Current Events > Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar declared the new President

(+) Yeah! (+)

Doom_Art posted...

Holy shit you're losing it lol

I mean, you just can't handle that the thing you want has clear anti-humanitarian consequences.

Just like, acknowledge it.

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Stuff like this is the real horrors, they got a List and will make sure they are all killed

https://twitter.com/jaglancy/status/1426878440838508547

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WeeWeiWiiWie posted...

you just can't handle that the thing you want has clear anti-humanitarian consequences.

Yes, because the US occupation of Afghanistan definitely had no clear anti-humanitarian consequences. This is all a giant clusterfuck and I genuinely do not pretend to know what the "right" answer is, but what you're posting is definite bullshit.

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Joeydollaz posted...

Stuff like this is the real horrors, they got a List and will make sure they are all killed

https://twitter.com/jaglancy/status/1426878440838508547

This is only the beginning of the bloodletting.

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Shezarr posted...

Yes, because the US occupation of Afghanistan definitely had no clear anti-humanitarian consequences. This is all a giant clusterfuck and I genuinely do not pretend to know what the "right" answer is, but what you're posting is definite bullshit.

The options at this point were pull out or don't pull out.

Pull out has far worse consequences for the people of Afghanistan. Like, clearly and obviously.

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WeeWeiWiiWie posted...

The options at this point were pull out or don't pull out.

Pull out has far worse consequences for the people of Afghanistan. Like, clearly and obviously.

And staying another 20 years for this same exact thing to happen when we pull out at that point?

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For some reason I hear this music playing every time I look at him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIdxNMBq11Q

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WeeWeiWiiWie posted...

the thing you want

you're suggesting I want the Taliban to control Afghanistan?

Please tell me you're trolling and/or imping COVxy because I'm gonna be very disappointed at someone supposedly as educated as they are behaving this stupidly.

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New Taliban Education figure....message for Females

https://twitter.com/Quicktake/status/1427002665637191682

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Doom_Art posted...

Please tell me you're trolling and/or imping COVxy because I'm gonna be very disappointed at someone supposedly as educated as they are behaving this stupidly.

Cov has a lot of intelligent stuff to say about academia and his field that I appreciate him for but he's always been obnoxiously center-right when it comes to political and social issues.

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Shezarr posted...

And staying another 20 years for this same exact thing to happen when we pull out at that point?

It literally doesn't matter. The choice to pull out clearly has far worse consequences to the people of Afghanistan. It's not ambiguous.

I'm not saying what the correct choice was, I just think it's morally fucked to not acknowledge this. But people have been doing their best to pretend like this isn't the case. Like we need to acknowledge that military resources, us soldiers, and money were weighed against the lives of the Afghan people, and we decided against them.

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Doom_Art posted...

you're suggesting I want the Taliban to control Afghanistan?

Please tell me you're trolling and/or imping COVxy because I'm gonna be very disappointed at someone supposedly as educated as they are behaving this stupidly.

...no? Very clearly I meant pulling out of Afghanistan.

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Joeydollaz posted...

I mean their is still time, they are not stablished

I am certain a group of nations can sent in their best to take care of this

We've been there for 20 years.

20. Years. And nothing has changed. They don't want us there and we're pissing billions in dollars (edit: its actually trillions, with a T. As in "999 billions, plus one more.) and thousands in lives down the plug hole with nothing to show for it.

Do you know why the Taliban has rolled over that place in less than a week?

Here's a hint: Most rank and file men over there want things that way. Do you honestly think a culture that has been dominantly male-centric for thousands of years really wants their women educated and with rights of their own? Please.

And it's not our job to police the world, despite having military bases in dozens of countries. How many foreign military bases are on our soil? Oh, zero? You don't say.

We were in an unwinnable situation, and it's well past time we get the hell out of it.

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WeeWeiWiiWie posted...

It literally doesn't matter. The choice to pull out clearly has far worse consequences to the people of Afghanistan. It's not ambiguous.

I'm not saying what the correct choice was, I just think it's morally fucked to not acknowledge this. But people have been doing their best to pretend like this isn't the case. Like we need to acknowledge that military resources, us soldiers, and money were weighed against the lives of the Afghan people, and we decided against them.

Millions if not Billions of dollars have been spend in that country. We have armed the army, we have trained them. And the second we leave they drop their guns.


