China has wanted mineral rights to Afghanistan’s oil for decades. I read about this when Obama was president sometime around 2009-2010 in Foreign Affairs magazine (The Council on Foreign Relations official rag). At the time, it was not politically expedient for Obama to hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban.

Obviously Bidet has been chosen to be the sacrificial lamb, as they say. It’s not news to anyone here, but the hatred of our country runs deep in many places in DC and in the same people the love for the PRC abounds.

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:

Perhaps, but what of the American citizens on the ground in A-stan right now that this administration seems minimally interested in removing from the country? Where does the focus get applied? Though it might sound terrible, I'd advocate sacrificing every one of those local lives if that was the only way to get every American out. This is a cluster**** of immeasurable proportions at this point thanks to the utter incompetence of the current administration, but the focus must be turned to protecting and savings the Americans there. If the Afghans who assisted the US can be saved as well, all the better, but they should not factor into getting all the Americans out 'first'.

Well, this wasn't an 'either/or' situation. Those Afghanis were inside the airport perimeter, which is surrounded by hostile forces. The 'administration' brags how the airport is "under US control," (as if that means anything with 5-10000 AMERICAN CITIZENS stuck in hostile enemy territory) but from what I've read here, MOST of the Americans are NOT at the airport. They were told to 'shelter in place,' so there is now no way for the Americans to get to the airport (until the 'administration' bribes off the Taliban give them free passage). So, in all likelihood, these Afghanis would have been left behind to die while a near-empty C-17 flew away, if we insisted on removing all the Americans first.

It is a national DISGRACE how these citizens are hung out to dry while the 'administration' brags about how they are not 'prioritizing' American citizens (you know, the taxpayers who pay these cowards' salaries). Meanwhile, president pudding cup is being hid at Camp David and the 'administration's' #1 priority is blaming this all on President Trump.

I think this might actually be a tipping point, so long as the msm is unable to shift focus on some new covid 'crisis.' While the single greatest diplomatic disaster in our history for the past 80 years is unfolding in real time, the 'president' is vacationing far away from Washington, and the Press Secretary refuses to take calls. The 'vice president' is going to Vietnam, further reminding us of the historical precedence.

This shouldn't surprise me. This 'administration' continues to exceed every low expectation I have of it. And getting rid of biden won't change anything - harris would be just the same useless puppet as biden is, while somebody else hides behind the curtain pulling all the strings. The ONLY thing that the dems have done better than I expected them to do is propping up dementia joe. I never expected him to last this long. Of course, this is the real reason he is 'vacationing' away from Washington. They know he couldn't stand up to ANY scrutiny, even with a sympathetic msm and refusing to take any questions even from the sycophant reporters.

Kabul evacuation flights take off EMPTY as Taliban close off airport and US general warns 'overwhelming force' will be used if fighters interfere with evacuation - as women beg soldiers for help through gates

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne...beg-troops-help.html

Evacuation flights out of Kabul are taking off almost empty despite tens of thousands of Afghans trying to flee the country after the Taliban formed a ring of steel around the airport and barred most people from reaching it.

One Australian Hercules C-130 aircraft with room for 120 people took off with just 26 on board today, the government has confirmed, while a German Airbus A-400M with room for 150 was carrying just seven people when it departed yesterday.

That is despite there being around 50,000 Afghans gathered at the airport who have been promised sanctuary by western nations. One particularly harrowing piece of footage showed women pleading with US troops that 'the Taliban are coming for me'.

America, Britain, Canada, and Germany are among those who have pledged to take tens of thousands of Afghan refugees each as part of a 'big-hearted' response to the collapse of their country that has failed to materialise.

US General Frank McKenzie, who is at the airport and leading the evacuation efforts, has warned of an 'overwhelming response' to the Taliban if they impede the evacuation - never-the-less, British Ex-Pats and other foreign nationals said they are struggling to get through into Kabul airport, and are even being turned away.

