But key Trump officials believed the decision would leak if they briefed in advance.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:27 am……..
If this happens after the ’22 election and GOP regains House/Senate. Buy lots of stock of popcorn because it’d be fugly.
Yeah, I think I mentioned that Senate issue in passing a while back. I doubt that the Demos would move Harris up until after the 2-year mark, to allow her the chance at winning re-election twice. So, sure, they might have to nominate a Jim Webb-type as VP, or more likely an aged, but sitting, Senator who could not possibly run for election later.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:28 amYes. Which was a proxy for uncouth American.
NJRob (eb56c3) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:28 amWe learned last administration that you can impeach for whatever you feel like. It’s Congress that decides.
And that was cheered on by the support of countless people.
NJRob (eb56c3) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:29 amRip, that sounds like the Trump administration. But Biden had options. He chose to do it this way. The parts that don’t work well are on him. If this really is the least bad alternative he hasn’t made that case clearly. I think he was boxed in to doing this quickly and badly or not at all.It’s fair to fault him for it. It’s also fair to fault leaders that came before him for their parts in it. Except for the partisan morons there’s plenty of blame to go around.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:32 amBut there was no version of “Stop the forever war” that didn’t end with the fall of Kabul. We believed otherwise, as a nation, because we wanted to believe it. And because we had shopping to do and television to watch and arguments to be had on social media.
What forever war? Not one combat casualty in almost 2 years. We’ve been in South Korea for almost 70 years. Why could we not wait the Taliban out? Like South Korea, a thriving Afghanistan economy — if only in the urban areas — would have made a far better impression than any number of helicopter gunships.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:33 am@501, if you really think ‘mean tweets’ is a accurate summary of why people here have criticized Trump you need to work on your reading comprehension.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:33 amNoah Webster, 1828
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misdemeanor-word-history-not-always-a-crime
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:35 amKevin, I agree with you. That would have been a better policy. But both Trump, His supporters, and the left wanted out of Afghanistan.
I think the retreat has gone worse then it should have but it was always a surrender to the Taliban. Also, it’s fair to point out that there’s a difference between functional states that have chosen a military alliance with us and a military occupation where the government depends on us for their continued existence. If SK asks us to leave in 6 months I don’t expect it will result in the fall of the SK government. NK might chose to invade, but that’s not likely.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:38 am‘mean tweets’ is a accurate summary of why people here have criticized Trump
“Mean tweets” are the Trumpist apologist’s term used to minimize the man’s misdemeanors.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:40 am@498
Doesn’t really matter would the Founding members would’ve thought.
Only thing that matters if there are political will to impeach for ‘x’.
whembly (0ae2ca) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:47 amit’s fair to point out that there’s a difference between functional states that have chosen a military alliance with us and a military occupation where the government depends on us for their continued existence.
Well, from 1948 to 1980, SK wasn’t much of a freely-elected state, and Syngman Rhee’s regime was pretty much propped up by the US, and later by the UN forces.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:47 amOnly thing that matters if there are political will to impeach for ‘x’.
Gerald Ford’s argument.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:48 am@508
I think the whole ‘mean tweets’ is simply a shorthand for – I’d still take the chaos of the Trump administration over this abject failure of the Biden administration. At least we’d get some Conservative/GOP wins along the way.
whembly (0ae2ca) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:50 amWhembly, perhaps. But it is also a misstatement of the reasons why many hold Trump in disfavor. Almost unsultingly so.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:52 amWhembly, it’s Sad in this context because Biden’s terrible performance is about what you’d expect from the Trump administration. There’s no reason to thing they’d have done this any better.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:53 amTrump is, to some conservatives, like that jackass who takes your side in the debate and perfectly illustrates the stereotypes that your opponents wish to project on you.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:53 amThere’s no reason to thing they’d have done this any better.
Well, they could hardly have done worse.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:54 am@513, It implies the critique of Trump is about presentations and lacking in substance. It would be like me saying “You’re only criticizing Biden here because he talks slowly.”
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:55 amThere is no reason, however, to think that Trump would care about any Afghan, or wish Afghani refugees brought here to settle. He’d probably tweet something awful about it too.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:56 amHe can’t. Twitter banned him for being a Troll. He’d have to do a press release.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:04 am@513 True, hence why I said it was used as a shorthand rather than minimizing the other concerns you had of Trump.
whembly (0ae2ca) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:07 amTime123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:17 am
Not really.
There will be a lot of reminders, plus a lot of people stuck in Afghanistan, with friends here.
Also family.
Every claim for asylum is now legitimate. Merely having applied to go to the United States would make a return to Afghanistan a bad idea. The question is are they the beneficiaries of special legislation, or ordinary refugees?
The refugee camp will be in Guam and the United States will find only a limited number of countries taking a limited number of people.
They won’t process the applications in a year the way things are done. And now they won’t have any records from the government of Afghanistan.
International refugee law usually says they should stay in the country of first asylum. A few may have close ties to the UK or France or some other country.
while we found places for them to seek asylum.
That should have been done before we pulled out, but it wasn’t.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:09 amAnd the odd thing is that I’d probably take the Trumpian maladministration over this maladministration. But that’s a false choice, as ever. There are other Republicans.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:10 amI also expect that most people will stop caring about this pretty quickly.
I think that having a lot of Afghan refugees here would make sure this wasn’t forgotten, much as the Vietnamese refugees did for a time. And, cynically, that may be why some would be fine with them not making it here.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:12 amTwitter banned him because he was an influential political opponent.
Trump supported conservative policies that would be much more effective than this disaster on all fronts from the Biden administration.
“No mean tweets” means you’d rather this apocalyptic scenario of high inflation, rising taxes, crippling long term unemployment, destroying businesses, an invasion from the south spreading disease, Saigon redux, etc than Trump’s chaotic personality.
NJRob (64d775) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:16 am522… too late, Kev. The choice was made for you.
Colonel Haiku (0c588c) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:16 amIf none are capable of the basic prerequisite of winning enough popular support among Actual-America for a primary and general election, then no, there are in fact no other Republicans. We have seen enough of the consequences from putting the ‘adults’ and ‘experts’ back ‘in charge’ for a mere six months.
Jorge Halo (f0ece9) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:16 am@454. In short, we really don’t know what Trump would’ve done in Biden’s shoes and any guess as to what would’ve happened is simply that – a guess.
