Afghanistan: All that the U.S. Accomplished in 20 years with thousands of Casualties and over a $Trillion in Investment Will Fall to the Taliban Within a Few months.

[abw0004 10,125]

It is sad to see for sure.  But this blame falls on both the Trump and Biden administration for how the pullout was handled.  

[DKW 86 7,431]

Leaving Vietnam and Afghanistan are horrible things in American History, horrible and the correct thing to do.

If the people there wont mount their own defense of themselves and country, then why should we be there defending it with our military, money, and blood?

Trump and Biden are in actuality correct. Bush43 and Obama were wrong to stay as long as we did.

Edited August 17, 2021 by DKW 86

[DKW 86 7,431]

1 hour ago, TexasTiger said:

Yep. Once started, no President wanted these images during their term— so it just kept going. 20 more years would have made no difference.

I actually have deep respect for Biden and Nixon for taking one for the team AND DOING THE CORRECT THING.

[CoffeeTiger 5,135]

Wow, My title to this thread really aged like milk here. 

We thought Afghanistan's government might hold out for months, and they couldn't even hold a week. 

 

The videos of people clinging to and falling from U.S. military planes taking off from Kabul is sad. 

Also have to feel terrible for all the U.S. families and soldiers who lost their lives, suffered injuries, and live with PTSD from this conflict.  

A lot of suffering and loss...for what? It lasted a week or two before the same group we "defeated" 20 years ago is back in power. 

[CoffeeTiger 5,135]

28 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

I actually have deep respect for Biden and Nixon for taking one for the team AND DOING THE CORRECT THING.

I agree. Biden did what needed to be done 100%

 

Biden and our military officials do deserve some criticism for what seems to be their VAST overestimation of Afghanistan's government and military capabilities. 

 

[AU9377 4,979]

41 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

Leaving Vietnam and Afghanistan are horrible things in American History, horrible and the correct thing to do.

If the people there wont mount their own defense of themselves and country, Then why should we be there defending it with our military, money, and blood?

Trump and Biden are in actuality correct. Bush43 and Obama were wrong to stay as long as we did.

I totally agree.

[AU9377 4,979]

I heard the argument made this morning that we "walked away from our strongest ally in the region" while Pakistan has nuclear weapons.  First, India is our strongest ally in the region. Second, Afghanistan was an ally in the way that a bully has friends.  They were an ally because we set up a puppet government and pretended that regular Afghans wanted us there.  That was clearly not the case.

[CoffeeTiger 5,135]

Interesting tidbit, one of the top leaders of the Taliban and Afghanistan's potential next ruler is Mullah Baradar, who the US and Pakistan captured in 2010, but was released back to the Taliban via a request from the Trump administration in 2018.  

 

[DKW 86 7,431]

55 minutes ago, CoffeeTiger said:

I agree. Biden did what needed to be done 100%

 

Biden and our military officials do deserve some criticism for what seems to be their VAST overestimation of Afghanistan's government and military capabilities. 

Agreed, but that is more on the military than him. The Afhgan Army was never anything. They cant fight. They do not have the stomache for it

Edited August 16, 2021 by DKW 86

[CoffeeTiger 5,135]

6 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

Agreed, but that is more on the military than him. The Afhgan Army was never anything. They cant fight. Thamey do not have the stomache for it

Yep, a good article on Washington post about how US Military leaders have been misleading the Public (and possibly our leaders?) for a long time in regards to how combat ready and effective Afghanistan's army would be. 

says 90+% of the Afghan soldiers couldn't read, count, and didn't know their colors when they enlisted. Obama's administration expanded the Afghan army from 200k to 300k when we couldn't even effectively train the original 200k....The entire Afghan military was illiterate, poorly trained, and was just showing up for a paycheck from the U.S. We were trying to organize the Afghan military into a US style military structure and it just wasn't working. Our military didn't know how to adapt or try new things apparently. 

They were never going to fight against the Taliban once America left. 

Edited August 16, 2021 by CoffeeTiger

[TexasTiger 12,964]

2 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

I actually have deep respect for Biden and Nixon for taking one for the team AND DOING THE CORRECT THING.

Nixon waited until he was re-elected. Huge losses on his watch.

[DKW 86 7,431]

1 hour ago, TexasTiger said:

Nixon waited until he was re-elected. Huge losses on his watch.

He still took the hit and did the right thing.

