Biden says he does not regret Afghanistan withdrawal as Taliban take over more towns

[Gergar12]

Another thing to hand to Biden when it comes to his realism is the number of refugees we will be taking. Unlike Vietnam where we took a much larger sum of refugees. This time Biden is taking in the best of the best. 30 thousand of the most educated, English-ready, and competent of the Afgan creme of the crop intelligentsia. Granted I would take in a lot more, but it's more of the trolley problem. You take in hundreds of thousands of refugees, and then Trump wins, and we reduce climate change funding(Regulations as well) and lower taxes even more thus hampering federal funding for a future Green New Deal.

It's a sad day when it has come to this, women will be raped, turned into sex slaves, and other bad things, and when we can save a lot more of them, we can't because it would mean another global south citizen would die of heatstroke, and typhoons and some of our citizens may get Zika in the South due to the changing climate.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Human beings are just fucking bastards aint they. I hope we never go to space and i hope the world burns us alive because we dont deserve existance.

Look, I get depression posting, but speaking as an existentialist who's seen this outcome in Afghanistan coming for 15 years, watched the New Atheist movement crater itself by sticking by some hilarious anti-theist bigots who's best ideas were 20 years old at the time, and spent the last 20 years wondering why we *wouldn't* want to help out Muslims trying to break away from the fundamentalist factions of their religion, people are generally good. People who want power are generally bastards.

So the snide remark of

Islam is a religion of peace guys. Don't worry about it, everything will be fine.

really grinds my gears. You don't care about these people, so what's with the claim that atheism is somehow morally superior? A theist who gives a shit is infinitely preferable than an atheist who doesn't. Shouldn't we be helping, actively or passively, the hundreds of thousands of people who want to flee an autocratic fundamentalist theocracy, or is it "fuck em, they're Muslim"?

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Another thing to hand to Biden when it comes to his realism is the number of refugees we will be taking. Unlike Vietnam where we took a much larger sum of refugees. This time Biden is taking in the best of the best. 30 thousand of the most educated, English-ready, and competent of the Afgan creme of the crop intelligentsia. Granted I would take in a lot more, but it's more of the trolley problem. You take in hundreds of thousands of refugees, and then Trump wins, and we reduce climate change funding(Regulations as well) and lower taxes even more thus hampering federal funding for a future Green New Deal.

Fuck the trolley. I am sick a goddamned tired of using the lives and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people as a political football.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Should we be helping, actively or passively, the hundreds of thousands of people who want to flee an autocratic fundamentalist theocracy, or is it "fuck em, they're Muslim"?

Depends, the only way I can see to help is to either go in there and murder every Taliban to retake over the government AND then occupy and turn Afganistan into a Us Territory (or British or whomever helps). Then remain there forever.

Or we let the country fight it out themselves and see what happens. So long as they don't start attacking other countries, which they will because they done it repeatedly throughout the last 3 decades, at which point we go in and murder everyone.

Basically what favor of murder do you perfer? Us going in and murdering? Them just murdering whomever they want? Or what?

Do you see any possible way the Taliban go away peacefully?

 

[Gergar12]

Fuck the trolley. I am sick a goddamned tired of using the lives and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people as a political football.

This could have been prevented, and Biden could have had more leeway to accept more refugees, and human beings, but he has refused to pressure congressional moderate democrats on the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act(AKA the fillibuster), and given how he has treated the Afgan interpreters, I don't think he would unless he was pressured to which would occur better under a safer political environment for the democrats. Also, everything is a political football in America. Vaccines, Masks, Video Games, Books, Movies, TV shows.

Also as much as I hate to agree with liberals, just one Republican president means

More drilling permits

More Oil pipelines

Less Clean Energy regulations

More Coal-Fire power plants

Less Solar, and Wind Subsidies

Sadly winning the US presidency has become vital for the planet

 

[Adam Jensen]

I'm still not seeing a solution from anyone here as to what we could have effectively done.

Short of attempting to unite the Afghani tribes and turn them into an actual nation, nothing.

The problem with Afghanistan and the reason why it fell so quickly is the fact that Afghani don't really consider themself to be Afghani. The concept of a nation means jack shit to them. They're tribal people who happen to occupy a territory called Afghanistan. They don't give a shit who's in charge of the Afghanistan government, they feel no loyalty to the country and no patriotism. They don't care about any of that and they don't know how to care. So why would they try to defend it? The only reason Afghanistan has soldiers is because being a soldier is a job with a salary for those people. But they're not about to die for a concept of Afghanistan. Fuck that noise.

 

[CriticalGaming]

This could have been prevented, and Biden could have had more leeway to accept more refugees, and human beings, but he has refused to pressure congressional moderate democrats on the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act(AKA the fillibuster), and given how he has treated the Afgan interpreters, I don't think he would unless he was pressured to which would occur better under a safer political environment for the democrats. Also, everything is a political football in America. Vaccines, Masks, Video Games, Books, Movies, TV shows.

