‘This Is Not Saigon. This Is Worse Than Saigon.’

[homersapien 11,388]

Why was the administration so slow to evacuate U.S. allies in Afghanistan trying to flee the Taliban?

 

By Russell Berman

The Afghans were not ready to leave.That was how President Joe Biden, in his address to the nation on Monday, tried to explain why his administration had not acted sooner, and faster, to evacuate America’s allies from Afghanistan ahead of the Taliban’s rapid march to Kabul. Many of the local partners who aided the U.S. military during its 20-year war—interpreters, activists, civil servants, and others—were “still hopeful for their country,” Biden said. He made no mention of another possible reason for the U.S. delay—a darker explanation whispered by Democratic members of Congress, aid workers, and even some administration officials in recent days: Was it politics? Did the fear of criticism from Republicans cause the president to

reject an influx of refugee who are now at grave risk? 

All Krish O’Mara Vignarajah knows is that Biden’s explanation rang false. Vignarajah, who runs a Baltimore-based resettlement agency called the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, told me she’s been inundated since the spring with pleas from America’s Afghan allies to help them escape. “We have been screaming from the rooftops that we need to get these allies out,” Vignarajah said. “The undeniable truth is that we had both the means and the time to save those in danger, and yet we’ve neglected to act in  any meaningful way.”

Eskinder Negash, the former director of refugee resettlement in the Obama administration who is now the president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, told me that Biden’s statement was “inconsistent” with what his group was hearing and seeing. “They’re pleading. They want to get out as soon as possible,” Negash said. The delayed evacuation has led to scenes of chaos and desperation at the airport in Kabul, reminiscent of the last-minute rush to leave Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, in 1975. “This is not Saigon,” Vignarajah told me. “This is worse than Saigon.”

The image of the final military helicopter taking off from the U.S. embassy is now infamous, but before and after South Vietnam fell, the U.S. managed to help 135,000 Vietnamese civilians flee to safety. By comparison, the Biden administration says it has relocated just 2,000 Afghan allies to the United States. As many as 80,000 Afghans are still in the pipeline of the Special Immigrant Visa program, Vignarajah told me, because the law allows qualified applicants to bring immediate family members with them. How many of them will be able to get out is unclear.

As of Monday afternoon, the U.S. military had taken over the Kabul airport, and Pentagon officials say they can evacuate as many as 9,000 people a day from Afghanistan. But although thousands have flooded into the airport, thousands more are now torn between making a risky journey to Kabul and hiding from the Taliban in their home, Vignarajah said. Last month, a longtime Afghan interpreter who worked for the U.S. was stopped at a Taliban checkpoint on his way to Kabul, dragged from his car, and beheaded on the spot, CNN reported. My colleague George Packer has reported on another would-be Afghan refugee who was murdered in retaliation for his work for the U.S. “The heartbreaking truth is that the Taliban knows who some of them are, and they will have to fend for themselves if the U.S. does not get them out,” Vignarajah said. In a statement, a White House official emphasized the backlog of more than 17,000 applications inherited from the Trump administration and said that it had conducted a “massive and complex interagency cross-governmental effort” to accelerate the processing of visas.

Calls for the U.S. to evacuate its Afghan allies began immediately after Biden announced plans for a swift military withdrawal back in April. Congress acted last month to help speed the notoriously slow application process and make more Afghans eligible for resettlement. Yet aid agencies and lawmakers alike were dumbfounded that the administration did not act with more urgency. A Democratic congressional aide working on resettlement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told me the White House never indicated that many Afghans were not ready to leave. The most charitable explanation I heard came from Negash, who said the administration “was genuinely surprised” at how fast Afghanistan fell. “It was not just an excuse,” he said. “I don’t think the administration expected this kind of takeover.”

Privately, however, multiple people who have spoken with government officials over the past several months told me they suspected politics played a role in the halting pace of evacuations. That shouldn’t be surprising. Biden’s predecessor rose to power by vilifying immigrants, and immigration remains a flash point of every modern presidency. From the moment Biden took office, Republicans criticized him for allowing asylum seekers who crossed the southern border from Mexico to remain in the U.S. while they awaited the adjudication of their cases. Though he ran on reversing the Trump administration’s hostility toward immigrants and refugees, Biden has hesitated to reverse some of his predecessor’s policies, most notably when he delayed for several months in raising the cap on refugee admissions that Trump had lowered. Already, prominent right-wing commentators such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, as well as former Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller, have warned against accepting thousands of refugees from Afghanistan. On Monday night, Carlson, who hosts the most widely watched cable-news program in the country, told his viewers, “First we invade, and then we’re invaded.”

