When it comes to the Taliban, some politicians are delusional

[RDKirk]

Many reports that China will fill the vacuum... probably for geopolitical strategory, scarfing up natural resources, and just a general drubbing of salt in the eye of their foe.

The Chinese are not going to try to prop up an Afghanistan central government. They'll try to secure a few deals with the Taliban, but they're not going to make the same mistake as the empires (including the US) before them.

 

[RDKirk]

But we did make progress and now we are abandoning our allies. We are better than this. We could have continued to help maintain peace without a war.
Now we will have a war... it's just a matter of when.
Whoever was advising the figurehead in the White house should be fired. Or jailed.

There was never any progress over the last 20 years, none at all. The failure in Afghanistan is the failure of the Afghans, the people and their own government. The US can't build a government for them.

 

[RDKirk]

No it didn't. That's a nice fantasy though. Now we will have to bomb the Taliban again at some point in the near future. Now more American lives will likely be wasted because we didn't maintain a presence there.

Yeah, that's said about everywhere the US government has ever been, particularly by people who won't go and won't send their children.

At least the Brits send their princes to war.

 

[The Barbarian]

Trump boasts about getting troops out of Afghanistan:

 

[renniks]

Yeah, that's said about everywhere the US government has ever been, particularly by people who won't go and won't send their children.

At least the Brits send their princes to war.

Bite your tongue. I have family that could end up fighting them.

 

[The Barbarian]

At least the Brits send their princes to war.

Mine was the first generation in which most political figures did not serve in a war. Before this, the children of privilege were the first to go and defend the country. With a few exceptions like John Kerry and Robert Mueller, that didn't happen with my generation. More (bone spurs! Oh, the pain, the pain!") Trumps than Kerrys.

 

[The Barbarian]

But we did make progress and now we are abandoning our allies.

Horsefeathers. Like Vietnam, we "turned the corner" so many times, it was like a pinwheel. And now, it turns out that our "allies" angry at Trump because he shut them out of the negotiations, made their own deals to hand over equipment/join up with the Taliban, which is why the government collapsed so rapidly.

 

[RDKirk]

Bite your tongue. I have family that could end up fighting them.

I didn't say anything that wasn't true.

 

[JimR-OCDS]

Maybe so. He betrayed our Kurdish allies in Iraq to their enemies. Loyalty for him is strictly one-way. It's just that this revelation explains why things collapsed so quickly.



No, that's not the case.

As expected, President Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops away from the Syria-Turkey border, effectively endorsing a Turkish assault on the U.S.-allied Kurds occupying northern Syria, has been a disaster. Trump made the call last Sunday after a phone call with Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, and without consulting the Pentagon or Congress. Less than a week later, Trump ordered the removal all U.S. troops from the region, further endangering the Kurdish people, strengthening ISIS, and ceding influence to some of America’s chief adversaries. In return, the U.S. has, to date, received nothing.
...
As is the case with many of Trump’s largely inexplicable world-changing decisions, pulling U.S. troops out of northern Syria was good news for Putin. Russia has long supported Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who is opposed by the Kurds, in the Syrian Civil War. Now that the Kurds have been abandoned by the U.S., however, they’ve been forced to strike a military alliance with Russia and Assad in order to fend off the Turkish. This gives Russia even more influence in the region.
Here's What Has Happened in Syria in the Week Since Trump Abandoned the Kurds

The PKK which has been in conflict with Turkey, is not the same group as the KRG in Iraq.
The US helped both, but Trump had pulled out the US troops who were imbedded with
the PKK. The president of Turkey told Trump that they were going to attack the PKK, because
of the acts of terrorism inside Turkey that they blamed the PKK for and if US forces remained
with the PKK, they would be in harms way. So, Trump removed them. There
is now way Trump was going to have US Troops fighting back against Turkish
planes and tanks as Turkey is a member of NATO.

Here's the history of the Kurds and how they're the same people but two different sects
currently.

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/IF10350.pdf

 

[JimR-OCDS]

Trump boasts about getting troops out of Afghanistan:

He's right.

