The Many Faces of US Politics...

[johnnycool]

Friendly reminder that when Trump invited the Taliban over to Camp David for a terrorist sleepover on 9/11 (whereupon Fox News would have lost their goddamn minds if a Dem president had done it), John Bolton called it the stupidest BS he'd seen in his life. Trump then fired Bolton.

The Taliban had SFA to do with 9/11.

It was Al-Qaeda who were almost exclusively Saudi's.

The US picked their bogey man to be Afghanistan as it was easier to transfer that vengeance for 9/11 onto a tangible country rather than a guerrilla outfit that comes and goes like a wisp of smoke.

everything else was all about the  $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[tbrick18]

Friendly reminder that when Trump invited the Taliban over to Camp David for a terrorist sleepover on 9/11 (whereupon Fox News would have lost their goddamn minds if a Dem president had done it), John Bolton called it the stupidest BS he'd seen in his life. Trump then fired Bolton.

The Taliban had SFA to do with 9/11.

It was Al-Qaeda who were almost exclusively Saudi's.

The US picked their bogey man to be Afghanistan as it was easier to transfer that vengeance for 9/11 onto a tangible country rather than a guerrilla outfit that comes and goes like a wisp of smoke.

everything else was all about the  $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

There's definitely something to that.
Is it any wonder that so many of these "extremists" are able to recruit and create propaganda against the west when the US and UK do this sort of thing?
Think how much of a recruitment tool that Bloody Sunday was here for the IRA. What does 20 years of occupation do for the Taliban? Or Al-Qaeda for that matter. The manner in which they have left Afghanistan and the vulnerable people there and the speed of the Taliban re-taking the country makes this look like a hurried retreat and a defeat to the Taliban. I see the media reporting that Kabul is like Biden's Saigon. There are certainly parallels there.
When you add all the US/UK caused deaths to a military victory for the Taliban, they are going to be more entrenched and emboldened than ever.

The sensible, humane and moral thing to do would have been to remain with a military presence to keep the peace and to enforce governance on the Afghan military and government until such times that they could self govern. It would take decades but the alternative is what we are now seeing.

[J70]

The sensible, humane and moral thing to do would have been to remain with a military presence to keep the peace and to enforce governance on the Afghan military and government until such times that they could self govern. It would take decades but the alternative is what we are now seeing.

Yes. It was one or the other. And its not like they haven't had troops stationed all over the planet for decades in other countries.

[Milltown Row2]

Could the Taliban have changed in the last 20 years? They have made moves internationally whereas before it would have not had outside contact bar Pakistan.

[Kidder81]

Biden said it was never about "nation building", the opposite of what he has said in the past

[Gmac]

The taliban see the weakness in the president and in the whole administration and don't fear any reprisals so now the USA is begging them to leave the airport open and try get get some people out , they will probably clean out their jails and send them through as asylum seekers . Joe is not in charge he is surrounded by idiots as the last few days have shown.

[Keyser soze]

The problem in USA, and indeed some other nations, is that when formulating foreign policy they listen to the armed forces, who are not exactly the brains trust of the nation if you get my drift.

[johnnycool]

The taliban see the weakness in the president and in the whole administration and don't fear any reprisals so now the USA is begging them to leave the airport open and try get get some people out , they will probably clean out their jails and send them through as asylum seekers . Joe is not in charge he is surrounded by idiots as the last few days have shown.

Pompeo has already emptied the jails so no worries on that front.

[Gmac]

The taliban see the weakness in the president and in the whole administration and don't fear any reprisals so now the USA is begging them to leave the airport open and try get get some people out , they will probably clean out their jails and send them through as asylum seekers . Joe is not in charge he is surrounded by idiots as the last few days have shown.

Pompeo has already emptied the jails so no worries on that front.

those ones will be staying.

[johnnycool]

The taliban see the weakness in the president and in the whole administration and don't fear any reprisals so now the USA is begging them to leave the airport open and try get get some people out , they will probably clean out their jails and send them through as asylum seekers . Joe is not in charge he is surrounded by idiots as the last few days have shown.

Pompeo has already emptied the jails so no worries on that front.

those ones will be staying.

So it's the non taliban ones that concern you?