Also as much as I hate to agree with liberals, just one Republican president means

More drilling permits

More Oil pipelines

Less Clean Energy regulations

More Coal-Fire power plants

Less Solar, and Wind Subsidies

Sadly winning the US presidency has become vital for the planet

If only more places would adapt Nuclear Power, when could go green without a lot of the sacrifices. Oh well.

 

[Piscian]

I was contemplating what went wrong in Afghanistan when we essentially did the same thing in Japan and Germany which turned out pretty well for us all things considered. It's a vicious cycle of blame and bureaucracy. You want to rail at Biden for leaving, but apparently we spent the entire 20 year period guaranteeing we'd have to. The post has an article that goes into detail about how we fucked at this up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-nation-building/

“One poignant example of this is a ribbon-cutting ceremony complete with the giant scissors I attended for the district police chief in some God-forsaken province,” Lute said. He recalled how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had overseen the design and construction of a police headquarters that featured a glass facade and an atrium.

“The police chief couldn’t even open the door,” Lute said. “He had never seen a doorknob like this. To me, this encapsulates the whole experience in Afghanistan.”

 

[Silvanus]

Depends, the only way I can see to help is to either go in there and murder every Taliban to retake over the government AND then occupy and turn Afganistan into a Us Territory (or British or whomever helps). Then remain there forever.

Or we let the country fight it out themselves and see what happens. So long as they don't start attacking other countries, which they will because they done it repeatedly throughout the last 3 decades, at which point we go in and murder everyone.

Basically what favor of murder do you perfer? Us going in and murdering? Them just murdering whomever they want? Or what?

Or you offer refuge. We have a huge amount of ability to offer refuge, despite what the austerity-mongers will tell you.

The US and UK helped create this godforsaken situation, so it's an absurd abdication of responsibility not to offer refuge to those dispossessed by the problems we contributed to.

(... I mean, Russia and Turkey also contributed to creating the situation, but their current governments don't give a solitary shit).

 

[SilentPony]

So this is a mess, and we're gonna be getting horror stories for years.

 

[Piscian]

So this is a mess, and we're gonna be getting horror stories for years.

I recall one Military leader, I wanna say it was Petraeus or one of the other Iraq guys, maybe the guy who replaced him, but they made a statement to the effect that the reason we keeping fucking this up is because we refuse to use the military for the purpose it was intended for. They should not be forced to govern civilians and nation build. They have neither skill or the understanding to be acting as a peacekeeping force. The military is a weapon, end of story. They did a whole congressional testimony on it and got ignored. It's not one leader or party, its our governments intentional incompetence as a whole.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Or you offer refuge. We have a huge amount of ability to offer refuge, despite what the austerity-mongers will tell you.

The problem with that is how do you get people out of the country? Do you think the Taliban wont deliberately attack Refuge points? Or start outright murdering the people in the streets to keep people afraid to even leave their homes? What about bombings and attacks against allied forces trying to take people to safety?

Sure let's offer refuge, but that isn't a permanent solution is it? Just have everyone move somewhere else and let the Taliban rule a wasteland is a cool idea, but not practical. Even if you could get some people out safely, the ones that don't get out will only suffer more.

 

[SilentPony]

I recall one Military leader, I wanna say it was Petraeus or one of the other Iraq guys, maybe the guy who replaced him, but they made a statement to the effect that the reason we keeping fucking this up is because we refuse to use the military for the purpose it was intended for. They should not be forced to govern civilians and nation build. They have neither skill or the understanding to be acting as a peacekeeping force. The military is a weapon, end of story. They did a whole congressional testimony on it and got ignored. It's not one leader or party, its our governments intentional incompetence as a whole.

Well that, and that whole region is arbitrarily walled off into Nations drawn by Europeans that didn't care at all for ethnic or tribal groups and differences. To large groups of people in the middle east Nations is some Western idea. The Afghanistani military doesn't have some national pride or sense of duty to the nation, because its not a real nation in the way we in the West see nations. The Taliban has already declared this Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, just boom new government, new laws, leaders, enforcers and probably national boundaries.

 

[CriticalGaming]

"Mostly peaceful"

 

[Dalisclock]

Gonna lead off on this is fucking terrible and I don't even want to imagine the horrors in store for the people there.

With that out of the way, it feels like this has been a slow motion disaster unfurling for 2 decades at this point over multiple administrations(but a special FU to Bush who put us there) and it's finally coming to a head because eventually we were gonna have to pull stakes here. Most the American public probably doesn't remember we were still there and I can't remember the last time I heard anyone give a shit about it until now.

It sounds like the Afghan government was a corrupt joke for a long time and the military was not something the Afghans could support nor did they appear to want to. The face this happened in iraq a couple years back should tell us that this shit isnt' fucking working but I doubt we'll learn anything from this.

