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2021 Political Thread

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ghost

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Well.. today was the day that Mr. My Pillow said that Trump would reclaim the presidency. He's still got 6 hrs to be right I guess
 

Evan

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Biden has so throughly screwed the pooch in Afghanistan that I'm not sure even Donald Trump would've handled it worse.
 

Evan

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Biden's promises and comments coming back to haunt him. And he's completely MIA as this entire debacle plays out.
 

gangstonc

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Biden has so throughly screwed the pooch in Afghanistan that I'm not sure even Donald Trump would've handled it worse.
What President hasn’t screwed it up?

remember when Pompeo met with the leader of the Taliban, then 5000 prisoners were released?

This entire thing was garbage from the start. Nation building doesn’t work. They have to want it for themselves.
 

Evan

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What President hasn’t screwed it up?

remember when Pompeo met with the leader of the Taliban, then 5000 prisoners were released?

This entire thing was garbage from the start. Nation building doesn’t work. They have to want it for themselves.

It wasn't garbage. I will go to my grave defending Afghanistan as a just war. That the American people and domestic politics didn't let our military win the war, or at least achieve a strategic victory, is not their fault. It's the fault of politicians like Biden and Trump.

I've got a long post in the old politics thread taking Trump to task for trying to invite the Taliban to Camp David. I'm very familiar with the history. None of that excuses the current admin's absolute botching of the withdrawal. Biden wanted this. He now owns it. Period. Trump was also foolish. He's also no longer President. Biden didn't have to stick to the deal Trump negotiated. We didn't need a large force to keep Afghanistan from turning into this. We were doing it with 5000 - 7500 troops (close to what we have there right now), and decent air support.

It was politically popular to end the mission in Afghanistan. Doesn't mean it was right or that the American people were right in demanding it end. Leaders have to lead you know...Biden is failing reprehensibly. I will always call it how I see it. I don't care for partisan politics. Surely people know that about me by now.
 

gangstonc

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It wasn't garbage. I will go to my grave defending Afghanistan as a just war. That the American people and domestic politics didn't let our military win the war, or at least achieve a strategic victory, is not their fault. It's the fault of politicians like Biden and Trump.

I've got a long post in the old politics thread taking Trump to task for trying to invite the Taliban to Camp David. I'm very familiar with the history. None of that excuses the current admin's absolute botching of the withdrawal. Biden wanted this. He now owns it. Period. Trump was also foolish. He's also no longer President. Biden didn't have to stick to the deal Trump negotiated. We didn't need a large force to keep Afghanistan from turning into this. We were doing it with 5000 - 7500 troops (close to what we have there right now), and decent air support.

It was politically popular to end the mission in Afghanistan. Doesn't mean it was right or that the American people were right in demanding it end. Leaders have to lead you know...Biden is failing reprehensibly. I will always call it how I see it. I don't care for partisan politics. Surely people know that about me by now.
It was garbage in the beginning because we tried to rebuild Afghanistan into our mold. We went in with the wrong plan for the finished product.

after that, every President, including Biden, has made several grave mistakes.
 

Evan

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It was garbage in the beginning because we tried to rebuild Afghanistan into our mold. We went in with the wrong plan for the finished product.

after that, every President, including Biden, has made several grave mistakes.

I don't recall people falling from USAF planes while trying to escape the Taliban happening under any other administration.
 

ghost

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How many aircraft (jets/planes/helicopters/drones) did we abandon that are now in the hands of the Taliban?
 

Evan

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Civilians certainly died, just in different ways.

People die due to viruses every day, too. But, when deaths are preventable, and the incompetence of leadership is largely responsible, we should hold them accountable instead of playing what-about games.

Lots of people are responsible for Afghanistan turning into the quagmire that it did. But, there's only one person responsible for the ill-fated and incompetent withdrawal we're seeing: Joe Biden. If Trump were in office I think everyone here knows I'd be saying the exact same thing.

I refuse to accept the fait acompli the Biden admin is offering as an explanation for this disaster. Because it's simply not true. It didn't have to go this way. They've admitted that they didn't expect things to go this way, which is quite amazing considering how many people warned them that an unconditional withdrawal, not based on the situation on the ground, would lead to Taliban rapidly taking back control of Afghanistan.

There are tens of thousands of Westerners who haven't been able to get out. If you think it's a smart plan not to plan for their withdrawal, or even a relatively successful one, then we have totally different metrics for measuring success.
 

Evan

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Evan

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I want to be clear that I'm in 100% agreement that we couldn't stay forever in Afghanistan. But the mission couldn't end with a political announcement. We needed to draw down our forces in a sensible way. You can't have dozens of NGOs and aid workers and a bunch of media milling around when you pull the plug. You also can't get rid of Bagram until you have your people in one secure area.

