Thread: Biden Made the Right Call

Originally Posted by Storekeeper

Should we start with the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army?

...sure, then the head of the CIA and the National Security Council...all trembling in fear of the unemployment line...this is incompetence of a tRumpian magnitude...

Originally Posted by baldrick

the agreement was signed in feb 2020 - seppos out in 18 months

where was the surprise ?

It was a military operation supporting a government for 20 years. The surprise was that the govt they were building up for 20 years , folded in under 2 weeks.

Originally Posted by tomcat

this is incompetence of a tRumpian magnitude...

I wouldn't go that far.

Originally Posted by Buckaroo Banzai

Biden did what every other president since we got into this debacle , they all knew we need to get out and also knew it was not going to be pretty , so they passed the ball. Biden was the only one with the balls to do the right thing for the country and take the political flak.

And whether or not it was by design he did it early enough in his presidency that whatever happens the shock will have largely worn off by the time of the next election.

Originally Posted by Backspin
But they internationally turned it over to the Taliban.

Originally Posted by lom

Was the UN involved?

What's your idea? When GWB started the war, was the UN involved? Was not, obviously since no Afgh. membership in UN that time?

And what the UN Charter says about invading countries? (something about what the good colonel Ghadaffi was explaining once in UNGA, next year he peacefully died...)

Paradox when this Monday a special urgent meeting in UN SC...
And the Afghan delegate of the non-existing Afgh. govt with fleeing president speaking there. Speaking about what?
And the other delegates, speaking about what?

Originally Posted by Cujo

And whether or not it was by design he did it early enough in his presidency that whatever happens the shock will have largely worn off by the time of the next election.

Even if it ends up costing him re-election … it was worth it.

Originally Posted by tomcat

...definitely: this was a time to rise above self-interested political gain and act to close an open wound. Biden acted and congressional midgets/seditionists/QAonites/anti-vaxxers/self-dealers and devout evangelicals loudly whined...boohoo...

All the Republicans are having a pop because it deflects from the fact that they are the greedy c u n t s that got America into the mess in the first place.

And it was Obama that got Bin Laden.

Originally Posted by tomcat

...definitely: this was a time to rise above self-interested political gain and act to close an open wound. Biden acted and congressional midgets/seditionists/QAonites/anti-vaxxers/self-dealers and devout evangelicals loudly whined...boohoo...

That is pretty much how I see it. I am not overly interested in domestic US politics but Afghanistan is a different matter and I think Biden did the right thing. He did what needed to be done.
The withdrawal might appear messy. Not so messy as the Brits' first withdrawal in 1842 when the Afghans slaughtered about 16,000 people. I'm sure all the generals are familiar with that military disaster and they absolutely did the right thing to pack up and leave in the night without telling them. It was a nest of snakes 200 years ago and I don't see it being so different today.
Now the Taliban have got what they wished for, control of Afghanistan. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. One nest of snakes, it's all yours.

The withdrawal/ Taliban victory is actually more good than bad. By the standards of these godawful things, there were not many lives lost and minimal property and infrastructure destruction.

The Taliban- so far- have not indulged in an orgy of blood lust, retribution, looting etc. They have even set up a complaint line for such things. It could have been sooo much worse. Count your blessings.

Originally Posted by Storekeeper

Even if it ends up costing him re-election … it was worth it.

Can't lose reelection if you don't run SK.
Other than the VP stating her boss did the right thing removing the troops her silence on Afghanistan has been deafing.

Originally Posted by Norton

Other than the VP stating her boss did the right thing removing the troops

...she supported her boss as required...

Originally Posted by Norton

her silence on Afghanistan has been deafening

...probably because she knows diddly about what's going on...

Originally Posted by Norton

Other than the VP stating her boss did the right thing removing the troops her silence on Afghanistan has been deafing.

She boasted on CNN, shortly after the president ordered troops withdrawn in April, that she was the last one in the room before Biden made his decision, and felt comfortable with the plan.

“The decision always rests with him,” she added, “but I have seen him over and over again make decisions based exactly on what he believes is right.”

Kamala Harris''' central role in U.S. Afghanistan withdrawal - Los Angeles Times

Somewhere else:

Harris was reportedly pressed to give an update on Afghanistan to the American people but refused.

