That is absolutely true. Any idea that a western government was going to be propped up there was fantasy. The Taliban would take over the moment they could.
Frankly the same is true in Iraq. The moment we are gone its going back to the militants.
Taliban in Kabul as President Flees
- Thread starter Mercor
- Start date
Frankly the same is true in Iraq. The moment we are gone its going back to the militants.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger slammed the Trump administration's deal with the Taliban, saying on Sunday that it set the stage for the current failure in Afghanistan.
The Illinois Republican said former President Donald Trump and his then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are at fault for America's "disastrous" withdrawal from the country.
"Donald Trump was publicly saying, 'We have to get out of Afghanistan at all costs. It's not worth it.' Mike Pompeo meets with the Taliban and tries to 'negotiate' something," Kinzinger said during an appearance on CNN.
"They ended up getting rolled almost as bad as Neville Chamberlain," he continued, referring to the British prime minister who negotiated the 1938 Munich Agreement, which was widely panned as enabling the Nazi invasion of Poland.
"They set this up to fail," Kinzinger said.
GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming on Sunday also blasted Trump's deal, calling it a "surrender" to the Taliban.
"We sat down and negotiated with terrorists," Cheney told NBC News. "We gave credibility to the Taliban ... We completely undercut the Afghan national government. We absolutely emboldened the Taliban."
While president, Trump was eager to remove American troops from Afghanistan and end the US' longest-running war. But he took an unprecedented step to try and fulfill that aim: negotiate directly with the Taliban. His administration engaged in a series of talks with the militant group in Qatar, and even invited them to a secret meeting at the presidential retreat Camp David for the 9/11 anniversary in 2019. Trump later reversed this decision after a Taliban attack killed a US service member in Afghanistan.
Still, Trump reached a deal with the Taliban in February 2020, which stipulated that US troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan within 14 months on the condition that the Taliban not turn the country into a terrorist base. The agreement had been widely criticized at the time for acceding to the Taliban and excluding the Afghan government. Pompeo attended the signing ceremony and took photos alongside Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar, who is anticipated to head the next Taliban government in Afghanistan.
Trump has now attempted to absolve himself from the situation and pinned responsibility solely on President Joe Biden for the Taliban's takeover and the Afghan government's collapse.
Though Kinzinger on Sunday attacked Trump, he also placed blame on Biden, who "could've easily turned this around" once he became president.
"The Republicans are putting out talking points to make Biden look bad. The Democrats are putting out talking points to point out the past administration. In truth, they're both responsible," Kinzinger said.
"Both parties have failed the American people," he added.
Biden agreed to carry out Trump's deal and pull out of Afghanistan. This week he defended his withdrawal of US troops, despite receiving widespread criticism from both sides of the aisle amid disturbing scenes coming out of Kabul of people clamoring to leave the country and the resurgence of the Taliban.
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Taliban dictating the terms. Get out by August 31 or else. Ya got one week Joe, one week before bad turns into REAL bad. After that the heads start rolling, literally.
Here is a press article about this...
Taliban warn Biden and Johnson face serious 'consequences' if troop withdraw delayed
TALIBAN leaders have threatened the US and UK with "consequences" if the withdrawal of western troops from Afghanistan is delayed.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/worl...reat-US-troop-withdraw-kabul-airport-video-VN
Every plane arriving in Kabul for evacuations should be packed with Rangers and SpecOps people.
Heavily armed angry men get off the plane and evacuees board the plane to leave.
When this goes sideways we need to retake Bagram and work from there. A perimeter much larger than Bagram will need to be carved out. As it is now, the result of this is going to be that we don't leave Afghanistan. If it wasn't a perpetual war before it will be now.
Better yet, let’s let Mike Pompeo blame Joe Biden for the deal with the Taliban Mike Pompeo made.
Or, let’s let Nikki Hailey criticize Joe Biden for negotiating with the Taliban after she negotiated with the Taliban.
