quote:

Originally posted by medic451:

They claim a picture is worth a thousand words. Yep, and then some.

Some should tell him before he goes to the rooftop meeting...

Incredible lack of coherence. Impressive.

Respect their culture she says, in the same breath that women and girls must be protected.

The cognitive dissonance is astounding. Astounding.

I noticed alot of those back stabbing Generals like Mattis are (not so) oddly quiet lately. Wonder why they arent speaking out about this clusterfuck?

Crazy Nancy indeed.

G-d help us all, the Afghanis in particular.

quote:

Really! No, it wasn't going to end up like this. It was done for political reasons, not what was best. Trump wanted to withdraw, but it was going to be gradual, not GTFO in in 24 hours.

No, not 24 hours, 14 months starting Feb.29,2020. The exit date negotiated by the Trump administration with the Taliban (or as they called them 'The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan') was May 1, 2021.

Here is the deal in writing: Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban and the United States of America

Some of the highlights of this agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban were:
1) All Taliban prisoners released by June 1, 2020
2) Removing all sanctions against the Taliban by Aug 27, 2020
3)Engaging with with UN Security Council to remove all UN sanctions against the Taliban.
4) Withdrawing all US and coalition forces from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021.

The Trump administration received these promises from the Taliban (some may laugh at "promises from the Taliban", but the Trump administration seemed to think they were honest guys):
1) Don't allow terrorist groups (bad guys) to operate from Afghanistan
2) Don't cooperate with bad guys
3) DOn't fund raise for bad guys
4) Don't provide asylum to bad guys
5) Don't provide travel documents to bad guys.

Say what you want about Biden's poor understanding of the actual security situation, he was just executing the deal Trump made with the Taliban.
As far as keeping troops in the country, that ship had sailed a long time ago when Trump inked the deal with the Taliban.

quote:

Originally posted by LoungeChair:


Say what you want about Biden's poor understanding of the actual security situation, he was just executing the deal Trump made with the Taliban.

Yes, because Senile Joe has executed and stuck with EVERY OTHER deal or EO or policy that Trump had in place, right?

I mean the poor guy was obligated to do this.

FFS

quote:

Say what you want about Biden's poor understanding of the actual security situation, he was just executing the deal Trump made with the Taliban.

Lol. Wow. So were Joe's hands tied? He absolutely, positively, had to do this? Couldn't have backed out? Couldn't have cancelled it? Totally impossible huh?

Face it. This is ALL on Biden. But go ahead, keep making excuses for his incompetence.

quote:

But, they made it out, safety in Qatar.

On the way to Minneapolis?

Opinion piece from The Wall Street Journal.

One thing I will point that should be obvious, but will be ignored as the Left tries to shift blame for all this to Trump, is that it assumes what was negotiated under him would have played out just as negotiated and that the result would have been the same. I was skeptical of the “deal” when I first heard of it for more than one reason, including my knowledge of history, but Trump was much more likely to have demanded that the terrorists uphold their parts of the bargain and to have stopped the process when they didn’t. Even Nixon put a halt to things when the North Vietnamese tried to get away with violating the agreements to that point and turned the heat back up. The result was, of course, no different in the long run, at least in part because the U.S. did not honor its commitments to the South, but it’s impossible to say, “Well, Trump would have reacted the same way to the Taliban as Biden has.”

Biden’s excuse now is the typical incompetent’s excuse.

The prior agreements with the Taliban could have been overturned at Biden’s whim just as he overturned countless other of his predecessor’s policies and rulings. You wanted the job, you took the job, it’s your job now and you are responsible for how it turned out.


====================================

Biden to Afghanistan: Drop Dead
Biden is defiant in blaming others for his Afghan debacle.

President Biden told the world on Monday that he doesn’t regret his decision to withdraw rapidly from Afghanistan, or even the chaotic, incompetent way the withdrawal has been executed. He is determined in retreat, defiant in surrender, and confident in the rightness of consigning the country to jihadist rule. We doubt the world will see it the same way in the days, months and years ahead.