White House source says Kamala Harris could be heard screaming today: “They will not pin this s*** on me!”

...^thus endeth the thread...

I personally doubt Kamala would have marched you into Afghanistan in the first place. Why should she have to live with the lingering stench?

See below by Heather Cox Richardson

August 18, 2021 (Wednesday)

"It is still early days, and the picture of what is happening in Afghanistan now that the Taliban has regained control of the country continues to develop.

Central to affairs there is money. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about half its population requiring humanitarian aid this year and about 90% of its people living below the poverty line of making $2 a day.

The country depends on foreign aid. Under the U.S.-supported Afghan government, the United States and other nations funded about 80% of Afghanistan’s budget. In 2020, foreign aid made up about 43% of Afghanistan’s GDP (the GDP, or gross domestic product, is the monetary value of all the goods and services produced in a country), down from 100% of it in 2009.

This is a huge problem for the Taliban, because their takeover of the country means that the money the country so desperately needs has dried up. The U.S. has frozen billions of dollars of Afghan government money held here in the U.S. The European Union and Germany have also suspended their financial support for the country, and today the International Monetary Fund blocked Afghanistan’s access to $460 million in currency reserves.

Adam M. Smith, who served on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, told Jeff Stein of the Washington Post that the financial squeeze is potentially “cataclysmic for Afghanistan.” It threatens to spark a humanitarian crisis that, in turn, will create a refugee crisis in central Asia. Already, the fighting in the last eight months has displaced more than half a million Afghans.

People fleeing from the Taliban threaten to destabilize the region more generally. While Russia was happy to support the Taliban in a war against the U.S., now that its fighters are in charge of the country, Russia needs to keep the Taliban’s extremism from spreading to other countries in the area. So it is tentatively saying supportive things about the Taliban, but it is also stepping up its protection of neighboring countries’ borders with Afghanistan. Other countries are also leery of refugees in the region: large numbers of refugees have, in the past, led countries to turn against immigrants, giving a leg up to right-wing governments.

Canada and Britain are each taking an additional 20,000 Afghan women leaders, reporters, LGBTQ people, and human rights workers on top of those they have already volunteered to take, but Turkey—which is governed by strongman president Recep Tayyip Erdogan—is building a wall to block refugees, and French President Emmanuel Macron asked officials in Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey to prevent migrants reaching their countries from traveling any further. The European Union has asked its member states to take more Afghan refugees.

In the U.S., the question of Afghan refugees is splitting the Republican Party, with about 30% of it following the hard anti-immigrant line of former president Donald Trump. Others, though, especially those whose districts include military installations, are saying they welcome our Afghan allies.

The people fleeing the country also present a problem for those now in control of Afghanistan. The idea that people are terrified of their rule is a foreign relations nightmare, at the same time that those leaving are the ones most likely to have the skills necessary to help govern the country. But leaders can’t really stop the outward flow—at least immediately—because they do not want to antagonize the international community so thoroughly that it continues to withhold the financial aid the country so badly needs. So, while on the streets, Taliban fighters are harassing Afghans who are trying to get away, Taliban leaders are saying they will permit people to evacuate, that they will offer blanket amnesty to those who opposed them, and also that they will defend some rights for women and girls.

The Biden administration is sending more personnel to help evacuate those who want to leave. The president has promised to evacuate all Americans in the country—as many as 15,000 people—but said only that we would evacuate as many of the estimated 65,000 Afghans who want to leave as possible. The Taliban has put up checkpoints on the roads to the airport and are not permitting everyone to pass. U.S. military leaders say they will be able to evacuate between 5000 and 9000 people a day.

Today, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A. Milley tried to explain the frantic rush to evacuate people from Afghanistan to reporters by saying: “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.” Maybe. But military analyst Jason Dempsey condemned the whole U.S. military project in Afghanistan when he told NPR's Don Gonyea that the collapse of the Afghan government showed that the U.S. had fundamentally misunderstood the people of Afghanistan and had tried to impose a military system that simply made no sense for a society based in patronage networks and family relationships.