Remember, Trump opposed going into Iraq, he said it was the dumbest move Bush was making.

Also, he described accurately what the 54 US troops who were imbedded with the PKK on
the Turkish Border was about when he removed them. Trump was right again.

The only mistake Biden made was delaying removal of US troops from Afghanistan. As Trump said,
they were trying to decide if this was a good idea or not and tried to undo it, but saw no other
way out.

 

[The Barbarian]

He's right.

Remember, Trump opposed going into Iraq, he said it was the dumbest move Bush was making.

It particularly offended Putin, who saw it as an obstacle to shutting the U.S. out of the Middle East. Trump had this right, even if his motives were to appease his boss.

We did have to deal with Saddam's aggression. He had gone off the deep end in his megalomania, and he was threatening other nations. The smart move would have been win the war, take out Saddam, gather the Baathist leaders together, explain to them bluntly what Saddam did to bring us down on them, and then also bluntly explain what they'd have to do to avoid that happening again. And then leave.

There was no way, once the Afghan army realized Trump had shut them out of the negotiations, to do it in an orderly fashion. They quite rationally realized that Trump had betrayed them, and they made the best deals they could. Which meant a rapid collapse of the state when we started to leave.

 

[The Barbarian]

That one hit home...

 

[Semper-Fi]

August 16, 2021 6:30 AM
Afghanistan Fall: Joe Biden’s Foreign-Policy Disaster | National Review
-

Afghanistan’s End Portends a Darker U.S. Future
Afghanistan’s End Portends a Darker U.S. Future | CEPA
-

Why Joe Biden’s Afghanistan Speech Was a Disaster
Why Joe Biden's Afghanistan Speech Was a Disaster
-

The fall of Kabul: a 20-year mission collapses in a single day
The fall of Kabul: a 20-year mission collapses in a single day

 

[The Barbarian]

It's hilarious to see that when Trump finally did something right (albeit in a way that caused huge problems in execution) his followers go ballistic and try to blame it on Biden.

The only things he did wrong was to toss the Afghan government and army under the bus, and ignore the warning of his own secretary of defense as to the likely consequences. Esper turned out to be right:

The chaos in Afghanistan as the United States leaves was expected by President Joe Biden, according to an interview with ABC News. But other military experts claim that it wasn't and that the steps taken ahead of this week laid the groundwork for chaos.

MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace showed a clip of CNN International from Tuesday evening in which President Donald Trump's former Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, explained that it was clear this was all going to happen.

"My concern was that President Trump, by continuing to want to withdraw American forces out of Afghanistan undermined the agreement, which is why in the fall when he was calling for a return of U.S. forces by Christmas, I objected and formally wrote a letter to him," said Esper.

He described it as "a memo based on recommendations from the military chain of command and my senior civilian leadership that we not go further, that we not reduce below 4,500 troops unless and until conditions were met by the Taliban. Otherwise we would see a number of things play out, which are unfolding right now in many ways."

Wallace said that Esper essentially was "explaining how Trump laid the groundwork for the situation we're currently in."

She noted that now Republicans are blaming Biden for Trump's withdrawal mistakes and "completely ignoring the role that the ex-president played."
https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/esper-afghanistan/

 

[Bob Crowley]

There seems to be a reasonably balanced view put here about the US withdrawal by the Brookings Institution. It was written four months ago in April by Vanda Felbab-Brown.

The US decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is the right one

Some European governments are complaining about the US withdrawal. I note though that according to the linked report under "NATO and Pakistan" that -

Even though the writing has been on the wall, the U.S. decision creates discomfort for some European allies — a poignant and ironic disparity in policy preferences. For years, the United States had been urging NATO allies under the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to devote greater military forces to Afghanistan and to leave their bases to engage in offensive counterinsurgency actions, even though Washington originally sold the Afghanistan mission to them as one of defensive patrolling, state-building, and economic development. Watching allies’ restrictive battlefield rules of engagement made U.S. soldiers joke bitterly that ISAF stood for “I Saw America Fight,” while U.S. troops slugged it out in hard firefights in remote forward operating bases.

