Kurt wrote:Afghanistan was so shitty that once we chose to go there we limited ourselves only to bad options.
We could see that:
Any exit plan would be shitty
Any plan to stay would be shitty
Any escalation or plan to "win" would be shitty.
The neo-libs and neo-cons are throwing a hissy-snit now because they hoped to keep going and to expand our interventions abroad....and they cannot quite face the fact that their shit ideas started all this.
Trump was right to want to leave and Biden was right to leave.
So, I agree with you Kurt. Trump was right to leave and Biden was right to leave. The policy isn't the issue. The execution, however, is.
It is, in short, staggeringly inept.
Let's accept for a second that Biden inherited a shitty hand given to him (and Trump) by a good 12 years of bad Bush/Obama policies where we coddled a corrupt Afghan regime, failed to address Taliban safe havens in Pakistan all the while paying Pakistan quite handsomely to wage a proxy war on ourselves, and subverted the potential tribal counterweights to a Taliban takeover.
BIden inherited a bad hand, and made it inconceivably worse with intentional decisions and actions.
- They knew collapse was imminent but kept promulgating the lie that the Taliban were not going to take over Afghanistan, giving Americans and other non-Afghan ex-pats working in Afghanistan a false sense of security with regards to time window available to them to exfil
- Biden ordered in-the night withdrawal and abandonment of US forces from places like Bagram, with no warning given to our so-called allies, so the Taliban in many cases just strolled right in and claimed the military equipment before it could be secured by the ANA
- The US withdrew all of the military and State Department personnel and basically gave a big middle finger to anyone still left in country - SIVs, American contractors, NGO workers, etc. Too bad, fuck you, hope you don't end up on a beheading video, but if you do, oh well.
- The US did all of this without consulting any of our other allies (i.e., Britain and France). Boris Johnson reportedly tried to call Biden on Monday, and Biden refused to take his calls for 36 fucking hours.
- The US had to backtrack and send in troops to secure KIA. There are now more 3x American troops in a very small area than we had in all Afghanistan 6 months ago. Surrounded by the Taliban. On the upcoming 10 year anniversary of 9-11.
- While the Brits and French are sending out their relatively small military to help retrieve their citizens, the US commanders on scene are trying to prevent them from doing so and are not allowing the much larger American forces to do anything to rescue Americans.
- There was a huge backlog of SIVs that were never processed. A large number who were processed, well, the State Department simple burned their passports. Too bad, so sad, hope the Taliban don't murder you and your family. Maybe your daughters will at least get to live as sex slaves.
- Reportedly, there was a plan in place to empower local militias in case the central government collapsed just like it has, but Biden nixed that.
- Billions of dollars worth of American military equipment fell into the hands of the Taliban - in a sane world, this equipment would have been destroyed, but now the Taliban went from being a rag-tag militia to being quite well armed.
I can't think of a single fucking thing the Biden admin did here that displayed any actual planning or competence.
We will be very, very lucky if the Taliban don't decide just to massacre all the Americans they can.
I'd whore myself out just one more time if I knew who to screw to get out of this grind.