DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Biden says US war in Afghanistan will end August 31

I get your point. And I am not suggesting we turn them into a democracy. Let's face it, if Afghanistan became a democracy tomorrow, nothing would change in the lives of the majority of people who live there. I am more concerned with addressing hunger and squalor.

Things get to a point that people learn a way of life then accept that as their reality that cannot be changed, so they stop looking. So scrap my city example, make if we teach them new techniques in farming that would double the amount of food they produce. Then they see that they don't have to live their life in hunger every day. Then the people would make the changes to the government to suit their needs.

Thanks for posting that, Clem.

thats the thing bro.

if we did what you suggested based on THEIR culture, it probably would've worked.

but we tried to do it based on american/western standards and traditions, instead of middle eastern standards and traditions.

Care to share one little tiny iota of proof? Anything at all will do. Or is this like the Big Lie of a stolen election - where there is zero proof but you'll say it endlessly until it starts to simply be accepted?

It took me a long time to realize the multitude of various paradigms out there to consider. We all have our own sets of rationales and logic in our minds based upon our own background and upbringing, and it's hard to view how different things actually are until you see them for yourself.

j/c...

From what I can see, it looks like we went in and tried to install a new government that we wanted then did nothing else. I'll grant that I could easily be missing something (or a lot of things) but what did we do to attempt to get them to want to change? Even a failed poorly executed attempt? I don't see anything except what looks like an occupying force.

j/c...

Click to read full thread. From the Taliban's press conference just recently in Kabul:







thread continues on....

Read this yesterday... pretty good breakdown of early intentions and how it all fell apart (although I agree with Swish, didn't have a snowball's chance in hell anyway).



https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/afghanistan-withdrawal-trump-biden.html

Thanks for posting that. Definitely paints a bit of a different picture.

Which was precisely the intent of the spokesperson. Don't buy it.

Not sure if this has already been posted. A ten minute video...I suggest watching all of it.



"We had all the people and equipment in place to save these people months ago, and we did nothing."

OK...slight difference. Point taken. I think the government bailed when it was clear the military was losing the battles.

Have to find the source, but I heard yesterday in a report that the Taliban have controlled over half the country since late last year. When Trump announced, we were going to pull out (2019?), the Taliban used that to start negotiating peaceful surrenders in northern provinces. Apparently, that simple tactic worked so well that in a matter of a couple of months they had control or surrender agreements in place with two thirds of the country... This is how they took over without a fight in record time.

So, it appears to me to be a combination of all the above. All four of the US presidents involved mishandled the war Afghanistan, normal Afghans just want to live and do not control who is in power, and Afghans leadership bailed EVERYWHERE at EVERY LEVEL.

Definitely will have to watch it play it out over time.

When the Afghanistan military refuses to fight, it makes it pretty easy for the Taliban to take over...........

Why didn't they fight? Speed of Afghan collapse surprised even the Taliban

The Taliban's rapid takeover of Afghanistan was the result of not only their strength on the battlefield and a strategy that began in the rural provinces but of a collapse of morale among an underserved Afghan military.

Why didn't the Afghan army fight?

Despite the $83 billion and two decades the US spent equipping and training the Afghan army, in many provinces the military appeared to evaporate in the face of Taliban insurgents.

With more than 300,000 personnel and equipment that was more advanced than the Taliban arsenal, Afghan army forces were formidable – on paper. In reality, they had been plagued by corruption, payoffs, poor leadership, lack of training and plummeting morale for years.

Desertions were common and US government inspectors had long warned that the situation was unsustainable.

The government outpost in Imam Sahib, a district of Kunduz province, held out for two months against the Taliban. But resources and supply runs soon dwindled. “In the last days, there was no food, no water and no weapons,” trooper Taj Mohammad, 38, told the Wall Street Journal. The remaining troops eventually fled for the provincial capital, which itself collapsed weeks later.

Troops on the front line in Afghanistan's second-largest city Kandahar were given "one cardboard box full of slimy potatoes" for an entire police unit’s daily rations last week, the New York Times reported.

Kandahar police said before the city fell they hadn’t been paid in six to nine months, according to the Washington Post, making Taliban offers more tempting.

Taliban insurgents mixed threats and bribery, along with propaganda and psychological warfare, as they took city after city – some with barely a shot fired – eventually capturing the capital.