[TexasTiger 12,964]

ICHY’s a bit incoherent in his responses today. 😉

[creed 1,641]

Based on how the current Afghan nation has responded to the Taliban I think we got played big time. Now the Taliban has good American made military equipment and our US$$$ funded by our taxes. Since all this was bi-partisan everyone can be pissed at their party of choice. Better yet, I think we should demand a freaking refund for this cluster.

[around4ever 4,139]

In addition to the military equipment left behind for the taliban, we trained 300,000 Afghan soldiers who will be fighting for the Taliban now. 
A question I have is how many taliban soldiers are getting on these jets taking off every few minutes from the airport?  There is no vetting.  They will be in the US in days. 

[SaturdayGT 719]

Well thank god for our border security now that the Taliban have expanded into a country! ...I mean... can you imagine the revenge the Taliban would want on the USA?...not on Biden watch!...hes got Cuba locked down tighter than his neighbors kids chastity belts!

[woodford 3,660]

Interventionism fails. Always. 

[SaturdayGT 719]

20 minutes ago, woodford said:

Interventionism fails. Always. 

Exit strategies have a shot tho..

[homersapien 11,393]

The 1 Thing That Could’ve Changed the War in Afghanistan

David Frum

Had Osama bin Laden been killed or captured in December 2001, justice would have been served in the way Americans like: fast, hard, and cheap.

Had the United States caught and killed Osama bin Laden in December 2001, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would have faded away almost immediately afterward. I cannot prove that. It’s only an opinion from my vantage point as one of President George W. Bush’s speechwriters in 2001 and 2002.

Yet I strongly believe it. The U.S. stayed for 20 years in Afghanistan because first Bush and then his successors got trapped in a pattern of responding to past failures by redoubling future efforts. In the fall of 2001, the U.S. mission in Afghanistan was clear, limited, and achievable: find and kill bin Laden. After bin Laden escaped, that mission escalated into something hazy and impossibly difficult: to rebuild Afghanistan’s society and remodel the Afghan state.

Had U.S. forces succeeded against bin Laden in 2001, justice would have been served in the way Americans like: fast, hard, and cheap. Republicans could have campaigned in the elections of 2002 as the winners of a completed war—and pivoted then to domestic concerns. Remember, if George W. Bush learned one single lesson from his father’s presidency, it was that even the most overwhelming military success does not translate into reelection. In November 1992, the elder Bush won 37 percent of the vote against a Democratic nominee who had opposed the triumphant Gulf War.

Bin Laden’s survival doomed any idea of pivoting back to domestic concerns. Without a kill or capture of bin Laden to show, the swift overthrow of the Taliban government seemed very much a consolation prize.

The road opened to the Iraq War.

Again, this is only one man’s opinion, but I don’t believe Bush was yet committed to a ground war against Saddam Hussein when he delivered his “Axis of Evil” speech in January 2002. That speech identified Iraq’s weapons potential as a deadly serious security threat. It said the same of Iran’s and North Korea’s weapons potential, and Bush had no intention of fighting either of them. There were and are many ways to address weapons potential short of a ground war, whether sanctions or sabotage or air strikes.

Yet in the year after that speech, the decision for war coalesced. Something had to be done against Islamic terrorism that was not Afghanistan; the Iraq War became that something. A strange dichotomy split the U.S. foreign-policy elite. Prominent figures in the Bush administration—Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—wished fiercely to escape Afghanistan. This wish was partly because of their determination to finish off Saddam Hussein, but it was also a policy preference in its own right. (For what little it’s worth, that’s how I personally felt at the time: However steep the odds against a stable future for Iraq, that urbanized and literate country was a more promising terrain for U.S. strategic goals than hopeless Afghanistan.)

The logic that impelled Bush toward Iraq operated in reverse to impel his Democratic opponents deeper and deeper into Afghanistan. I doubt that either John Kerry or Barack Obama would independently have selected a ground war in Afghanistan as a sound foreign-policy undertaking. But having arraigned Iraq as the wrong war in the wrong place against the wrong enemy, they backed themselves into identifying Afghanistan as the right war in the right place against the right enemy.

It became Democratic Party doctrine to demand more and more for Afghanistan. Thus the Democratic platform in 2004 urged: “We must expand NATO forces outside Kabul. We must accelerate training for the Afghan army and police. The program to disarm and reintegrate warlord militias into society must be expedited and expanded into a mainstream strategy. We will attack the exploding opium trade ignored by the Bush Administration by doubling our counter-narcotics assistance to the Karzai Government and reinvigorating the regional drug control program.”