He’ll tell everyone tonight; he’s calling in to Hannity.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:19 amWATCH: Trump Gushed About Handing Afghanistan Over to the Taliban, Who Would Then ‘Kill Terrorists’
Former President Donald Trump gushed about the prospect of a Taliban-led Afghanistan last year, predicting that once they took over the country, they would devote themselves to killing terrorists.
……..
But last February (2020), months after canceling a planned meeting with the Taliban that would have placed the group’s leaders inside the White House on September 11th, Trump gloried in the idea of a Taliban-led Afghanistan that would become a bane to terrorists.
“I’ll be meeting personally with Taliban leaders in the not-too-distant future. And we’ll be very much hoping that they will be doing what they say they’re going to be doing: They will be killing terrorists. They will be killing some very bad people. They will keep that fight going,” Trump said at the Feb. 29, 2020 briefing, at which he also announced the first reported U.S. death due to COVID-19.
He then praised the U.S. military for killing terrorists throughout the region over the past 20 years, and said that “now it’s time for somebody else to do that work, and that’ll be the Taliban,” adding “and it could be surrounding countries.”
“I really believe the Taliban wants to do something to show that we’re not all wasting time,” Trump said, promising that ” If bad things happen, we’ll go back.”
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:21 am………
“ It was inevitable that the side by side Biden vs Biden videos would begin to appear alongside these spot on critiques of every LLR’s hero, Dementia Joe.
There is one video out that proves Biden was a strong advocate for nation building so thsts just another fundamental lie biden vomited up in his lie filled drug addled reading exercise yesterday.
Joe Biden yesterday: “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy,”
Joe Biden in 2002 (arguing for a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan):
“Perhaps the most important question, however, is one of commitment. Will we stay the course and build security in Afghanistan, or will we permit this country to relapse into chaos?”
Biden continues; “After World War II, America used its soldiers as peacekeepers and its dollars as peacebuilders. This may have been the wisest investment of the past century: We turned our most bitter foes into our staunchest allies. But if we’re going to talk about a new Marshall Plan, we should be willing to back up our words with deeds. The original Marshall Plan cost $90 billion in today’s dollars. Our total pledge for Afghan reconstruction is less than 1 percent of that, and we’ve only delivered a fraction of this pledge.”
—- Drago
Colonel Haiku (0c588c) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:22 amTrump had, of anything, slowed down the visa processing. Biden doesn’t want to be criticized as soft on immigration, so he didn’t eliminate any steps.
Biden could have done worse. He at least prepared to send some American troops back to Afghanistan, although he didn’t want to do that until it was undeniably necessary.
And he kept an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Oman.
Only Afghanistan fell even faster to the Taliban than their worst case scenario.
We still have yet to see how this Dunkirk will work – a Dunkirk using entirely or almosy entirely, U.S. government planes.
The Russian embassy is staying.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:23 amThat sounds about right.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:28 am@463. ROFLMAOPIP- Certainly Eexpect more from you than a personal attack. But then, neocon war profiteer$ outta ammo do have their prioritie$$$$ … don’t they.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:28 amBest economy in 50 years
Energy independence
Abraham Accords,
Strengthened NATO and our Obama-depleted military
Confronted China (woke Americans up) and North Korea
Took control of borders, gained cooperation with neighboring countries to help do so.
I’ll take it, especially compared to seven months of Biden junta “accomplishments”.
Colonel Haiku (0c588c) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:31 amnk wrote:
So, the guy who was leading Iran’s external terrorism campaign should have been untouchable because we are not technically at war with Iran?
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (d1b882) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:42 amYawn.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:43 am@477. your disrespect for the men and women in uniform is jarring. I know some people feel this way but it still feels odd to run into.
Why? Did you miss the Mỹ Lai massacre? But there was a draft then. These volunteer-career-neoconning-MIC/war-profiteer-protecting brasshole ‘men and women’ have earned every ounce of disrespect they’re getting now. 20 years; $2.26 trillion. They blew this and the only folks who won were the war profiteers and the first they’ll eventually retire and lobby for along K-street. The grunts in the field knew it. [Hell, my own neighbor told me this after multiple deployments to Afghanistan.] The soldirs in the field told them. The brassholes didn’t listen. The Pentagon needs a ‘Doyle Lonnegan’ house-cleaning. Everyone above the rank of captain mustered out; fired/court martialed or transferred to duty as permanent latrine orderlies in Antarctica.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:48 amJesus…
Jake Sullivan, Biden National Security Advisor = Robert Hoover, Delta frat prez., ‘Animal House.’
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:53 amRadegunda wrote:
No, the neocons at The Buttfook never, ever, want to pull American troops out of anywhere. Their view of a Pax Americana really needs an American version of this.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (d1b882) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:54 am@463. ROFLMAOPIP- Certainly Eexpect more from you than a personal attack. But then, neocon war profiteer$ outta ammo do have their prioritie$$$$ … don’t they.
No, I just have respect for the dead, no matter their motivation to earn a living.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:56 amHere is the video that was embedded in a possibly ignored link above. The relevant portion starts one hour and seven minutes into the hearing:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9bpS8Zcic-U
The current secretary of defense assures congress not to worry about leaving Afghanistan. He notes the the current administration “developed a very detailed plan” and the administration had “accomplished the task according to the plan” up to that point.
Anonymous “Biden officials” don’t hold a candle to an on the congressional record statement from the Biden Secretary of Defense.
Biden’s plan. Period.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:58 amSo, the guy who was leading Iran’s external terrorism campaign should have been untouchable because we are not technically at war with Iran?
Declarations of war are so 20th century. If not 19th.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:01 am@479. What’s your point, Paul. In some societies, people still wear suits and ties to work, too. You expect her to doff a mini-skirt? World cultures aren’t all craving western ways– and Afghans certainly weren’t willing to fight for her right to wear heels and pantyhose in the streets of Kabul. In America you pet your dog and eat steak; In Korea, they eat dogs and in India, they worship cows.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:03 amDoug Ose drops out of recall campaign after suffering heart attack.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-17/doug-ose-recall-candidate-heart-attack
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:03 amMr M wrote:
We already had that . . . right up until September 11th.
But what’s the alternative, always being at war with someone else because, if we aren’t, someone will attack us?