In a sign of how dire the situation has become, White House spokesman Jen Psaki was forced to admit Tuesday that there is no guarantee that all US citizens and visa holders will be able to leave the country before troops pull out on August 31

More at link

The united states has a record of betraying its local allies in countries where it has fought unpopular wars. This history, echoing in the taunts hurled by the Taliban fighters as they gunned down Mohammad, includes Vietnam. In the spring of 1975, as North Vietnamese divisions approached Saigon, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese with connections to the U.S.—soldiers, officials, spies, interpreters, drivers, bar girls, cooks—begged their American friends and colleagues to help them find a way out. But the embassy in Saigon and the Ford administration in Washington were slow to face the gravity of the situation and reluctant to prepare an evacuation for fear of panicking the population into chaos. In mid-April, President Gerald Ford finally realized that the government of South Vietnam might fall, and he asked Congress for $300 million in emergency aid, including money to evacuate the remaining 2,500 Americans and their dependents along with up to 175,000 South Vietnamese.

But Congress, led by Senate Democrats, had no interest in throwing away more money on a lost war that Americans wanted to forget. The prospect of sending U.S. troops to help evacuate Vietnamese along with Americans was a nonstarter. Some of the most strenuous objections came from the 32-year-old first-term senator from Delaware, Joseph R. Biden.

“I feel put upon in being presented an all-or-nothing number,” Biden said at a rare White House meeting between the president and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 14. “I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out.”

Ford countered: “We opened our door to the Hungarians. I am not saying the situation is identical, but our tradition is to welcome the oppressed. I don’t think these people should be treated any differently from any other people—the Hungarians, Cubans, Jews from the Soviet Union.”

Biden and other Democrats were unmoved. In a Senate speech on April 23, Biden argued that the president lacked the authority to rescue any Vietnamese. “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals” other than diplomats of third countries, Biden said. “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.” The U.S. should leave the task of protecting them to “the organizations that are available” and “diplomatic channels,” he added. A week later, North Vietnamese tanks entered the grounds of the presidential palace in Saigon just hours after the last helicopter carried the last Americans out of Vietnam

https://www.theatlantic.com/id...ho-helped-us/618416/

quote:

Originally posted by old rugged cross:
You guys are living in a dream world if you think that this chaos unfolding there is poor planning and ineptness by those running the show.

Oh, horse shit. Open your eyes.

If you posted this with the intent of being completely wrong, congratulations, you've succeeded.

Afghanistan and America’s Ruling Class

They govern in your name for their own sakes, and for the sake of a globalist vision that exists to serve themselves and their friends.

By Kevin Portteus
August 17, 2021

The sudden collapse of American power in Afghanistan has triggered the usual partisan blamestorming in Washington. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has blamed the Biden Administration. How clueless does a member of the Cheney family have to be to go around assigning blame for Afghanistan? Talking points from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office show that their plan was to blame Donald Trump for everything. Biden went on TV and blamed Trump for the plan Biden abandoned, the Afghan people for being unwilling to fight, and the Good Humor Man for running out of chocolate chocolate chip.

There’s going to be a lot to sort out in the weeks and months to come regarding this catastrophe, and all the questions that have been asked are legitimate. Should we have been there in the first place? What was our mission? What does the outcome say about the competence of our military?

In one sense, this is very clearly a disaster of the Biden Administration’s making. We managed to bobble along in Afghanistan for nearly 20 years before the present administration arrived, with ideas about foreign policy that seem to be no deeper than lecturing America on its faults, flying rainbow flags, and pushing cringy Instagram videos.

In another sense, if it’s accountability you want, then it’s time to look in the mirror. We were all part of it, you know. All of us. Republicans and Democrats alike. Did you vote for Bush, Kerry, McCain, Obama, Romney, Hillary, or Biden, or any of the array of primary candidates that are too numerous to mention? You were part of it.

Did you go along with the mission creep that turned a campaign to kill jihadis into an exercise in nation-building? Did you cheer George W. Bush when he talked about Afghan women voting, or Afghan girls learning to read? You were part of it. Did you swallow all of the lies our generals told us about our progress in the region, and about the capabilities of the Afghan military? You were part of it.

