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

So he knew about covid AND the Taliban... hummm.

The ending to Vietnam was botched.

The ending to Afghanistan was botched.

Maybe we should not be waging wars in countries that have puppet governments.

Seriously the whole premise was wrong. Go in kill Bin Laden and get out.

To try installing a functional government, let alone a democracy is crazy beyond belief.

History repeats itself again, and again.

I think the next time we go after some third world country we need to practice scorched earth, take no prisoners, smash mouth war... this nation building and pumping billions or trillions into fighting what amounts to a gnat is pure BS. Now I'm humane, so I don't like to see civilian casualties, but I also don't like the enemy thinking they can strap bombs on kids and hit us. So we need to find that speak softly and carry a big ass stick mentality in the next one or don't even bother going.

The problem is it is hard to tell civilians from soldiers anymore. When the fighters use civilians as a shield, it's hard to avoid.

Jc

It’s clear that some of y’all get your ideas of withdrawing out of a war from movies or tv, not actual real life.

Pulling out of an active war zone is ugly. Like, very ugly. If it was smooth and peaceful….then it wouldn’t be called a WAR ZONE.

I really hate pulling the captain obvious rhetoric but damn guys. We can’t be having complex discussions when people clearly don’t even understand the basics. And it isn’t just this topic but so many others.

I think my (and others) argument have also kinda morphed to include the "why were we there in the first place and for so long" argument. That blame is on quite a few admins.

Sorry man, that just sounds like a stinky excuse. War is messy, yes. But that doesn't excuse what we've seen with this withdrawal - like people trying to climb aboard airplanes that are taking-off and falling to their deaths. Billions of dollars of tax-payer paid military equipment in the hands of the Taliban.

It also doesn't excuse Biden lying saying it wasn't inevitable that the Afghan government would fall to the Taliban less than 2 months ago, when all intelligence reports said that it was inevitable.

it isnt an excuse, its reality.

the fact that there are people on the airfield while planes are trying to take off should let you know how useless any aspect of the afghan government or military really is.

hell, this should be PROOF that there was never a situation where we were gonna come out on top of this war campaign.

we got people who sneak into military bases in THIS country all the time, but somehow someway, seeing people in their own country run up into an airstrip in a war zone is somehow just mind blowing to you.

some of things you guys are saying just doesnt make a lick of sense.

For me, it's more the pulling of troops out just to send more back because a larger presence is needed to secure the evac. Pulling troops out just to send more back speaks to poor planning.

like the poor planning that started the moment we went into afghanistan in the first place?

im just trying to figure out what the moment was you guys decided that we went from good planning to poor planning when it comes to anything dealing with the middle east.

im reading these comments, and yall standards seem to be about as fluid as the gender studies lefties yall love whining about so much.

all i ever asked on this board: whats the standard? seems to change day by day.

maybe its my experience there, but i seem to be one of the few - if only - person on this board not surprised by literally anything going wrong right now.

i dont often agree with dude but he nails it. and i post this just in case people get the stupid notion that i think biden and the generals couldn't had done this a tad bit better.

some of yall are making military industrial complex driven arguments right now.

No idea who he is or what channel that is ... but I think he certainly nailed it. Many won't like it because of spending more time on how we could have done better with the withdrawal he focuses on the aspects of the decision that were correct. Anyway - thanks for posting.

lol... yes and fair point. I get the feeling from your post that the exit is required to be a poorly thought out as the entrance (?).

Where I think things went off the rails is pretty much what you said to begin with. Trying to go in there and control the government and help install a government. To support and prop up a government and build them a military.

That never ends well. And if Bush had explained that would be a part of our mission, Americans never would have supported it. We were told the mission was to marginalize Al-Qaeda and get Bin Laden. What we were told is that this was about 9/11 and nothing more.

But as per usual, that was only a small part of what this morphed into. (Insert military industrial complex here) As for the "Taliban ending up with U.S. weapons", what the hell did people think was going to happen? Did they think we were going to pack up all of our weapons on the way out the door? What did people think, we were going to go back into territory the Taliban had already won from the Afghans and continue the war to gather our weapons up? When in all of our nations history has that ever happened?

If they're military failed, their enemy would get the weapons. That's how it works in every war. Not only did their military fail, it rolled over and played dead.

And that's the thing, I will gladly listen to you about it. You were actually there. If anyone would know the dynamics, our people who served there would.

The false premise, was that al-Qaeda was allowed to be there by the existing Taliban government, so if we get al-Qaeda that is fine, but what about the next terrorist group? So the Taliban had to go.

But it did not. The puppet government was never able to support itself as a viable entity. It was not a government of the people, by the people and for the people, it was a corrupt shell of what the US thought that government should be. And a funnel for US money that was corrupt. It was viewed as a US installed government, and could not support itself.

As the saying go, we may have had the watch, but they had the time and waited us out.

We knew this from Vietnam. It's so painfully obvious. You can't fight a limited engagement war. If you are going to war, you need to destroy the enemy, and get out.