Even with Dempsey’s likely accurate assessment, the statement that U.S. military intelligence missed that a 300,000 person army was going to melt away still seems to me astonishing. Still, foreign policy and national security policy analyst Dr. John Gans of the University of Pennsylvania speculated on Twitter that such a lapse might be more “normal”—his word and quotation marks—than it seems, reflecting the slips possible in government bureaucracy. He points out that the Department of Defense has largely controlled Afghanistan and the way the U.S. involvement there was handled in Washington. But with the end of the military mission, the Defense Department was eager to hand off responsibility to the State Department, which was badly weakened under the previous administration and has not yet rebuilt fully enough to handle what was clearly a complicated handoff. “There have not been many transitions between an American war & an American diplomatic relationship with a sovereign, friendly country,” Gans wrote. “Fewer still when the friendly regime disintegrates so quickly.” When things started to go wrong, they snowballed.

And yet, the media portrayal of our withdrawal as a catastrophe also seems to me surprising. To date, at least as far as I have seen, there have been no reports of such atrocities as the top American diplomat in Syria reported in the chaos when the U.S. pulled out of northern Syria in 2019. Violence against our Kurdish allies there was widely expected and it indeed occurred. In a memo made public in November of that year, Ambassador William V. Roebuck wrote that “Islamist groups” paid by Turkey were deliberately engaged in ethnic cleansing of Kurds, and were committing “widely publicized, fear-inducing atrocities” even while “our military forces and diplomats were on the ground.” The memo continued: “The Turkey operation damaged our regional and international credibility and has significantly destabilized northeastern Syria.”

Reports of that ethnic cleansing in the wake of our withdrawal seemed to get very little media attention in 2019, perhaps because the former president’s first impeachment inquiry took up all the oxygen. But it strikes me that the sensibility of Roebuck’s memo is now being read onto our withdrawal from Afghanistan although conditions there are not—yet—like that.

For now, it seems, the drive to keep the door open for foreign money is reining in Taliban extremism. That caution seems unlikely to last forever, but it might hold for long enough to complete an evacuation.

Much is still unclear and the situation is changing rapidly, but my guess is that keeping an eye on the money will be crucial for understanding how this plays out.

Meanwhile, the former president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, has surfaced in the United Arab Emirates. He denies early reports that he fled the country with suitcases full of cash".

When you consider what wealth they are sitting on, it's absurd how poor they are.

Mind you:

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani reportedly fled Kabul with $169 million in cash

Originally Posted by baldrick

the agreement was signed in feb 2020 - seppos out in 18 months

where was the surprise ?

The agreement was conditional, the Taliban broke that agreement when they took over the first province 6 months ago.

Originally Posted by beachbound

Yeah, that was a real shocker, wasn’t it? The Trump administration could not of seen that coming.

Derrr, that's why you put condition on, Biden had every right to bomb the shit out of them once they broke the conditions

Abdul Gani Baradar, the Taliban's chief political leader returns to Kabul.

One of my favourite recent news photos. His face just says it all:

"WTF! There I was, living it large in Doha, hangin' with the billionaire sheikhs, 5-star hotels, hot and cold running room boys, just negotiating in bad faith and havin’ a larf. It was a great gig, it could have gone on for years. We even had ice-cream. Then these guys only went and won! Now I’m back in this sh*thole wondering who will be first to poison me. It shouldn’t be too hard to run a country, if we can just get some money. There is a slim chance that the Western powers have actually realised what lying weasels we all are, still if we play the humanitarian crisis card well enough maybe they’ll keep the dollars flowing. I’ve gotta keep up the payments on the Abu Dhabi penthouse somehow, and the place in Paris, and the holiday villa in Islamabad. We still have the world’s supply of heroin to control. I know we said we’d stop that but no one really believes a word we say, after all these years, do they, really? The main problem will be getting the warlords to give us a cut without them getting anything in return and without them shooting me in the back. Tricky one that. At least it’s a narrow focus, I don’t have to worry about Health or Education Departments or stuff like that. On the bright side, there will be a large number of young girls needing extra religious instruction. Probably, with the lights off and from behind they look more or less the same as the real thing. Wish me luck. I suppose that Christmas shopping trip to Dubai won’t happen now. Bother.”

Originally Posted by Buckaroo Banzai

political flak.

You do know what Flak is? probably not the terminology to use.

See more of these #@$%^ on TV than Biden.

Maybe they'll have a news conference and answer some fucking questions, for a change.