That cable doesn’t even come close to predicting the cut and run scenario that actually unfolded. No one saw such a lay down happening. No one in government, no one on the ground and no one in the media , left or right.
It really is time to stop acting like this 11 day collapse of an entire country was easily foreseeable or that anyone even posed it as a possibility.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-n...handling-afghanistan-could-gift-donald-trump/
Joe Biden's asinine handling of Afghanistan could gift Donald Trump the White House
The president has committed the unforgivable sin: making the United States look like a loser
20 August 2021 • 6:00am
For a president famed for his empathy, Joe Biden has shown very little for Afghans Credit: BLOOMBERG
It’s a bit early in his tenure for a political obituary. But for Joe Biden the Afghanistan debacle may be presidency-shattering. HMS Biden is now holed below the water line and slowly sinking.
Donald Trump scents blood in the water and is popping up on the airwaves to put the boot in to his hapless successor.
That's not to say that, if Mr Trump were still president, the US departure from Afghanistan would have been any less chaotic.
It's just that American voters - and the Taliban - know the US reaction to the crisis would have been very different under a President Trump.
Mr Biden, shamefully, sought to blame Afghans themselves. His officials meekly pleaded with the Taliban to allow American citizens safe passage to the airport.
And, in Washington, not a single head rolled in response to what one Pentagon official called a “s—show”.
Trump would not have been bullied like this
What would Mr Trump have done if confronted with this monumental insult to American pride? Well, for starters he would have fired the head of every US intelligence service that touched any piece of information out of Afghanistan in recent months.
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Then, he would probably have called for Ashraf Ghani, the former president of Afghanistan who fled Kabul on Sunday, to be detained for cowardice, and delivered a tirade down the phone to the leader of any country harbouring him.
And then, he would have publicly threatened to rain down “fire and fury” on the Taliban unless it helped US citizens, their allies and translators get to Kabul airport.
After his press conference Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, would have faced the very real possibility of his house being flattened by a MOAB if he didn't comply.
The Taliban know a bully when they see one. Americans, and Britons, would have found themselves swept to the airport with an armed Taliban escort and an apology.
Car crash interview has only made it worse
Instead, Mr Biden has been left floundering, having completely lost control of events, and unable even to take responsibility for his own mistakes.
What has really riled Americans is not his original decision to withdraw - which was popular - but that he made the US look like a loser. For a president, it’s the unforgivable sin.
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Mr Biden's attempt to retrieve the situation in a TV interview on Thursday was an unmitigated car crash - despite the interview being conducted by Bill Clinton's former White House press chief.
Viewers heard Mr Biden saying he “can't recall” - never a good phrase for a president to use - being advised by his generals that he should leave 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. There is evidence to suggest that he was advised of that.
Nor did he remember any of his intelligence officials suggesting the Afghan government and military might possibly collapse like a house of cards the moment the US left. Again, there are suggestions they did tell him this.
Bizarrely, Mr Biden said he always expected the withdrawal to be chaotic. And, strangest of all, for a politician famed for empathy, he showed not a jot of it for those who fell to their deaths clinging to the wheels of a fleeing US aircraft.
“That was four days ago, five days ago!” was all Mr Biden had to say on that subject. It actually happened two days before the interview.
Mr Trump, meanwhile, has been busy comparing the situation to Dunkirk, and Mr Biden to Jimmy Carter. His allies in the Senate are calling for Mr Biden to be removed under the 25th Amendment for not being competent to carry out his duties.
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With the Jan 6 Capitol riot now in the rear view mirror, many Americans are starting to hear Mr Trump's clarion call once again.
The ever-more-frequent comparison between Mr Biden and Mr Carter is not entirely apt. The disaster that befell Mr Carter - the Iranian hostage crisis – happened in the final year of what would prove his only term.
Mr Biden has longer to recover, but he is politically wounded, and the fallout may come at next year's midterm congressional elections.
The Democrats losing control of Congress would provide a springboard for Mr Trump's 2024 presidential bid, which indications are he is very keen to launch.