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (d1b882) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:04 amNo, I just have respect for the dead, no matter their motivation to earn a living.
Really… and Bin Laden smiled.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:04 amIf you do pray, please pray for the safety of Americans and the Afghans who believed in and assisted our folks over there. They’ve been put in harm’s way with the Taliban holding ALL the cards by this incoherent, incompetent action.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:09 am543… that’s rough, he’s a good man.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:10 amObudman wrote:
The actual insurrection by the left was the entire summer of 2020 and the utterly idiotic antifa and black lives matter rioters. They actually established their own ‘autonomous zone,’ which is a direct rebellion against lawful authority.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (d1b882) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:11 amNJRob, That all sounds bad. It was also mostly there in Nov when i voted against Trump.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:13 amA stadium in London wrote:
Could President Trump have done the withdrawal better than President Biden? There’s no way to know, but there isn’t a whole lot of room in which he could have done it worse.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (d1b882) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:14 am@546. Not if they’re hired war profiteers under contract. They knew what the risks and are extremely well paid for it thanks to Neocon Liz and her chums. Nobody conscripted them, drafted them or ordered ’em there. They aren’t there to wave American flags but collect American dollars.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:18 am“where by the VP is in flux and the 50-50 Senate is in flux”
I would expect that Romney, Collins, Murkowski, and probably guys like Sasse and Mike Lee would not hold VP hostage….but Ford took 2 months to confirm (Democratic Congress)….and Rockefeller 4 months….so I doubt anything would be quicker in our even more hyper-partisan times. However, based on the previous primary season….who would emerge as a consensus Democratic favorite? B. Obama can’t do it…nor can Bill Clinton…both being twice elected. Klobuchar would be an interesting choice….being a senator would help her garner support….and she tends to be a bit more moderate. The question is whether Republicans would want her to have an opportunity to gain nationwide name recognition…and become a contender for 2024 or beyond? Could they dust off someone like Bloomberg figuring he would not run again? Probably not…..Bernie and Warren would be problematic. Maybe someone like Kane would be non-controversial.
AJ_Liberty (ec7f74) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:19 amRemembering the Shameful Trump-Taliban ‘Peace’ Agreement
…….
The debacle in Afghanistan — the U.S. surrender, the deadly chaos that has followed, the withdrawal without any feasible plan to prevent the reemergence of jihadist safe havens (actually, the proliferation beyond the havens that already exist) — belongs to Biden. He is the commander in chief, he could have prevented it, he insisted that it wasn’t happening even as it was washing over him, and he has shamed our country as it has not been shamed since the end of the Vietnam War nearly a half-century ago.
That said, to hear former Trump officials and Trump apologists at the RNC rip into Biden as if the former president’s fingerprints and nauseating “forever war” drivel were not all over this debacle is hard to take.
As the Trump administration knew it would, the release of the prisoners swelled the ranks of the Taliban even as they were overrunning the U.S.-backed government throughout the country. Indeed, the leader of the Taliban, Abdul Ghani Baradar, who took control of Afghanistan on Sunday, had been in Pakistan’s custody for years until 2018 — when he was released at the request of the Trump administration, in furtherance of its negotiations with the terrorist organization. Those, you may recall, are the same negotiations for which President Trump tried to invite the Taliban to Camp David until publicity about that outrageous notion embarrassed him into canceling.
After Mawlavi Talib’s release pursuant to the Trump administration’s written agreement with the Taliban, he led the fighting in Helmand province. The Trump jailbreak also filled out the forces of jihadist organizations, most prominently al-Qaeda, which have aligned with the Taliban throughout the years of fighting, and which will now have free rein to set up shop, recruit, train, and plot against the United States, just as they did — under the Taliban’s protection — in the years before the 9/11 attacks.
……
The Trump administration nevertheless agreed to an unconscionable jailbreak. It is right there, indelibly, in the black and white of Trump’s agreement with the Taliban: “Up to five thousand (5,000) prisoners” were to be released by March 10, 2020.
……..
The Taliban are a terrorist organization. And not just any terrorist organization — they are the terrorists who gave sanctuary to al-Qaeda when it publicly declared war against the United States…..
The United States tells the world that it does not negotiate with terrorists. But the Trump administration, just like Republican and Democratic administrations before it, pretended the Taliban were not a terrorist organization so that it could carry out talks, mouthing the familiar claptrap about how “you make peace with your enemies, not your friends” — quite a departure from, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.”
……[T]he name that the Trump State Department repeatedly invoked but claimed not to recognize — the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan — is highly meaningful. The objective of the global jihad to which the Taliban joined themselves by supporting al-Qaeda is a worldwide caliphate governed by sharia, Islam’s archaic legal system and societal framework. …..
That is the nightmare vision that our government lends credence to, however mindlessly, when it invokes the name the jihadists demand to be addressed by — the “which is not recognized by the United States” lip-service notwithstanding.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:21 am……..
Trump’s agreement with the Taliban was never anything more than a fig leaf. He was determined to get out, heedless of whether our government had in place a plausible counterterrorism apparatus to prevent the Taliban from giving safe harbor to al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other anti-American jihadist groups.
………
@548, both are bad. I have no use for either set of terrorists, the ‘leaders’ unwilling to speak out against them, or the people who make excuses for their crimes.
But to be clear, I don’t blame non-violent protestors whose only ‘crime’ is that the terrorists agree with them on something.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:22 amNo, I just have respect for the dead, no matter their motivation to earn a living.
Really… and Bin Laden smiled.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:04 am
Let me clarify-dead Americans, those you blithely dismiss as “war profiteers”.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:23 amQuia ipsa loquitur, DCSCA.
Paul Montagu (bf189f) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:27 am@555. Let me clarify-dead Americans, those you blithely dismiss as “war profiteers”.
Which is exactly what they are.
No doubt you respect American ‘blood money’ ‘contract’ profiteers like Gotti and Dillinger, too. 😉
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:29 amThe National Review notes that Trump is a buffoon…
Surprising!
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:37 am@556. Dana’s latest post on Clarissa Ward is a ‘cruz missile’ that shoots down your point, Paul.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:43 amTime123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:17 am
I don’t see any reason anyone didn’t think the Taliban would have retaken control. Biden trying to convince everyone otherwise was ridiculous on its face. He barely pretended to believe it himself when he read it from the teleprompter. Did you believe him? If so why? If not why don’t you have a problem with him lying about the situation? In either case, why are you trying to move this away from Biden to Trump?