America’s Iraq-skeptical allies likewise committed more and more to Afghanistan. In January 2002, they pledged a comparatively modest $4.5 billion over five years to Afghan reconstruction, a little less than $1 billion a year. By 2004, they had doubled that rate of annual spend to $7 billion over three years.

Barack Obama had been even more against the Iraq War than John Kerry had been—and so the logic of “do something” pushed him to be even more in favor of the Afghanistan War than Kerry had been. In February 2009, President Obama approved a surge of 17,000 additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan. He ordered 30,000 more in December. Almost 65,000 U.S. personnel were deployed in the country by the end of his first term.

What were those troops in Afghanistan to do? It became progressively harder to say. America’s most important partner in Afghanistan was adjoining Pakistan. Without some cooperation from Pakistan, military operations inside Afghanistan could not be sustained. Yet at the same time, Pakistan was also the deadliest and most implacable enemy of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan—the ultimate patron of the Taliban against whom the United States was fighting. When bin Laden was finally killed, he was killed in Pakistan, where somebody had been hiding him for many years.

In 2001, bin Laden’s death would have concluded the war. By 2011, it concluded nothing.

Like President Obama, President Trump began his administration by deploying more troops to Afghanistan. By the end of his first term, Trump was looking for an exit at almost any price. The price he paid was a deal with the Taliban: final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after the 2020 election in exchange for a Taliban commitment not to inflict U.S. casualties before the 2020 election. Trump collected his political benefit—his boast of at least ending the “endless war”—while bequeathing an ugly dilemma to his successor: Renege on the Trump deal and relaunch a shooting war? Or stick with the Trump deal, accept the collapse of the Kabul government, and suffer ferocious pro-Trump abuse for continuing Trump’s own policy?

What’s coming next in Afghanistan will be grim and gruesome. What the U.S. can mitigate, it should mitigate, especially by helping those who helped U.S. forces and the international community. But in the cold calculus of state power, the impact upon the U.S. will likely be much less than many now worriedly anticipate. The U.S. smashed the military power first of al-Qaeda, then the Islamic State. Opinion surveys suggest that Islamic extremism is subsiding in the Arab Middle East and North Africa. Bin Laden relocated to Afghanistan as a safe haven to fight for control of the Saudi state. But the strategic significance of the Middle East is also likely soon to subside. World oil consumption will likely peak sometime in this current decade, then decline. The U.S. and other developed countries are moving especially rapidly into a post-petroleum future. Even to the extent that they continue to burn oil, that oil will come from many more sources than in the past. The U.S. has been a net exporter of oil for nearly a decade now. Bin Laden’s vision of Afghanistan as the launching place for a world caliphate looks even stranger now than it did 20 years ago.

Instead, getting out of Afghanistan liberates the U.S. to confront more directly the security challenge presented by the Pakistani state’s support for regional and global jihadism. Since 9/11, the U.S. has developed new ways to strike terrorist enemies while putting fewer of its own military personnel at risk. The U.S. can exact very severe retribution against the new rulers of Afghanistan if they decide to return to the business of harboring anti-U.S. jihadis.

Maybe the most important lesson to take from the outcome in Afghanistan is the steep strategic cost of America’s fierce partisan polarization. Decisions in Afghanistan by Republicans and Democrats alike were driven much more by domestic political competition than by realities inside Afghanistan. George W. Bush couldn’t afford to quit Afghanistan when he should have, early in 2002. John Kerry and Barack Obama were compelled to overpromise about Afghanistan despite their own misgivings. Donald Trump backdated a debacle because he wanted a seemingly cheap win for 2020.

Through the Cold War, the U.S. found methods to manage foreign policy that rose above party. Since 1990, the U.S. has succeeded less well at this essential nonpartisan task, and in the 21st century, even worse than that.

We are surely headed to another vicious round of foreign-policy partisanship after the fall of Kabul. For five years, pro-Trump voices have championed protectionism, isolationism, and the betrayal of allies such as Estonia, Montenegro, and the Syrian Kurds. Trump himself envisioned U.S. foreign policy as more or less a protection racket, with payments due from aspiring U.S. partners both to the United States Treasury and to his own enterprises. Now those advocates of a predatory “America Alone” will try to retcon themselves as defenders of U.S. strength and leadership.