Agree with you. We need to go a step further. Our government does things the average man on US street knows nothing about.

An example, US Army and Marine Corps FM (Field Manual)- their bibles-manuals state the 2006
Army and Marine Corps Field Manual (FM)
3-24, Counterinsurgency, which placed stability
operations at the heart of the armed forces’
mission, and stated on its first page: “Soldiers
and Marines are expected to be nation-builders
as well as warriors.” I call BALONEY. We need to delete this manual...or change it VASTLY. We just spent trillions of dollars on a puppet government, ie nation building and our attempt lasted less than a month. We can't change cultures in 20 years that have lasted thousands.
It was the Presidents and generals fault and we should hold them accountable. Get out of nation building process...no, call it fairy tale. Contact your senators and representatives.
Peace.
I don't fault Biden, Trump correctly started it finally, and the exit was unknown obviously. Damn glad we lost less than 3000 rather than 58000. Wonder if we'll ever learn.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/u-s...N?ocid=msedgntp

I assume the president gets the intel and reads it or hears it in meetings. McConnell was in some of the briefings and heard of the situation. Was the president sleeping?

Funny isn't it. The same article written 9 months ago would have been laughed at and ridiculed. Not a single SOURCE named anywhere. Odd how that works for you.

Go back and read what I wrote about what intelligence was saying and what the military was saying. It was 2 days ago and a quote from the NPR guest. It sheds a more balanced light on things so maybe you don't want that.

CBS news...something wrong with them?

I want to see this deal that Pompeo and Trump cut with the Taliban that supposedly had Biden's hands tied. Have a feeling the Taliban used it to hold Biden's feet to the fire. That is about the only thing I can think of for why this was done so haphazardly.

And unlike many on here, I don't care who is to blame but I would like the facts. Right-wingers bashing Biden here only flies if this was not due to some crap Trump pulled before leaving. And the left needs to not go hard at Trump until we know what was behind the rush and the facts of the agreement. Pompeo in the pic at that Taliban meeting looks like he just sold us out IMHO. That guy is a douche.

I know something stinks with those 'negotiations' because we never negotiate with bad faith actors/terrorists... And before now, I would have never thought we would just hand Afghanistan back to the Taliban without a fight... I wish we knew the details and could follow the money to see if the Taliban paid Trump and or Pompeo... I know for me, something damn sure isn't adding up here.

? I take it this is for somebody else?

Listen to it yourself. Starts at about 36 seconds.

Biden says he had a choice: abide by the agreement to have troops out by May 1 - since that was the agreement Trump made......in other words, he's trying to say his hands were tied: He had to abide by the agreement.

Well, hello. He didn't abide by that, and any talk of him having his hands tied has been refuted by the simple fact the u.s. didn't leave on May 1.

The hands tied excuse is straight up BS anyway. Biden didn't have his hands tied with reversing anything else Trump had put in to effect. Get past your embarassment.

So what if Trump knew that the Taliban were consolidating power. If anything he ought to be given credit for accepting the reality that the Taliban returning to power was inevitable. Right? Everyone here agrees that there was no nation building to be done there. Everyone knew the Taliban were never destroyed.

The only thing left was to hold the dogs at bay while we helped U.S. citizens and Afghani allies who are likely to face retribution to get out of the country.

That's it. That's military ops centered around logistics.

It's not the agreement that brought us to this mess. Its lack of planning and execution because the people in charge have been too busy worrying about other non-sensical [censored].

Agree 100% ... provided we are only talking about the extraction/withdrawal. Which I think you are.

The planning and execution of the withdraw was terrible.

However, when we look at agreements from a political standpoint, which is what we've been programmed to do as of late. Things like The Paris Agreement on Climate Change, The Trans-Pacific Partnership, The Iran Deal, UNESCO, NAFTA as well as others we do begin to think of things in terms of politics.

That's never been how we looked at things from a historical point of view. Before, as well as it should be now, such agreements were agreements made by The United States of America

So you have a choice. You can try to paint every deal made according to which president made it. Or you can see them as The United states of America made a deal and it's our duty to live up to those deals.

You see, we had a guy who thought every deal made was a deal made to be broken. Our nation never worked that way before. Don't blame the next guy in line because we're going back to normal by keeping our deals.

Pit -

Do you really think, deal or no deal, the mess that is the extraction and the process was as good as it could have been?

Do you think the "agreement" was more important than doing this the right way?

I think the agreement is BS and an excuse. No reason whatsoever not to have planned and executed this better and over a longer period of time.

Did you bother to read my very first line in the above post you are responding to?

Allow me to repeat it for you in bold.....

The planning and execution of the withdraw was terrible.

I hope that clears it up for you.

When you make a statement and follow it up with a "but" or "however" - invariably the focus is on the second part of the message. That's how communication works - based on training and classes I have received. I think part one of the message is big enough to stand alone without any other factors. Maybe it's just me but it seems like in the post you are trying to put excuses in there. If that's not your intent then apologies.

