Trump set to announce he's withdrawing 4,000 troops from Afghanistan amid troubled peace talks with

Trump set to announce he's withdrawing 4,000 troops from Afghanistan amid troubled peace talks with Taliban
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/othe...-troubled-peace-talks-with-taliban/ar-AAK8n4q

this is about I/3 of troops. Apparently the plan is to get entirely out by the election

is this actually a strategy? Or is it simply accepting the fact that there is not much we can do there?

is it some how different that Obama’s leaving Iraq? Or how we left Vietnam? Will conservatives endlessly claim “we coulda won?” How will conservative spin this?

 

Ending the pointless mess in Afghanistan is a no brainer. Getting the US out of "forever wars" was a central plank that Trump ran on. It was a campaign promise that he made, and he's keeping the promise.

As hard as the left tries to pretend Trump is a warmongering warhawk, he's just not. Only a fool(like Obama) would think Afghanistan is "winnable war", and Trump is no fool.

Why would conservatives need to spin this at all? Team Obama wasted mountains of taxpayer money, and thousands of American lives, in Afghanistan, and they perpetuated the lie that it was accomplishing something for 8 straight years.

Trump is ending the debacle. Who would argue that that's somehow not a good thing, what why would a "spin" need to be put on it?

 

How would you end the war?

 

The spin is going to come from the liberals, and it'll be the same crap as it was when Trump pulled troops out of Syria.

"Trump is abandoning our allies! The blood of our abandoned allies will forever stain Trump's tiny hands!"

Remember that? Back a few months ago when the liberals pretended to care about the Kurds for about a week in order to try and score some Orange Man Bad points. Remember that spin? Yeah, that didn't last long.

Get ready for more of that.

 

i don’t know. But, in not knowing, I think we have to admit there is no perfect solution. We searched for a perfect solution in Vietnam... and finally left in a very imperfect way. I doubt that perfect exit to Vietnam nam ever would have been found. And yet, still, people will lament that we did not find a winning exit which was just there at hand.

likewise with Korea, there was no perfect exit. Likewise with Iraq and Syria.... there is no perfect exit. And there will be no perfect exit that trump will arrange for Afghanistan.... not because trump is a bad guy... just there are some situations where the options are bad and worse.

but sadly. We almost never wish to acknowledge that unpleasant reality. We have stayed in Afghanistan for as long as we have because no politician wanted to pay the price of “losing” that his political opponents would exact from him. In some ways I am happy that trump is a sufficient renegade to say “**** it, this ain’t working, let’s just leave.”


But I find it irritating that Obama faced a similar dilemma in Iraq... and, omg, what an uproar from exactly the same people who will now support trump

 

The best way to get out of a forever war is to not get into it in the first place, and Trump is doing exactly that.

The best way to get out of a forever war that some other pack of idiots got you into is to just rip off the Band Aid.

 

I appreciate your candid response.

 

I'll second this.

It's rare to see a "Maybe the Orange Man's badness ain't all that bad." and it should be commended.

 

At this point in time, as we observed some months back when DJT attempted to get us out of Syria, it is the Democrats who seem far more interested in perpetual undeclared war than the Republicans are.

 

It's amazing how the left pulls a 180-degree bootlegger turn from hippie peaceniks to bloodthirsty warhawks the minute Trump starts pulling out troops.

 

Why in the world is this a 'war' in the first place? We went there to roust the AQ groups and they have been in Pakistan ever since. Just pack up and bring our guys home with all their stuff and let Afghanistan be Afghanistan. If AQ returns and starts the same crap just drone the hell out of them, no need for anymore American blood on those rocks. The end there was always going to be the same, we move out and the Taliban flows in behind us. It will always be that way.

 

Obama should have gotten us out of Afghanistan but he was too worried about his presidential legacy while not giving a damn about how many of our military personnel got destroyed. Trump is looking at things as a business man and has decided that since it's obviously Vietnam 2.0; it's time to cut our losses and bring our people home.

By the way I don't cut G.W. Bush any slack about this either. HE should have gotten us out of Afghanistan before leaving office. Bush should have, Obama should have, Trump looks like he intends to actually do it. Yay Trump!

