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[QUOTE=CrestWood87;5515427]Official release from the White House.[/QUOTE]That fucken "Palace" should have been gone, and all in it! Fucker, wait until this weekend when USA men, Woman, left behind, and you see the pics of bodies, parts?
Show us your back as you walk away from us, Joe! One more time!
Do you really thing the Taliban or Isis would be acting this way if Trump was still president? They were not that stupid. We held them at bay with only 2,500 troops for a few years.
[QUOTE=Bullett64;5515517]Its a little more complicated than you are making it.
The presumptive leader of Afghanistan is Mullah Baradar, who was imprisoned by Pakistan in 2010 and released as part of the deal then President Trump made with the Taliban in 2018. He then became the chief negotiator for the Taliban, resulting in the agreement (again with the Trump administration) to remove all US forces from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021.
There was no planning by the Trump administration to make this happen.
When he lost the election, President Trump lost interest in pretty much everything except getting it overturned and refused to coordinate any change-over support to the Biden administration, which he did not recognize.
President Biden was presented with a fait accompi regarding Afghanistan. The process was underway and in President Trump's own words, "They cannot stop it. ".
So the evacuation was going to happen. And it is happening. It was assumed that the Afghan forced could hold off the Taliban for six months. This turned out to be a very bad assumption indeed. The country folded in a matter of days, changing the entire dynamic of how the withdrawal would happen.
Now it seems that ISIS is also involved making things even more difficult. I truly believe that the forces on the ground are doing everything within their power to extract every one that they can. Some people cannot be located. Others have refused to leave. Some are being detain or have been arrested by the Taliban. So we will not get everyone out. Anyone who thinks we can is simply naive. But to say that President Biden has turned his back on them is simply disingenuous. It is not his best moment by any means, but he was put in a no-win position by President Trump who should share well over 50% of the blame.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=SgtLurker;5515856]Do you really thing the Taliban or Isis would be acting this way if Trump was still president? They were not that stupid. We held them at bay with only 2,500 troops for a few years.[/QUOTE]Yes, I do. It was President Trump who released 4000 cof their leaders from prison and it was President Trump who negotiated the "Peace" agreement with them, an agreement so bad that even under the current environment they have not violated. And it was President Trump who drew our forces down to 2,500, a number too small to stop anything. This would have occurred regardless of who was President now. When President Biden took office, President Trump gloated that "the process cannot be stopped." He was correct and he would not have been able to stop it either.
And it was President Trump who failed to plan for the eventual withdrawal that he created because he was too busy trying to overturn the election.
He just dumped the whole mess into President Biden's lap.
President Biden is not without fault either. His intel people either failed to recognize, or failed to inform him, or he failed to accept the fact that the Afghan army would capitulate in days rather than months and to thereby plan accordingly for the withdrawal.
It didn't help that President Trump's idea (which was never formalized as an OPLAN) never even considered removing Afghans who worked for us, which I find to be unconscionable.
If you truly believe that President Trump would have done thing s better just because he said so, I have just wasted a couple hundred words.
[QUOTE=AaronHamlet;5505140]Along with the 15,000 Americans and 80,000 Afghan allies abandoned in Afghanistan, we are completely fucked.[/QUOTE]With four days to go, they have airlifted over 100,000 people out of Afghanistan.
Do tour numbers indicate that if you were in charge, you would have left over 5,000 of them (and counting at the rate of approximately 12,000/ day) behind?
[QUOTE=Bullett64;5515977]President Biden is not without fault either. His intel people either failed to recognize, or failed to inform him, or he failed to accept the fact that the Afghan army would capitulate in days rather than months and to thereby plan accordingly for the withdrawal.
[/QUOTE]The part that bothers me is that the US knew years ago that Afghan soldiers only cared about collecting a paycheck, not giving a shit about the cause (paraphrasing Gen. Clark). Same thing with the NVA and VC in Vietnam, and we know what a cluster fuck that evacuation was. Why haven't we learned that agreements with the enemy never work? Really pisses me off that the US essentially has done the same thing again, fully knowing the circumstances beforehand. I blame leadership and, If I were the CINC (Biden), heads would roll. At least the forces we have on the ground are doing their best to get people out.
[QUOTE=Niteluvr;5516603]The part that bothers me is that the US knew years ago that Afghan soldiers only cared about collecting a paycheck, not giving a shit about the cause (paraphrasing Gen. Clark). Same thing with the NVA and VC in Vietnam, and we know what a cluster fuck that evacuation was. Why haven't we learned that agreements with the enemy never work? Really pisses me off that the US essentially has done the same thing again, fully knowing the circumstances beforehand. I blame leadership and, If I were the CINC (Biden), heads would roll. At least the forces we have on the ground are doing their best to get people out.[/QUOTE]You are referring to the ARVN, not thr NVA or VC, but I get your point. The US does indeed make this mistake over and over again. I blame it on the fact that we change administrations every 4-8 years, losing a lot of the people with knowledge in vital areas in the process, and that we jump into fires with all good intentions, but without a firm goal or exit strategy.
[QUOTE=Bullett64;5516957]You are referring to the ARVN, not thr NVA or VC, but I get your point. The US does indeed make this mistake over and over again. I blame it on the fact that we change administrations every 4-8 years, losing a lot of the people with knowledge in vital areas in the process, and that we jump into fires with all good intentions, but without a firm goal or exit strategy.[/QUOTE]Correct on ARVN, their official name, but NVA is how most vets refer to them in my veterans groups. The CIA had separate agreements with the Viet Cong, another poor ROI. Those shitty agreements were the angst of my post, such that, so many decades later, we're still fucking it up on a world stage?