Over the next weeks, pro-Trump critics of Biden will astonish the world with their shamelessness, as they convert from attacks on endless wars to laments for the last helicopter out of Saigon. That shamelessness will prove more effective than it deserves to—but less effective than it needs to. The brave lives lost in Afghanistan, the money squandered there: Those will haunt American society for a long time. But the new possibilities opened for the United States, the freedom of action recovered, the future waste now prevented—those will be realities too. The material, economic, financial, and moral assets that make America strong—the United States still possesses all of those. The domestic political dysfunction that leads to politics-instead-of-policy—that, and not the iconography of helicopters out of Kabul—that’s the weakness now to overcome.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/bin-laden-2001-end-war-afghanistan/619767/

 

 

Edited August 17, 2021 by homersapien

[SaturdayGT 719]

1 minute ago, homersapien said:

The 1 Thing That Could’ve Changed the War in Afghanistan

David Frum

Had Osama bin Laden been killed or captured in December 2001, justice would have been served in the way Americans like: fast, hard, and cheap.

Had the United States caught and killed Osama bin Laden in December 2001, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would have faded away almost immediately afterward. I cannot prove that. It’s only an opinion from my vantage point as one of President George W. Bush’s speechwriters in 2001 and 2002.

Yet I strongly believe it. The U.S. stayed for 20 years in Afghanistan because first Bush and then his successors got trapped in a pattern of responding to past failures by redoubling future efforts. In the fall of 2001, the U.S. mission in Afghanistan was clear, limited, and achievable: find and kill bin Laden. After bin Laden escaped, that mission escalated into something hazy and impossibly difficult: to rebuild Afghanistan’s society and remodel the Afghan state.

Had U.S. forces succeeded against bin Laden in 2001, justice would have been served in the way Americans like: fast, hard, and cheap. Republicans could have campaigned in the elections of 2002 as the winners of a completed war—and pivoted then to domestic concerns. Remember, if George W. Bush learned one single lesson from his father’s presidency, it was that even the most overwhelming military success does not translate into reelection. In November 1992, the elder Bush won 37 percent of the vote against a Democratic nominee who had opposed the triumphant Gulf War.

Bin Laden’s survival doomed any idea of pivoting back to domestic concerns. Without a kill or capture of bin Laden to show, the swift overthrow of the Taliban government seemed very much a consolation prize.

The road opened to the Iraq War.

Again, this is only one man’s opinion, but I don’t believe Bush was yet committed to a ground war against Saddam Hussein when he delivered his “Axis of Evil” speech in January 2002. That speech identified Iraq’s weapons potential as a deadly serious security threat. It said the same of Iran’s and North Korea’s weapons potential, and Bush had no intention of fighting either of them. There were and are many ways to address weapons potential short of a ground war, whether sanctions or sabotage or air strikes.

Yet in the year after that speech, the decision for war coalesced. Something had to be done against Islamic terrorism that was not Afghanistan; the Iraq War became that something. A strange dichotomy split the U.S. foreign-policy elite. Prominent figures in the Bush administration—Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—wished fiercely to escape Afghanistan. This wish was partly because of their determination to finish off Saddam Hussein, but it was also a policy preference in its own right. (For what little it’s worth, that’s how I personally felt at the time: However steep the odds against a stable future for Iraq, that urbanized and literate country was a more promising terrain for U.S. strategic goals than hopeless Afghanistan.)

The logic that impelled Bush toward Iraq operated in reverse to impel his Democratic opponents deeper and deeper into Afghanistan. I doubt that either John Kerry or Barack Obama would independently have selected a ground war in Afghanistan as a sound foreign-policy undertaking. But having arraigned Iraq as the wrong war in the wrong place against the wrong enemy, they backed themselves into identifying Afghanistan as the right war in the right place against the right enemy.

It became Democratic Party doctrine to demand more and more for Afghanistan. Thus the Democratic platform in 2004 urged: “We must expand NATO forces outside Kabul. We must accelerate training for the Afghan army and police. The program to disarm and reintegrate warlord militias into society must be expedited and expanded into a mainstream strategy. We will attack the exploding opium trade ignored by the Bush Administration by doubling our counter-narcotics assistance to the Karzai Government and reinvigorating the regional drug control program.”

America’s Iraq-skeptical allies likewise committed more and more to Afghanistan. In January 2002, they pledged a comparatively modest $4.5 billion over five years to Afghan reconstruction, a little less than $1 billion a year. By 2004, they had doubled that rate of annual spend to $7 billion over three years.

Barack Obama had been even more against the Iraq War than John Kerry had been—and so the logic of “do something” pushed him to be even more in favor of the Afghanistan War than Kerry had been. In February 2009, President Obama approved a surge of 17,000 additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan. He ordered 30,000 more in December. Almost 65,000 U.S. personnel were deployed in the country by the end of his first term.