This is Biden's Bay of Pigs – except Kennedy took responsibility
Like Mr Biden, President John F Kennedy faced a humiliation in the eyes of the world in his first year in office, following the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.
Looking back, there is some comfort for Mr Biden in the fact that Mr Kennedy recovered well in the polls.
However, Mr Kennedy's reaction to the Bay of Pigs was very different. He took full responsibility. Mr Biden is seeking to blame anyone but himself.
Vietnamese and American evacuees wait inside the US embassy compound in Saigon in 1975. Unlike Biden with Afghanistan, President Ford's approval ratings went up after the Saigon evacuation CREDIT: CORBIS
Remarkably, President Gerald Ford's approval rating actually went up in the wake of the Fall of Saigon in 1975.
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Most Americans were just happy to be done with Vietnam, however chaotic the end was.
Mr Biden is hoping that the public's desire to be done with Afghanistan similarly outweighs their horror at the scenes of the last week.
Obsession with China could be costly
Ultimately, the reason Mr Biden dropped the ball on Afghanistan is because he is obsessed with China. For him Afghanistan (and Iraq) were foreign policy irritations to be jettisoned so he could concentrate on the main event.
This is the case for the US military-industrial complex too. The Pentagon is currently playing (and losing) large scale war games with China.
These tend to be set around 2030, less than a decade from now, and they believe some kind of titanic showdown is potentially not very far off.
Pentagon analysts looking at projections of China’s military strength - including its advances in hypersonic missiles - believe focusing any amount of military capital on the tribal wastelands of Afghanistan makes zero sense.
That's the kind of thinking that turns up in the Presidential Daily Brief, Mr Biden's daily rundown of threats to US national security.
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It's why he calls Afghanistan “yesterday's threat” and has long seemed uninterested in the fate of the Afghan people.
But his strategic decision to focus elsewhere is having terrible consequences that are filling American TV screens.
Surely, sitting in his living room in Wilmington Delaware, this supposedly most empathetic of presidents must have seen the images of chaos at Kabul airport and thought “What have I done?”
But, apparently not. There has been little in the way of empathy from Mr Biden for Afghans. He even failed to properly thank his allies for the blood they have spilled, and the lives they have lost.
Mr Trump called it the "greatest embarrassment in the history of our country." Many Americans, and not just Republicans, are inclined to agree with him.
And this is what it’s all about on right, any angle that would give them hope Trump could be elected again.
They don’t care about US citizens, our military and certainly not Afghans that worked with us.
For once, you may be right. A new war may be unavoidable if we cannot get out all Americans. The stakes are very high right now.
I hear that. But as I said a couple days ago the reporting and focus is very "Kabul-centric" for a number of understandable reasons.
I have, along with most others, an appetite for seeing some more aggressive and ballsy action in Kabul to retake it or portions of it and re-establish control at least for the purpose of evacuation.
Unfortunately- the Kabul-centric- focus undercalculates the vast number of Americans and other allies still out in other parts of the country. So we can send in more military and take Kabul or enter into some kind of engagement but those in the outlying areas will disappear into hostage-land almost immediately and they can forget about any thought of making it to Kabul for exit.
Just sayin, I am wide-eyed about what the cost of going into Kabul and/or restarting the war so to speak would be. What Biden is wide-eyed about I dont know, but I see the risk to the non-Kabul citizens as very high. That is not to say it should not be done, just that they absolutely need to exhaust negotiations but without it turning into dithering, and they need to be realistic about the fact that it is an operation to reduce net loss, because Americans are either going to be killed there and in the hinterlands or disappear into hostage scenarios. It would be equally dangerous to just dither because Joe says we are getting out without losing anyone except the peasants we have lost already and he does not care about.
The 64,000 dollar question is "what will the Taliban do after the August 31 deadline if it is extended?" If they are just going to put the hammer down and close all lids in and out of the country and say that they abided by the deadline, then the Americans should have moved earlier even if it had high costs. We are largely dependent on the intel operations that fucked this up in the first place. What a mess.