The problem isn’t leaving. The problem is the management of the withdrawal.
We had two plausible choices. We could occupy the country indefinitely or make an orderly withdrawal. Biden chose to reenact the Kevin Bacon scene from the end of Animal House. Have you seen the picture of him “on a zoom call” at Camp David?
You hope is probably a more accurate statement. Biden was supposed to restore US credibility overseas correct? But we just got something a lot of people are desperately trying to pretend would have been worse with Trump. The problem is Trump isn’t POTUS and it doesn’t matter what he would have done.
I could make the same comment about any given position from NeverTrump/D/left. Seems we’re having one of those days that end with the letter y.
frosty (f27e97) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:44 amBiden was supposed to restore US credibility overseas correct?
No- he was supposed to be competent in the ways of moving the institutional levers of government with 50 years of swamp creature experience.
Turns out he’s a bigger fvck-up than the inexperienced, corner-cutting, PT Barnum capitalist of recent years.
He’s a bum.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:51 amBut to be clear, I don’t blame non-violent protestors whose only ‘crime’ is that the terrorists agree with them on something.
Yes… I recall you taking the same approach with the non-violent folks that went to the Capitol on 1/6.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:51 amThere’s been a shift in American opinion on the Trump/Biden bugout
I have no idea how public opinion will change in the next weeks, months, and years — except if there is another major terrorist attack on the US while Biden is president.
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:52 amIt actually reinforces my point, DCSCA. Your comment explains a lot.
Paul Montagu (bf189f) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:53 amI didn’t see Trump mentioned in your link, Jim.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:55 am“Just two months ago, the President signed the Afghanistan Freedom Support Act of 2002, and Senator Hagel and Senator Lugar and I cosponsored that. It was pushed forward by this committee, and we finally got it passed. But the act authorizes $3.3 billion for reconstruction and security of Afghanistan over and above the funds the President might see fit to allocate from other sources.”
—- Sen. Joe Biden – February 2003 Senate Hearing
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:56 am@564. Except it doesn’t.
But neocons gotta keep neoing and onning.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:57 amI didn’t think he had plan that would work well. His assurances didn’t seem credible and I assumed he was buying time to increase our presence and we would remain indefinitely. I was wrong about his intentions.
I think leaving is a mistake. I think the withdrawal has been terribly managed and as I’ve said in previous comments Biden is responsible for that.
I think it would have been about the same under Trump. I do hope that Biden will do a better job supporting the the people that supported us, but I’m not very confident his administration will.
You are mischaracterizing what I’ve said.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:57 amThat smacks of “nation building”…
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:58 amJim, that makes sense. The public has been conditioned to believe that hard things are easy and that they never have to support something that will have a downside. Now that they see a downside they don’t like it.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:59 amNew York Times:
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:02 pmhttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/us/politics/afghanistan-biden-administration.html
But apparently, they were still not saying it could collapse before the date set for the complete American withdrawal.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:04 pmI support brutal peacetime measures up to and including war crimes against all journalists, pollsters and whoever pays for them now trying to imply that every American was actually following all details of the Afghanistan pullout for four months instead of the four DAYS it actually took for the panic to set in among everyone on the ground, and THEREFORE OBVIOUSLY there’s totally organic support for starting the war back up again.
Jorge Halo (b7b602) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:07 pmPublic opinion moves slowly, when not everyone is paying daily attention, but it moves.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:11 pmOT-
Rip Murdock (431d14) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:13 pmFormer Rep. Doug Ose drops out of recall race after heart attack
#565 BuDuh – I was trying to be even-handed, which the poll wasn’t. Wouldn’t you like to know whether the public blames Trump, partly, for this debacle? I would. (Of course, for comparisons, the pollsters were limited by the questions they had asked in April.)
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:18 pmJim, If you want to get public response on a policy tying it to specific leader / party can be counter productive. Some respondents may be opposed but unwilling to say so if that statement would imply criticism for a party/leader they like. Same issue can work in reverse.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:22 pmI wouldn’t mind a poll of what people think the current Secretary of Defense is saying at the noted time in The YouTube I linked above, Jim.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:26 pmHere’s the George and Laura Bush statement on Afghanistan.
As far as I can tell with a quick Google search, Barack and Michelle Obama have not issued a similar statement.
(On the whole, I thought the former president was correct in following the American custom of presidents keeping quiet on political questions after they leave office — but there are times when exceptions are appropriate, for example, now.)
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:28 pm#579 Time – Of course you are right — but the pollsters did mention Biden. (I think mentioning both, or neither, would be the better approach.)
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:32 pmTime123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 11:57 am
What did he say to make you think that? He clearly said the troops were leaving and the Afghan government was capable of taking care of things.
frosty (f27e97) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:33 pm@522
The primaries is the time to take your pick. That goes without saying.
But, yeah I’d take Trumpian maladministration (we can still criticize!) over Biden’s maladministrations for sure. My only hesitation is that the only thing I haven’t forgiven Trump (nor I don’t think I’d ever will) for his behavior during the 1/6 riot. Outside of that, Biden 7 month is has already had two impeachment moment imo – the southern border and this afganistan withdrawal.
whembly (0ae2ca) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:35 pm@584 Whembly, this is a debacle so far. No doubt about that. But it doesn’t appear to be an abuse of power or an illegal act. Isn’t the standard still high crime and misdemeanor? How do you feel this qualifies?
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:54 pm$10,000 INVESTED IN DEFENSE STOCKS WHEN AFGHANISTAN WAR BEGAN NOW WORTH ALMOST $100,000
War, no matter who wins, is good business.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:56 pmThis is terrible.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 12:59 pmMr M wrote:
Thing is, there aren’t. Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 and 2020, and if there was no real opposition last time, there was plenty in 2016 . . . and the Republican primary voters chose Mr Trump. By the time you got to the general election, Mr Trump was the only Republican choice.
If only there had been a commenter here who told you guys that the President’s policies are what are important, what effect every American, and not his personality.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (d1b882) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:00 pm@585
The standard is whatever the House charges him with and whatever the Senate convicts him of (which leads to removal).
That’s it.
Incompetence, such that it puts thousands of American’s lives at stake in which we don’t know what the future holds and the future is dark, can be a criterion to remove Biden. Has Trump done anything remotely as bad?