[whitey]

5-10,000 Americans supposedly still stuck in Afghanistan

WTF was Joe thinking?

[J70]

5-10,000 Americans supposedly still stuck in Afghanistan

WTF was Joe thinking?

He was obviously seriously misled about the potential speed of the Taliban reconquest. They thought they'd have a couple of months.

Absolute clusterfuck.

[Eamonnca1]

Friendly reminder that when Trump invited the Taliban over to Camp David for a terrorist sleepover on 9/11 (whereupon Fox News would have lost their goddamn minds if a Dem president had done it), John Bolton called it the stupidest BS he'd seen in his life. Trump then fired Bolton.

The Taliban had SFA to do with 9/11.

It was Al-Qaeda who were almost exclusively Saudi's.

The US picked their bogey man to be Afghanistan as it was easier to transfer that vengeance for 9/11 onto a tangible country rather than a guerrilla outfit that comes and goes like a wisp of smoke.

everything else was all about the  $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

There's a lot of truth in that. Al Queda was using Afghanistan as a staging ground all right, but invading the place was more about posturing and enriching military contractors. Bush Jnr had the chance to get Bin Laden in Afghanistan but diverted the troops to Iraq. It took Obama to get Bin Laden, and that was with a small group of special forces working behind the scenes in Pakistan. No grandiose invasion needed there.

[Eamonnca1]

Taken from elsewhere:

August 16, 2021 (Monday)
According to an article by Susannah George in the Washington Post, the lightning speed takeover of Afghanistan by Taliban forces—which captured all 17 of the regional capitals and the national capital of Kabul in about nine days with astonishing ease—was a result of "cease fire" deals, which amounted to bribes, negotiated after former president Trump's administration came to an agreement with the Taliban in February 2020. When U.S. officials excluded the Afghan government from the deal, soldiers believed that it was only a question of time until they were on their own and cut deals to switch sides. When Biden announced that he would honor Trump's deal, the process sped up.

This seems to me to beg the question of how the Biden administration continued to have faith that the Afghan army would at the very least delay the Taliban victory, if not prevent it. Did military and intelligence leaders have no inkling of such a development? In a speech today in which he stood by his decision to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden explained that the U.S. did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner because some, still hoping they could hold off the Taliban, did not yet want to leave.

At the same time, Biden said, "the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, 'a crisis of confidence.'" He explained that he had urged Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chairman Abdullah Abdullah of the High Council for National Reconciliation to clean up government corruption, unite politically, and seek a political settlement with the Taliban. They "flatly refused" to do so, but "insisted the Afghan forces would fight."

Instead, government officials themselves fled the country before the Taliban arrived in Kabul, throwing the capital into chaos.
Biden argued today that the disintegration of the Afghan military proved that pulling out the few remaining U.S. troops was the right decision. He inherited from former president Donald Trump the deal with the Taliban agreeing that if the Taliban stopped killing U.S. soldiers and refused to protect terrorists, the U.S. would withdraw its forces by May 1, 2021. The Taliban stopped killing soldiers after it negotiated the deal, and Trump dropped the number of soldiers in Afghanistan from about 15,500 to about 2,500.

Biden had either to reject the deal, pour in more troops, and absorb more U.S. casualties, or honor the plan that was already underway. "I stand squarely behind my decision," Biden said today. "American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong—incredibly well equipped—a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.... We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided...close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future.  What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future."

"It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan's own armed forces would not. If the political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down, they would never have done so while U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan bearing the brunt of the fighting for them."

Biden added, "I'm left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay: How many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight...Afghanistan's civil war when Afghan troops will not?" 

The president recalled that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan almost 20 years ago to prevent another al Qaeda attack on America by making sure the Taliban government could not continue to protect al Qaeda and by removing Osama bin Laden. After accomplishing those goals, though, the U.S. expanded its mission to turn the country into a unified, centralized democracy, a mission that was not, Biden said, a vital national interest.