What were those troops in Afghanistan to do? It became progressively harder to say. America’s most important partner in Afghanistan was adjoining Pakistan. Without some cooperation from Pakistan, military operations inside Afghanistan could not be sustained. Yet at the same time, Pakistan was also the deadliest and most implacable enemy of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan—the ultimate patron of the Taliban against whom the United States was fighting. When bin Laden was finally killed, he was killed in Pakistan, where somebody had been hiding him for many years.

In 2001, bin Laden’s death would have concluded the war. By 2011, it concluded nothing.

Like President Obama, President Trump began his administration by deploying more troops to Afghanistan. By the end of his first term, Trump was looking for an exit at almost any price. The price he paid was a deal with the Taliban: final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after the 2020 election in exchange for a Taliban commitment not to inflict U.S. casualties before the 2020 election. Trump collected his political benefit—his boast of at least ending the “endless war”—while bequeathing an ugly dilemma to his successor: Renege on the Trump deal and relaunch a shooting war? Or stick with the Trump deal, accept the collapse of the Kabul government, and suffer ferocious pro-Trump abuse for continuing Trump’s own policy?

What’s coming next in Afghanistan will be grim and gruesome. What the U.S. can mitigate, it should mitigate, especially by helping those who helped U.S. forces and the international community. But in the cold calculus of state power, the impact upon the U.S. will likely be much less than many now worriedly anticipate. The U.S. smashed the military power first of al-Qaeda, then the Islamic State. Opinion surveys suggest that Islamic extremism is subsiding in the Arab Middle East and North Africa. Bin Laden relocated to Afghanistan as a safe haven to fight for control of the Saudi state. But the strategic significance of the Middle East is also likely soon to subside. World oil consumption will likely peak sometime in this current decade, then decline. The U.S. and other developed countries are moving especially rapidly into a post-petroleum future. Even to the extent that they continue to burn oil, that oil will come from many more sources than in the past. The U.S. has been a net exporter of oil for nearly a decade now. Bin Laden’s vision of Afghanistan as the launching place for a world caliphate looks even stranger now than it did 20 years ago.

Instead, getting out of Afghanistan liberates the U.S. to confront more directly the security challenge presented by the Pakistani state’s support for regional and global jihadism. Since 9/11, the U.S. has developed new ways to strike terrorist enemies while putting fewer of its own military personnel at risk. The U.S. can exact very severe retribution against the new rulers of Afghanistan if they decide to return to the business of harboring anti-U.S. jihadis.

Maybe the most important lesson to take from the outcome in Afghanistan is the steep strategic cost of America’s fierce partisan polarization. Decisions in Afghanistan by Republicans and Democrats alike were driven much more by domestic political competition than by realities inside Afghanistan. George W. Bush couldn’t afford to quit Afghanistan when he should have, early in 2002. John Kerry and Barack Obama were compelled to overpromise about Afghanistan despite their own misgivings. Donald Trump backdated a debacle because he wanted a seemingly cheap win for 2020.

Through the Cold War, the U.S. found methods to manage foreign policy that rose above party. Since 1990, the U.S. has succeeded less well at this essential nonpartisan task, and in the 21st century, even worse than that.

We are surely headed to another vicious round of foreign-policy partisanship after the fall of Kabul. For five years, pro-Trump voices have championed protectionism, isolationism, and the betrayal of allies such as Estonia, Montenegro, and the Syrian Kurds. Trump himself envisioned U.S. foreign policy as more or less a protection racket, with payments due from aspiring U.S. partners both to the United States Treasury and to his own enterprises. Now those advocates of a predatory “America Alone” will try to retcon themselves as defenders of U.S. strength and leadership.

Over the next weeks, pro-Trump critics of Biden will astonish the world with their shamelessness, as they convert from attacks on endless wars to laments for the last helicopter out of Saigon. That shamelessness will prove more effective than it deserves to—but less effective than it needs to. The brave lives lost in Afghanistan, the money squandered there: Those will haunt American society for a long time. But the new possibilities opened for the United States, the freedom of action recovered, the future waste now prevented—those will be realities too. The material, economic, financial, and moral assets that make America strong—the United States still possesses all of those. The domestic political dysfunction that leads to politics-instead-of-policy—that, and not the iconography of helicopters out of Kabul—that’s the weakness now to overcome.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/bin-laden-2001-end-war-afghanistan/619767/

 

 

Lol..all you have to do is read the last paragraphs of homers c&ps to get the gist of the story...