[QUOTE=SgtLurker;5515409]You have something else to put in your accomplishment column, the single deadliest day for our men and women in uniform in 10 years in Afghanistan! You spineless pu $$why!.[/QUOTE]No doubt about it, Biden and his underlings at the State Department / NSA totally botched up the withdrawal of US Troops from Afghanistan but it is inconceivable the Trump administration would have done any better. After-all, trump's administration was populated by a great many incompetents, and made a mess of every large-scale logistical challenge it confronted. If they couldn't deal with a hurricane in Puerto Rico, or distribute vaccine doses in an effective manner, how could the Trump White House have pulled off a withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan.
[B][I]
Trump, in a written statement, April 18, 2020
I personally believe that the predictions that the Afghan forces will collapse right away, they are not right. We will help; we are helping them now. We will help them. This is our commitment. I personally believe that the statements that the forces will disintegrate, and the Talibs will take over in short order are mistaken. The real choices that the Afghans will face is between a long war and negotiated settlement.
Trump, at a political rally, June 26, 2020
Whatever happens in Afghanistan if there is a significant deterioration in security, that could well happen. Weve discussed this before. I dont think its going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday. So I wouldnt necessary equate the departure of our forces in July, August, or by early September with some kind of immediate deterioration in the situation.[/I]
[/B]
The agreement that then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo negotiated with the Taliban was substantially complete by February of 2020. If Trump and Pompeo thought that leaving Afghanistan would be easy, then they would have set things up to complete the withdrawal before the 2020 election, so Trump could run on that accomplishment. Instead, they pointedly set the withdrawal up to take place at a time about as far away from a presidential election, or a midterm, as is possible. They knew full well that a fiasco was likely.
I am not a Biden supporter and I definitely don't want anything to do with Trump. But I have to give both of them credits for the courage to leave Afghanistan. The mistake was made by George Bush, propagated by Obama and Trump. We should have gotten out after we killed Osama Bin Laden. I don't believe in occupying another country by nation building. We cannot force other countries to live, to think and to behave the way we want them. It is up to them and not us. How many deaths and refugees we have created around the world? Leadership is achieved by persuasion, sincerity and not by bombs. We failed there because we don't understand them. It is easy to bribe their leadership by planeloads of gold bars. We failed to find read Afghan leaders in 20 years. What we had were Olympic champions who broke world records to leave by breaking world records. We should go after these leaders that betrayed us and get back all our money! They are as bad as the terrorists there. We are the most powerful and best country. The best way is to win people heart, like providing vaccines to the world quickly! Domination does not work. There Are so much we can help the world. In fact, the whole world (including China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) is looking forward to good USA leadership. I pray for world peace and for all our soldiers that died last week. May God bless their families and USA.
[QUOTE=Niteluvr;5518065]Correct on ARVN, their official name, but NVA is how most vets refer to them in my veterans groups. The CIA had separate agreements with the Viet Cong, another poor ROI. Those shitty agreements were the angst of my post, such that, so many decades later, we're still fucking it up on a world stage?[/QUOTE]ARVH = Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (the "good" guys).
NVA = North Viet Namese Army (the "bad" guys).
VC = Viet Cong (also the "bad" guys but less formally organized then the NVA).
Truth is, we have successfully done nation building but it is no longer politically correct and no one has the stomach for it. We did in the Philippines, Japan, and Germany. But it requires complete take over of the government and slowly bringing them into the fold over the course of a generation or two. While we certainly stayed in Afghanistan half the time required, we did not use the same approach.
[QUOTE=ILoveHo;5518366]I am not a Biden supporter and I definitely don't want anything to do with Trump. But I have to give both of them credits for the courage to leave Afghanistan. The mistake was made by George Bush, propagated by Obama and Trump. We should have gotten out after we killed Osama Bin Laden. I don't believe in occupying another country by nation building. We cannot force other countries to live, to think and to behave the way we want them. It is up to them and not us. How many deaths and refugees we have created around the world? Leadership is achieved by persuasion, sincerity and not by bombs. We failed there because we don't understand them. It is easy to bribe their leadership by planeloads of gold bars. We failed to find read Afghan leaders in 20 years. What we had were Olympic champions who broke world records to leave by breaking world records. We should go after these leaders that betrayed us and get back all our money! They are as bad as the terrorists there. We are the most powerful and best country. The best way is to win people heart, like providing vaccines to the world quickly! Domination does not work. There Are so much we can help the world. In fact, the whole world (including China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) is looking forward to good USA leadership. I pray for world peace and for all our soldiers that died last week. May God bless their families and USA.[/QUOTE]
Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.
[QUOTE=AaronHamlet;5519675]Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.[/QUOTE]Good thing it wasn't stolen.
[QUOTE=AaronHamlet;5519675]Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.[/QUOTE]Biden is a fucking embarrassment. Multiple reports told by pilots unable to land outside of Afghanistan due to the United States pressuring those countries to deny them access to airfields. They are literally sending Americans back to Afghanistan to be murdered.
The democrats their voters, representations and their President have weakened and disgrace our country in the eyes of the world. The republicans are not muc better.