Mr. Biden refused to accept responsibility for the botched withdrawal while blaming others. He blamed Donald Trump’s peace deal with the Taliban and falsely claimed again that he was trapped. He blamed his three predecessors for not getting out of Afghanistan. He blamed the Afghans for not fighting hard enough, their leaders for fleeing, and even Afghans who helped us for not leaving sooner. The one group he conspicuously did not blame was the Taliban, who once harbored Osama bin Laden and may protect his terrorist successor.

The President made glancing reference to the horrible scenes unfolding in Kabul and especially at the airport, though again without addressing the mistakes that led to them. Had the U.S. not given up the air base at Bagram, now controlled by the Taliban, the U.S. would not now have to fight to control Kabul’s commercial airfield. The chaotic scenes at the airport, with Afghans hanging from a U.S. military plane and two falling from the sky to their deaths, will be the indelible images of this debacle. They are the echo of 9/11, with people falling from the sky, that Mr. Biden didn’t anticipate when he chose the 20th anniversary of 9/11 as his withdrawal deadline.

Instead of taking responsibility, Mr. Biden played to the sentiment of Americans who are tired of foreign military missions. It’s a powerful point to speak of sending a child to risk his life in a foreign country, and no doubt it will resonate with many Americans. It is a question that every President should ask.

But the President was dishonest in framing the U.S. mission merely as fighting in another country’s “civil war.” The U.S. didn’t remain in Afghanistan for 20 years to send women to school or to “nation build.” The core mission was to prevent the country from again becoming a terrorist safe haven. The Taliban’s victory will now attract thousands of young jihadists from around the world, and they will have Americans and the U.S. homeland in their sights.

Mr. Biden said he would maintain a “counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability” to strike camps in Afghanistan, but that will be much harder from the distance of the Persian Gulf. This is a far bigger risk than he lets on, as U.S. intelligence agencies know. Mr. Biden was also dishonest in framing his Afghan decision as a false choice between total withdrawal and sending tens of thousands of troops again. He knows his own advisers, military and civilian, believed they could support the Afghan military with no more than a few thousand troops to supply air power and intelligence.

He also knows the U.S. hasn’t had a single casualty in more than a year in Afghanistan. Even if Mr. Biden was set on withdrawal, he could have done it based on conditions that would have given the Taliban more incentive to negotiate with the government.

Mr. Biden claimed that Afghan leaders Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah had refused his advice to negotiate with the Taliban. That is false. They had been negotiating with the Taliban for months, under enormous pressure from the Trump Administration. The problem is that the Taliban had no incentive to negotiate in good faith when it knew the U.S. was leaving and would be able to take its chances on a military victory.

Like all good liberal internationalists, Mr. Biden thinks you can achieve a diplomatic outcome by diplomacy alone. Mr. Biden’s claim that the U.S. will continue to support the Afghan people and stand for human rights and the women of Afghanistan is the same kind of internationalist twaddle. The Taliban is taking the women of Afghanistan back to the Dark Ages, and the “international community” will do nothing to stop it. Mr. Biden’s words of “support” will be cold comfort when the Taliban knocks on the doors of women who worked in the Afghan government.

We had hoped that Mr. Biden would accept some responsibility and explain how he would fix this mess. He did none of that, making it clear that he himself is the main architect of this needless American surrender. It does not bode well for the rest of his Presidency.

The world has seen a President portraying surrender as an act of political courage, and retreat as strategic wisdom. As we write this, the world’s rogues are looking for ways to give him a chance to deliver a similar speech about other parts of the world.

LINK

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
Incredible lack of coherence. Impressive.

Respect their culture she says, in the same breath that women and girls must be protected.

But they had no problem with the sodomizing of little boys.

quote:

Originally posted by Mars_Attacks:
We still operate bases in Germany and Japan and it keeps them extremely polite.

Well, keeping the unruly natives polite may have been the purpose in the first ten years. For the next 45, it was defending the countries together with the natives against the unruly neighbors. For the last 30 years, they have been mostly springboards for pacifying unruly natives elsewhere in the world. If the locals had been unruly to the point of killing several thousand US troops per year for a decade or two, those bases would probably have gone the way of all the Western colonial possessions in the 50s/60s as people back home complained it was the job of local governments to fight insurgencies, and demanded to bring the boys home. As frequently noted, conditions were just vastly different.