Yet despite the howls from Trump loyalists, officials who work to resettle refugees say Afghan allies enjoy much broader bipartisan support than other endangered communities have in recent years, including migrants who have fled Central America and Syria’s civil war, specifically because they aided the U.S. war effort and because the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 is partly the cause of their plight. In many cases, they’ve also already been vetted by the military or U.S. intelligence agencies because of their work. Even Trump initially called for helping Afghans left behind, before backing away once his supporters turned against them. “It’s a moral imperative. It’s a national-security imperative,” Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat and an Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, told me. “And we have to send the message to the world that the American handshake matters.”

In the House, senior Republicans have joined Crow’s push to speed resettlements from Afghanistan. Several Republican governors, including the conservative Brian Kemp of Georgia, have offered to take in refugees. “We’re getting just an incredible amount of support, to be honest with you,” Negash told me. “I have never seen this before.” Offers to help have come pouring in. Negash said that as we were speaking on the phone, he received an email from Hyatt Hotels’ global director asking if the company could assist with refugees.

The biggest question mark in the refugee debate might be Biden himself. The president has, over his long career, repeatedly scoffed at the debt the U.S. supposedly owes to foreigners who risk their lives to help Americans in wartime, and at the notion that the U.S. should expend much effort to rescue them. I asked Crow, who has pushed the administration harder than any other Democrat, whether he believed Biden was truly behind the effort to save the Afghan allies.

“I’m not a mind reader,” he told me. “I don’t purport to know what the president of the United States or anybody else for that matter is thinking at any given moment.”

He quickly added a note that served as a vote of confidence in the president—and an extra bit of pressure to do right by the men and women trying to flee the Taliban. “I know President Biden to be a man of compassion, a man of heart, a man of integrity,” Crow said.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/biden-afghanistan-delay/619809/

Edited August 19, 2021 by homersapien

[AU9377 4,967]

Just my 2 cents. 

America has done more for the people of Afghanistan that consider themselves to be allies of the U.S. than anyone could have hoped for.  We keep hearing outrageous numbers ranging from 20,000 to 200,000 people that claim the U.S. promised to take care of them. Of those, why were there not even 20,000 willing to fight for their country after 20 years of protection and being on he payroll of the U.S.?  Let us not forget how we got there. The country was home to terrorist camps that trained some of those responsible for 9/11.  We justifiably attacked in order to degrade Al Qaeda and arrest terrorists. We had no responsibility to provide a safe haven for those Afghans that wanted to live in a country free from radical Islam.  Even so,in concert with NATO, we established a government structure and trained military personnel for over 20 YEARS.  We employed thousands of Afghans and paid them more than they had ever dreamed in order to secure their loyalty.  We provided military weaponry and civilian police vehicles, we opened schools for all children, built streets,built sewer systems and built interstate styled highways to get from one part of the country to another.  We built air-ports, a system of public transportation, radio stations and television broadcast stations.  Along the way, we convinced ourselves that the vast majority of these people really wanted to change and really wanted to improve themselves. After close to 2 trillion dollars spent and, more importantly, 2,312 U.S. soldiers' lives lost, we hand the keys to everything to these people.  What do they do?  They give up without a fight.  That should tell us something.  That should be a clear statement that the majority were never on our side in the first place.  The Taliban doesn't have advanced weapons, tanks, armored vehicles.  They rode into town on the back of crowded old Toyotas.  Nobody defended the government buildings or the Presidential palace.  All they did was leave the lights on for them and the doors unlocked.