But if you were on the other side, did you notice that your people kept right on doing the same things once the Bushitler was gone? Did you swoon over President Hope-and-Change, whose preferred Middle East diplomacy tactic was the drone strike? Do you remember Cindy Sheehan, the “Gold Star Mom” who was paraded in front of the microphones by the Democrats on every occasion to attack Bush? Do you remember how those same Democrats kicked her to the curb as soon as Obama came into office? You were part of it, too.

We were all part of it because we believed that there was a meaningful difference between the parties in Washington. There isn’t. Self-proclaimed Republicans and Democrats in real America are different, but not the subspecies of each that prowls the Washington swamps. They go through the motions of disagreeing, but none of it means anything.

There is a ritual of partisan combat in D.C., but it’s just bread and circuses for the masses. Do you remember the foreign policy debate between Obama and Romney during the 2012 election? Read the transcript without the names. Except for a 30-second exchange on Russia, the two were basically indistinguishable. Neoliberal, or neoconservative; does it really make any difference?

Many people in both parties figured this out, from the Bernie Bros on Twitter to your neighbor who went to the Trump rally. Some people figured it out earlier than others. For me, Angelo Codevilla’s 2010 essay “America’s Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution” and the whole Mitt Romney experience in 2012 were seminal moments. Some figured it out for the wrong reasons, like those on the far Left who basically agreed with our putative enemies that America is the Great Satan. Some figured it out but kept supporting the establishment anyway.

So we were all part of it. That can’t be changed now. The question is, are you still part of it? Have you learned anything?

The same class of self-interested lying incompetents who brought about this debacle in Afghanistan have spent the last 18 months peddling COVID fear porn and musing about vaccine mandates. And they’re the same people who breathlessly tell us that a couple of grandmas who took a self-guided tour of the Capitol are a greater threat to Our Democracy™ than Antifa goons, the Chinese Communists, and millions of Third-World invaders. If you still trust these people, you haven’t learned anything. If our elites tell you the sun comes up in the east, you should go outside and check.

For all his faults, Trump was the exception, the only viable alternative to this policy of Progressive Imperialism. The uniparty knew it and went all-out to destroy him. They finally deposed him, and perhaps half the country cheered; because mean tweets.

If you were one of those who cheered Trump’s ouster and the restoration of the uniparty to power, you’re still part of it. If you’re running around squealing about how this is all the Republicans’ fault, or all the Democrats’ fault, you haven’t learned a damn thing. You’re still the stooge of a ruling class that couldn’t possibly care less about you, your community, or even the United States as a sovereign nation. They govern in your name for their own sakes, and for the sake of a globalist vision that exists to serve themselves and their friends. As far as they are concerned you are to be kept as postmodern serfs: a cheap, disposable, and easily exploited resource pool for their projects.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/0...ericas-ruling-class/

quote:

Originally posted by wcb6092:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne...beg-troops-help.html

Thanks. Once again the Daily Mail reports more than most major U.S. sources.

Taliban Troll Biden On Twitter By Posing With Ice Cream

https://www.zerohedge.com/poli...ter-posing-ice-cream



The message is clear. They know Biden is a weak, mentally disabled joke of a man, and they have zero fear of America under his leadership.

This is the image Biden has projected to America’s enemies.

During a “press conference” in which Taliban leaders took questions from reporters (something Joe Biden refused to do Monday) they even commented that free speech in America is under more threat than in Afghanistan owing to the administration’s use of Facebook to censor dissent, and general big tech erosion of freedom of expression:

Biden waited and waited until Kabul had been overrun by the Taliban and chaotic images started to emerge before he finally said anything to the American people on the matter.

Sources also claim that Biden tried to get Kamala Harris to deal with the situation while he was at Camp David.

Much more at link.

Damn

Sorry, but I have to say- good for them. They have this senile halfwit's number.

When the Taliban's observations about the First Amendment are believable and the American news media's remarks are not...


"Achmed, what flavors did you get?"

"I got ass and camel."

LMAO!!!

A digital billboard in Wilmington, North Carolina appears to have either been hacked or purchased for the purpose of showing a manipulated image of Joe Biden eating ice cream with a bewildered facial expression while the last U.S. helicopter leaves Afghanistan.