The first German A400M finally managed to touch down in Kabul last night at 2200 local and delivered 80 troops to secure further operations, but only had a 30-minute slot on the ground and could take on just seven initial evacuees who had made it to the military side of the airport. The easily inflamed lit up online over supposed continued national bumbling, but with no prior knowledge when permission to land would be given, a curfew in effect from 2100 and people blocked from coming over from the civilian side (probably because, you know, they would have had to cross the runways), they couldn't have done better. Word is that the US plans to secure the airport until the originally intended final pullout date of 31 August though, so hopefully there will be time to evac everyone who needs to. The second aircraft is now on the ground.

quote:

Originally posted by LoungeChair:

quote:

Really! No, it wasn't going to end up like this. It was done for political reasons, not what was best. Trump wanted to withdraw, but it was going to be gradual, not GTFO in in 24 hours.

No, not 24 hours, 14 months starting Feb.29,2020. The exit date negotiated by the Trump administration with the Taliban (or as they called them 'The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan') was May 1, 2021.

Here is the deal in writing: Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban and the United States of America

Some of the highlights of this agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban were:
1) All Taliban prisoners released by June 1, 2020
2) Removing all sanctions against the Taliban by Aug 27, 2020
3)Engaging with with UN Security Council to remove all UN sanctions against the Taliban.
4) Withdrawing all US and coalition forces from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021.

The Trump administration received these promises from the Taliban (some may laugh at "promises from the Taliban", but the Trump administration seemed to think they were honest guys):
1) Don't allow terrorist groups (bad guys) to operate from Afghanistan
2) Don't cooperate with bad guys
3) DOn't fund raise for bad guys
4) Don't provide asylum to bad guys
5) Don't provide travel documents to bad guys.

Say what you want about Biden's poor understanding of the actual security situation, he was just executing the deal Trump made with the Taliban.
As far as keeping troops in the country, that ship had sailed a long time ago when Trump inked the deal with the Taliban.

Me thinks you've been in the 'LoungeChair' too long...

- Isn't this the deal where the 'Deep State' Military leadership was beside themselves, and the 'Deep State' State Dept was apoplectic because they weren't involved, and didn't get to sign off on/grant their blessing?
- Isn't this the deal which never got off the ground because the 'ceasefire' (one of the four tenets of the 'peace agreement') was summarily broken by both sides, almost immediately? As I recall, there was an offensive operation by the US Military that occurred even before the Taliban had a chance to break the ceasefire in their own.

The ONLY action/part of this 'agreement' which was implemented WAS the Withdrawal of US forces by the current administration!

Also, the Trump Administration never called them 'The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan', nor did any other coalition partner refer to them as such. That's the name the Taliban gave themselves & the country they just marched across, seizing control of provinces at will, and ultimately the capitol & it's presidential palace, with little of no resistance!

The horror show of Biden's 'Operation Clusterfuck' in A'stan was NOT the result of this agreement!

Afghanistan Didn't Fall: It Never Existed

All wars are forever when you don’t know what you’re fighting for.

Tue Aug 17, 2021 Daniel Greenfield

"Afghanistan's collapse: Did US intelligence get it wrong?" ABC News asks. "Afghanistan Is Your Fault," barks Tom Nichols at The Atlantic. “Why Afghan Forces So Quickly Laid Down Their Arms,” Politico ponders.

The one thing that the Taliban's conquest of Afghanistan is good for is more media hot takes.

Afghanistan didn't fall because it never existed. The Afghan army laid down its arms because it also never existed. And not just because many of the 300,000 soldiers were imaginary. Its Pashtun members surrendered to their fellow Taliban Pashtuns, or fled to Iran or Uzbekistan, depending on their tribal or religious affiliations which, unlike Afghanistan, are very real.

The Afghan army was there because we spent $90 billion on it. Much like Afghanistan with its president, its constitution, and its elections existed because we spent a fortune on it. When we left, the president fled, the army collapsed, and Afghanistan: The Musical closed in Kabul.

Afghanistan isn’t a country. It’s a stone age Brigadoon of quarreling tribes, ethnic groups, Islamic denominations, and warlords manned by young men with old Russian and American rifles. Unlike the fiction of a democratic Afghanistan, that is something they will die for.