Afghanistan is a mess. We shouldn't have been there past early 2002. American hubris and poor leadership is why we stayed. Our troops did a hell of a job. The generals and the Pentagon? Could've had better leaders if we'd picked names out of a phonebook. Biden doesn't own Afghanistan. There are dozens of people who are way more culpable than he is for us failing in Afghanistan. My beef with Biden is that he made the right decision (to leave), but he chose to do it in an extremely foolish, short-sighted, and incompetent way.

Everyone should read the Afghanistan papers. We were doomed in Afghanistan because of leadership, period. Yet even then we didn't learn that for a withdrawal to succeed you MUST have a strategy. You can't just wing it. In a way, as sad as it is, the current catastrophe is almost the perfect ending as it encapsulates why we never could get the upper hand. We were always rushed and always said we were getting out very soon. We had no clear strategy. The Taliban waited until we actually made it clear we were really leaving and that's history, folks.

I don't think Afghanistan could've ever been fixed. But we could've drawdown all our resources over a more sensible timeline so that we got our non-military personnel out and cleared the SIV holders who we decided deserved to get out and got them out as well. Biden was tantalizingly close to making the right decision it's just that they botched the execution badly. He owns that specific Afghanistan event forever.
 

gangstonc

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People die due to viruses every day, too. But, when deaths are preventable, and the incompetence of leadership is largely responsible, we should hold them accountable instead of playing what-about games.

Lots of people are responsible for Afghanistan turning into the quagmire that it did. But, there's only one person responsible for the ill-fated and incompetent withdrawal we're seeing: Joe Biden. If Trump were in office I think everyone here knows I'd be saying the exact same thing.

I refuse to accept the fait acompli the Biden admin is offering as an explanation for this disaster. Because it's simply not true. It didn't have to go this way. They've admitted that they didn't expect things to go this way, which is quite amazing considering how many people warned them that an unconditional withdrawal, not based on the situation on the ground, would lead to Taliban rapidly taking back control of Afghanistan.

There are tens of thousands of Westerners who haven't been able to get out. If you think it's a smart plan not to plan for their withdrawal, or even a relatively successful one, then we have totally different metrics for measuring success.
I agree with this post. I just don’t think Biden has made any more grave mistakes wrt Afghanistan than bush, Obama, or trump.
 

ghost

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This is a post made by a friend of mine who is a pastor at a church. I found it very informative. I can't find much I disagree with in his post.

"I have been praying for Afghanistan. God loves the people of Afghanistan.

I want to ruminate for a moment on Afghanistan. Whatever I say below should not be taken as any kind of comment upon soldiers, Marines, airmen and airwomen and any service personnel that ever served in that land. My hat is off to you. My comment has to do with policy. The United States sent you in harms way and you should be taken care of for life in my opinion.

I begin with a question: what do we know about Afghanistan? Can we find it on a map? Recently the slogan that "Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires" has made the rounds. It is a misnomer. It is true that the British Empire, the Soviet Empire and the American Empire has foundered here. But there is much more to the story that that.

I have only read one book that deals with Afghanistan, Ahmed Rashid's book The Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. I read that book in 2000 ... BEFORE the events of September 11, 2001. It was an eye opening book. But I have read lots of articles since. (I am not remotely an expert on Afghanistan though. Just sharing what I have learned over the years).
Alexander the Great entered what we call Afghanistan in 330 BC. The Greeks built numerous cities that dot the land to this day. It was part of the Seleucid Empire (part of leftovers from Alexander's Empire).

Afghanistan was as modern as much of the rural United States throughout the 20th century. Roads were built. Factories were run. Public schools began to appear. By 1950, Kabul was more modern than Grenada, MS. The Universities were full. Women walked down the street not only without burkas but in mini-skirts! Women worked alongside men in medicine, industry, politics and even just strolling down the street. Tourism was beginning to be a thing. Bookstores. Record stores. Dwight D. Eisenhower took a motorcade through Kubal in 1959. John F. Kennedy hosted the Afghan leader in 1963. In 1964, Afghanistan ratified its first constitution.

But Afghanistan was caught between the political tug of war between the USA and the Soviet Union. And she has suffered dearly because of it. However throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and until 1978, the major cities of Afghanistan were hardly in the middle ages either socially or technologically. It is shocking in fact to look at pictures of Afghanistan from 1900 to 1978, you might think you are looking at Milwaukee or Colorado.

What has happened in Afghanistan is largely the result of the USA and the Soviets. The country was squeezed between these giant Empires. The Soviets entered Afghanistan in 1978 and were there until 1989. The United States, beginning around 1980, under Ronald Reagan used Afghanistan to fight a proxy war against the Soviets. The USA spent hundreds of millions of dollars to fund Muslim "freedom fighters" (as we called them!) but the Soviets described them as terrorists.

