I served in Afghanistan as a US Marine, twice. Here’s the truth in two sentences

Sure thing. No proof of that but hey, you can imagine anything you want.

 

Have you been asleep for the last 4 years?

 

Yeah, you got nothing as usual.

The CIA director is in Kabul in secret talks with the Taliban. Think he is there to make sure they are not Trump supporters?

 

LOL...You can call him "Cajones Joe" all that you like. It will never stick because it is ridiculously off base. Even ardent Democrats do not believe that nonsense. You are truly going it alone on that notion.

Nobody ever said that getting out would be "nice and easy", but for crying out loud that does not mean that you had to let Kabul fall before you got tens of thousands of Americans and American allies out of harms way. One could say that we lost this war, but that does not mean that we were defeated on the battlefield. It only means that they were able to outlast us by hiding in the shadows and waiting until which time we decided to leave. This is an important distinction, because if defeated on the battlefield one could understand a hasty retreat that left so many assets behind, but being that we have been in almost total control, such a hasty, reckless retreat makes no sense whatsoever.

I realize that to a person that keeps trying to nickname him "Cajones Joe", that changing your mind is obviously impossible, but any rational person can see that the tactics chosen that have led to this rather precarious situation are ridiculously idiotic and wholly inadequate.

 

I'd say that much of the world DEEPLY regrets that Trump is gone and they're stuck with a vegetable for a president.

 

I guess they are not that secret.

Not sure why being in talks with the Taliban is now a bad thing, it was not back in 2020

 

Great post. You nailed it.

 

And I'd say you have a very active imagination

 

Riiiiiight. The British, French, and Germans have the utmost respect, admiration, and faith in China-Joe, right? Lol. Thanks for the laugh!

 

Came in here to learn more about the aphganistan situation but every other reply is “trump,Trump,Trump”
Ok then. I guess it’s another Trump thread then

 

I just have to ask, am I the only one that prior to last week did not know there were tens of thousands of Americans living in Afghanistan? Who are these people and why were they there? Why did they wait so long to leave, they have known for close to 1.5 years that we were pulling out all of our troops.

 

On that I 100% agree with you.

 

See, you still live in this black and white world where one has to like either Trump or Biden. It does not have to be one or the other, it is 100% possible to have no respect, admiration, or faith in either one of them.

 

has it ever occurred to you that the British, French, and Germans might be wonder why we keep electing such terrible choices to be POTUS?

 

It wasn’t a bad thing when Obama was doing the same thing, but that’s what partisans do. They change their opinion based off of who is in the White House.

 

post of the day

 

Pick a news service and go look..

 

LOL...fair question. All I know is that the State Department estimates that there are between 5k and 10k American citizens there, in addition to 10k plus Afghans that allied themselves and assisted the military throughout this occupation that were promised a path out due to their lives being in danger due to them helping our military. I would imagine the American citizens are probably a combination of dual US and Afghani citizens, missionaries, teachers, defense contractors, infrastructure engineers etc.

I do not know why they waited so long to leave, but one can safely assume that they know full well how dangerous it would be to still be there under Taliban control having been allied with the attempt to modernize that country. With that being the case, one can safely assume that they were not made aware of the urgency to get out now.

If it were me?....I would have never went in the first place. No thank you. Rather than making my way through numerous Taliban checkpoints in the hopes of getting through to the airport, I would much prefer to sit here arguing with strangers about the topic.

 

I don't disagree with the author of the article in the OP. Curious as to why he's running as a Democrat, of course, but that doesn't make his assessment of the end result in Afghanistan wrong.

His article didn't really deal with the specifics of the exit so much as the inevitable conclusion that the Afghan forces were compromised and would fold. That's not shocking, for sure.

 

Ding Ding Ding....100% spot on. Yet for some people this logic is somehow very hard for them to grasp.

 

yep… smells of treason… aiding and abetting your enemy…. What happens when they start shooting our soldiers or or shooting down our aircraft with our own weapons?

 

I at least admit to a bias of preference for one party over another. I will most likely never vote Democrat again in my lifetime. I'd done so just a few times in the past. The binary nature of the debates does make it a bit hard to admit being unhappy with one party or the other, yet that explains so much of why Trump was elected in the first place.

As Michael Moore said when predicting a Trump win, Trump's election was one of the biggest F-YOUS (paraphrased) in American political history. He wasn't wrong. Trump won, in part, because all those "partisans" decided the Republican Party, and DC in general, was broken.

 

I know right, all those damn Presidents that have been sending that stuff over there for the last 12 or or so years

 

What would you have done? I don't mean this in a snarky way, but what would you do?

Granting that prior administrations kept us in Afghanistan for poor reasons, you're handed the keys.

It's a catch 22.
1) You confiscate the military equipment prior administrations told them they could use, and exfiltrate that equipment and our personnel from the country - guaranteeing a Taliban takeover.
2) You leave the Afghan forces, whom you know to have a close to 0% chance of maintaining the status quo, with the equipment, and take the gamble.

To me, leaving the equipment behind was also a poor decision. A nasty situation. One that probably resulted in Trump's decision to not get us all the way out of Afghanistan. Part practical and part a political decision. He was probably warned of precisely what Biden walked into.

The culture of Afghanistan is broken, as is the culture in South Chicago, as is the cartel culture in Mexico and other countries. Not something you can fix without expending tremendous resources and breaking the bank. Unfortunately.

 

I have actually never voted for a Dem. The last three elections I have voted third party as I couldn’t stomach voting for either of the two main candidates. I have never nor will ever belong to any one party.