Beginning last year, Taliban leaders started offering desperate troops money in exchange for weapons, according to the Washington Post, in meetings and deals dubbed "ceasefires" by Afghan officials. "Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces," the Post wrote.

And yet as foreign troops began their final withdrawal based on a Trump administration deadline set for May 1, Washington and Kabul were confident the Afghan military would put up a fight against the Taliban.

Afghan forces did put up strong resistance in some areas such as Lashkar Gah in the south, but they were facing the Taliban without US air strikes or military support. Confronted with smaller but highly motivated groups of Taliban insurgents, many soldiers and even entire units simply deserted or surrendered, leaving the Islamists to capture city after city.

Meanwhile, US intelligence assessments were woefully optimistic. The Taliban could take over Kabul within 90 days, US officials estimated last week. Some 72 hours later, Kabul had fallen.

Even the Taliban were reportedly surprised at how quickly they were able to take control of some provinces.

How did the US fuel a Taliban victory?

For some, Afghanistan's collapse was 20 years in the making, as mistake after mistake was made in the Western nation-building project. But the final nail in the coffin of the Afghan government came last year when former US president Donald Trump signed a deal with the insurgents to withdraw US troops by May 1.

For the Taliban, it was a sign that their victory was imminent after nearly two decades of war. For Afghans, it was a betrayal and meant their abandonment by the international community.

The Taliban continued to attack government forces but started to combine those with the targeted killings of journalists and rights activists, heightening the environment of fear.

They also pushed a narrative of inevitable Taliban victory in their propaganda and psychological operations. Soldiers and local officials were reportedly bombarded with text messages in some areas, urging them to surrender or cooperate with the Taliban to avoid a worse fate.

Many were offered safe passage if they left their weapons and did not put up a fight, while others were reached through tribal and village elders.

What happened to the anti-Taliban warlords?

With Afghan forces unable to hold off the Taliban advances, many of Afghanistan's notorious warlords rallied their militias and promised to fight the Taliban if they attacked their cities. But with confidence plunging in the ability of Afghanistan's government to survive, the writing was also on the wall for the warlords.

Their cities fell without a fight.

Longtime warlord Ismail Khan, known as the "Lion of Herat" and seen as his city's last hope, was captured by the Taliban as Herat fell.

Uzbek commander and former vice president Abdul Rashid Dostum as well as fellow warlord Atta Mohammad Noor briefly joined the battle for Mazar-i-Sharif before fleeing into Uzbekistan as their militias abandoned their humvees, weapons and even their uniforms.

What was the Taliban's strategy?

The Taliban had been quietly pursuing what has been called an "outside-in" strategy, slowly tightening their grip on provincial rural areas before moving in to take over the regional capitals.

The insurgents also reportedly began negotiating deals and surrender arrangements – with everyone from individual soldiers and low-level government officials to provincial governors and government ministers – long before the launch of their final blitz in May.

The strategies proved immensely effective.

Images from the Taliban's final march to Kabul were not of bloody battles but of Taliban and government officials sitting comfortably as they formalised the handover of cities and provinces that were taken largely without a fight.

By Sunday, president Ashraf Ghani had fled the country, reportedly to Tajikistan, bringing a stunning end to the 20-year international campaign to transform Afghanistan into a modern state with a central government whose power extended into the diverse provinces across the country.

As a tense calm fell across Kabul, with many people hiding in their homes in accordance with Taliban orders, fears of a return to the brutal rule the Taliban imposed when it was last in power led others to throng the roads leading to Hamid Karzai international airport, where chaotic scenes unfolded as both Afghans and foreigners made a last mad dash to escape.

https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific...ven-the-taliban

This is not the same source I saw but it is basically the same story. The US got our asses handed to us by a low-tech homegrown propaganda machine.

I meant the DoD tweets about the ongoing evac effort. Sorry for the confusion.

The Taliban spokesperson was actually much more upfront than I expected.

I don't know that "we" got our asses handed to us. Actually I don't think we did. Our troop levels were around 15,000 in 2018 and then down to 2500 for some time now. That's certainly not troop levels high enough to fight the war. While I'm sure there were points they engaged in battle, their main function was to train the Afghan military to fight the war themselves.

