Or he intends to run a few token B52 bombing runs over where he thinks the organisers of the attack are. You know, the logical leap a leader should be able to trust his people can make.So a bit of levity to come from the unfolding tragedy
Afghanistan: 'We will hunt you down and make you pay' - Joe Biden's warning to Kabul airport attackers
The US casualties in Kabul are the country's first deaths in action in Afghanistan in 18 months, despite a promise from Mr Biden that withdrawing was intended to save American lives.news.sky.com
Context in case anyone didn't know, the Kabul airport attackers were suicide bombers.
So guess Biden plans to invade heaven or more likely hell next?
Biden says he does not regret Afghanistan withdrawal as Taliban take over more towns
- Thread starter Dwarvenhobble
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Like the report of them hassling a woman trying to get to the airport and saying 'why do you want to leave?' then threatening to shoot her. Like seriously, how dumb are these maniacs?
The biggest problem Afghanistan is going to face besides everything else is their Army. I honestly think there is going to be a certain point where the government isn't going to be able to control them unless they are paid out the ass with money and women. They are going to be in control, not the council the Taliban is planning to make and they don't seem that very level-headed.
See: the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, an extremely well known incident which you're unsuccessfully trying to pass off as somehow not an invasion. But which is universally recognised as such by everyone else who isn't trying to rehabilitate despots.
I don't particularly give a shit why they didn't assassinate the Soviet-sympathetic leader they installed. As far as I'm concerned, not assassinating foreign heads of state should be the default, and doesn't earn you praise.
According to me, invading and occupying a country under the flimsy auspices of preventing its leaders from doing something repressive is imperialist, yes, that's right. Imagine! How crazy, applying the same standard I apply to the US.
These guys are really going to have a hard time keeping IS under control. As bad as the Taliban is it can always get worse. The Taliban chain of command seems very weak and the country's economic situation with people trying to flee the country and risks of famine will provide a very fragile base for any kind of central authority even if the people are oppressed. The Taliban most likely realize this considering they are trying really hard not to become international pariahs. But IS will probably try to topple them with their usual tactics in an attempt to draw the Americans back into the Afghan battlefield. Unless China and Russia are willing to assist the Taliban. I can see Russia providing military assistance to deal with IS which will be all kinds of irony if you consider the history.
On the upside, at least the guy on the right seems to be practising proper trigger discipline.
Please send troops to Normandy Beach, we're having such a dreadful time with the Maquis and need your help! -Hitler writing to Roosevelt, apparently
But you're not applying the same standard. You're treating an ally of Afghanistan that was mobilized to defeat a United States-backed insurgency against a fragile socialist revolution as if it were the same as the US invasion of Afghanistan. You're free to not like what they did, but it's absolutely not the same.
What exactly should they do about it though? I don't mean this as a challenge, but I feel like one of the leading causes of apathy in the states is the feeling that it doesn't matter who you elect, they just morph into another cog for their party and imagine the same is true across the pond.
This is such dogshite. That's all.
They were an "ally" of the ruling party, until their betrayal and purge, at which point they were an "ally" of one faction of the ruling party, acting as its installed puppet. They were not an "ally" of Afghanistan itself as they massacred its civilian populace, looted and occupied it for a decade.
And nobody else agrees that their primary purpose was solely defending the Afghan state against that insurgency, any more than I believe the US motivation for their 20 year occupation was solely the defeat of terrorist groups.
The difference here is that you reject wholesale the flimsy excuses of the US military and government, while swallowing and regurgitating the flimsy excuses of the Soviet military and government.
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I have to say, this thread has given me a much greater respect for Silvanus.
This is what you say when you don't have an answer.
It wasn't the Soviet-Khalqist Friendship Treaty. The treaty was signed between the Soviets and Afghanistan as represented by the PDPA, not any particular faction of the PDPA.
Just leaving out that Amin betrayed and purged various people among the leadership of Afghanistan. After the treaty. While the Afghan government was asking for troops from the Soviet Union. To respond to aggression that was backed by the United States; not just armed by the United States, but also recruited from other countries alongside Afghanistan and trained in Pakistan. But that is somehow not an invasion
The Soviets had a relationship with Taraki and Amin-- principally Taraki-- and then Amin killed Taraki. Reacting to that jarring state of affairs with anything more than a shrug is "imperialism".
That's why US intelligence estimates and diplomatic cables at the time favored arming Islamic extremists to increase the probability of a Soviet intervention. Because they thought the Soviets were going to do it anyway-- because they thought it was in the Soviet interest regardless. Oh wait, precisely the opposite was the case.