And in the coming years you will see some of those same soldiers who laid down their guns fighting and dying for tribes and warlords, even fighting the Taliban, in the real endless war.

The forever war isn’t something we invented after 9/11: Afghanistan has always been at war.

Americans are impressed that the Taliban held out for 20 years. They shouldn’t be.

There’s no time in Afghanistan. Two decades of war are horrifyingly incomprehensible to Americans. To Afghans, it’s the way things have always been. We stepped into a place that has been a war zone for centuries, took sides, supplied weapons, and then left as everyone knew we would. The British and the Russians came and went. After us, the Chinese will come and go.

And the forever war will go on endlessly.

Before us, the Russians wanted the Afghans to pretend to be Communists. We wanted them to pretend that they were Democrats. But the Afghans aren’t ‘Afghans’, they’re Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Balochs, Hazaras, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, everything else is just a temporary costume.

The Taliban, another Pashtun bid to seize power, will be met with resistance, not by the proponents of a free and democratic Afghanistan, but by rival tribes and warlords.

We’ll probably end up funding some of them. And maybe this time we won’t be stupid enough to ask them to hold elections or any of the other nation-building nonsense from Foggy Bottom.

Our Afghanistan campaign after September 11 was fast, clever, and ruthless. The men who conducted it understood the society. They worked together with warlords to crush the Taliban. Their goal was a quick and dirty victory that would make an example out of the Taliban.

Our allies were anyone whose current factional interests in the endless power struggle aligned with ours. As the years went on, some of our allies became enemies, and some enemies became allies. The Taliban were the bad guys, but just like in Syria, so was everyone else. There were plenty of innocents caught in the crossfire, but innocents have no power.

The average Afghan rural villager doesn’t think of being a citizen of some country called Afghanistan. He cares little for elections and his elders confuse Americans with the Russians and sometimes even the British. The elites in Kabul are happy to dress up their power grabs in presidential titles and constitutions that no one else in the country cares about. USAID pays girls in Kabul to play at feminism and college graduates to talk about international relations.

None of it mattered a damn in the vast majority of the country as we are now finding out.

But, Afghanistan didn’t become a complete disaster for us. Until Obama.

American forces peaked at 25,000 under Bush. Obama quadrupled them to 100,000. That’s the year more American soldiers were wounded than during the entire Bush administration.

1,200 Americans died during Obama's Afghanistan surge, not just because he quadrupled the number of soldiers, but because the military was told to stop trying to defeat the Taliban.

Our soldiers became community organizers with guns who were told not to fight.

No hearts and minds were won. But cemeteries filled up with boys from Texas and West Virginia who weren’t allowed to shoot back because Obama wanted to win Muslim hearts and minds.

The military brass who embraced Obama’s strategy buried and crippled a generation of young men. Countless men and women came home wounded inside. They overdosed or killed themselves.

The surge receded. The military brass pulled back to secure the cities while the Taliban secured the rural areas that we spent so many lives on. All they had to do was wait for us to leave.

The speed with which the Taliban took the country only seems magical to CNN viewers.

The country was theirs for the taking. The Taliban fought few battles. The various warlords and leaders began switching sides when Biden announced his withdrawal to join the winning team. That’s the Islamic team backed by Pakistan, China, Turkey who are the big boys still standing.

But that doesn’t mean that they won’t switch sides next month or next year.

The hated government in Kabul was backed by our money and our air power. We’re out, so are they. But the locals will hate the Taliban too. And as the Chinese come in to set up mines, run roads, and offend the locals, they’ll find out what we, the British, and the Russians learned.

Afghanistan doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s its own forever war of quarreling tribes.

The forever war will continue whether or not we’re there. But we’ll probably be there in one form or another. We never really understood Afghanistan or Iraq. And so we can’t escape them.

Al Qaeda and ISIS will operate out of Afghanistan. So will countless other Jihadi fighters.

Americans didn’t invent the forever war. It’s been going on in the Islamic parts of the world for over a thousand years. It’s unfashionable and politically incorrect to mention it. That’s why the media carefully describes the Taliban as “religious students” without naming the religion. It’ll refer to Sunni and Shiite infighting in Iraq while leaving off the “Islam” part of the group.