So we've wasted 20 years, thousands of lives and a trillion or so dollars to accomplish nothing. Good Job USA. And I know that's no comfort to anyone, least of all the people who are getting or shortly going to get royally screwed.

 

[Piscian]

Well that, and that whole region is arbitrarily walled off into Nations drawn by Europeans that didn't care at all for ethnic or tribal groups and differences. To large groups of people in the middle east Nations is some Western idea. The Afghanistani military doesn't have some national pride or sense of duty to the nation, because its not a real nation in the way we in the West see nations. The Taliban has already declared this Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, just boom new government, new laws, leaders, enforcers and probably national boundaries.

I tried to go to the wiki to get a bead on what you're talking about, but the history of territorial disputes in that region is like a hundred pages long and goes back a 1000 years.

 

[CriticalGaming]

So we've wasted 20 years, thousands of lives and a trillion or so dollars to accomplish nothing. Good Job USA. And I know that's no comfort to anyone, least of all the people who are getting or shortly going to get royally screwed.

It wouldn't be a good government if it's primary result wasn't wasting a shit load of time and money!

 

[immortalfrieza]

I was contemplating what went wrong in Afghanistan when we essentially did the same thing in Japan and Germany which turned out pretty well for us all things considered. It's a vicious cycle of blame and bureaucracy. You want to rail at Biden for leaving, but apparently we spent the entire 20 year period guaranteeing we'd have to. The post has an article that goes into detail about how we fucked at this up.

What went wrong is that our economy was so badly in the toilet during the Great Depression that World War 2 actually gave us a substantial boost from all the jobs that the war created and thus allowed the U.S. to finally dig ourselves out of that hole. We we so bad off that war ended up benefiting instead of costing us. If it wasn't for World War 2 the Great Depression would likely have lasted for many years longer, decades even despite the measures we were taking at the time to try to get out of it.

Since then? Ever war we've been in we've either lost, got nothing out of, or both. The military in general hasn't done anything except waste money and lives for nothing in over 70 years. 9/11 was the worst example of this, we started 2 completely pointless wars that we not only didn't benefit from but cost us literally trillions of dollars and countless lives even just on our side not to mention theirs. We weren't far off from causing a second Great Depression to ourselves. What's worst of all, we proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that terrorism works. What we should have done was, for a microscopic fraction of what we spent on these wars, simply beefed up our security, grieved a bit, and got on with our lives. Maybe have a special forces unit sneak into Afganistan and snipe Bin Laden and his cronies from a mile away if we really cared about getting revenge, and once again for a insignificant fraction of the time, money, and lives that the actual wars cost us.

What we did as a result of 9/11 is exactly what terrorism is designed to do, scare the target stupid so they do more damage to themselves than any number of terrorist attacks could have done. A hundred 9/11s couldn't have done as much damage at least financially that we did trying to "fight" terrorism, and thanks to what we did we probably will be facing a hundred 9/11s in the future from all the terrorist groups we'll have birthed from going out of our way to tank the reputation of the U.S. on top of proving the validity of the tactic known as terrorism.

It's about time someone decided to actually pull out and leave these guys to their own devices. We were going to have to do that anyway and they'd reverse probably in a tiny fraction of the time everything we might have actually accomplished in those countries. We didn't even conquer either country and add them to U.S. territory much less get anything else we could've gotten out of it so in the end it was completely pointless.

In short, what went wrong was that we didn't consider the consequences of our actions and definitely if what we were doing was actually worthwhile.

 

[SilentPony]

I tried to go to the wiki to get a bead on what you're talking about, but the history of territorial disputes in that region is like a hundred pages long and goes back a 1000 years.

I mean yup, that's exactly it. The US wasn't about to fix that with 20 years of drone strikes and Navy SEAL raids.

 

[meiam]

I was contemplating what went wrong in Afghanistan when we essentially did the same thing in Japan and Germany which turned out pretty well for us all things considered. It's a vicious cycle of blame and bureaucracy. You want to rail at Biden for leaving, but apparently we spent the entire 20 year period guaranteeing we'd have to. The post has an article that goes into detail about how we fucked at this up.

Japan and Germany were modern country before the invasion, Afghanistan was little more than an iron age nation.

It seems like there's a few things that need to happen to allow a country to become successful, one of the key aspect seems to be that the people need to stop relying on informal link (tribe, religion, family) and start relying on formal one (law, competence). This seems to be a very slow process where every subsequent generation can only change so much, and Afghanistan wasn't even starting to do this. I think realistically it would have taken something like century to change it into a true nation that could stand on its own, we'd have to wait for everyone who lived in the old system to die out and be replaced.

As far as refugee compared to Vietnam, its not fun to say but asian refugee have always been much more popular than middle eastern one. Partly because they don't have very visible religion and partly because of the fear that some of them will be terrorist (which data says is kinda ridiculous but you can't change perception that easily).