Frankly, if you remember my past conversations about my opposition to Kamala Harris being in the White House and I was scared of the damage that should could do…prayed and prayed for Biden to keep the office all four years? Well, 7 months into Biden’s administration I’m VERY close to preferring Harris now. She can’t be any worse….
whembly (0ae2ca) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:05 pmW:
He hasn’t really. But if Bush wants him to do that, it would make sense to say so.
Biden has committed himself to evacuating also those Afghans who were well along in the application process, some of them only to third countries (of they can find them) or Guam for now, and agreed to take out of Afghanistan people who work(ed) for media organizations – but they have to get to the airport on their own.
When 600 Afghans jumped into a departing cargo plane, they just took them all rather than delay and try to sort them out,
But does Biden have the courage to dispense with bureaucratic delay?
He’s lying. He’s not confident. He’s trying to push Biden around.
But he’ll do so anyway.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:07 pmIf this turns out to something like the Iran Embassy hostage situation, Biden’s done. Democrats are done for the foreseeable future.
It didn’t have to be this way.
whembly (3bda0a) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:13 pm@586. War, no matter who wins, is good business.
Duh.
The Cheney Credo.
Neocon 101.
Neos need to neo and gotta keep conning.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:24 pmObama always wanted to knock the chip of the USA’s shoulder but he was too lazy to follow through with total credibility destruction. It took the most popular President in history to accomplish this.
BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:25 pmWhatever the facts, an impeachment resolution always characterizes the president as intentionally doing something wrong (and severely wrong at that) and Trump was no exception.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/madison-constitutional-convention-notes/603703
The point is, whether or not Madison actually officially proposed it at the constitutional convention, “maladministration” was a grounds for impeachment in several state constitutions, but was not one of the several choices considered from time to time, and it does have a separate meaning from abuse of power or or violation of some public trust.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:28 pmThey are not yet detaining any Americana or westerners or doing anything beyond what they have done in previously captured parts of Afghanistan. They await orders.
Now if Biden has any sense, he’ll prevent the top Taliban officials from getting into a position where they can issue any orders.
Don’t let any plane carrying them land at the airport. Keep them busy in Doha. He can buy maybe a month’s time.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:33 pm@594 Sammy… I don’t think we can characterize Biden’s signoff of the withdrawal plans as an “oops”.
Strictly speaking about US Citizens, he left them to dry in Kabal and his administration is scrambling…bad.
whembly (3bda0a) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:33 pmIs he bloody serious?
Can you imagine the absolute crap-storm had this happened under Trump/Bush/Reagan??
The articles of impeachment would already be drafted.
whembly (3bda0a) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:40 pm597. BuDuh (fdd65e) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:33 pm
They CAN’T GET THEM OUT.
So they are saying it;s their own fault for not leaving as soon as they were warned, like months ago.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:46 pmThey’ve got to keep the top Taliban leaders bottled up in Doha until every American is out of the country. And warn every country of severe consequences if they facilitate their return.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:48 pm@598/@599. Such is the fine print in them there ‘exit clauses’ w/government contracted war profiteers.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 1:49 pmA lot of Americans were doing something other than helping the Afghan military and many who were, were pulled out, I think, which accelerated the collapse. Some contractors are from third countries, like the Phillipines
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 2:02 pm#595 Sammy – That’s an excellent idea. (And we ought to have a contingency plan to capture them, in case we need to exchange hostages.)
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/17/2021 @ 2:15 pmSlow Joe Biden’s the name
And each day brings another surprise
‘til hot mid-August it came
He’d really try on the dunce cap for size
In the summer of ‘21
Power sprang fast from a Taliban gun
August 16th, Kabul had fell
It was a day we’ll remember, all too well
The day Joe Biden failed the test
And the gunmen were gunning
The day Joe Biden failed the test
And the people were running
They went, “help! help! help! help! help! help!”
“Help! help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!
Back in DC, a calamity
Joe had made no plans to flee
My wife said “quick, come see
Watch this unfold on TV!”
Now, I don’t mind some Democrats
Even some of teh old sh*tbrained fat cats
But Joe lost his mud
And you know the rest
An EPIC FAILURE
When faced with his greatest test
The day Joe Biden failed the test
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 2:17 pmAnd the gunmen were gunning
The day Joe Biden failed the test
And the people were running
They went, “help! help! help! help! help! help!”
“Help! help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!
@603 That takes some foresight and competency. This administration has shown anything but those…
whembly (3bda0a) — 8/17/2021 @ 2:35 pmHas anyone heard a statement from Jim wokepuppy Mattis?
mg (8cbc69) — 8/17/2021 @ 2:43 pmHere’s the George and Laura Bush statement on Afghanistan.
Kinda busy here… was there an apology in it?
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 2:57 pmHow Colonel Haiku would have solved the Afghan problem:
Alas! I have plagiarized that.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (3867c9) — 8/17/2021 @ 2:59 pmDamn straight, Bluegrass Dana!
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 3:03 pm610.http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/news/hal.html
Current and former employees described instances where Halliburton overcharged U.S. taxpayers by paying $45 per case of soda, $100 for a standard cleaning of laundry, and $80,000 for brand new Mercedes trucks that were torched because of minor equipment problems.
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/01/24/
KABUL, Afghanistan — A group of six veterans is suing two military contracting companies, claiming they overcharged the government hundreds of millions of dollars for work in Afghanistan.
How much does KBR pay to work in Iraq? – http://www.mbdanceapparel.com 3/15/21
http://www.mbdanceapparel.com/2021/03/15
A KBR food-service worker in Iraq or Afghanistan earns $70,000 or more per year, tax free. Truck drivers, the most dangerous positions, can exceed $100,000 annually. What does KBR company stand for? KBR, Inc. (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root) is an American company, formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 3:09 pmCash money, homey.
mg (8cbc69) — 8/17/2021 @ 3:25 pmquote by Randy Moss
A plurality of British voters think the West made a mistake withdrawing from Afghanistan; a plurality think we should not go back; and a large majority think pulling out will increase terrorism.
(I have other things to do, but you can find those poll results by scrolling through the comments here. You’ll save time if you start with the earliest comments.)
