me like trump

me punch YOU

hunga dunga grrrrrrrrrrr

ayup people just want to pretend that he wasn’t one of the warmongering govt thugs who voted to give the US the ability to wage no-win, seemingly never-ending wars.




it gets worse:

https://mobile.twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1428074795703353350

General Milley admits that U.S. intelligence agencies could not have foreseen the Taliban's rapid rise to power: "There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse in 11 days."

the military leadership is trying to cite a lack of intelligence for this horrible situation (oh the irony). of course the military was too busy studying “white rage” (ironic given the leadership is mostly comprised of angry old white men) to be really focused on what was going on

Sure it is. Trump actively made it more difficult for people like interpreters to get moved to the U.S. He announced the withdrawal before he left office and left without any infrastructure set up to evacuate these people.

Something doesn't become a new president's fault immediately. I've been totally consistent on this across multiple administrations.

I think one of the issues is that we had like 80k people to evacuate, and the Afghan government folded basically over night. If they had lasted even a month, it probably wouldn't have been this bad. I don't think anybody was expecting the country to fall this quickly. If you had asked any arbitrary intelligence official a few weeks ago "how long do you think the government will stay around once we leave" I doubt they would have said "They'll fold immediately and within a week will take Kabul".




He explicitly said the buck stops with me. As in, it was his decision to pull out that precipitated the current situation. Honestly, Biden didn't do much wrong. He could have gotten people out sooner, but that implies lack of confidence in the Afghanistan military which is a message you don't want to send.

What does this even mean lol. His admin negotiated some conditions between the Taliban & govt mostly generalities. What infrastructure are you expecting? Those are tactical decisions to be made, his administration wasn't going to sit there and plan flights a year+ ahead of a withdrawal, that's retarded.

The real failure here is the military's planning. They were blindsided by the Taliban's ability to negotiate surrenders with tribal chiefs and they were completely unprepared logistically. Trump's not at fault for that you have to at least try to be honest with yourself that those types of details are not talked about on such a long timeline.

Biden at the very least should quietly relieve some generals of their command. This is a colossal failure on their side.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Aug 18 2021 06:12pm

Sure, nobody expected it to happen this quickly, myself included. But such a worst case scenario should definitely have been part of Pentagon planning. Pulling out the troops before the civilians and the people to be evacuated was completely foolish, and Biden should have seen this glaring mistake by his generals. And as various media articles show (I've linked one a couple of pages before), Biden was keenly aware of what a desolate, corrupt, unreliable hellhole Afghanistan is since at least 2002.



Again: Biden takes generic, undirected responsibility in his capacity as POTUS, but refuses to take blame for his own misjudgement in trusting his foolish generals and intelligence community. If there's anyone who should have known better than to trust these incompetent warmongering swamp demons, it's the guy with 40 years of experience on Capitol Hill plus 8 years of experience as a foreign-policy-focused VP.

You can't always prepare for the worst case scenario in a way that prevents it or effectively mitigates it. There isn't much you can do to airlift eighty thousand people out of Aghanistan in 11 days once it becomes clear the Taliban are advancing faster than you thought, and you can't evacuate them weeks ahead of our retreat without signaling that you have absolutely no faith in the ability of the Afghani military to hold the line because it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If we're being honest, there's not much more that could have been done that doesn't span across multiple administrations. If we were going to nation build we needed to root out corruption and create a stable government, spent more than a few tens of billions out of the two trillion on infrastructure, and so many more things.



I definitely agree that this was a massive intelligence failure, and some heads probably need to roll within the military command.

I'm talking about the fact that part of Trump's making it more difficult for immigrants to get visas into the U.S. included actively preventing our allies in Afghanistan from getting visas.

I'm not laying it totally on Trump though, Biden could have easily cut through red tape and given them special visas. But so could have any of the last four administrations. This isn't something that is unique to this administration.

It's also pretty naive to think Biden should have just refused to listen to his generals before it happened. Like, what was he going to do within 7 months? You can't totally rework your intelligence in the time span from January to August. If you are going to say we should have had better intelligence, then there's very little you can do to spin that into a Biden failure. That's something Trump should have had set up looooong before he made a deal with the Taliban on a leave date.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Aug 18 2021 06:25pm

Would triggering this self-fulfilling prophecy by a public vote of no confidence in the Afghan military have lead to a worse situation than what we are in now? I don't think so.

Also, I have to disagree on the worst case contingency plan. It had been become clear that the Taliban would steamroll the entire country by Tuesday or Wednesday of last week. Biden or his generals should have sent a quick response division of 6-10k men to Afghanistan right around that time, not on Friday/Saturday. This would have given them the time needed to secure the airport and an escape corridor through Kabul for almost all the local helpers slated for evacuation.


Even that would not nearly have been enough. We've been over this before, imho, Afghanistan is a hopeless case as long as their mentality and mores are stuck in the Stone Age.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 18 2021 06:32pm

honestly, i dont believe that in a million years

are they really trying to tell me that billion dollar intelligence agencies with more spies than the rest of the world except china combined and so many veterans on the ground didnt predict that this "army" is complete garbage?

It would have been a 40+ year affair to actually build them into a stable nation. We would have basically created a nation from nothing. A noble endeavor if done properly, but we obviously weren't interested in doing it properly, so we should have been out around 2009 when our intelligence said there were less than 100 Al Qaeda operatives left in the country.

I think you are misunderstanding the agreement. We aren't allowed to fight the Taliban and they aren't allowed to fight us. They have largely abided by our attempts to evacuate. If we brought in 10k troops to support local leaders and the Afghani army in pushing off the Taliban then the entire agreement is off and the Taliban starts slaughtering the people we are trying to protect. Your suggestion would be the perfect opposite of what needs to happen and is the only way to absolutely guarantee we can't get anybody out. It would actually guarantee we remain in the country, which is again the exact opposite of the goal.

You don't get the benefit of hindsight when making preparation. Again, nobody thought they would take Kabul within a few days. The preparation you are suggesting would have resulted in the current situation being a guarantee, which is not what you do when you prep for the worst case scenario.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Aug 18 2021 06:38pm

Why would we expect Afghanis to fight when our own intelligence services gave them ~6 months? We're saying that we knew, and everyone knew the government was doomed, but we expected them to fight and die in a pointless war to give us a few months more time.

The army could have fought, it's true, but for what, a corrupt government run by aging warlords who provide nonexistent public services? The fact that we didn't know the Afghani government would fold, or that the Talibanwas secret rly negotiating the surrender of an entire country (which we happened to be occupying), is astounding.