Here is a fun fact for you. Those folks that we trained and funded as "freedom fighters" against the Soviets are the exact same ones we now label "terrorists" and we have spent 20 years trying to kill. Among those we funded, armed, trained and worked side by side with was Osama bin Laden. That's right, I did not make that up. The Taliban was largely the creation of the CIA (the USA).
The Taliban was important for the sake of stability. Stability is good for mammon. Stability was needed for oil pipelines. In 1997 the United States hosted Taliban "ministers" to discuss the 1.9 billion dollar Centgas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Indian Ocean (Pakistan). The US backed the Taliban in the civil war in Afghanistan (following the Soviet withdrawal) because we needed a stable government for the oil. Money talks. Now mind you, the Taliban was a hated minority of thinkers in Afghanistan. But they had power. Now mind you that the Taliban was already widely known as butchers. I read all of this BEFORE September 11, 2001. I read it in Rashid's amazingly informative book listed above. Then 2001 happened, and I was like, I know who that is. And suddenly the Taliban were bad. But the Taliban had not changed one iota.

We decided to invade Afghanistan. There has been absolute waste in human life and trillions of dollars (the soldiers need to be taken care of!!). Unbelievably poor planning from the beginning with the Bush Administration to the Obama Admin to Trump who decided to negotiate directly with the Taliban without the Afghan government itself involved and now Biden. There is no doubt what is happening in Afghanistan is a complete and tragic joke. Most Americans are blissfully unaware and even uninterested in what "we" do around the world and the lives that are destroyed by our actions. We often are not the least bit interested in understanding HOW we got to where we are at. We just assume whatever we do/did was innocent and pure. And really if it does not effect us on a personal level we simply do not care. But the consequences of our greed are immense.

It is the PEOPLE of Afghanistan that have been caught in the machinations of our war games and our worship of Mammon. We can point fingers at Republicans. We can point fingers at Democrats. But the truth of the matter is that this disaster upon the people of Afghanistan sits squarely upon the shoulders of the entire United States of America. You will not hear this on CNN, MSNBC and certainly not on Fox. But you might hear something similar on BBC.

The picture is Kabul in the early 1970s. In the first comment I will link an article from 2001 discussing the Centgas Pipeline. Rashid's book has recently been revised and updated though I have not read it yet. It is more than worth your time if you want truth.
Open the borders to those Afghans that have worked alongside us for 20 years. They will be slaughtered without mercy if we do not. Study the picture."


May be an image of 3 people, people standing and text that says 'CABUL 1970s ANTES DO TALEBAN'
 

Evan

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I agree with this post. I just don’t think Biden has made any more grave mistakes wrt Afghanistan than bush, Obama, or trump.









And the ultimate kicker:



Did Bush, Trump, or Obama leave thousands of American citizens to be captured, tortured, and executed by the Taliban?

Biden made an absolutely colossal mistake. He says he owns it, but his actions show otherwise.

"It didn't have to be this way" is so true that it hurts me in my stomach.

People need to stop blaming the Afghan Army. Their leaders sold them out when it became apparent the USA was going to cut and run and leave them without air support, technical support, or even a functioning government to pay and feed them. It's estimated that over 20% of the Afghan Army died in combat from the time we established their force. Imagine 1/5 of your co-workers died to to unsafe working conditions. Imagine that the owners of your company, who took it over during a hostile takeover, suddenly said they weren't investing one more dime or minute into your company, and yet everyone was still demanding you produce widgets for scant pay, while you struggled to even get a meal. I'm sure all of his here would hop right back on the factory line.

The Afghan Army wasn't a bunch of cowards. They did what any sane human would do when suddenly abandoned in a dangerous situation. Who was going to re-supply them when they already couldn't get even enough food to eat? When many hadn't been paid in months? You know who was responsible for the leadership of Afghanistan, their corruption, avarice, and the weak institutions that made up the Afghan government? The United States of America. We put those people in place. We built those institutions. We overlooked their graft and incompetence.

The average Afghan soldier performed heroically under conditions none of us can even imagine. They're not losers or cowards. They deserved better. The Americans left in Afghanistan deserved better. Joe Biden wanted the job and the responsibility. He made the decision. The buck stops with him. Period.
 

Evan

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According to President Biden's fairy-tale fantasy, these are the people who simply didn't want to leave Afghanistan previously:



You can hear the fear in their voice and see the desperation on their faces.

But maybe some people don't care about the Afghans who helped us. OK. I obviously disagree that we shouldn't care about them, but there's not even a plan for saving Americans outside of Kabul. They're on their own. I expected such foolishness from Trump. Biden claimed he was different and that the adults were back in charge.
 

ghost

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Someone has to beat this guy and get him out of DC... I hope it's Katie

 

Evan

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If true, this constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors and is an impeachable offense:

 
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