Afganistan

[BackInTex]

Not an answer to my question. How would you have managed the situation differently? --Bob

For starters, get civilians, allies and weaponry out BEFORE the military.
Forget stock in burquas - I'm buying stock in chiropractic practices. The gymnastics you peeps on the left will need to do to justify Sleepy Joe's 'presidency' will make that a bull market.

Do you have a clue how long that would take? Because just getting the people out, much less the equipment, is going to take months, and that's cramming thousands of people at a time into our largest planes.

You might want to check out what Seth Moulton and Peter Meijer said after returning from Afghanistan. Both of them changed their mind as a result of that trip. They had thought President Biden should delay our departure until after August 31. Once they actually saw the facts on the ground, they concluded that there was no way to make the evacuation work without cooperation from the Taliban, and the price of that cooperation would be leaving on August 31.

President Biden assumed (based on intelligence estimates that we'll probably never see) that the Afghan government would hold Kabul long enough to make the process more orderly. When Donny negotiated the withdrawal, I don't recall anyone here predicting that the Afghan government would collapse in a matter of days.

So if you want to take the extra months and months necessary to get all of that done, understand it's going to happen at the price of additional American casualties because the Taliban would resume shooting at us. Is that a price you're willing to ask American soldiers to pay? President Biden decided it wasn't. So what would we gain that you think is worth the extra American deaths we would have paid?

Like I said, carping is easy. Solutions are hard. --Bob

Bobby, back up several months first. Once it was seen how the Taliban was making moves (as reported on some media outlets that weren't focused on just the pandemic), plans should have changed, communication to the Taliban should have been tough and with meaning. I'm not a military expert, nor have I been privy to all of the intelligence the past 9 months, but I see the result and it is a disaster. I can't read or play music but I know when a performance sucks and when the performers are out of their league.

Americans are dead and Americans are trapped. Even Biden says the buck stops with him (first truthful thing he's said in years).

We lost 4 servicemen in Afghanistan last year. 4 in 366 days.

[tlynn78]

Not an answer to my question. How would you have managed the situation differently? --Bob

For starters, get civilians, allies and weaponry out BEFORE the military.
Forget stock in burquas - I'm buying stock in chiropractic practices. The gymnastics you peeps on the left will need to do to justify Sleepy Joe's 'presidency' will make that a bull market.

Do you have a clue how long that would take? Because just getting the people out, much less the equipment, is going to take months, and that's cramming thousands of people at a time into our largest planes.

You might want to check out what Seth Moulton and Peter Meijer said after returning from Afghanistan. Both of them changed their mind as a result of that trip. They had thought President Biden should delay our departure until after August 31. Once they actually saw the facts on the ground, they concluded that there was no way to make the evacuation work without cooperation from the Taliban, and the price of that cooperation would be leaving on August 31.

President Biden assumed (based on intelligence estimates that we'll probably never see) that the Afghan government would hold Kabul long enough to make the process more orderly. When Donny negotiated the withdrawal, I don't recall anyone here predicting that the Afghan government would collapse in a matter of days.

So if you want to take the extra months and months necessary to get all of that done, understand it's going to happen at the price of additional American casualties because the Taliban would resume shooting at us. Is that a price you're willing to ask American soldiers to pay? President Biden decided it wasn't. So what would we gain that you think is worth the extra American deaths we would have paid?

Like I said, carping is easy. Solutions are hard. --Bob

Except, until today, there'd been no US casualties in Afghanistan this year. And don't kid yourself that Biden decided anything.

[silverscreenselect]

For starters, get civilians, allies and weaponry out BEFORE the military.

The Afghan President Ghani asked Biden specifically NOT to do that during his last trip to Washington in June, fearing it would lead to a loss of confidence in his government.

[tlynn78]

For starters, get civilians, allies and weaponry out BEFORE the military.

The Afghan President Ghani asked Biden specifically NOT to do that during his last trip to Washington in June, fearing it would lead to a loss of confidence in his government.

Well, that's so much more important than the lives of our servicemembers.

[silverscreenselect]

Once it was seen how the Taliban was making moves (as reported on some media outlets that weren't focused on just the pandemic), plans should have changed, communication to the Taliban should have been tough and with meaning.

When Biden took over, our troop strength in Afghanistan was 2,500, Trump had agreed to a May 1 pullout date, and we had no real plan of withdrawal by May 1 or ever. Biden postponed that while he reviewed the situation and in April extended the date to August 31. The plan was to allow an orderly turnover of US bases and assets to Afghan troops. Obviously, that didn't happen. But the problem Biden faced was that with so few troops left in country, we really couldn't get too tough with the Taliban on our own unless we were willing to send a lot more troops back in.

What happened was bad, no question, and some things could have been done better. But unless we decided to change plans and send heavy troops back in, we were always going to face this, and the fact is that the Taliban held off on assaults on US troops that could have made our mission a lot worse.