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Shezarr posted...

Cov has a lot of intelligent stuff to say about academia and his field that I appreciate him for but he's always been obnoxiously center-right when it comes to political and social issues.

Yeah I'm starting to get that lol

Equating me with a slave owner because I dared to suggest (correctly) that staying another several years wouldn't have improved the morale of the Afghan people, the state of the Afghan Army, and the legitimacy of the government we set up.

I'm evil incarnate for suggesting that's the case though

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Shezarr posted...

Cov has a lot of intelligent stuff to say about academia and his field that I appreciate him for but he's always been obnoxiously center-right when it comes to political and social issues.

Being upset that we're seeing a regime known for commiting war crimes come to power is "center-right"?

No, fuck that.

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mybbqrules posted...

We've been there for 20 years.

20. Years. And nothing has changed. They don't want us there and we're pissing billions in dollars and thousands in lives down the plug hole with nothing to show for it.

Do you know why the Taliban has rolled over that place in less than a week?

Here's a hint: Most rank and file men over there want things that way. Do you honestly think a culture that has been dominantly male-centric for thousands of years really wants their women educated and with rights of their own? Please.

And it's not our job to police the world, despite having military bases in dozens of countries. How many foreign military bases are on our soil? Oh, zero? You don't say.

We were in an unwinnable situation, and it's well past time we get the hell out of it.

I don't know about that, since US troops will be send back in by the thousands each
month to not allow a 100 percent take over.

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1427005438168608776

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WeeWeiWiiWie posted...

Being upset that we're seeing a regime known for commiting war crimes come to power

Replace this with

"Lashing out at anyone who didn't want the occupation to continue indefinitely and comparing them to slavers"

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Irony posted...

Thanks Biden

I thought you guys wanted to bring our troops home like Trump was planning to do, so which is it?
@Irony

Joeydollaz posted...

New Taliban Education figure....message for Females

When it comes to the girls only religious education, not regular.
Skip to 4:30
https://youtu.be/lJn7KifjqQI

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Doom_Art posted...

Replace this with

"Lashing out at anyone who didn't want the occupation to continue indefinitely and comparing them to slavers"

Your unwillingness to believe that the fundamental structural issues present in Afghanistan pose a particular difficulty for setting up a stable government and instead attributing it to the "will of the people" is right-wing as fuck. You can't see it because you have "pull out of the middle east" coded as a left wing view and are doing a lot of justification to avoid acknowledging any difficulty with that view.

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WeeWeiWiiWie posted...

a regime known for commiting war crimes

This also describes the United States, though. You're going to have be more specific on this distinction.

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It was always obvious that the government we created was both extremely incompetent and extremely corrupt. We taught a bunch of men to fight for it, but why would you lay down your life for some venal piece of crap who was always going to flee with as much Afghani money he could as soon as things went bad?
We, instead, launched brutal drone strikes which regularly killed civilians in droves and propped up corrupt, brutal warlords and a government engaged in sex trafficking and are shocked nobody wants to die to preserve it.

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Trump's kid laughing

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1427003238792896515

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Intro2Logic posted...

This also describes the United States, though.

But the comparison here is simple. We're not talking about some global philosophy encompassing all historic actions.

Ask: are the people of Afghanistan likely better off now under Taliban rule than under US occupation?

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The leftist consensus has always been that the US is responsible for most of the conflict and misery in the world, that we only intervene overseas to protect the interest of corporations, and that we need to pull out everywhere and defund the military.

What's happening now, and what happened in Syria under Trump, are good examples of why that's wrong but it's not going to make these people change their mind. They've spent years being indoctrinated by Russian and Chinese online misinformation campaigns.

WeeWeiWiiWie posted...

Ask: are the people of Afghanistan likely better off now under Taliban rule than under US occupation?

How many other countries would the US be entitled to occupy on this logic?

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The future of Afghanistan is up to the people of Afghanistan. It's unlikely another 20 years would have made this outcome any different.

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Good thing we had FDR and Truman rather Biden during WW2.

Trillions of dollars and thousands of lives! Come on man! Germany and Japan started this mess they can fix it on their own.

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Joeydollaz posted...

Trump's kid laughing

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1427003238792896515

How nice of him to pull his face out of his Tony Montana-esque desktop coke mountain to chime in with his shit take.