[homersapien 11,393]

2 minutes ago, SaturdayGT said:

Lol..all you have to do is read the last paragraphs of homers c&ps to get the gist of the story...

Well, we shall see, right?

[SaturdayGT 719]

8 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Well, we shall see, right?

Well s***...that may depend on the rest of the story!! :p...

Nice one! Haha

[DKW 86 7,431]

7 hours ago, homersapien said:

Over the next weeks, pro-Trump critics of Biden will astonish the world with their shamelessness, as they convert from attacks on endless wars to laments for the last helicopter out of Saigon. That shamelessness will prove more effective than it deserves to—but less effective than it needs to. The brave lives lost in Afghanistan, the money squandered there: Those will haunt American society for a long time. But the new possibilities opened for the United States, the freedom of action recovered, the future waste now prevented—those will be realities too. The material, economic, financial, and moral assets that make America strong—the United States still possesses all of those. The domestic political dysfunction that leads to politics-instead-of-policy—that, and not the iconography of helicopters out of Kabul—that’s the weakness now to overcome.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/bin-laden-2001-end-war-afghanistan/619767/

 

 

**** the Republicans who pivot to the mindless criticism of Biden. We should NEVER have been there after 2003 or 2004. We should have left and not WASTED Time, Money, Lives. We have permanently damaged ourselves and our reputation by getting involved in a war we were never going to win. No one has ever won in Afghanistan. The country is poor as hell and too hard to hold. Who cares to hold a God-forsaken hole like Afghanistan with the worst culture in the world? Not the Russians, not the Chinese, only the dumbass Americans...well, no longer.

We have now tired the American people for another 10-20 years of war that may come to us the next time. What happens now if the Chinese seize Taiwan? We are not going back into another war any time soon. We just arent. The people are not going to support another military action for 10-20 years. We wasted so much money on a war that got us nothing. Our kids answered the call to support our govt's stupid ideas. They served nobly. But it was still a war for the MIC. They will no doubt be looking for another 20 year conflict to get involved with. They are addicted to the money. They want the money. They are going to get paid no matter what. Selling bombs to kill brown skinned people with is just too lucrative.

Edited August 17, 2021 by DKW 86

[TexasTiger 12,964]

3 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

**** the Republicans who pivot to the mindless criticism of Biden. We should NEVER have been there after 2003 or 2004. We should have left and not WASTED Time, Money, Lives. We have permanently damaged ourselves and our reputation by getting involved in a war we were never going to win. No one has ever won in Afghanistan. The country is poor as hell and too hard to hold. Who cares to hold a God-forsaken hole like Afghanistan with the worst culture in the world? Not the Russians, not the Chinese, only the dumbass Americans...well, no longer.

We have now tired the American people for another 10-20 years of war that may come to us the next time. What happens now if the Chinese seize Taiwan? We are not going back into another war any time soon. We just arent. The people are not going to support another military action for 10-20 years. We wasted so much money on a war that got us nothing. Our kids answered the call to support our govt's stupid ideas. They served nobly. But it was still a war for the MIC. They will no doubt be looking for another 20 year conflict to get involved with. They are addicted to the money. They want the money. They are going to get paid no matter what. Selling bombs to kill brown skinned people with is just too lucrative.

The decisions of the Dubya administration again proving to be absolutely catastrophic long term, and most of America enthusiastically cheered them on at the time. These were the early arguments I most engaged in when I joined this board. Here and in “real life” I had folks telling me I was weak and naive. Over the last 20 years I’ve watched my country devolve into something I don’t even recognize any more. Bin Laden was wildly successful. Very depressing to witness.

[DKW 86 7,431]

23 minutes ago, TexasTiger said:

The decisions of the Dubya administration again proving to be absolutely catastrophic long term, and most of America enthusiastically cheered them on at the time. These were the early arguments I most engaged in when I joined this board. Here and in “real life” I had folks telling me I was weak and naive. Over the last 20 years I’ve watched my country devolve into something I don’t even recognize any more. Bin Laden was wildly successful. Very depressing to witness.

I think most of the US was sold on the idea of not being in Afghanistan for long. I dont think anyone thought we would be there 20 years. We should have exited before Bush43s first term was up, but by then, Halliburton and others were making far too much money. The never ending military contracts....the never ending cash and profits, it was just so stupid. trump, has his blind squirrel moment and gets one thing right and Biden does the correct thing and gets out. There is no need to criticize Biden, He did what we had to have happen. it was going to end this way no matter how long we stayed.