There are some Afghans that we should and will assist in leaving.  That is by the grace of the American people. That does not mean that we have a duty to provide every 100,000 that want to leave a home, job, education, health care and a government check for the next decade.  If Americans had the same backbone as these people, we would have statues of Adolph Hitler in front of our elementary schools.  Freedom is not free.  My grandfather stormed the beaches of Normandy, France.  He sat in a fox hole with the dead bodies of 2 fellow soldiers for two days waiting on air support and praying that German tanks didn't get there first. He told stories about how the Germans in the countryside, in the last days of the war, would offer food to the the American troops if they had any.  The Germans hunted down members of the Nazi party long after the Allied troops had returned control to the citizens.  The idea that we owe Afghanistan some debt in perpetuity is just horse s***. Everyone that ever got a paycheck from the U.S. is not all of a sudden owed a new life.  A life they chose not to fight for, in part due to it being much less of a sacrifice to have it given to them.

[TitanTiger 20,499]

The exit here is a total clusterf***. 

And anyone who fought alongside our troops, helped as translators, or otherwise helped our military over there absolutely deserves our help getting out of there and to come to the US for resettlement.  You don't get to put people and their families' lives in danger by convincing them to assist you and that you'll have their back if s*** hits the fan, then bail on them at the end, leaving them at the mercy (lol) of the Taliban.

[RunInRed 16,430]

There's an interesting political dynamic that has emerged related to immigration for Afghans refugees.

[DKW 86 7,426]

Trump screwed it up screwing over the Kurds, just a few years ago..
We screwed it up with the Montagnards after Vietnam.

I am hopeful that we will not screw this up, although fixing it may mean staying a while longer.

[AU9377 4,967]

1 hour ago, TitanTiger said:

The exit here is a total clusterf***. 

And anyone who fought alongside our troops, helped as translators, or otherwise helped our military over there absolutely deserves our help getting out of there and to come to the US for resettlement.  You don't get to put people and their families' lives in danger by convincing them to assist you and that you'll have their back if s*** hits the fan, then bail on them at the end, leaving them at the mercy (lol) of the Taliban.

We have to define what help is.  Should that include anyone that received a check from the U.S. govt over the past 20 years in Afghanistan?  Is that 10,000 people, 100,000 people?  When in the history of the world has that been done?  Like I said, there are those that we owe protection, but that cannot include everyone that has been pro U.S. occupation over the past 20 years.

The country was a terrible place to live before we got there and it will be a terrible place to live after we leave.  The Russians couldn't fix it, the British couldn't fix it and we can't fix it.

Edited August 20, 2021 by AU9377

[tigeraddikt 1,611]

11 hours ago, AU9377 said:

Just my 2 cents. 

America has done more for the people of Afghanistan that consider themselves to be allies of the U.S. than anyone could have hoped for.  We keep hearing outrageous numbers ranging from 20,000 to 200,000 people that claim the U.S. promised to take care of them. Of those, why were there not even 20,000 willing to fight for their country after 20 years of protection and being on he payroll of the U.S.?  Let us not forget how we got there. The country was home to terrorist camps that trained some of those responsible for 9/11.  We justifiably attacked in order to degrade Al Qaeda and arrest terrorists. We had no responsibility to provide a safe haven for those Afghans that wanted to live in a country free from radical Islam.  Even so,in concert with NATO, we established a government structure and trained military personnel for over 20 YEARS.  We employed thousands of Afghans and paid them more than they had ever dreamed in order to secure their loyalty.  We provided military weaponry and civilian police vehicles, we opened schools for all children, built streets,built sewer systems and built interstate styled highways to get from one part of the country to another.  We built air-ports, a system of public transportation, radio stations and television broadcast stations.  Along the way, we convinced ourselves that the vast majority of these people really wanted to change and really wanted to improve themselves. After close to 2 trillion dollars spent and, more importantly, 2,312 U.S. soldiers' lives lost, we hand the keys to everything to these people.  What do they do?  They give up without a fight.  That should tell us something.  That should be a clear statement that the majority were never on our side in the first place.  The Taliban doesn't have advanced weapons, tanks, armored vehicles.  They rode into town on the back of crowded old Toyotas.  Nobody defended the government buildings or the Presidential palace.  All they did was leave the lights on for them and the doors unlocked.