How quickly he forgets that his father started the troop withdrawal, in one of the very few actions during his "presidency" that I agreed with.

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Intro2Logic posted...

How many other countries would the US be entitled to govern over on this basis?

But the choice, at this point, wasn't invade or don't invade! It was stay or leave.

We knew that this was going to happen the moment we pulled out, and we made that choice consciously. I'm not asking people to say this was the wrong choice. I'm just asking that people actually acknowledge that this choice was made. That's all.

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US and Afghan National govt never formally surrendered to the Taliban although the Taliban are pretty much owning everything now. No sense in dropping more troops in. They will surround the airport and prevent anyone from escaping.

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How much change did everyone expect to happen in the time weve been there? That the people would be like us, Id die for my country and my fellow Americans, USA ! USA! USA!

We went in 20 years but how long into that until there was a system set up to try teaching them? Were talking about a place with a deeply conservative culture and mostly fragmented along tribal lines. I dont think less than 20 years is enough to fully change the mindset of even a single generation.

I dont think that we should have done any of that to begin with though, especially since were just abandoning them now. Now theyre guilty by association.

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WeeWeiWiiWie posted...

But the choice, at this point, wasn't invade or don't invade! It was stay or leave.

We knew that this was going to happen the moment we pulled out, and we made that choice consciously. I'm not asking people to say this was the wrong choice. I'm just asking that people actually acknowledge that this choice was made. That's all.

If we knew this was coming then there was definitely time to prepare and get our allies out that deserved to be brought home.

At this point well be lucky to just get the embassy staff out.


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Well that's a pretty giant L for the West and its Allies. I suppose if this was inevitable surrender rather than a prolonged war is overall better for the civilians. But I feel awful for the people who tried to make things better and all of the women who will have to deal with the consequences of this.

DandyQuackShot posted...

Good thing we had FDR and Truman rather Biden during WW2.

Trillions of dollars and thousands of lives! Come on man! Germany and Japan started this mess they can fix it on their own.

It has been 20 years of occupation. Not sure what you expect them to do. Make that permanent? They'll still just wait. There's no specific army or leader to defeat.

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The alternative choice was to continue to throw billions of dollars indefinitely in service of a war that everyone at the highest levels of American power knew was unwinnable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan_Papers?wprov=sfla1


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It has been 20 years of occupation. Not sure what you expect them to do. Make that permanent? They'll still just wait. There's no specific army or leader to defeat.

We had intelligence in our forces in country to prevent something like 9/11 from happening again just as we have forces still in Japan and Germany as a constant reminder to any nation that decides invading another country in the region is a good idea.

We leave behind allies who will be summarily executed for their war crimes against fellow countrymen will have no intelligence capabilities in country, and basically a huge L hanging over NATO and the US saying a war of attrition will cause us to fold.

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DandyQuackShot posted...

We had intelligence in our forces in country to prevent something like 9/11 from happening again just as we have forces still in Japan and Germany as a constant reminder to any nation that decides invading another country in the region is a good idea.

We leave behind allies who will be summarily executed for their war crimes against fellow countrymen will have no intelligence capabilities in country, and basically a huge L hanging over NATO and the US saying a war of attrition will cause us to fold.

Is that the same intelligence that said the takeover would take at least 90 days? Afghanistan isn't Germany or Japan. They're not a unified Government or army.

I do think they should have taken more allies with them yes. How this was handled is overall disgusting but it always has been.

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https://twitter.com/ANI/status/1426930996469932032

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I think this NYT article is illuminating:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/14/us/afghanistan-biden.html

President Bidens top advisers concede they were stunned by the rapid collapse of the Afghan army in the face of an aggressive, well-planned offensive by the Taliban that now threatens Kabul, Afghanistans capital.
The past 20 years show they should not have been.

If there is a consistent theme over two decades of war in Afghanistan, it is the overestimation of the results of the $83 billion the United States has spent since 2001 training and equipping the Afghan security forces and an underestimation of the brutal, wily strategy of the Taliban. The Pentagon had issued dire warnings to Mr. Biden even before he took office about the potential for the Taliban to overrun the Afghan army, but intelligence estimates, now shown to have badly missed the mark, assessed it might happen in 18 months, not weeks.