[silverscreenselect]

For starters, get civilians, allies and weaponry out BEFORE the military.

The Afghan President Ghani asked Biden specifically NOT to do that during his last trip to Washington in June, fearing it would lead to a loss of confidence in his government.

Well, that's so much more important than the lives of our servicemembers.

Once we started a large scale evacuation, we would have encountered the same situation we face now, except that our troops would have been stretched even thinner.

[Bob78164]

For starters, get civilians, allies and weaponry out BEFORE the military.

The Afghan President Ghani asked Biden specifically NOT to do that during his last trip to Washington in June, fearing it would lead to a loss of confidence in his government.

Well, that's so much more important than the lives of our servicemembers.

If he'd done that, this mess would have happened months earlier, but it would have been the same mess.

It's one thing to know that a symphony sucks if you've heard it played well. But there are an awful lot of very knowledgeable people saying that getting out of Afghanistan was always going to be a godawful mess. And so far, we're getting it done without the Taliban shooting at Americans.

Or perhaps you'd rather handle things like Donny handled the Kurds -- abandoning people who put their lives at risk to help American interests. Perhaps you're on the side of the Republican politicians who are saying we shouldn't accept those Afghans. I, for one, think that when we ask people to put their lives at risk to help American interests and they do so, then we owe them a debt, and one that's worth risking American lives to repay. Maybe you disagree.

We're getting people out of Afghanistan, and we're doing it really, really fast. I read that yesterday (or maybe the day before) we evacuated more people in a single day than we evacuated in total from Saigon. And so far, we're doing it without the Taliban shooting at us. That'll change if we stay past the end of August. --Bob

[tlynn78]

The Afghan President Ghani asked Biden specifically NOT to do that during his last trip to Washington in June, fearing it would lead to a loss of confidence in his government.

Well, that's so much more important than the lives of our servicemembers.

If he'd done that, this mess would have happened months earlier, but it would have been the same mess.

It's one thing to know that a symphony sucks if you've heard it played well. But there are an awful lot of very knowledgeable people saying that getting out of Afghanistan was always going to be a godawful mess. And so far, we're getting it done without the Taliban shooting at Americans.

Or perhaps you'd rather handle things like Donny handled the Kurds -- abandoning people who put their lives at risk to help American interests. Perhaps you're on the side of the Republican politicians who are saying we shouldn't accept those Afghans. I, for one, think that when we ask people to put their lives at risk to help American interests and they do so, then we owe them a debt, and one that's worth risking American lives to repay. Maybe you disagree.

We're getting people out of Afghanistan, and we're doing it really, really fast. I read that yesterday (or maybe the day before) we evacuated more people in a single day than we evacuated in total from Saigon. And so far, we're doing it without the Taliban shooting at us. That'll change if we stay past the end of August. --Bob

There's an awful lot of experts saying it's been utterly bungled.

[BackInTex]

Once it was seen how the Taliban was making moves (as reported on some media outlets that weren't focused on just the pandemic), plans should have changed, communication to the Taliban should have been tough and with meaning.

When Biden took over, our troop strength in Afghanistan was 2,500, Trump had agreed to a May 1 pullout date, and we had no real plan of withdrawal by May 1 or ever. Biden postponed that while he reviewed the situation and in April extended the date to August 31. The plan was to allow an orderly turnover of US bases and assets to Afghan troops. Obviously, that didn't happen. But the problem Biden faced was that with so few troops left in country, we really couldn't get too tough with the Taliban on our own unless we were willing to send a lot more troops back in.

What happened was bad, no question, and some things could have been done better. But unless we decided to change plans and send heavy troops back in, we were always going to face this, and the fact is that the Taliban held off on assaults on US troops that could have made our mission a lot worse.

The Taliban held off until they saw weakness. And the weakness has been confirmed.

[BackInTex]

We're getting people out of Afghanistan, and we're doing it really, really fast. I read that yesterday (or maybe the day before) we evacuated more people in a single day than we evacuated in total from Saigon. And so far, we're doing it without the Taliban shooting at us. That'll change if we stay past the end of August. --Bob

I've seen this movie before Joseph Cotten was more convincing.

[silverscreenselect]

US military conducts airstrike against ISIS-K planner

The US has conducted an airstrike against an ISIS-K planner, US Central Command said in a statement Friday. "U.S. military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today against an ISIS-K planner. The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan," spokesman Capt. Bill Urban said. "Initial indications are that we killed the target. We know of no civilian casualties," Urban continued.

I'm always a bit skeptical about reports like this coming at a very convenient time for any President, but the lack of any blowback from the Taliban would seem to indicate that whoever they hit wasn't some poor schnook driving in the wrong place at the wrong time or a Taliban soldier. How high level this individual was happens to be a different question, one that we'll probably never know for sure.