Jim Miller (edcec1) — 8/17/2021 @ 3:29 pmThe earliest comments, as I guessed from those instructions, are at the bottom and you have to click on More Comments a few times. They seem nested.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 4:18 pmBush said it would be fun
The Limerick Avenger (3867c9) — 8/17/2021 @ 4:18 pmBut the ‘ban have us on the run
Now we’ve got to flee
Is there room for ol’ me
A guy’s after me with a gun!
Ta-li-ban on teh run
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 4:35 pm‘ban on teh run
Mitch Mettah Mave Muh Money!
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 4:37 pmBy Li’l Harelip… on Death Row Records
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/17/2021 @ 4:38 pmMore about the Afghan army’s collapse.
As Bing West would say, we were the strongest tribe, until Biden tucked tail.
Paul Montagu (5de684) — 8/17/2021 @ 5:31 pmA plurality of British voters think the West made a mistake withdrawing from Afghanistan; a plurality think we should not go back; and a large majority think pulling out will increase terrorism.
=ring-ring= history calling; hold for:
First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842), Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880), Siege of Malakand & Tirah Campaign (1897, Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919), Operation Herrick (War in Afghanistan; November 2001 – October 2014 stage)
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 6:50 pmTa-li-ban on teh run
‘ban on teh run
Just wait until you have to flee California before the onslaught of the Green Inquisition.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:05 pmMemo to MSNBC
Subject: Lawrence O’Donnell
He’s a liar.
When O’Donnell wailed to younger viewers tonight that Vietnam was worse and broadcasts to viewers the unmitigated bullcrap that ‘America never had a president who thought he could charm an end to a war,’ then runs a hit piece clip against Donald Trump trying to ‘charm’ the Taliban- O’Donnell convinently forgets LBJ’s charm offensive to literally try to buy off Ho Chi Minh with ‘TVA’ sized dam and water projects for Vietnam, quotin him saying, “Old Ho, can’t turn that down,” as Johnson privately told aides like Bill Moyers, who has publicly verified it.
But Johnson’s peace overture is quickly rejected.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 7:28 pm458 gives the wrong link (although the quotes are from August 16, 2021)
Thus is the right link:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/08/16/remarks-by-president-biden-on-afghanistan
The worst, or perhaps most infuriating, lines in Biden’s speech were:
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/17/2021 @ 8:06 pmVideo of Saigon ‘75 and Kabul ‘21 should run in a continuous loop in the oval office for the next 100 years with the caption “Nation building is for suckers”. One politician’s “It will be different this time” is another politician’s hubris.
kaf (c23e6e) — 8/17/2021 @ 9:11 pmJake ‘Robert Hoover’ Sullivan, Biden National Security Advisor & ex-president, Delta House:
“They [the Taliban] confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn’t steal!”
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:21 pm589/whembly, find the competent pol that she will put out for on the sly or during executive time and she will govern as a puppet of he…in a nod to the old Scandal TV show, maybe it’s even a conservative R.
urbanleftbehind (0a5f21) — 8/17/2021 @ 10:29 pm“The Ballad Of Joe The Loco”
Standing with my phone at Camp David
Trying to call Macron over in France
The man with the Mac said, “You’ve got to go back”
You know they didn’t even give me a chance
Christ! You know it ain’t easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
Kammy’s gonna replace me
Finally made the chopper into DC
Honeymoon long over with press
Young Jake called to say
“You can make it OK
When you give a speech on radio and TV”
Christ! You know it ain’t easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
Kammy’s gonna replace me
Read a prompter into the camera
Talking like I’m holding the buck
The newspapers say, you passed it today
I said blarney is what Irish call luck
Christ! You know it ain’t easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
Kammy’s gonna replace me
Getting my transfusion for Scranton
Or maybe it’s for Wilmington this week;
Last night Kammy said
“Oh boy, when you’re dead; you don’t take nothing with you but your soul.” Think!
Made another trip out to vacation
Eating chocolate ice cream too fast;
The newspapers said;
Brain freeze gone to his head
He talks just like he’s stroked out, half-dead”
Christ! You know it ain’t easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
Kammy’s gonna replace me
Caught the whirlybird back to DC
Reporters wanna give me a smack
The men from the press said “you call that success?”
Malarkey, I say you’re all here on crack!”
Christ! You know it ain’t easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
Kamala’s gonna replace me
The way things are going
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/18/2021 @ 12:24 amKamala’s gonna replace me
How long has West Point been run by the taliban? We have no military leaders we can trust.
mg (8cbc69) — 8/18/2021 @ 4:10 amPathetic.
People like you depress me MG. As long as you could think of the military as being on your side in the culture war you were all about honoring their service. As soon as they disagree with you on that all of the ‘honoring their service’ goes away.
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/18/2021 @ 5:05 amKenneth McKenzie is not West Point. He is Citadel Navy ROTC.
nk (1d9030) — 8/18/2021 @ 5:09 amBecause that’s whom you send to landlocked mountains a thousand miles from the nearest beach. The Marines.
nk (1d9030) — 8/18/2021 @ 5:15 amThe Marines haven’t made an amphibious landing since Inchon, Korea, in 1950 (planning was quick) although they pretended to be planning to do one in Iraq in 1991, and Saddam Hussein put a lot of his army and much military equipment there to repel it.
But they are a force used to quick (and sometimes short0 deployments.
Sammy Finkelman (b434ee) — 8/18/2021 @ 5:40 amhttps://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-chamberlain-afghanistan-withdrawal-saigon-jihadist-taliban-kabul-pakistan-11629128451
Sammy Finkelman (b434ee) — 8/18/2021 @ 6:19 amC’mon, people! What could biden do? His hands are tied and his back has been against the wall for some time now. He had no choice but to fu*k things up. The airport’s surrounded. Suggestions are most welcomed.
There are only 15,000 American citizens in Afghanistan at this time. The Taliban are known to be a friendly and reasonable people. What could go wrong?
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/18/2021 @ 6:25 amYou must have bought stock in the maker of Zoloft®, mg. A smart purchase… with lefties soiling themselves over 7 months of Biden policy wreckage, it’s a bull market.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/18/2021 @ 6:34 am“ Of course, I blame President Biden for the disastrous retrograde operation still unfolding. But let us not allow that to deflect us from heaping even more blame on military leaders. They stonewalled President Trump rather than beginning deliberate preparations to exit the country when he told them to. They thought that they could outlast him and then talk sense to his successor. Then after the inauguration, they pressed the new president to reverse course. He wisely chose withdrawal. Then and only then did the generals begin their preparations in earnest. But it was too late to do it well.