We should be finding places in the middle east and se asia for these people to relocate. Moving them to western countries is a bad idea.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

THOUGHTS ON AFGHANISTAN, from a senior military officer:

I ask that you not use my name. I am a currently serving General Officer and what I have to say is highly critical of our current military leadership. But it must be said.

I don’t blame President Biden for the catastrophe in Afghanistan. It was the right decision to leave, the proof of which is how quickly the country collapsed without US support. Twenty years of training and equipping the Afghan army and all that they were capable of was a few hours of delay in a country the size of Texas. As for his predecessor, the only blame I place on President Trump was that he didn’t withdraw sooner.

We should blame President Bush, not for the decision to attack into Afghanistan following 9-11, but for his decision to “shift the goalposts” and attempt to reform Afghanistan society. That was a fool’s errand any student of history would have recognized. And yes, we should place blame on President Obama for his decision to double down on failure when he “surged” in Afghanistan, rather than to withdraw.

However, most of the blame belongs to the leadership of the US military, and the Army in particular. The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” detailed years of US officials failing to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” That report was two years ago, and the stories within it began more than a decade before that. Afghanistan was, and always will be, “unwinnable”.

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.

Just as it did after Vietnam, the military, and especially the Army, must conduct a comprehensive review of why it exists. The purpose of the Army is to visit profound violence on our nation’s enemies; it is not to rebuild failed states. We have decades of experience: counter-insurgencies and nation-building does not work for America. We do not have the stomach for long wars of occupation—and that is a good thing. We are a nation of commerce, not conflict. A constellation of retired stars will tell you that the two can coexist. They are wrong. Retired Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane said only two months ago that because Afghanistan consumes just a small portion of the force, America “can afford the cost of fighting” there. What he does not see is that for 20 years, that “small portion” was the most important portion of the military. Everything else necessarily is subservient to the portion of the force in conflict. It has altered who the Army is and how it thinks. There exists only a handful of officers below the general officer ranks who served during the Cold War and who have lived through an era of great power conflict. From private through brigade commander, virtually every Army Soldier serving today has experienced little other than counterinsurgencies or nation-building while operating out of secure FOBs. Large scale combat operations and insurgencies require different cultures and mindsets. In a resource constrained environment, the same service cannot do both well. The Army today could not win a major war. Yet, winning a major war, is the number one reason why an Army exists. It will take a generation to break bad habits, to think in terms of closing with and destroying the enemy versus winning hearts and minds. Keane sees raw numbers (and ignores the stark evidence that there was no progress over 20 years) and thinks that America’s Army can sustain that level of commitment. It cannot, and the opportunity cost to the culture of the force is much too great. Ignore him. Ignore Petraeus, McMaster, Stavridis, and the rest of their ilk.

Concurrent with its review of purpose, the Army must reevaluate its size and how it is organized. The active component is much too large. That makes it too eager to get involved in irrelevant theaters where failure is likely or even preordained. It should be very difficult for an American president to deploy the Army without the National Guard performing most combat operations. You argue that that takes time? Yes, that’s the point: it should take time to make the case to the American people that war is worth it.

The Marine Corps must provide the nation’s rapid response forces. It is a self-contained deployable multi-domain force. Some would argue that the service has both insufficient combat power and staying power. However, that is a feature, and not a flaw, as it forces the nation to rely on its Army—and hence its reserve components—before engaging in heavy combat or lengthy operations. The current Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Berger, already seems to recognize his service’s role—hence his decision to eliminate armor from the Corps.

Congress must reevaluate the authorities contained within Sections 12301 through 12304 of Title X. The president has too much latitude to, on his own authority, mobilize tens or even hundreds of thousands of Guardsmen and Reservists without congressional approval. It must be the policy of the United States that we do not place our service members in harm’s way without first making the case to the American people. This also means ending the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force as well as strengthening Congress’ role in the War Powers Act such that, absent an actual declaration of war, there can be no war.

Some would argue that such a constraint would limit the nation’s ability to respond to a Russian incursion in the Baltics or a Chinese attack on Taiwan. However, recent open-source studies conclude that the US military already is unable to defend against either attack. Pretending otherwise while not having the means to back up our assurances unnecessarily emboldens our partners and allies, making such an attack more likely. We lose nothing by making the law match the reality.