We had troops there, with about 26,000 Australian troops serving. We withdrew a few years ago, but some stayed as advisors and trainers. I don't know if any are there now, and we're having difficulty getting the last Australian-Afghans out of Afghanistan, plus some Afghans who assisted our troops at some time. Some have been evacuated, but I don't know how many.

Some of our troops, mainly special forces (read SAS) are facing court charges for war crimes. At the risk of sounding cynical, I think we should give the QC's and barristers some military training, give them a gun and uniform and send them into a civil war zone hotspot where you don't know who is friend and who is foe, and see how they'd go

Whether we like it or not, the Taliban will be the next rulers, and we will just have to learn to live with them. I think now the US will be very interested in what happens in Pakistan.

 

[The Barbarian]

But we did make progress and now we are abandoning our allies.

Trump abandoned them when he shut them out his negotiations with the Taliban.

We are better than this. We could have continued to help maintain peace without a war.

There was a war until the last few days. Did you not notice that American troops were coming home in body bags all this time?
Soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan 2001-2019 | Statista

Now we will have a war...

Now there isn't a war.

Whoever was advising the figurehead in the White house should be fired. Or jailed.

Well, now we know more about it...

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump sowed the seeds for this week’s chaotic U.S. pullback from Afghanistan by striking a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops by May 1 of this year. But Trump’s final acting defense secretary has now audaciously claimed that the former president never had any intention of going through with his own plan. Chris Miller told Defense One that Trump’s deal with the Taliban was actually all a “play” to disguise his administration’s secret strategy. He said: “We weren’t just going to head for the door... We were going to jam [ousted Afghan president] Ghani hard and make him cut a deal with the Taliban. It would have been ugly. It wouldn’t have been great. But there was no plan to just leave.” The plan as recounted by Miller would have seen some U.S. troops stay in Afghanistan while the Taliban was invited to lead the government. An unnamed Trump official told Defense One that Miller’s plan would have been totally unworkable, saying the idea that a Taliban-led government would allow U.S. troops to stick around was “wishful thinking.”
Trump Acting Defense Secretary’s Bold Claim: We Weren’t Really Planning to Leave Afghanistan

Trump is no genius, but I doubt very much if he's that stupid. But Miller was the guy running the department of defense for him. We're just lucky we got through that with relatively little damage.

 

[renniks]

Now there isn't a war.

Not yet.
Only people being oppressed.

 

[Justin-H.S.]

"These colors don't run."

They'll run when God determines they will.

The warriors of Babylon have ceased fighting, they remain in their strongholds; their strength has failed, they have become women; her dwellings are on fire, her bars are broken. - Jeremiah 51:30 RSV

Behind the curtains while the world is distracted with Afghanistan, the wise will keep both eyes on WA-DC for it is a den of thieves. Thieves with black hearts, and hardened as a rock.

 

[The Barbarian]

Now there isn't a war.

Not yet.

Not any more. Our troops aren't dying any more for a hopeless war.

 

[HannahT]

War was never officially declared, because of politics. I remember as a kid they said the same thing about Vietnam - at that age I was old enough to recognize something was happening. I remember asking my mother when the war would end, and her telling me they claim its not a war..but a police action. Which confused me. lol I was wondering why they would send police when we have solders.

We had about 2500 people in Afghanistan, and thankfully the death count severely decreased as the years went by - I think it was 11 at last count. I was looking at icasualities.org, and it shows many of the last year were from accidents - or as they term it non-hostile.

Many wanted to end things in Afghanistan, but the way they did it is in question. Looks like they are going to leave many Americans - and others that should be evacuated behind. That leaves a sour taste in my mouth, and I was watching an interview about this when it was asked of this administration. They didn't want to give anyone as heads up to head to the airport, because the Afghan President/Supporters wanted to save face and look legitimate in a nutshell. There has to be more to that, because that doesn't make any sense. You don't leave people behind because the country wanted to look legitimate.