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Biden to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by 9/11/21

Trump criticizes Biden over Afghanistan withdrawal, claims it would have been much more successful if he were still POTUS. Why? According to Trump he “personally had discussions with top Taliban leaders whereby they understood what they were doing now would not be acceptable. It would have been a much different and much more successful withdrawal, and the Taliban understood that better than anyone.”

In the real world, this is what Trump said about withdrawing from Afghanistan back in April - withdrawing "was a wonderful and positive thing to do", but he criticized Biden then for being too slow to fully leave the country. "Though the former President offered his support of President Joe Biden's plans to bring home American troops, he urged his successor to draw an end to America's longest war well before the September 11 deadline that Biden set last week..."I wish Joe Biden wouldn't use September 11 as the date to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan...we can and should get out earlier. Nineteen years is enough, in fact, far too much and way too long...[Trump said] he had set a May 1 withdrawal deadline and added that "we should keep as close to that schedule as possible."

So in April Trump praised Biden for pulling US military forces out of Afghanistan, but complained that he was taking too long to leave and should have done it by May 1. Now he's criticizing Biden for the withdrawal and says that he would have been more successful because he talked to the Taliban and let them know that Dear Leader wasn't fooling around. I'm sure that would have done the trick.

Trump's April statements: https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/18/politics/trump-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal/index.html

Trump's statements now: https://news.yahoo.com/trump-claims-afghanistan-withdrawal-much-141000913.html
 
Devastating for a lot of Afghanis but when 20 years worth of "nation building" falls apart in a couple months, it had no chance of succeeding anyway.
 
HuskyDeac said:
Devastating for a lot of Afghanis but when 20 years worth of "nation building" falls apart in a couple months, it had no chance of succeeding anyway.
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Pretty much. We’ve been stacking and restacking a house of cards all this time.
 
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Good article from former US Army officer who served 21 years, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had four combat deployments. He basically argues that our attempts at nation-building there were always doomed from the beginning, and that Bush should have pulled us out of Afghanistan before he left office.

"The Taliban has been seizing territory in Afghanistan at an alarming rate, having captured all or parts of 10 provincial capitals from the Afghan National Defense Security Forces (ANDSF) in the past week. Far from representing a reason for Joe Biden to halt the withdrawal, however, this rapid deterioration in Afghan security has exposed the bankruptcy of US policies for at least the past 15 years – and the stark unwillingness to tell the truth by a generation of senior US leaders.

Since early 2002, the war in Afghanistan never had a chance of succeeding. After President Bush’s initial objectives of disrupting al-Qaida and punishing the Taliban were accomplished by March 2002, the mission was changed to a nation-building operation that included objectives that were outright militarily unattainable. Presidents Obama and Trump continued the nation-building focus, guaranteeing the war would never be “won” and thus never end...The illusion of success could be maintained so long as US and Nato military remained engaged. Now that the military cover is being withdrawn, the ugly and bloody truth is emerging: 20 years’ worth of senior leaders claiming progress, success, and “on the right azimuth” were always fiction.

Behind the scenes America’s senior leaders have known, almost from the beginning, that the war was unwinnable, that the Afghan government was fatally corrupt, and that the Afghan security forces would never be up to the task. Instead of acknowledging reality, instead of coming clean to the American people, they hid the truth or outright lied about it...As awful as the security situation in Afghanistan is today, it was a disaster almost two decades in the making. The US should have admitted the truth long ago and ended the war even before the conclusion of the Bush administration. Above all, America must permanently cease waging “nation-building” wars, restricting deployments abroad only to fights directly related to US national security."

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/14/afghanistan-taliban-us-troops
 
HuskyDeac said:
Devastating for a lot of Afghanis but when 20 years worth of "nation building" falls apart in a couple months, it had no chance of succeeding anyway.
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Probably should have just pulled out 10 years ago.
 
This is going to turn into gotcha right wing news talking points against Biden and Dems, but Afghanistan is a disaster in the making from all parties for 20 years. I don't really know what the answer is. Maybe if it was feasible to continue the status quo of 4-5k troops indefinitely keeping the region relatively stable that would be preferable, but after Trump's deal with the Taliban announcing the intention to withdraw that probably wasn't feasible either. It's probable Biden would either have to surge troops to re-engage in a full scale war with the Taliban or do what is occurring now and just surrender everything to them.

I think probably the biggest mistake is everyone announcing a time table to the world. If you want to leave and drawdown (which I support), keep that secret until you've basically moved all the military equipment, people, Afghan support partners out of the region. Announcing everything for a political win just tells the Taliban you aren't fighting anymore and led directly to the chaos. My biggest fear is its likely we are going to have a renewed terrorist group, ISIS, Al Queda, etc. now roaming free to grow and start Western terrorist attacks again. So, I wouldn't be surprised if in another 20-30 years we are right back in that place in another war after an attack.

There is really no winning there, I agree we shouldn't be there forever, but there is basically nothing but a series of bad choices.
 
I doubt it’s possible to keep a full withdrawal secret from local opposition forces. It strikes me as weirdly US-centric to think the Taliban finds out what’s happening on the ground from Jen Psaki and CNN.
 
sailordeac said:
Damn, if they had only studied more Critical Race Theory at the Pentagon, the Taliban would be toast.
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Wow this is fucking stupid. But what I can expect from the mouth breathers that make up the conservative side of the aisle these days.

A wider understanding of geopolitics and tribal/ethnic history is exactly what the Pentagon needs. Our inability to distinguish a Pashtun from a Tajik, and our willingness to prop up a corrupt, ethnic minority elite has fucked us in Iraq and now Afghanistan.

Here'a a good read on the Ponzi scheme that is Afghanistan. We lost the war 15 years ago but instead of admitting defeat, Neocons and Neoliberals alike have burned tens of billions of American dollars and thousands of lives, in order to fill the coffers of their corporate masters. Bush, Obama, Biden, Trump, McConnell, Boehner, McCarthy, Pelosi, Schumer, Reid, etc have all been complicit in this immoral and fraudulent occupation.

https://www.juancole.com/2021/08/washington-afghanistan-crashing.html

Afghanistan is nothing more than a shakedown of the American people by the industrial military complex, with zero regard for the lives of the Afghans it destroyed.
 
That’s a good read, Brasky.

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Joe Biden knew all this. He is the consummate insider. He was the one who decided to blow the whistle on the Ponzi scheme. Of course, when such a scheme is revealed, a lot of institutions collapse and a lot of people get hurt. But actually the institutions were already in collapse, they just didn’t know it, and the people had already lost all their investments, they just hadn’t yet come to that realization.

The Northern Alliance in fall of 2001 defeated the Taliban with US air support, because they had esprit de corps and were fighting for what they believed in. The Afghanistan National Army seems to be unwilling to fight in the same way, presumably because they don’t ultimately want to risk their lives for their government. It is a sad, tragic development, and many urban people and women and minorities will suffer. But once a Ponzi schemer has already stolen all the money, it is not possible to keep up the pretense of normality forever.
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Imagine being so cynical that you’d rather keep spending trillions of American dollars propping up the Afghan government instead of spending trillions on Americans.
 
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