 

Yes, rip off the BandAid and get us out of useless wars. America is 239 years old and has been in some sort of war for 222 of them. The last few years have been "What for?" wars. Yes, we wanted to strike out after 911, but the plan was "Get in, do the job, and get out." We stayed too long.

Put the money into the Space Force initiative so we don't get attacked by a foreign satellite operation.

 

Pulling out of Iraq was a mistake. Staying in Afghanistan has always been a bigger one.

 

I took a while to think about my answers to your questions, since I feel you are being sincere, I will be too.

As for how I view the withdrawal, about time. I think that Trump sees the futility in fighting against an ideology whose adherents are more than willing to maim and kill even members of their own population in order to regain regional control. The only way to fight that is to have a permanent presence, which was never our intent. And we cannot ask the civilian population of Afghanistan to stand firm in the face of such terror.

Additionally, the withdrawal is beneficial if, as a result, those factions of Afghans who are currently aligned against us, will begin in-fighting once their common enemy is gone. With them causing each other problems, they will be less of a threat globally, for a while.

As for winning the war, I think we won as much as we could win. It's time to either move in permanently or get out.

It is a bit different than Iraq and Vietnam, as well as those two events themselves are different than the other. In Vietnam we got run out. We lost. In Iraq, a withdrawal meant a standing down when there was still plenty of fighting to go around.

The similarity between Vietnam and Iraq however, is that we were fighting government forces mainly and we had the hearts and minds of a significant portion of the populace so there was hope and help, to an extent.

And finally I think the the bottom line reflects that it's time to cut loose. It just costs too much to patrol villages made of mud and dirt. We'd be better reallocating our resources to guard against Russia or China incursion.

 

Because we went in with no exit plan.

 

We don't "forever wars" but I wonder how we deal with "forever enemies"?

 

The idea of trying to accomplish anything in Afghanistan without taking Islam into account is nonsensical.

Unless we insanely intend to try to convert the country to some other religion, we have no business there now.

We have methods, I believe and hope, of preventing a repeat of the 9/11 attacks from spawning in Afghanistan without the need for our troops being there.

 

Dont welcome them into your house. Dont go to their house to live.

https://forums.t-nation.com/t/islam-for-infidels/101116

 

Because our government does not understand Islam.

www.politicalIslam.com

 

The enemy is inside the wire.

We need to figure out how to keep them from making America like we made Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

How is this a conservative issue. We should have been out of there 15 years ago. And we never should have went after Iraq or Libya or Syria.

 

By treating them as adversaries that have their own interests that are different from ours. Same way Kennedy dealt with kruchev, Nixon, Breshnev, Reagan/Gororchev etc. Work on common ground. We don't need to eliminate our enemies we just have to live with them.

 

As a nation we ell learned from the experiences of fighting in and occupying Muslim lands and now that knowledge informs our conclusion that leaving is the right thing to do.

 

I see you are going down a path against Islam, and I agree that their are fundamentalist sects within Islam who believe in killing anyone who wouldn't convert and willingly abide by sharia law, which is anathema to both Christian values and western laws for individual freedoms and separation of church and state. I agree, they should not be welcome in western societies. We do not want to have a situation like places in Europe, where radical Muslims have established communities under Sharia law, ignore the laws of the countries, and have "no go" zones. I recall Merkel lamenting a few years ago, after inviting many Muslim refugees to Germany, that they do not assimilate into culture.

Stereotyping "all" Islam as bad isn't the right path though, in my opinion, but I am opposed to stereotypes in general. I have had a few Muslim acquaintances and coworkers since before 911 who are all "modern Muslims" and they think that the Koran provides general principles, and which rejects the fundamentalist teachings that all Christians, Jews and other non-believers should be done away with. Just like most Christians no longer believe in some of the violent Old Testament scriptures like "An eye for an eye," there are more modern, peaceful Islamic sects.

I understand where you are coming from, and agree we don't want radicals coming here imposing and installing sharia law (and killing non-believers...yikes!). How to know who is who? I don't know what the answer to that is. I am definitely for selective immigration, knowing who comes here, and screening people. Not sure that is "enough" to prevent radical terrorist ideologies from slipping through the cracks, but I don't know what more we can do. I don't think we want what the leftists falsely call "a Muslim ban" on all practitioners of the Islamic faith...at least I don't.