We came to defeat the Jihadists behind September 11 and we stayed behind to reform Afghanistan. But what were we reforming it from? We couldn’t name the problem.

And when you can’t name a problem, you never come up with a solution.

Having failed to fix Afghanistan, the process is now underway to bring as many Afghans as possible to America. The old plan to bring 100,000 “interpreters” and their family members has been vastly expanded to make any Afghan who did any work for American organizations, from aid groups to the media, eligible to come to America. By the time they’re done, we may end up with a million Afghan refugees in America. Some of them will become Islamic terrorists.

The final act of fighting terrorism is bringing the terrorists to America to create more terror.

The real tragedy of Afghanistan isn’t just that we lost so many of our best and brightest in the dust, it’s that we learned nothing from the experience. Nothing except to blame ourselves.

We didn’t fail Afghanistan. Nor did we lose Afghanistan. It was never ours or anyone’s.

Afghanistan wasn’t our forever war. It’s the forever war of the warlords and tribesmen who will keep on fighting it until the water dries up, the cattle die, and they all move to Fremont where 25,000 Afghans already live. Our mistake was not recognizing what Afghanistan was.

Americans like to believe that everyone is like us. It’s an easy trap to fall into. Wherever we go, the people speak English, listen to our music, and wear Nike shirts. They have opinions about our presidents and want to know how easy it is to move to Fremont. And we cheerfully supply them with more Nike shirts, bad music, worse movies, and try to persuade them to create a United States of Iraq or a United States of Afghanistan. Then when it doesn’t work out, they move to Fremont, Minnesota, or New York City, run for Congress, and tell us they hate us.

If we learn anything from Afghanistan, from Iraq, and from September 11, let it be this.

There have to be boundaries, physical and conceptual borders, between us and the rest of the world. American exceptionalism can’t be a narcissistic belief that everyone ought to be like us. If everyone could become us, there would be nothing exceptional about us. Our exceptionalism is that the rest of the world isn’t like us and never will be. And that if we want to protect ourselves, we have to stop trying to define the world or allowing the rest of the world to redefine America.

We could have won in Afghanistan, swiftly and decisively, and left, if we hadn’t been seduced into believing that Afghanistan could be America and that Afghans deserved to be Americans.

Likewise, Iraq.

Victories became defeats and cemeteries filled with the dead because we lost sight of the truth about Afghanistan and about ourselves. The more we think about Afghanistan or any place in terms of ourselves, the less we see it for what it is. And that can be a deadly illusion.

Americans have spent the last century trying to turn the world into America. Let’s spend this century making America what it was always intended to be: a refuge from the rest of the world.

We won’t win wars anymore because we can no longer remember what we’re fighting for. Unable to draw boundaries between the enemy and ourselves, between our nation and the world, we’ve lost touch with the fundamental purpose and even the concept of what a war is.

To win a war, we have to remember what we’re fighting for. Ourselves.

The Afghans understand that concept. Perhaps they understand it too well. But it’s time we learned it too. If we can’t go to war for ourselves, not for democracy, human rights, or so that Afghan girls can go to school, then we will lose soldiers, lose wars, and lose our nation.

All wars are endless and forever when you don’t understand what it takes to win.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/f...n-daniel-greenfield/

Biden is the current President.

His fault 100%. Anything short of that is leftist blaming. He is a mush-brained idiot asleep on watch.

Zero credibility in any capacity going forward. The ENTIRE country folded in ~three weeks after he ASSURED us that could not happen.

------------------------------------

Biden complained about the Trump "deal", but then went on and on that it was the right thing to do.

Remember when biden said Afghanistan had an air force ?

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/...ign=rightrailsticky3

In the last few weeks, Afghanistan’s air force became a sticking point in negotiations between the Biden administration and Afghan officials, according to one person familiar with the talks.

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.

“Americans have spent the last century trying to turn the world into America. Let’s spend this century making America what it was always intended to be: a refuge from the rest of the world.”

This right here is exactly what we should be doing. The amount of blood and treasure wasted on adventures overseas is staggering. What do we have to show for it? There are a lot of problems domestically that have been put on the back burner. At some point America needs to focus on America and put it first again on the priority list. I wonder when that will happen.

Chillin1....the article you posted ..well
It's the absolute truth.