So your of the opinion that leaving Americans stuck in Afghanistan, pulling out troops in the middle of the night and leaving the taliban $85 billion dollars of the best military equipment in the world was inevitable?
Even obama managed to pull out of Iraq, by securing the people and munitions first before dispersing the army and pulling air support.
Further, I am totally unshocked that you are completely oblivious to why we were there in the first place. It’s totally fair to criticize the way the wars were conducted, but to pretend like these countries were not threats and were hurting nobody is completely numb brained. Afghanistan committed 5 separate high casualty terror attacks against America before we responded. Iraq violated every term of their conditional surrender from the first Gulf War. They were agitents and terror harborers and sponsors. Even Clinton had considered a declaration of war before passing the buck to the next admin. WMD’s may have been a poor excuse, but we were going to be fighting Iraq at some point, it was inevitable. But like most Americans, you forget or don’t care about history and what actually happened. If it didn’t happen last week, it didn’t happen.
A short memory is the worst most prominent disease the U.S. has. These things did not happen in a vacuum.
Like I said. This is the worst decision ever made by any administration before it. And that capped off a series of horrible decisions that people just don’t care about, until they go to the store an look at the empty shelves and notice that Mayo costs twice what it cost last month, then they say ‘what the fuck?’, but have no idea how we got here. The long-term memory loss we have in this country is far more dangerous than covid.
I cannot legitimately come up with one thing that is not in crisis and failing massively that the executive is not in charge of.
But Afghanistan took the cake. It even knocked CNN off their pivot foot for a minute.
Sadly, we have a ‘Mission complete’ message from the executive, even though people numbering at least 100 probably more still stuck there. I knew it the second Psaki said it, what the message was going to be. “We will get every American who wants to get out, out.” So, apparently those who could not get to the airport ‘didn’t want to get out’. And they will sweep the lives of these hundred plus people under the rug, why? Messaging. Optics.
They never answer questions and when they do, they hand pick softballs, obfuscate and just plain lie. And the media helps them.
What can we do? Well, I still write my congressman. If people took 5 minutes to do that, and send them a bunch of letters, it would have an effect. But people just off-handedly believe letter writing doesn’t work. That’s not true, movements have been based off of that. And it’s damn sure better than rioting and looting.
Well, unfortunately for you that story wasn’t entirely true. The “Mission Accomplished” banner was for the ship, not the status of the war. After a long deployment the ship got to go home after accomplishing it’s mission and placed the banner for that occasion, not for Bush declaring ‘mission accomplished’.
And yes, the conducting of the war, the ideas for the war and the way it was prosecuted was a travesty of stupidity. But that wasn’t the decision of one administration. That crap started in the 1950’s. The idea of proportional force and nation building was a rolling concept over several administrations. And since the U.S. hasn’t won a war that way, ever. It’s time to go back to the tried and true methodology of ‘total war’. Destroying your enemy so completely they cannot rebound. That forces you to consider war much more carefully and ensures if you are going to go to war, your intention is to leave rubble and not much else. It’s the only thing we know works.
Bullshit. I knew the second Psaki said that infamous statement, …everybody who wants to get out that the administration was going to declare that the people we abandoned in fact wanted to stay. We already know it’s bullshit because stranded Americans are begging for help and even CNN ran a phone call with a stranded American claiming she did everything the government said and they left her anyway.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the stranded join the taliban to get revenge for the lies and broken promises of America. These are dark times.
I just wanted to see whatever idiotic source he had for his false information. It was probably a Trump tweet. Yes, 83B was what we spent over the course of 20 years there.
There’s been cause for concern about the entire operation in Afghanistan for about the last 11 years or so. I’d draw a line after OBL was killed. I don’t like the fact that we left any equipment there but as you stated facts are important and it’s likely that the operational and non-obsolete equipment we left there is a small fraction of the 85B Pat quoted. Pat’s concerns aren’t misplaced, just misguided and when you gather your information from shit sources like Pat does, I’ll call it out.
I think when we discuss the equipment that fell into the hands of the Taliban, we have to break down concerns into a few categories.
We spent a lot of money and got nothing for it. This is an accurate complaint, but it goes way beyond the money spend on equipment that we left behind.
We gave the Taliban equipment that has a significant value for them that they simply couldn’t have afforded otherwise. This applies to various helicopters, lightly armored vehicles, vehicles in general, and small arms. I don’t think we left any vehicles in running order that would be considered tier 1 vehicles. That is, they are vehicles that our military would not consider a credible combat threat. Thus, the Taliban could have purchased near equivalent equipment if they had the funds, but the reality is they probably didn’t have sufficient funds to acquire these. Basically, points 1 and 2 is that we effectively gave the Taliban a fair bit of cash. There are legitimate questions as to whether or not the Taliban actually has the ability to use and maintain this equipment without outside support (over an extended period of time).
I think the most important concern, however, is if we gave the Taliban working equipment that our military would consider to be high tech threats. For instance, in the 1980s we gave the Mujahadeen stinger missiles and we had concerns that they could use them to shoot down our aircraft. Similarly, we are concerned about radios, missile launchers, night vision goggles, etc. that we left behind this time. Frankly, I don’t really know how real of a problem this is since it’s hard to get accurate information on what we actually left and then get spin-free analysis on how big of a deal the equipment is, how easy it would be for the Taliban to use and maintain it, and whether or not we can take actions to mitigate or neutralize the threat that the equipment poses to us.
What? A point based on something false is most certainly invalidated by the truth.
We know pat’s point was to attack Biden by holding him responsible. Given that Biden didn’t give anyone 83 billion dollars worth of equipment it makes pat’s point invalid.
The Taliban can buy better equipment from China or Russia. They probably already have.
People forget, they probably never knew, we sold F14s to Iran back when the Sha was in power. Some of them are still in service, but they would be useless against our fighters.