There are some Afghans that we should and will assist in leaving.  That is by the grace of the American people. That does not mean that we have a duty to provide every 100,000 that want to leave a home, job, education, health care and a government check for the next decade.  If Americans had the same backbone as these people, we would have statues of Adolph Hitler in front of our elementary schools.  Freedom is not free.  My grandfather stormed the beaches of Normandy, France.  He sat in a fox hole with the dead bodies of 2 fellow soldiers for two days waiting on air support and praying that German tanks didn't get there first. He told stories about how the Germans in the countryside, in the last days of the war, would offer food to the the American troops if they had any.  The Germans hunted down members of the Nazi party long after the Allied troops had returned control to the citizens.  The idea that we owe Afghanistan some debt in perpetuity is just horse s***. Everyone that ever got a paycheck from the U.S. is not all of a sudden owed a new life.  A life they chose not to fight for, in part due to it being much less of a sacrifice to have it given to them.

This is a great post.  i have no idea what could be going on in the head of the person who down-voted this post.

[AuburnNTexas 7,151]

On 8/20/2021 at 3:45 AM, AU9377 said:

Just my 2 cents. 

America has done more for the people of Afghanistan that consider themselves to be allies of the U.S. than anyone could have hoped for.  We keep hearing outrageous numbers ranging from 20,000 to 200,000 people that claim the U.S. promised to take care of them. Of those, why were there not even 20,000 willing to fight for their country after 20 years of protection and being on he payroll of the U.S.?  Let us not forget how we got there. The country was home to terrorist camps that trained some of those responsible for 9/11.  We justifiably attacked in order to degrade Al Qaeda and arrest terrorists. We had no responsibility to provide a safe haven for those Afghans that wanted to live in a country free from radical Islam.  Even so,in concert with NATO, we established a government structure and trained military personnel for over 20 YEARS.  We employed thousands of Afghans and paid them more than they had ever dreamed in order to secure their loyalty.  We provided military weaponry and civilian police vehicles, we opened schools for all children, built streets,built sewer systems and built interstate styled highways to get from one part of the country to another.  We built air-ports, a system of public transportation, radio stations and television broadcast stations.  Along the way, we convinced ourselves that the vast majority of these people really wanted to change and really wanted to improve themselves. After close to 2 trillion dollars spent and, more importantly, 2,312 U.S. soldiers' lives lost, we hand the keys to everything to these people.  What do they do?  They give up without a fight.  That should tell us something.  That should be a clear statement that the majority were never on our side in the first place.  The Taliban doesn't have advanced weapons, tanks, armored vehicles.  They rode into town on the back of crowded old Toyotas.  Nobody defended the government buildings or the Presidential palace.  All they did was leave the lights on for them and the doors unlocked.

There are some Afghans that we should and will assist in leaving.  That is by the grace of the American people. That does not mean that we have a duty to provide every 100,000 that want to leave a home, job, education, health care and a government check for the next decade.  If Americans had the same backbone as these people, we would have statues of Adolph Hitler in front of our elementary schools.  Freedom is not free.  My grandfather stormed the beaches of Normandy, France.  He sat in a fox hole with the dead bodies of 2 fellow soldiers for two days waiting on air support and praying that German tanks didn't get there first. He told stories about how the Germans in the countryside, in the last days of the war, would offer food to the the American troops if they had any.  The Germans hunted down members of the Nazi party long after the Allied troops had returned control to the citizens.  The idea that we owe Afghanistan some debt in perpetuity is just horse s***. Everyone that ever got a paycheck from the U.S. is not all of a sudden owed a new life.  A life they chose not to fight for, in part due to it being much less of a sacrifice to have it given to them.

I don't disagree with your basic concept that we have done a lot for the Afghan people.  I also think the blame for the total collapse of the Afgahn military is on the Afghans, My problem is the withdrawal and the lack of planning.  We had depending on the different sources 10-20,000 Americans and large number of Afghan in country people whose lives are at risk because they helped us. I agree with Biden it was time to get out of Afghanistan but it needed to be planned in away to allow these people to get out.  You don't close Bagram Airbase and remove most of our soldiers prior to getting these people out. Biden's excuse his hands were tied because of the timeframe Trump had set was bogus because there were multiple things Trump did that Biden overturned so one more thing would not have mattered.  Leave Bagram open even re-enforce it for a short period of time.  This should have been done two months ago. Contact every American and tell them where to be and evacuate them while still in control and have the forces available. Give them a date for pickup and make it clear the date is not negotiable. Same thing with those that aided us.  After these people are out you close the embassy and then get the military out.  Worse case you have a few people who didn't listen not thousands.