The American ruling class profited mightily from the war in Afghanistan; the Soviet Union did not profit or gain from its intervention in Afghanistan nor did it seem like they expected to. The looting that you've referred to was battlefield and museum looting by Red Army commanders for souvenirs, not the sort of providing the entire world with opium that the United States pulled-- both during the Soviet Afghan intervention and during the US occupation. The former is frustrated asshole behavior (which, to be sure, the US has also engaged in), the latter is actual imperialism. You're comparing apples and oranges.
The difference here is that you reflexively regurgitate the anti-communist sewage that we all swim in with the pretension that this makes you principled.
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Of interest, here is a third perspective which disagrees with both of us in crucial respects.
Afghanistan, Another Untold Story
Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghani history and the role played by the United States.
www.commondreams.org
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If you continuously bomb Afghanistan at random you might eventually kill all the leaders of ISIS-K.
...Maybe I shouldn't give them any ideas, this sounds like the kind of thing they might try.
Yeah, ok buddy. Because "Hitler didn't invite the allies!" Is suuuuch a bulletproof argument, and not irrelevant drivel.
...which they promptly broke, purging those outside of the sympathetic faction they tolerated. The only lasting alliance was with that faction.
I don't know why you're somehow assuming that I'm excusing the US intervention by condemning the USSR one. Are you actually incapable of conceiving that someone can be against aggressive invasion from either foreign power?
"Anything more than a shrug" = invasion, decade of occupation, civilian massacre, political purges, mass looting, apparently.
"It didn't do them any good, turning into a self-defeating mire, and that's how we know it was well intentioned!"
Lol ok.
"The US did worse so military mass looting is fine".
And you dismiss any and all criticisms of the USSR because you cannot conceive that they come from anywhere except US propaganda. Which is transparently bollocks, and goes about as far as the argument that you only criticise US imperialism because the commies have brainwashed you.
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I have the foreboding feeling that it's going to continue for quite a bit.
Could it have ended any other way? Sure, you get people who want to see an American Empire advocating for permanently colonizing the country (of course, none of those people would ever actually serve over there), but short of that, we were always going to lose the "waiting game". And two decades of effort in trying to assemble a democratic, representative government crumbing that fast demonstrates that, if Afghanistan was ever going to travel that path, we certainly weren't going about it the right way.
And yes, as someone who despises Trump for setting all this up and thinks that anyone who he ever appointed into his administration should be hauled into the Hague, I believe that Biden did absolutely botch this withdrawal.
Taliban: "President Bush, could you help us against the Northern Alliance?"
Kuwait: "Saddam Hussein, could you send troops to help us drill this oil?"
Iraq: "President, er, other Bush, could you help us subjugate these Shiites?"
This all happened because this is how invasions work. You get invited to a place by some people to help with something and one of them murders many of the others and if you don't just let him do that, then you're an invading imperialist.
(cutting this post up because it doesn't want to post it all at once)
They broke their agreement with the government of Afghanistan to send troops to Afghanistan to help against the insurgency by sending troops to Afghanistan to help against the insurgency. Also, they eliminated a murderous autocrat who came to power after the treaty was negotiated and (while still calling for troops based on that treaty) murdered the principal Afghan architect of that treaty. This is imperialist somehow; wanting to protect a popular revolution from both foreign-armed insurgency and the ascension of a murdering autocrat is just like setting up and maintaining a global system of exploitation of the global south on behalf of monopoly capital.
Not only did it "turn into" a quagmire, that was the United States plan all along. The United States wasn't thinking "what do we do if the Soviet Union intervenes?" it was thinking "How can we induce Soviet intervention?" But sure, just continue to ignore the crucial difference that the invasion of Afghanistan was immensely good for the ruling economic elite of the United States and the opposite was the case for the government of the Soviet Union with respect to their intervention in Afghanistan.
You said that the Soviet intervention was more imperialist than the actions taken by the United States which intentionally caused it.
It's not fine (or as far as I can tell officially sanctioned apart from by the individual commanders and regiments who perpetrated it). It's just not "imperialism"-- unless you want to torture the definition of that even further. The looting of Lindisfarne wasn't imperialism. Wait, you might actually think that it was.
I didn't see this post before now
In the case of the United States in Afghanistan, it was an insurgency they were friendly with as late as 1999 (having negotiated the construction of a pipeline) and that was the government of the country at the time of the invasion and years before it- not one which the representatives of a popular revolution asked for help to suppress.
There wasn't an invasion. There was an assassination. And there was a continued presence in Afghanistan as the PDPA had requested and continued to request. Karmal was a part of the PDPA, participated in the Saur revolution and the revolution against the King before that.
At the request of the representatives of a popular revolution. Not appreciably more "imperialist" in concept than sending peacekeepers to Kosovo.
In the case of the United States in Afghanistan, it was an insurgency they were friendly with as late as 1999 (having negotiated the construction of a pipeline) and that was the government of the country at the time of the invasion and years before it- not one which the representatives of a popular revolution asked for help to suppress.