You can train people all you want. You can't make them determined to fight or even fight at all.

Yes they handed our asses to us! Did you not watch our POTUS act shocked at what they pulled off? Do you see us reacting too what they have done? Who has egg on their face? We absolutely got our asses handed to us from a planning, preparedness, and execution point of view.

Anyone with eyes can see this is a military/US Leadership embarrassment.

So our intention was to train them just for training's sake? I'm not sure that really passes any sort of smell test. You're right that their will to fight was ultimately their own, but the reason we were there was to prop them up for them to eventually stand on their own. We weren't able to do that after 20 years of blank-check-writing. With the level of involvement we had, there's no way we can avoid this 'L'.

j/c...

Taliban quick to get their messaging out and shaping how they wish. Time will tell...



https://twitter.com/RehanToday/status/1427364591915372548
Rehan Arshad
@RehanToday
#Taliban to Lady Doctors: “Be calm. No need to worry. You are our sisters. You are our mothers. We respect you. No one will harm you. We respect your from the bottom of our hearts. Your work is very important. Don’t worry about anything.”

So they ran over the Afghan military who pretty much just rolled over and played dead and somehow that's America's fault?

Sure he was shocked. None of those on the ground thought it would happen that quickly.

That support was to supply and train them. Unless of course you think 2500 troops or even 15,000 troops was there as some show of military might.

I'm not sure why you would think I'm trying to make a difference between training them and training them to fight for themselves or as you put it stand on their own.

My assertion is you can train someone and prepare them if they apply what you trained them to do. You can supply and train them with superior weaponry to give them the advantage if they're willing to stand and fight.

What you can't do is make them believe in their government and fight.

We supported/supplied/trained them for two decades for the sole purpose of preventing what just happened. I don't see how we can view our involvement as anything other than a failure.

No, this has nothing to do with the army not fighting... Apparently, we had no clue they had all these agreements in place OR we knew and could do NOTHING about it. Either way, that was the L.

From the moment Trump announced the withdrawal, the Taliban set out to use that announcement for propaganda that caused rural leaderships to fold across the country... They folded at the threat of a power change because who wants to be on the wrong side of the Taliban and be stuck in Afghanistan after they take power back and the US leaves?

That's a scary threat that seems to have been used long enough without our knowledge that we were caught with our pants down during these final days of our engagement in Afghanistan.

And this isn't about our military might. Everyone including the Taliban knows that we can invade and crush them... but we can't outwait them... and that was the problem from jump. And it's also why their propaganda was so effective. It really didn't matter when the US pulled out, the Taliban would be waiting.

I've said this before but it bears repeating, the people in that part of the world do not see things the same as we do. Sure they are just people who want to live their lives in peace, but they have quite different values and priorities than we do. I'm sure the women and many of the young adults are scared of Taliban rule and for good reason. But I can't help but think that a large percentage of Afghans, due mostly to religious beliefs, prefer the Taliban rule over American occupation. It is even possible that the average person did not want the Taliban to return, but the local officials and old warlords sold them out to save themselves. Either way, the whole situation has been a slow-moving train wreck for America since day one.

So is it then your assertion that their unwllingness to fight is our failure? Or is it your assertion that we did not train them to fight and supply them with the ability to fight our failure? Or is it both.

You see, you can provide people with the opportunity to succeed but you can not force then to implement and deploy the tools they have been given to achieve that success.

Now there were certainly mistakes made. I have no idea who all the people were Biden listened to. My guess would be a combination of people including those on the ground and military advisors at the very least. They gave him a timetable of when the Taliban may reach Kabul. That timetable was deeply flawed. The people he chose to listen to in that regard was certainly a mistake.

No matter what anyone told him, pulling the troops out before evacuating all of our citizens and the Afghani people who helped us in our fight in Afghanistan was certainly a mistake.

But when someone raises a child, teaches it the proper way to live, provides them with an education to insure they succeed in life and then that child goes out and refuses to apply him or her self, I don't blame the parents.

Our entire strategy of nation building by somehow convincing ourselves that the entire world thinks and believes the exact same principals as we do has been a problem all along.