Commanders did know that the afflictions of the Afghan forces had never been cured: the deep corruption, the failure by the government to pay many Afghan soldiers and police officers for months, the defections, the soldiers sent to the front without adequate food and water, let alone arms.

Mr. Bidens aides say that the persistence of those problems reinforced his belief that the United States could not prop up the Afghan government and military in perpetuity. In Oval Office meetings this spring, he told aides that staying another year, or even five, would not make a substantial difference and was not worth the risks.
...
After Mr. Biden took office, top Defense Department officials began a lobbying campaign to keep a small counterterrorism force in Afghanistan for a few more years. They told the president that the Taliban had grown stronger under Mr. Trump than at any point in the past two decades and pointed to intelligence estimates predicting that in two or three years, Al Qaeda could find a new foothold in Afghanistan.

Shortly after Lloyd J. Austin III was sworn in as defense secretary on Jan. 22, he and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended to Mr. Biden that 3,000 to 4,500 troops stay in Afghanistan, nearly double the 2,500 troops there. On Feb. 3, a congressionally appointed panel led by a retired four-star Marine general, Joseph F. Dunford Jr., publicly recommended that Mr. Biden abandon the exit deadline of May 1 and further reduce American forces only as security conditions improved.

A report by the panel assessed that withdrawing troops on a strict timeline rather than how well the Taliban adhered to the agreement heightened the risk of a potential civil war once international forces left.

But Mr. Biden, who had become deeply skeptical of American efforts to remake foreign countries in his years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vice president, asked what a few thousand American troops could do if Kabul was attacked. Aides said he told them that the presence of the American troops would further the Afghan governments reliance on the United States and delay the day it would take responsibility for its own defense.

The president told his national security team, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, that he was convinced that no matter what the United States did, Afghanistan was almost certainly headed into another civil war one Washington could not prevent, but also, in his view, one it could not be drawn into.

By March, Pentagon officials said they realized they were not getting anywhere with Mr. Biden. Although he listened to their arguments and asked extensive questions, they said they had a sense that his mind was made up.

In late March, Mr. Austin and General Milley made a last-ditch effort with the president by forecasting dire outcomes in which the Afghan military folded in an aggressive advance by the Taliban. They drew comparisons to how the Iraqi military was overrun by the Islamic State in 2014 after American combat troops left Iraq, prompting Mr. Obama to send American forces back.

Weve seen this movie before, Mr. Austin told Mr. Biden, according to officials with knowledge of the meetings.

But the president was unmoved. If the Afghan government could not hold off the Taliban now, aides said he asked, when would they be able to? None of the Pentagon officials could answer the question.

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Joeydollaz posted...

https://twitter.com/ANI/status/1426930996469932032

Yeah but what about the billions of dollars

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It will be interesting to see how the western world will feel about US intervention on the other side of this. What is happening now is definitely challenging my own views.

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Some great stability and democracy we brought to Afghanistan there

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DandyQuackShot posted...

Good thing we had FDR and Truman rather Biden during WW2.

Trillions of dollars and thousands of lives! Come on man! Germany and Japan started this mess they can fix it on their own.

Is your argument that Biden or one of the Presidents before him should have started WW3 to actually defeat terrorism?

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hockeybub89 posted...

Is your argument that Biden or one of the Presidents before him should have started WW3 to actually defeat terrorism?

More of a generalization that the US being attacked directly can result in its capitulation.

Scary stuff.

If this pullout was about ending a so called forever war then our enemies are certainly just beginning.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlmkgXBoYGk

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AP saying US officials are in warning mode

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1427020778722242572

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Any time there's a taliban leader declared, I dont' see why we don't just send a cruise missile their way. Don't send in any troops, just lob some ordinance their way.

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pogo_rabid posted...

Any time there's a taliban leader declared, I dont' see why we don't just send a cruise missile their way. Don't send in any troops, just lob some ordinance their way.

I am assuming they got their protectors, someone got their backs for them to be this bold

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pogo_rabid posted...

Any time there's a taliban leader declared, I dont' see why we don't just send a cruise missile their way. Don't send in any troops, just lob some ordinance their way.

Because the "Rules of Engagement" require that we minimize collatoral damage.

And we send any ordinance, we need to make sure that it hits only the bad guys and minimal amount of innocent civilians.

Without real time, on the ground eyes & ears, that's incredibly hard to do.

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