The war in Afghanistan lasted more than twice as long as the Vietnam War. Although the cost in terms of American blood was thankfully far smaller, the mistakes are the same: America got involved in a long land war in Asia, in a peripheral region, in order to prop up a floundering and unreliable government, and at a time when there was a much bigger looming threat. In fact, Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in that at least the Vietnam War was tangentially related to the effort to stop the global spread of communism during the Cold War. Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in another respect: the military’s leaders of the Vietnam era had no precedent to dissuade them from a disastrous path. Today’s military leadership has the precedent of not just Vietnam, but also Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. That much obtuseness must be punished and removed from the system.
General Milley must resign. Not only is he the Chairman of the Joint Staff, prior to that he was the Chief of Staff of the Army. While all services share the blame, the Army is the land domain proponent. The 20 years of failure in Afghanistan is an Army failure. Scores of other generals also deserve a thorough evaluation; many of them are complicit in the lies to protect a decades-long failed strategy.
Secretary of Defense Austin also must be fired. The recently retired Army general and former CENTCOM commander was, and still is, part of the culture that is impervious to the fact that 20 years of trying it their way did not work.”
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/468442/
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/18/2021 @ 6:42 amSammy, I just like speculating that the reason the evacuation is going badly is because the Navy ships McKenzie ordered to Kabul still haven’t shown up.
nk (1d9030) — 8/18/2021 @ 6:46 amhttps://twitter.com/SecDef/status/1414654991785136133?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1414654991785136133%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fabcnews.go.com%2FPolitics%2Ftop-us-general-afghanistan-turns-command-symbolic-end%2Fstory%3Fid%3D78798961
Sammy Finkelman (b434ee) — 8/18/2021 @ 6:57 amMy respect is zero for the Generals of the Military. You nailed it, Time123, not fighting to win is American. Count me as a once American.
mg (8cbc69) — 8/18/2021 @ 7:12 am@638, honestly it’s been clear for a while you not very patriotic
Time123 (9f42ee) — 8/18/2021 @ 7:15 amI think President Biden is more committed to his August 31 pullout date than he is to getting anybody out of Afghanistan, and anyway the Taliban have now set up checkpoints at the entrances to the airport and are preventing Afghans from getting through (although denying that’s ther purpose)
The other day they were stopping people from leaving the airport.
The former Taliban Minister of the Interior is now in Kandahar, so he wasn’t stopped from returning to Afghanistan and issuing orders.
Meanwhile, or earlier:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/17/taliban-pledged-safe-passage-of-civilians-to-kabul-airport-white-house-says.html
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 8:25 am300 Afghan refugees have been taken to Albania and placed n hotels and in student housing. North Macedonia, is expecting 450 refugees, and also some in Kosovo. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has agreed to accept 20,000 (their pick probably)
Iran announced it will let no Afghan refugees cross the border for now.
I think it is not possible for anyone not connected with the Taliban to leave Afghanistan by land.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 8:26 amTo get rid of Trump, some people felt it was necessary to say things about Joe Biden that aren’t true–that he is competent, for example, compassionate, caring, even wise. For some to say it, they had to find a way to make themselves believe it. Now reality has come crashing in.”
—- Robert P. George
Colonel Haiku (0c588c) — 8/18/2021 @ 9:05 amBiden in his speech:
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 9:11 amI think it is correct that the Taliban were already “beating and whipping” Afghans who attempted to go to the airport by the time National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters that Taliban militants had informed the U.S. that they are prepared to provide safe passage for civilians attempting to flee Afghanistan through Kabul’s airport,
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 9:36 amThe reason Joe Biden is such a bad president is that he doesn’t have a decent opposition. He, more than almost anyone else, would pay attention to telling criticism.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 9:46 amThe reason Joe Biden is such a bad president is that he doesn’t have a decent opposition.”
J. Henry Christ, Sammy… he’s a bad president because over the years he’s been wrong about nearly every challenge that the U.S has been presented with, he’s in serious decline with dementia, he can barely string two coherent sentences together and his instincts are terrible.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/18/2021 @ 10:15 amNo one ‘fesses to votin’ for Biden
The Limerick Avenger (3867c9) — 8/18/2021 @ 10:26 amThe Prez who’s gone into hiden’
He can’t face the truth
That he is a doof
While the Taliban they are high ridin’
644. There was a little bit more to that press briefing
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/08/17/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-and-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-august-17-2021
So North Korea invading South Korea wou;d not be a civil war? What determines that? Separate embassies and seoarate missions at the United Nations?
Or are they making things up as they go along?
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 10:36 amI don’;t think he has ever simply gone with what he felt was righr, but has had his finger to the wind. He’s felt he needed to keep the left wing of the Democratic Party happy, while keeping the general electorate happy, too by not supporting obviously wrong things too much,
He would be a much better president if he had a cogent opposition to pay attention to,
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 10:40 amI don’t think he has ever simply gone with what he felt was righr, but has had his finger to the wind
Biden’s at the stage now, Sammy, where you pull his finger and he BREAKS wind.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/18/2021 @ 10:47 amJ. Henry Christ, Sammy… he’s a bad president because over the years he’s been wrong about nearly every challenge that the U.S has been presented with, he’s in serious decline with dementia, he can barely string two coherent sentences together and his instincts are terrible.
Swamp Creature; Swamp Fever.
This puddle of puss was supposed to be competent in the ways of moving the institutional levers of government with 50 years of swamp creature experience. Turns out he’s a bigger fvck-up than the inexperienced, bombastic, corner-cutting, capitalist with the entertaining PT Barnum act of recent years. But those of us who’ve seen Convoy Joe railroading ‘folks’ w/here’s the deal malarkey over half-a-century tried to warn you about his habitual bull-slinging blarney.
This gig’s too big for the faux Big Rigger. Once a senator, always a senator.
No projection; the bum is actually really, truly getting people killed. This Afghanistan disaster makes Trump’s screw-up in Helsinki look like a Weekend at Bernie’s.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/18/2021 @ 10:48 amI just saw a photo of some smiling Taliban thugs eating Joe Biden’s ice cream cone.