There was nothing we could do to stop or prevent this eventual outcome unless we just stayed there forever. That's why my biggest beef with the entire mess lays with Obama. Once we marginalized Al-Qaeda and captured Bin Laden the mission the American people were told we went there to accomplish had been met. That's the exact moment we should have left.

Sadly even at that point we had spent years trying to train their military to fight against a force they clearly weren't going to fight.

We need to know more about what Trump and Pompeo did with the Taliban. It looks like whatever deal or agreement they crafted somehow left Biden with no choice but to pull out. Wonder if the Trump admin looked the other way on the Taliban actions in the north or if Trump and Pompeo did not care about the fallout and just wanted the US out regardless of human costs. If I remotely trusted either of them it would be hard to accept that they would do this, but knowing how shady that admin was, I put nothing past them. I think if we are truly going to understand any of this, we need to know what happened then between the Trump admin and the Taliban. Really want to know how and why Biden seemed to be hemmed-in by those actions, whatever they were.

Here's what I know. Trump promised to get us out and had a timeline of May 1st to do so. There had been an agreement made with the Taliban as to a timetable of that withdraw. The Taliban had clearly become the enemy even though that was never the stated mission to the American people when we entered Afghanistan.

I know he actually proposed inviting the Taliban to Camp David which those surrounding him talked him out of. The optics of that alone looked horrible.

From the reports I read the Trump administration negotiated only with the Taliban while actually leaving the Afghani government out of those talks. To me that makes no sense.

Beyond that I have no idea.

This is just the beginning of this, and more facts will come out. The world, especially our allies, seemed to be shocked as well. Expect more answers will be revealed in the coming days. How the US and their allies were all caught off guard, or what happened behind the scenes here has now become extremely important to our ally relationships going forward.

I'll wait for some actual evidence to come out before I try and make any sense out of it. I think every president involved in this Afghanistan situation holds some responsibility in the mess it has become over time.

Side note: It's really irritating when you do this (misrepresent someone else's argument to try to make it sound more flawed), and makes it a little harder to carry on productive conversation.

The answer to your question is neither. We set out to build a nation with a democratic government by (among other things) supplying and training their military. We pursued this effort intensely and for a long time... and fast forward to the president fleeing after his military was boat-raced by a (on paper) inferior fighting force. We had a goal and failed miserably (though not for lack of effort).

What I'm saying speaks more to the question of why we were even there vs the specifics that went into the fall of Kabul (which is what it sounds like you're talking about). I'm not saying it's on us that the Afghanis largely gave up the fight. But to say we're NOT taking a massive 'L' on how this is ending is incorrect.

j/c...




Sara Cook
@saraecook
A congressional aide tells
@CBSNews
we have no partners left in Afghanistan to safely get Americans in-country to Kabul. “There are 10-15k AmCits who still need to get out, and that obviously doesn’t include the tens of thousands of SIVs or P2 applicants trying to get out of Afg”

https://twitter.com/saraecook/status/1427692270548099081

I wasn't trying to misrepresent what you were saying. That's why I asked the questions. I wasn't clear on what it was you were trying to say. I appreciate the response which cleared that up.

I think we are actually saying pretty much the same thing. One of the things that troubled me the most is that we have a clear history of the end result of us attempting to nation build. It's an exercise in futility that our government and us as a people should know by now is doomed to failure. What is it they say about doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result?

Then my apologies for being snippy.

Agreed on the definition of insanity.

It's no problem. Often times it's very hard to interpret ones intentions based on the printed word.

No kidding bro. Afghanistans have refused peace for centuries not decades. Let them run their own country their way. We can’t force peace down their throats.

I don't know anyone arguing for us to do that. What I hear is an uproar over what looks like poor/inept planning and a complete mishandling of this military withdrawal. People deserve answers for that.

I agree with Biden's decision to pull out of Afghanistan.

However, there is no denying that the entire withdrawal operation has been majorly botched. We need answers for that.

And it looks really bad if you go back and listen to Biden's press conference on July 8th. He either straight-up lied, or he didn't listen to his intelligence reports. Either way, it looks really bad, and puts America in a bad light.

How can other countries trust us? How can people on the fence about getting the vaccine trust Biden, when he straight-up lied and said it wasn't a foregone conclusion that the Taliban would takeover when the US withdrew? Definitely not transparent, and definitely not a good look, especially during these uncertain times.