There was no planning and no thought in the way the Biden administration did the pullout. Then to try and blame everybody but Biden and the White House staff is pitiful and downright disgraceful. 

[autigeremt 6,643]

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2021/08/20/bidens-pentagon-just-confirmed-hes-lying-n2594475?fbclid=IwAR2QOC9aS6O1uSlLfahZlI0HmyfDqJ70_JNGHTXTGzZtKh6Goeb-HycjapI

[AU9377 4,967]

1 hour ago, autigeremt said:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2021/08/20/bidens-pentagon-just-confirmed-hes-lying-n2594475?fbclid=IwAR2QOC9aS6O1uSlLfahZlI0HmyfDqJ70_JNGHTXTGzZtKh6Goeb-HycjapI

Did this happen?  Maybe or maybe not.  This article above is saying someone said that someone heard someone else say something.  Hardly an indictment.  My question would be what exactly that many Americans are doing in that God forsaken place still?  My guess is they are milking the situation for all it's worth.  Again, we have now flown over 10,000 people out of Afghanistan.  It may be closer to 15,000 after today.  We know that of those approx 4,000 are Afghans.  Italy has flown out another 2500 Afghans.  The UK has flown out around 4,000 and has committed to re-locate as many as 20,000 Afghans.  Is there an expectation that we evacuate every non Taliban resident of the country?  I certainly hope not.

[AUDub 11,153]

It's funny how hostile the media is being toward Biden about the withdrawal,  which is actually going quite well given the circumstances.

Guess they need something to do after Trump. 

[AUDub 11,153]

Kevin Drum's take

https://jabberwocking.com/the-biggest-military-evacuation-in-us-history-is-going-pretty-well/comment-page-1/#comments

Quote

The biggest military evacuation in US history is going pretty well

AuthorKevin DrumPublished onAugust 22, 2021 – 1:58 pm77 Commentson The biggest military evacuation in US history is going pretty well

I have had it with coverage of the Kabul evacuation. The plain fact is that, under the circumstances, it's going fairly well. Both Americans and Afghan allies are being flown out safely and bloodshed on the ground is surprisingly limited. Sure, the whole operation is going to take a few weeks, but what did everyone expect?

But you'd never know this thanks to an immense firehose of crap coming from the very people we should least believe. This includes:

• The hawks who kept the war in Afghanistan going for years with lies and happy talk, and who are now desperate to defend themselves.
• Republicans who figure this is a great opportunity to sling partisan bull****. Their favorite is that Biden has destroyed America's standing in the world, an old chestnut for which there's no evidence whatsoever.
• Trumpies trying to avoid blame for the execution of their own plan. It is gobsmacking to hear them complain about slow processing of Afghan allies when they were the ones who deliberately hobbled the visa process in the first place.
• Democrats who, as usual, are too damn cowardly to defend the withdrawal for fear of—something. It's not always clear what.
• Reporters who are sympathetic to all this because they genuinely care about the danger that the withdrawal poses for people they knew in Afghanistan.

The only real mistake the military made in this operation was in not realizing just what a terrible job they had been doing all along. Everything else flows from that. If the Afghan government had been able to hold off the Taliban for even a few weeks, everything would have been fine. But they didn't even try. Ghani just grabbed a few suitcases of cash and took off.

All by itself, this should tell you how hopeless the situation in Afghanistan has been all along. After 20 years, the Afghan military, even with plenty of warning about when we planned to leave, was unable, and in many cases unwilling, to fight. It's laughable to think that another few months would have made any difference. It's equally laughable to hear from the "light footprint" gang, who think that we could have kept a few thousand troops in Afghanistan forever and avoided any kind of fighting even after the Taliban cease-fire was over.

As for all the Americans being airlifted out, I suppose it's bad form to point out that they were told to leave months ago? If they had a lick of common sense most of them wouldn't be stuck in Kabul and elsewhere waiting to be rescued.