Now that has to hurt.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/18/2021 @ 10:53 amThis photo says it all, Haiku:
“There’s gonna be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.” – President Plagiarist, July 8, 2021
https://img.jagranjosh.com/images/2021/August/1682021/us_evacuation_from_kabul_saigon_comparison.jpg
He’s an idiot.
And a bum.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/18/2021 @ 10:58 am651. Joe Biden;s problem is that he is trying to satisfy everyone (or the 60% who might possibly vote Democratic)
It causes mistakes because he tries to somiltaneously get more outcomes 5han pssible by relying on comfortable assumptions.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 10:58 amJoe Biden’s problem is he’s a goddamned idiot, Sammy.
And a never-turned-a-profit-Amtrak-railroad-riding-bum.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:01 amIn Kabul, the landing spot for the helicopters was next to the embassy, not on its roof. And they didn’t get everybody out,
They’re insisting the Taliban allow at least all American citizens, SIV applicants and soome others.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:03 amWhy the media is asking such tough questions.
They are concerned about their own people.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:05 amThe last line, starting wih Biden is mine.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/568047-wapo-publisher-urges-white-house-to-help-evacuate-journalists-in-afghanistan
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:08 amWe planned for every contingency.
They planned for people hanging off of planes or being crushed by landing gear? Damn, they are GOOD!
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:10 amThey planned for people hanging off of planes or being crushed by landing gear? Damn, they are GOOD!
At least some’body’ got out– just not alive: the plane landed and human remains were found in the wheel wells.
Human remains found in wheel well of C-17 military plane
abcnews.go.com/Politics/
A U.S. official has confirmed that human remains were found inside the wheel well of a C-17 military plane that had been swarmed by hundreds of people on the tarmac as it took off at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. The discovery was made upon landing at al Udeid Air Base in Qatar on Monday.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:24 amThey’d F-up a cup of coffee… https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/468506/
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:29 am“This is our Dunkirk moment!”- Gerald Rivera
Trouble is, Convoy Joe’s no Churchill; more a -peace for our time- Chamberlain. And even he had the dignity to resign.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:36 amWendy Shermen, Deputy Sec., of State briefing… voice breaking… oh gee, very little sleep… skip the commercial ,dear— so it was well planned?!?!
WHERE THE HELL IS SECRETARY OF STATE BLINKEN?!
Where the hell are the responsible officers of government?!
“Biden time,” of course.
Idiots all.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:42 amOnly Joe Biden could make Donald Trump look presidential.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:44 amMemo to Wendy Sherman:
Jesus Christ Almighty, you dumb-assed old broad: exporting 1970s western-styled-culture-quirks like feminism is NOT an essential element of American Foreign Policy. The ERA failed here and it sure as hell won’t be accepted there.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:50 amWe planned for every contingency.
I think he left off a few words.
Every contingency we were willing to assume was possible.
The fall of Kabul before August 31 was not one of them.
AS he said:
. The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated…
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:52 amJake Sullivan yesterday:
Still, a “civil war.”
Although the Taliban got lots of help from Pakistan – or they still don’t realize that?
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:59 am663, Blinken was on Met the Press and ABC;s This Week in Sunday.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-15-21-sec-antony-blinken-rep/story?id=79458722
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 12:10 pmWatching Austin and Milley “answering” questions… journalists listening and then asking the same question again IN ANOTHER VAIN ATTEMPT TO GET AN ANSWER.
As one black journalist said, “the video is not matching the audio”. Asks her question and after Austin’s evasion, asks it again.
Incompetent Clowns!
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/18/2021 @ 12:32 pmWatching Austin and Milley “answering” questions… journalists listening and then asking the same question again IN ANOTHER VAIN ATTEMPT TO GET AN ANSWER. As one black journalist said, “the video is not matching the audio”. Asks her question and after Austin’s evasion, asks it again. Incompetent Clowns!
Watching it, too. The press are smarter. Loved that doge about what to do about all that equipment tleft behind, too.
Austin and Milley; Salt ‘N’ Pepper: Amos ‘N’ Andy.
White Rage:
[ ] resign
[ ] court-martial
[ ] pistol in the drawer
[ ] grenade up the poop-chute
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/18/2021 @ 12:42 pmBack in the day, REAL managers; GOOD managers; SMART managers in the U.S. government confronted w/a problem: held a presser, literally told the public there’s nothing they could do about what caused the problem now: their focus and objective was to GET OUR PEOPLE HOME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
The managers? Chris Kraft, Glynn Lunney, Gerry Griffin, Gene Kranz. The problem: Apollo 13.
These Austin, Milley., Blinken, Biden, etc., are fvcked up idiots.
Lightweights.
Fire them.
NOW.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 8/18/2021 @ 12:51 pmI wish this was not predictable, but it is:
The Trumpists are now attacking “RINO” governors for being willing to accept Afghan refugees. From the asswipe who is challenging for the GOP nomination in Georgia”
Anyone got a good way to get rid of these jerks? It’s the worst spam ever.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/18/2021 @ 3:38 pmWilliam Tecumseh Sherman tried his best, Kevin.
nk (1d9030) — 8/18/2021 @ 3:56 pmI wasn;t sure that woukld happen, but clearly President Biden was afraid of that, and he did not speed up processing of Afghan visas in the past few months.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 4:05 pmPresident Biden has said the time to evacuate might extend past August 31.
I told you he could be pushed around.
(from the words his people were saying, August 31 seemed to be the deadline)
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 8/18/2021 @ 4:07 pmThe adherents of a New York carpetbagger who was
nk (1d9030) — 8/18/2021 @ 4:27 pmalmost certainly buggered by Roy Cohneverything except a Republican for most of his life calling not just lifelong but multi-generational Republicans RINOs is beyond absurd. It’s KKKookoo Kloud Land.the refugees are best needed in crawford, martha’s vineyard, marin and loudoun county
JF (e1156d) — 8/18/2021 @ 4:34 pmHope those tranny bathrooms are A-OK.
mg (8cbc69) — 8/18/2021 @ 4:37 pm670… embrace the power of thermite!
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 8/18/2021 @ 4:49 pmHope those tranny bathrooms are A-OK.
I don’t spend a great deal of time worrying about that. This is the kind of thinking that goes on in a 4th party.
Kevin M (ab1c11) — 8/18/2021 @ 11:02 pm