Let us not forget the intelligence agencies. They reported that Kabul was at risk of falling in as little as 90 days. That report was from last Thursday! The capital fell in less than 90 hours. Failure must be punished. And punishment in a bureaucracy means mass firings and a smaller budget—not more money so that they might be better the next time. Congress must consolidate and collapse our intelligence agencies. And when its reorganization is done, if the overall size of the nation’s intelligence apparatus is a quarter of what it is now, that still is too large.

And while we are on the topic of “too large,” DoD must be halved. There are too many flag officers, too many agencies, departments, and directorates. It is the only secretariat with independent but supposedly subordinate secretaries. There are too many Geographic Component Commands—each led by a 4-star virtual proconsul whose budget dwarfs what the Department of State spends in their regions. The result is a foreign policy that is overly military and underly diplomatic, informational, and economic. Congress must revisit the 1947 National Security Act and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. Both were good for their times, but after decades of experience, there clearly are new reforms necessary.

Unreformed, DoD is an inscrutable labyrinth which invites fraud, waste, and abuse. The excess attracts unscrupulous camp followers. Amazon did not choose Crystal City to locate its new headquarters because of low rents and ease of transportation access for its 25,000 employees. It chose the Arlington, Virginia neighborhood because it is two blocks from the Pentagon. That building controls the distribution of three-quarters of a trillion dollars every year. Most of it is wasted. The excess is apparent in the scores of class-A high rises housing defense contractors just blocks from the Pentagon. To end that waste, nothing so concentrates the senses as austerity.

Let me conclude with one last thought: the generals, the intelligence analysts, the defense contractors, and the pundits all leveraged America’s rarest resource: the American serviceman and woman. They are the ones who fought, and sweat, and bled, and died for what is now clearly a failed strategy and a doomed mission. Even after its failure was apparent to their leaders, they continued to enlist and reenlist, largely because their superiors—the experts—assured them that success was possible. It was not. It never was. Absent American support, Afghanistan collapsed over the length of a long weekend. That is proof enough that the last 20 years were in vain, and proof enough that the system is broken from within.

quote:

Originally posted by wcb6092:
Taliban Troll Biden On Twitter By Posing With Ice Cream

Two Scoops!
Now that is some sophisticated trolling.

quote:

Originally posted by feersum dreadnaught:...

THOUGHTS ON AFGHANISTAN, from a senior military officer:

I ask that you not use my name. I am a currently serving General Officer....

Not buying the "authenticity" of the author...

well we are either going to leave a bunch of people behind. Bribe the Taliban for access to these people or send in more military to retake Bagram and send out armed military units to get these people out. Biden fucked up a surrender... Incredible.

quote:

Originally posted by sigmonkey:

quote:

Originally posted by feersum dreadnaught:...
THOUGHTS ON AFGHANISTAN, from a senior military officer:
I ask that you not use my name. I am a currently serving General Officer....

Not buying the "authenticity" of the author...

Yep. Dead giveaway.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:


"Achmed, what flavors did you get?"

"I got ass and camel."

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:

"Achmed, what flavors did you get?"

"I got ass and camel."

Literally, LOL!

quote:

Originally posted by sigmonkey:
Not buying the "authenticity" of the author...

Yes, anonymous sources are anonymous.

However, following that link did lead me to this:

Biden reportedly visited Kabul and met a young Afghan girl who informed him, “You cannot leave. They will not deny me learning to read. I will read, and I will be a doctor like my mother. America must stay,” she reportedly said according to the New Yorker in 2004.

The New Yorker reported:

I promise I’ll come back,” Biden told her. “You cannot leave,” the girl insisted. “They will not deny me learning to read. I will read, and I will be a doctor like my mother. I will. America must stay.” As Biden put it in a recent interview, the Afghan girl was telling him, “Don’t fuck with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You better not leave me now.”

Biden has ahead full of garbage. That's what's between his ears- the shit people throw away.

Ol Droolin' Joe is fucked ten ways from Sunday. But first, we had to elect the idiot POTUS to see what's in him...