The sophisticated attitude these days is to say that, of course, we needed to leave Afghanistan, but surely we could have executed the withdrawal more competently? Maybe, but I'd like to hear the plan. The problems we've run into were baked into the cake long ago, and the actual evacuation itself has been run with courage and guts. "There's a whole nother story line that media could follow," Cheryl Rofer says. "The people who are working to keep the flights running, the people who get on the flights, the people who are helping others to get to the airport, the people who are running the logistics."

Amen to that. This is by far the biggest military evacuation in US history, and it's being handled surprisingly well. Maybe that will change tomorrow. Anything could happen. But so far the US media has been suckered into a narrative that's almost precisely the opposite of the truth. It needs to stop.

 

[AuburnNTexas 7,151]

2 hours ago, AUDub said:

It's funny how hostile the media is being toward Biden about the withdrawal,  which is actually going quite well given the circumstances.

Guess they need something to do after Trump. 

Going well people hanging onto an airplane and falling to their death. People being beaten trying to get to the airport having to bring in 6000 troops because there was no initial plan for an evacuation. They have had plenty to do after Trump like the Border, Inflation, etc. They ignored those things because they didn't want to make Biden look bad. This was so bad they couldn't ignore it. Finally Biden is getting some honest coverage and you are complaining about that. Five minutes after he finally has a few Press conferences his own people are correcting what he said, because to be honest he is not all there.

[AUDub 11,153]

9 hours ago, AuburnNTexas said:

Going well people hanging onto an airplane and falling to their death.

Hey that ******* sucks but you can't really reason with the desperate at all. 

9 hours ago, AuburnNTexas said:

People being beaten trying to get to the airport having to bring in 6000 troops because there was no initial plan for an evacuation.

 We had contingencies in place. Dated June 15th. 

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-speeds-visas-vulnerable-afghans-pullout-looms-congress-wants-more-2021-06-15/

It's a cluster**** because everything collapsed so damn fast, but after the Afghan army unexpectedly surrendered the entire country to the Taliban in 9 days we have evacuated roughly 1 out of every 800 people in Afghanistan with ZERO US CASUALTIES. 

Whether you want to admit it or not the ongoing evacuation is going very well. 

9 hours ago, AuburnNTexas said:

They have had plenty to do after Trump like the Border, Inflation, etc. They ignored those things because they didn't want to make Biden look bad. This was so bad they couldn't ignore it. Finally Biden is getting some honest coverage and you are complaining about that. Five minutes after he finally has a few Press conferences his own people are correcting what he said, because to be honest he is not all there.

Alright, wingnut.

This was never going to be pretty. There was literally no way to make it pretty. Biden is taking it on the chin but the people dishing the punches either didn't want to withdraw in the first place or are too stupid to realize they're being hoodwinked by a bad narrative. 

[AUDub 11,153]

18 minutes ago, AUDub said:

This was never going to be pretty. There was literally no way to make it pretty. Biden is taking it on the chin but the people dishing the punches either didn't want to withdraw in the first place or are too stupid to realize they're being hoodwinked by a bad narrative. 

Perfect 

 

[SLAG-91 1,483]

The "order" in which this exit has been conducted has been ham-handed at best and incompetent at worst.  That IS on the current administration.  It's like bringing one garbage bag to clean up after an Animal House frat party.

 

[AUDub 11,153]

16 minutes ago, SLAG-91 said:

The "order" in which this exit has been conducted has been ham-handed at best and incompetent at worst.  That IS on the current administration.  It's like bringing one garbage bag to clean up after an Animal House frat party.

 

Bah House Intel Chair just ham-handedly sticking up for the Intel community for their bad assessment. 1 to 2 years lol.

The word quick is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Quick is a few months, maybe a year. 10 days is the blink of an eye. There's literally no way to avoid chaos in that scenario, and that's what we're getting. There's also really no way to plan around it, so our guys and gals on the ground are making the best of a bad situation right now. Luckily what little contingencies we had in place seem to be holding up. We're successfully evacuating thousands of people around the clock and there has been very little violence directed our way in the meantime.

In fact, the worst thing the Taliban could do at this point is kill an American. They want us out as much as we want to be gone.

Let's get down to brass tacks. What would all of you guys that are suddenly foreign policy experts have done differently? 

