As shuffle had said. There's no money in it for anyone with just a few thousand troops.

Most of the cow had been milked.

Maybe I'm wrong but feels like we'll just deploy more troops to keep a lid on Afghanistan, are we really going to let the Taliban just control it when the troop count needed there is so minimal?

Even though he was dealt a bad hand, Biden looks terribly weak and incompetent with the way this was handled. Especially given his soundbite where he scoffed at the idea that Kabul would be taken. He didn't even need to say anything like that.

The AMA not even being able to fight to keep their land for a few weeks is 1 of the most bizarre things I've ever seen in my lifetime. The second we leave, they just give up? That is mind blowing that no one could see that coming.

Probably worth noting Biden himself said, when he was running for office, that Americans should have enough presence to prevent the Taliban, Isis, and Al-Qaeda from re-establishing footholds.

And yes, we will be sending troops to the region.

There is no upside. It’s all wishful thinking and unwillingness to stare at reality in the face that carried this disastrous withdrawal through. Obama had a phase like this early on in his presidency as well… then he learned.

AOC and the Squad should be blamed for this among all the woke Dems. They adore Islamic principles and got what they wanted

What's wrong with you?

What's wrong with you?

What half of the country here likes to say everything went downhill when women got the right to vote?

What's the o/u until u.s. is back in there? I put it at 6 months. Biden has some of the same yahoos who "pulled" out last time

Define back. We will have commandos in Afghanistan within weeks.

What's the scenario for the US having boots on the ground again?
Videos of women getting stoned to death for showing some chin in public and the world guilting us into it?
Taliban cutting off the opium supply?

We'll for sure be bombing the place for the rest of our lifetime but I'd be surprised if Kabul is under foreign control again for awhile.

Al-Qaeda blowing up time square would do it.

Afghanistan as your terrorist homebase is so 1999.

45 actually

https://theconversation.com/the-worl...d-girls-165426

It didn't have to be this way. They should have evacuated the translators and anyone else who were embedded in the U.S. government before the final withdrawal. They seemed to have no plan here.

The big picture inevitability stemmed from that the money we were pouring into that country was going straight down a rat hole. It's been reported i the mainstream that the military and the government have been straight up lying to the American public about work being done there for years. Biden was supposedly involved in serious discussions of Afghanistan during the Obama administration but he probably doesn't remember a damn one of them.

Honest miscalculation.
If only Biden want part of the deep state. He could then blame the deep state.

Which was the name of the game, the more territory, the stronger the card. Now they have pretty much the entire deck.

But the veneer of government is important, even if the substance matters less. The Taliban will have countries they wish to have diplomatic and foreign relations with, and potential recognition. Pakistan, Russia and China comes to mind.

They are hardly civically minded in any kind of sense we would recognize, but they are not idiots. A lot of their power power must come from enough popularity that the remaining populace can be beaten into submission. Afghanistan is an ethnically, religiously and linguistically divided country, so clashes are coming. At the bare bones minimum they will have to deliver some stability and a minimum level of economic flow.

I hate to focus on politics during what currently amounts to a humanitarian crisis, but this seems disastrous for Biden. The fall of Saigon optics are terrible. Not sure how he can course correct on this.

Do the american public at large care about any of this? Like, at all?

Feel like the only way this harms biden is if a future terror attack on US soil can plausibly be linked to the fall of afghan govt

I disagree. This will be moderately harmful to Biden.

But there is no satisfying the American public on these sorts of issues. Isolationist rhetoric and "bring the soldiers home" rhetoric plays reasonably well to voters. But the people who are drawn to that rhetoric often imagine that U.S. withdrawal comes without consequences, which is almost never the case.

What the **** have they been doing there for 20 odd years when it can all be undone in the space of a couple of days?

This guy spits hot fire at our generals



This is a disaster. Biden and secretary Austin have an obligation to get in front of microphones and explain what the **** happened. Not ‘I stand by my decision’, they need to account for one of the greatest failures in us military history, going from pacified cities to pants around our ankles at a civilian airport. Explain to me why this happened.

And when he says the centcom commander should have planned for this he is absolutely correct. The secretary of defense is a former centcom commander.

An entire generation of generals abject failures and liars.

General Patreus took command of Iraq AFTER the Sunni tribes switched sides. His counter insurgency campaign did absolutely nothing to dislodge Shia militias who controlled the country then and control the country now. He made no strategic gains and we were kicked out of Iraq. His Sunni allies were overrun by/became ISIS. The army he trained crumbled.

But by that time he had failed up to command Afghanistan. No control of the country side. No strategic gains. Built an Afghan army that crumbled. Strategic failure.

So he naturally failed up to become the director of the CIA. Then cheated on his wife banging a journalist all the while leaving classified documents laying around his apartment.

He broke the uniform code of military justice, he broke the laws governing classified documents. No court martial. No disgrace from either military or personal failure. He failed up to the paid speaking circuit. So he can teach the next generation his lessons of leadership.

That’s been the career path for every general or rising colonel in 20 years of war. Battlefield failure no longer matters when evaluating the performance of battlefield commanders.

Not really, no. It's just another avenue for throwing shade at whatever political party you don't normally vote for.

As TeflonDawg would say: "Adapt or die, Afghanistan."

Based on what I have read, everyone knew that the withdrawal of U.S. forces -- whether it occurred now, six months from now, or two years from now -- would lead to encroachment by the Taliban.

The only question in the minds of knowledgeable people was the extent of Taliban rule and speed of the encroachment. Even Biden, it seems, was expecting that the Taliban would control a sizeable part of the country within six months or so.

I'm not sure why Biden thought this would occur more slowly and less completely than it did. And I would be very curious to know what he was being told by people on the ground re those points.

I don't know nearly enough about troop withdrawal to have any comments on execution, but I share the general sentiment that better execution than this must have been possible.

In the foreseeable future, I don't think we ever had a prayer of leaving Afghanistan in the hands of a functional, stable government that could maintain control over the entire country without U.S. support.

The real question for Biden was whether to resign himself to the prospect that U.S. troops would be in Afghanistan for his entire presidency. Telling the public that there was no timeline to withdraw would have been unpopular and contrary to what he said over the last two years, but it probably would have been the best decision.

About 80,000 translators and their families left behind