Didn’t See That Coming

7 Responses to Didn’t See That Coming

1. Chris Peterson says:

   August 16, 2021 at 11:14 am

   Not sure which is worse; Joe’s obvious fumbling retreat of himself and our troops, or the media’s attempts to make the outcome, which any intelligent observer could have predicted, into a call to return to for a couple more decades to “protect” what the Afghan people obviously won’t. And that’s our fault for giving the Afghan people the impression that we could just give hand them a democracy, with no cost or commitment from them.

   The burning or removal of documents in the embassy should have begun the minute Biden called a date certain for all troop removal. And the Afghans who aided us should have been slowly extracted at the same time.
   Turns out we literally don’t know how to retreat, which despite the loud, chicken hawk patriots who claim we never should, is not a good thing. War is a messy, give and take, murderous affair and the ignorance of that can have horrific and inexcusable consequences.

   We’ve had twenty years to plan our exit, and this is what we came up with? So much for the end of the embarrassment of the Trump years.

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   • rlcrabb says:

     August 16, 2021 at 11:27 am

     It was just a few days ago that Biden declared that the Afghan military had an overwhelming advantage over the poor Taliban. He’ll be eating crow for months after that call.
     But it should be noted that Trump and Pompeo handed the deed to Afghanistan to the barbarians last year, even holding a chummy press conference with the headman they freed from a Pakistani prison. The elected government had little input on that sellout.
     And remember how the Trumpists deserted our Kurdish allies, who actually do believe in civilized democracy.
     Everybody has shit on their faces over this fiasco.

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     • Chris Peterson says:

       August 16, 2021 at 3:15 pm

       I will NEVER get over the sell out of the Kurds. They were the backbone of the resistance in the region, whether it was al quida or ISIS. We owe them big time. And we didn’t just abandon them, we sold them out to the Turks.
       The Kurds were the only people in the region that stood up for themselves and we shit on them. Disgusting.

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2. George Boardman says:

   August 16, 2021 at 1:09 pm

   Biden’s big mistake was believing the mis-named intelligence community when they told him the Afghanis would fight. After all, these guys and their Pentagon counterparts spent 20 years constructing a paper tiger while they propped up one corrupt leader after another. You can’t expect them to admit now they were wrong by telling Biden the truth.

   Biden would have been better off following Trump’s lead and ignoring his “intelligence assessments.”

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3. Robert Cross says:

   August 16, 2021 at 4:07 pm

   Let us not forget George W. Bush who got us there in the first place and then abandoned the project to invade Iraq under false pretenses. Perhaps if the US had stayed in force at that time the Taliban might have faded away. The US created the mujahideen to combat the Russians. They later became the Taliban and were the defacto government. Western oil companies were negotiating with them to protect a proposed oil pipeline to move oil from former Soviet countries down to the Gulf. When the Taliban asked for a few percentage points more for their share of the deal the negotiations broke off. A short time later 911 happened and the US invaded, perhaps to install a government more friendly to the oil companies as much as or more than finding Bin Laden. It seems that American foreign policy (invasions and regime support) in the region have the fingerprints of Big Oil all over them just as climate denial does.

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   • Chris Peterson says:

     August 16, 2021 at 4:22 pm

     Perfect analogy. I would only add that I distinctly remember Husseins embargo was about to end and he signed a deal with Russia for them to buy $80 billion worth of oil using Russian rubles as currency, destabilizing the US dollar and upsetting the American and Arabian oil companies.
     The very next day is when VP Cheney started his public WMD march to war with Iraq.

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     • Chris Peterson says:

       August 16, 2021 at 4:25 pm

       That also set bin Laden and 9-11 in motion because the Saudi king allowed US jets to use a Saudi airbase, which was his #1 gripe against us.

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