Not smart people, but sure: the same ol' canard, collateral damage? Not wanting to tarnish our reputation any further? The fact that we just finished taking down the war powers authorization, so Biden would need a Congressional declaration?
Far from smart, but blowing up their leaders would leave a highly pissed off, well armed, rudderless bunch of barbarians that thinks beheading people is a sport running amok in a defenseless civilian population. Probably a look we'd best avoid right now.
I think you have to remember, also, that the dummy, low-hanging-fruit soldiers were picked off in the early days of the aughts. Now? The guys who are left now are the former leaders of Saddam's military (real smart thing to get rid of all the officers and make them unemployed, eh?) and the people who are battle-hardened and combat-savvy enough to have survived the US onslaught for all these years. It's a quagmire. The landscape is so rugged that there's always a cave to hide in and you can never hope to search it all. The people are so jaded and mistrustful of outsiders that they've learned to take what they can get and view anything else as transient (which it is). It's forever been where the world has fought its proxy wars so that the nasty bits of combat didn't have to be visited upon our own land. The only way to actually fix it - if such a thing can be done - is absolute, total commitment. Go in there and treat it as full-on war. Too bad if civilians are killed. Throw out all the Taliban and brass you can find, and then install western-led government. Forever. It would be an enormous commitment of time and resources, which no one has the stomach for.
At least one of those C17s were carrying 800 people, with seating for about 100. I think that image defines Afghani will to fight better. Absolute certain death to those that cling on long enough, rather than stand against the Taliban.
During the peace talks earlier this year the Taliban left well enough alone as far as US troops were concerned, I don't think just when they've gotten them to leave the country they're going to jump right in and give them reasons to come back. I would not be at all surprised if they focus on consolidating their power for a while and try to rejoin the international community, there has been a fair bit of PR go into convincing people they aren't the same Taliban they used to be. What happens remains to be seen but that's my take.
This is about as honest and straightforward as Presidential tweets get. And the press is miffed that he didn't take the opportunity to self flagellate and drop some Mea Culpas.
I agree with his sentiment in the tweet. If you look at the pictures from the airport, those are all military aged males (I refuse to call them "Men") that should've fought for their own damn country. But they didn't and are now trying to run away and leave the women and children to their fate. Fuck all of them. But....Biden is completely missing the point that the withdrawal is not the problem, his execution of it is. You do not remove the military while the civilians that need to be gotten out are still in place. That's what people are upset about, the fact that he didn't do a strategic withdrawal, but let it become a cluster fuck evacuation.
I was under the impression that this guy, with the embassy flag, was the last one that had to be pulled out. The rest were non-US citizens WANTING to leave, but not entitled to any military (US or Canada or UN) assistance in leaving.
Embassy personnel, private contractors, American citizens and Afghans who supported our mission in the country. I would add journalists, but they would've stayed till the bitter end anyways in hopes of getting a story and I don't think our military members should be placed in harms way for that.
I like to do visualization. I am imagining what this message board would look like if this happened with Trump as President. I'm curious, in the board's opinion, if this would just be a bombshell, an impeachable offense or both?
You mean the ones that Trump explicitly said were owed nothing in return? And as far as I understand, all embassy personnel were removed. The only ones left were private contractors, and for all we know, they were under a "you're on your own" contract. And "normal" US citizens, much like a few Canadian citizens, are there on their own accord, despite "DO NOT TRAVEL HERE" recommendations by our governments, so I tend to think "fuck them." I know people want to really paint the "Biden's Fault" narrative, all while the GOP are removing any and all mention of the deal that Trump made with them in the first place, but we do NOT know the details. Again, I've seen zero reporting on anything about embassy staff or others like them who were left behind.
The vast majority of this was set up by Trump... so I don't get your point. I'll ask again, who exactly was left behind that shouldn't have been?
We already thought it was bad when he sought to negotiate with the Taliban, to include a Camp David visit, and arranged for 5,000 of them to be released from prison including the guy who now leads them. So to have him preside over this debacle wouldn't have been that shocking, really. Just another turd of incompetence atop the shit pie.
Trump is not the president, so why would that be pertinent to the situation? There were plenty of embassy personnel in place when Kabul was over run. Maybe they've got them all out now, I don't know. And there are plenty of Afghans who supported us still in country and we can't leave our allies to swing in the breeze. Or maybe we can just have a new creed: "Not to many left behind."
That last C-17 on the way out represented the last of the embassy personnel... it had seating for 100, and yet reports are they airlifted 800 out in it. The vast majority of passengers were random civilians that overran the airport looking for a way out. Zero local security. The airport was shut down long before the Taliban got there due to the locals overrunning it and trying to get a way out. But I ask again, what were you doing in there in the first place? When the Afghani PM and military fuck off out of the country and the Taliban takes over in a DAY, what are you supposed to do? I get it... the extraction was a mess... but I don't see how it could have been done any better without sending a shit-ton more troops back in. Again, the locals (government and military) all fucked off, leaving the US troops/civilians holding the bag. Your mandate was not "nation building". That was on them, and THEY failed that. The extraction plan relied on 2 key things... the Taliban doing what they agreed to with the Trump agreement, and the locals providing some authority/control of the situation in order to provide some resistance to the Taliban. There was none.
There was a Catch-22 at play: 1. There are a large number of people who would only be evacuated in the case that the Afghani government falls (embassy staff, humanitarian workers, etc). 2. Evacuating those people before the Taliban arrives would require the Afghani government to be functioning. The second you start evacuating those people you've declared your belief that the Afghani government is doomed, which is likely itself to precipitate its immediate doom.