Biden, who is better versed in foreign affairs than any president since President George H. W. Bush, said today that the U.S. should focus not on counterinsurgency or on nation building, but narrowly on counterterrorism, which now reaches far beyond Afghanistan. Terrorism missions do not require a permanent military presence. The U.S. already conducts such missions, and will conduct them in Afghanistan in the future, if necessary, he said.
Biden claims that human rights are central to his foreign policy, but he wants to accomplish them through diplomacy, economic tools, and rallying others to join us, rather than with "endless military deployments." He explained that U.S. diplomats are secure at the Kabul airport, and he has authorized 6,000 U.S. troops to go to Afghanistan to help with evacuation.
Biden accepted responsibility for his decision to leave Afghanistan, and he maintained that it is the right decision for America.
While a lot of U.S. observers have quite strong opinions about what the future looks like for Afghanistan, it seems to me far too soon to guess how the situation there will play out. There is a lot of power sloshing around in central Asia right now, and I don't think either that Taliban leaders are the major players or that Afghanistan is the primary stage. Russia has just concluded military exercises with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, both of which border Afghanistan, out of concern about the military takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. At the same time, the area is about to have to deal with large numbers of Afghan refugees, who are already fleeing the country.

But the attacks on Biden for the withdrawal from Afghanistan do raise the important question of when it is in America's interest to fight a ground war. Should we limit foreign intervention to questions of the safety of Americans? Should we protect our economic interests? Should we fight to spread democracy? Should we fight to defend human rights? Should we fight to shorten other wars, or prevent genocide?
These are not easy questions, and reasonable people can, and maybe should, disagree about the answers.
But none of them is about partisan politics, either; they are about defining our national interest.

It strikes me that some of the same people currently expressing concern over the fate of Afghanistan's women and girls work quite happily with Saudi Arabia, which has its own repressive government, and have voted against reauthorizing our own Violence Against Women Act. Some of the same people worrying about the slowness of our evacuation of our Afghan allies voted just last month against providing more visas for them, and others seemed to worry very little about our utter abandonment of our Kurdish allies when we withdrew from northern Syria in 2019. And those worrying about democracy in Afghanistan seem to be largely unconcerned about protecting voting rights here at home.

Most notably to me, some of the same people who are now focusing on keeping troops in Afghanistan to protect Americans seem uninterested in stopping the spread of a disease that has already killed more than 620,000 of us and that is, once again, raging.

[Eamonnca1]

If this doesn't tell you it was a lost cause I don't know what does:

From an NPR story -   "The Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan and removal of the U.S.-backed government is stunning in its speed and tragic in its impact, but it does not surprise experts who have monitored the U.S. reconstruction efforts for the past 20 years. The reasons why are summed up by eight paradoxes that are at the heart of a U.S. government watchdog's just-released review of the mission. ... The U.S. goals were often "operationally impractical or conceptually incoherent," the new SIGAR report says, running down a list of eight paradoxes the U.S. and its partners tried to navigate. The report says they tried to:

•     Root out corruption, but also to jump-start the economy by injecting billions of dollars into it;
•     Improve formal governance and eliminate a culture of impunity, but also to maintain security, even if it meant empowering corrupt or predatory actors;
•     Give Afghan security forces a competitive edge against the Taliban, but also to limit them to equipment and skills that they could sustain after a U.S. departure;
•     Direct considerable reconstruction funds through the Afghan government to help officials practice public financial management, but also to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse;
•     Build a credible election process from scratch, but also to respect Afghan sovereignty;
•     Focus on making immediate progress on security and governance, but also to build the long-term capacity of Afghan officials;
•     Reduce the cultivation of poppy, but without depriving the farmers and laborers who depend on it;
•     Empower women to become more educated and economically independent, but also to be culturally sensitive and respect Afghan traditions."

and this ... from a Washington Post story ...

"But perhaps the biggest hardship was having to teach virtually every recruit how to read. [Jack Kem, a retired Army officer] estimated that only 2 to 5 percent of Afghan recruits could read at a third-grade level despite efforts by the United States to enroll millions of Afghan children in school over the previous decade.

" 'The literacy was just insurmountable'," he said in an Army oral-history interview. Some Afghans also had to learn their colors, or had to be taught how to count. 'I mean, you'd ask an Afghan soldier how many brothers and sisters they had and they couldn't tell you it was four. They could tell you their names, but they couldn't go 'one, two, three, four.' "