That's how I interpreted his reply. There's large scale agreement we needed to pull out. Trump should get credit for getting that ball rolling. Biden should get credit for keeping to that intention when he easily could have reversed course an increased troop levels.

There is nothing about this situation that the Biden Admin was forced in to doing if they didn't want to do it. There might be an argument if this happened back in May, but even then they had months to create a workable plan. Swish pointed out correctly that what you plan doesn't usually look like what happens, but there is a difference between having a plan of action and not having a pan of action. See the Browns offense under Kitchens vs. Stefanski

It seems you don't recognize there are two separate issues at play here. One is an agreement made between The United states and the Taliban.

Issue one is should the deal our nation made have been honored? Is that deal something that should be considered political depending on who made it agreement, or a national agreement by The United States and honored as such?

The second part is how was the agreement was executed. How did the strategy or execution thereof play out and could a better job have been done? It was executed horribly and there is no, nor did I try to make excuses for that.

They are not one in the same. They are mutually exclusive. Now this time I mentioned them in reverse order so maybe that works better for you.

I agree with you on the over-arching basis of 'Deals aren't made with Presidents, they're made with the USA'. Just because there was a Presidential election doesn't give the current guy a free pass to flip the bird on the country's commitments. I don't think the reality is as black-and-white as that, though.

Where it gets hazy (for me, at least) is the idea of confronting bad deals. IMO, the best example of this is actually the Paris Climate accord. I know many won't agree with me here, but the no-go on the Paris Accord is how the US would be funding a portion of China's climate efforts (it's true, check it out). The USA is an (I believe it's called) Annex 1 country (basically a 'developed' country), and those Annex 1 countries are responsible for helping the non-developed countries with their climate efforts. China, in the Paris accord, is considered a non-developed country. So while companies continue to ship manufacturing over to those parts of the world because of their lax labor and environmental policies, we also have to pay for them to clean up their skies? That's a joke, and I can confidently say that until that part gets fixed, it's a no-go from me if I were sitting in his chair.

I was fine with the idea of the President (in this case, Trump) getting the US out of bad deals. I felt, as it was, Paris was one of those. I also think Trump went overboard on this and ended up creating bigger problems when trying to fix trade problems (ex. China Trade Wars).

I recognize it well and have stated that plainly.

It seems you don't recognize that communication is a two way street - when you say something, and someone interprets what you intended to mean differently, it's not the other person who is wholly at fault. It's why qualifying questions and verifying understanding is important.

I appreciate you qualifying.

And maybe you're getting somewhere closer to a point that I could actually agree with. Of course that kind of thing can happen when people hold a rational discussion. I think diplomacy is the strongest tool a nation has to iron things out. Especially when we hold all the cards in a trade deal. We have the most bulk consumers and drive the trade market. It's certainly better than using war as an option.

You certainly bring up a good point about The Paris Agreement. But diplomacy has methods and degrees of how you use it. First I think one has to try the pairing knife method. You point out things like you mentioned and try to renegotiate a better deal. You try to sit down with your global partners and hash things out.

Then there's the stomp your feet, throw a tantrum and use a chainsaw to cut the whole thing down from the very beginning method.

I prefer to see leaders act like leaders and use diplomacy to try and resolve issues rather than take a blow torch to things and burn them down.

Often time people see what they want to see. It's not the message being sent but the way someone receives that message. I have no problem clarifying it because I often times also see things in ways that are unintended.

Just an edit to add. What I try to keep in mind is that most of us didn't major in English. I understand that as such, it does become confusing at times to understand the intent of the thoughts people are trying to convey. To that extent I can see how you may feel it's in part the fault of the poster. I did however feel that separating my post into two separate paragraphs would help clarify I intended them as different issues. Sorry that wasn't clear.

Please don't show me that list again. I vomit instantly when I see those names.

I'm gonna be really honest... I almost deleted that whole last post a couple times. Trying to argue/articulate an idea (what should Presidents do about bad deals that they inherited) using examples that, while illustrating the point, are also full of holes (like taking your ball and going home like a toddler vs working the problem) isn't the easiest thing.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I do applaud Trump for basically saying "This sucks (ex. Paris Deal), and I don't want the US to be on the hook for it any more". The problem is that the way he handled most of those kind of undid most if not all the good to be had by addressing it.

I guess that was my main point/argument. Deals are made with the country, not the guy sitting in the chair. Sometimes that sucks, but it's just the way it is. Pulling out of bad commitments should be done with care. Diplomacy IS our greatest tool in international situations/conflicts, and reneging on previous commitments is a great way to ruin that tool.

You brought up an interesting dynamic. It seems like often times - as with your point on the Paris Accords - there is a legitimate reason to acknowledge a bad deal is a bad deal.

To your other point, it seems like when we recognize portions of something that need to be tweaked, rather than calling out the portion(s) that need(s) to be tweaked, we seem to encounter the scorched earth approach.