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

Gergar12

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My geopolitical analysis of this situation is that the US just chuck a grenade in Central Asia. If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, it won't be the US who has to deal with the problem but Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China, India, and the other stans. With the exception of India, and some of the stans those are all US foes. This action proves once, and for all Biden is a hard-boiled realist. A neoliberal, or Neo-Con would have tried to stay and make Afghanistan into a democracy. This is a pure realist move. You cut your losses, and let your opponents deal with the fallout. And it's kinda working, Russian Embassy staff have gotten assurances from the Islamic Emirate(Taliban), but China has had to leave their embassy, and soon it will be their problem given their border with Afghanistan.

Edit: This is just an analysis, I am not personally thrilled about having another North Korea in the world.
 
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TheMysteriousGX

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Generals said:
Sure having a standing army to fight the Taliban was needed, but what was needed even more is giving the Afghan people an incentive not to join the Taliban and be willing to put their lives on the line to fight them. A corrupt inept local government and having guns thrown at their faces doesn't provide that. instead of spending 1 trillion $ in military spending they should have invested in roads, water/energy supplies, funding anti corruption institutions, paying wages to civil servants to reduce the incentive to become corrupt, etc.
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Can't do that. That's "socialism". It's un-American to have the US government be good at anything besides killing people. That's why we get so much pushback whenever the government tries to do something effectively.

That's also why China's eating our lunch with the whole "provide infrastructure" plan.
 
meiam

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Gergar12 said:
My geopolitical analysis of this situation is that the US just chuck a grenade in Central Asia. If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, it won't be the US who has to deal with the problem but Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China, India, and the other stans. With the exception of India, and some of the stans those are all US foes. This action proves once, and for all Biden is a hard-boiled realist. A neoliberal, or Neo-Con would have tried to stay and make Afghanistan into a democracy. This is a pure realist move. You cut your losses, and let your opponents deal with the fallout. And it's kinda working, Russian Embassy staff have gotten assurances from the Islamic Emirate(Taliban), but China has had to leave their embassy, and soon it will be their problem given their border with Afghanistan.

Edit: This is just an analysis, I am not personally thrilled about having another North Korea in the world.
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I think north korea is the best comparison but it's not really the case. For one the Taliban have no hope to even come close to an A bomb and they don't have a foreign capital to hold hostage (like Seoul). China won't really have any problem with them because, if they need it, they can just round up everyone that look like they might possibly be taliban sympathizer and make the problem go away and they also don't have any affinity either political or culturally, so they really don't care about them. If anything Pakistan might have some problem with them, they'll grow bolder and might start snipping at the government over there, like when they shoot up that military school awhile back.

I think the biggest geopolitical situation to come of this will be the massive emigration wave toward europe that will happen and stoke right wing politician. Otherwise Afghanistan will just become a failed state that nobody really care about.
 
TheMysteriousGX

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meiam said:
Is there even a market left for opium? There's tons of synthetic drug from china now and Syria is already mass producing and exporting some drug (can't remember the name) and they're better situated. Plus I don't think it ever really stopped even under the US, so I doubt it would even be enough to replace like 10% of the US spending.
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It's such a big cash crop that we used US soldiers to protect harvests.

Fun fact to conspiratorialize with: the Taliban banned the growth of opium in 2001, shortly before we invaded.
 
Agema

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Hawki said:
I don't mean to make light of this, but I can imagine centuries from now, historians going over the events and pointing to it as one of the rare cases in human history where a smaller, more motivated army can take out a larger, yet ill-motivated one.
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It's not at all rare for smaller, more motivated armies to defeat larger ones, and there are many examples: in the final collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, for instance, the Viet Cong in South Vietnam doing the fighting were about a quarter of the numbers of the South Vietnamese forces.
 
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AnxietyProne

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

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CriticalGaming said:
Islam is a religion of peace guys. Don't worry about it, everything will be fine.
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The same could be said about nearly any religion (and many ideologies). There's always fundamentalists and extremists harming others in the name of what they believe.
 
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CriticalGaming

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Avnger said:
The same could be said about nearly any religion (and many ideologies). There's always fundamentalists and extremists harming others in the name of what they believe.
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That's true of everything except Atheism. Can't hurt anyone in the name of your beliefs if you don't believe in anything.

Wars usually boil down to Religion or Money, and sometimes both. So....I dunno.
 
CriticalGaming

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Avnger said:
About that....
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I would argue that they are bad people doing bad things, but not in the name of Atheism itself. They might have been Atheists but there actions weren't necessarily motivation by their Athiesm. I never even heard of Hilter being Atheist throughout documentaries on him, school lessons, or anything. So while he might have been Athiest, I don't know that his non-belief motivated his actions.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely after all.

North Korea is technically an "athiest" state, however the dictatorship there has sort of created their own religion in which Kim Jong Un is the glorious leader for all mankind or what-the-fuck-ever. Because they've create a religion on that basis I wouldn't label them as Atheists because there is a belief system in place there.

As for Russia, I don't know enough about the history to even begin to comment on it.

However if you compare the numbers of victims from reglious dogma, versus atheist atrocity, I don't think the numbers really compare.
 
CM156

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AnxietyProne said:
I'm still not seeing a solution from anyone here as to what we could have effectively done.
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We needed a better plan to get everyone who collaborated with us out. Any interpreters who worked for us, for instance, should be put on a plane headed for the USA.
 
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CriticalGaming

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TheMysteriousGX said:
*Laughs in Stalin*
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Again it is more about what motivates a person's actions. Atheism doesn't motivate people to kill because there is no belief or view system in that to base actions upon.

Stalin was basically Russian ANTIFA, and Marxist–Leninist and Socialist. Which doesn't sound like anything that anybody is doing these days, so....I wouldn't worry about it.
 
TheMysteriousGX

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CriticalGaming said:
Again it is more about what motivates a person's actions. Atheism doesn't motivate people to kill because there is no belief or view system in that to base actions upon.

Stalin was basically Russian ANTIFA, and Marxist–Leninist and Socialist. Which doesn't sound like anything that anybody is doing these days, so....I wouldn't worry about it.
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What a fantastically narrow definition of atheism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union
 
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