[AUDub 11,153]

 

[DKW 86 7,426]

8 hours ago, AUDub said:

Bah House Intel Chair just ham-handedly sticking up for the Intel community for their bad assessment. 1 to 2 years lol.

The word quick is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Quick is a few months, maybe a year. 10 days is the blink of an eye. There's literally no way to avoid chaos in that scenario, and that's what we're getting. There's also really no way to plan around it, so our guys and gals on the ground are making the best of a bad situation right now. Luckily what little contingencies we had in place seem to be holding up. We're successfully evacuating thousands of people around the clock and there has been very little violence directed our way in the meantime.

In fact, the worst thing the Taliban could do at this point is kill an American. They want us out as much as we want to be gone.

Let's get down to brass tacks. What would all of you guys that are suddenly foreign policy experts have done differently? 

Thank you. 1) No one should trust one word Schiff ever says, see the WSJ article on that. 2) The Intel has been said by everyone to have been totally wrong, you know, like why and when we went into Afghanistan. 3) Folks, with all the money we have invested in Intel, we keep getting it wrong. For 20 plus years, have they gotten anything correct? Why are we listening to them anymore?

 

Edited August 24, 2021 by DKW 86

[DKW 86 7,426]

8 hours ago, AUDub said:

 

I would have kept everyone at Bagram and leaving from there until 8-31-21.

[AUDub 11,153]

7 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

I would have kept everyone at Bagram and leaving from there until 8-31-21.

Getting the people there is what was problematic. Bagram is, for all intents and purposes, out in the middle of nowhere and not really ideal for an evacuation point. We'd need a massive deployment of troops and materiel to even secure the 40 miles of highway between it and Kabul to boot.

Nearly everyone we need to evacuate is either in Kabul or in the area around it as well.

Then you got all of these idiots like Rothman seriously suggesting retaking Bagram. Yeah, no. We're currently in a tenuously negotiated ceasefire and are on pace to get nearly 6 figures worth of people out of danger. We seriously going to escalate by deploying 10s of thousands of troops to secure a road to nowhere and hope the Taliban doesn't mind?  

[autigeremt 6,643]

It's going...but not well. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but I do know what my brothers and sisters have been dealing with over there. I have three former battle buddies there now leading their soldiers through a very tense and poorly devised mission. 

 

[DKW 86 7,426]

1 hour ago, AUDub said:

Getting the people there is what was problematic. Bagram is, for all intents and purposes, out in the middle of nowhere and not really ideal for an evacuation point. We'd need a massive deployment of troops and materiel to even secure the 40 miles of highway between it and Kabul to boot.

Nearly everyone we need to evacuate is either in Kabul or in the area around it as well.

Then you got all of these idiots like Rothman seriously suggesting retaking Bagram. Yeah, no. We're currently in a tenuously negotiated ceasefire and are on pace to get nearly 6 figures worth of people out of danger. We seriously going to escalate by deploying 10s of thousands of troops to secure a road to nowhere and hope the Taliban doesn't mind?  

No, we are not retaking it. I dont think at all, But it would have eliminated the huge crowds that we see at the Kabul Airport.

[DKW 86 7,426]

12 minutes ago, autigeremt said:

It's going...but not well. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but I do know what my brothers and sisters have been dealing with over there. I have three former battle buddies there now leading their soldiers through a very tense and poorly devised mission. 

Bro, its been that way for 18 years or more. I know plenty of Vets on disability after this war. We should have left by 2003 or 2004 at the latest. 

[AUDub 11,153]

19 minutes ago, autigeremt said:

It's going...but not well.

No American soldiers killed with 60000 airlifted to safety is about as good as we could have expected given the circumstances. 

Quote

I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but I do know what my brothers and sisters have been dealing with over there. I have three former battle buddies there now leading their soldiers through a very tense and poorly devised mission. 

I mean there may be a legit criticism in basing plans on how long the Afghan government could have held out, but to suggest we should have expected the government to only last a hair over a week is pretty ham handed. 

It's clear now the Taliban had everything set up in the back channels for a quick victory and the Intel community blew it. As a result we get this shitshow. 

Edited August 24, 2021 by AUDub