Afghanistan about to fall to taliban

i wonder how much $$$ Ghani was able to flee with.

It's pretty f***ed, but I truly don't think another two decades would change the situation. Massive failure on the part of the US though, from beginning to end really.

I don't think they (the world) will. I mean there will be the usual political mud slinging and defense and spinning of the whole situation, but I think the Western world is gonna be happy to be done with it and won't second-guess too much. There's already plenty of terrorist training grounds out there, what's one more in Afghanistan?

What I am really curious about is who will invade next. China? Maybe Russia take another crack at it?

What a waste. Thousands of people died for nothing, but hey, at least those military contractors made lots of money.

I remember and it was the right thing to do. Pulling our military out was the right thing to do. We were just wasting our military and tax payer money. I don't fault Biden for pulling our troops out, it is just he can't do anything right. As I posted before when are we going to get a leader in the White House. I can see a president getting something wrong. I can't abide a president getting everything wrong and the line of succession for Biden is even worse.

Lol and people voted for that clown. There blind hatred for trump results in Afghanistan falling months in under Biden administration so badly they can't even flee fast enough to safe there own skins.

Also i though biden and the left cared so much for woman, to protect them and give them equal rights and about black rights etc.

Guess what's going to happen in afghanistan to these people now? yea rip them.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1426660888874950658

What a morbid joke.

@Gatygun: You do realise that your cult leader signed for this?

@ghost_of_phobos: He signed for it, much like every president after bush that wanted to pull out, but they never did because this is the result u get.

Biden lost the entire control of Afghanistan and his 30 days still left remark showcases even further how incapable this guy is for his function.

The results will be absolute horrible, woman will die / enslaved / sex slaves overnight, gays will be killed, black people will be linched, anybody else that has a religion that isn't there's will be culled.

And not to forget the endless lists of people that supported the west are now going to get culled and killed because of this radical garbage that engulved the country.

And that all because of hippie idiots with purple hair and tabloit CCP state news media went full donkey on trump because he didn't bend the knee to idiots on social media that have no clue how the world spins.

Absolute disgusting.

Liberals in america went straight of the cliff and became ultra far right overnight.

Honestly every country in the EU should call for him to resign directly or cut ties with america entirely until a new president is elected.

And anybody connected with biden should be put on a terrorist list world wide and land locked into the US to never ever be able to get out of it.

@Gatygun: Afghanistan was obviously never under control, the regaining of control by the Taliban outside cities begun more than 10 ago and since 2017 they only became stronger. Trump as easy to manipulate as he was even went as far as negotiating with them.

It's not a right Vs left, or Reps Vs Dems. It's just a fucked up situation that crossed various administrations, started 20 years ago and no one had the balls to do it.

Ending the occupation of a foreign country is the right thing to do. There are better ways to help a nation than a military occupation, sell it for exploration, killing civilians, committing war crimes and electing a puppet government.

If the US/west could stop financing groups like the Taliban or the Islamic State, that would be the greatest help really.

Yup, the people who pull the strings of our government do not care if innocents die as long as they get their money.

Guess who was president when the withdrawal was deciding on? And people voted for that clown more than once.

you're right about it. Honestly it would have been BEST if we never stepped one foot in that backwater place, they had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on 9/11, it was mostly the saudis and a few egyptians who planned and executed it.

This failure is right up there with vietnam, another place we never should have stepped into. But I thought we would learn from this...leaving so half assedly that the taliban would take control in 1 month..what a damn joke. I would have thought that after 20 years of bombing the shit out of them, they'd be too weak to mount any kind of offensive. And another thing I have a problem with is that we have kept troops in japan for almost 80 years, whats so hard about keeping troops in afghanistan until the population as a whole becomes more moderate?

Please understand our President said the country would not fall into Taliban control. That's straight from the horses mouth by a four or five decade recipient of the public teat and it proves they never learn. People can bitch all day about who they blame but seeing those citizens grabbing onto American aircraft looks terrible for both Biden and the United States. IMO this is worse than Vietnam.

this could be bad news in 4 years time for biden. Trump doesn't even need to run, just keep bashing Biden on this disaster from the sidelines, and whichever republican runs (as long as hes half decent) will put Biden in a bad spot. If trump does run, then that would unite the democrats and independents though.

I will say this, the terrorists were terrified of trump. I remember he dropped the MOAB on them in the first 2 months after being elected.

1. trump's political career is over. He's not getting another whack even if he avoids jail.

2. This will be forgotten come election time.

3. Covid is one of the most important issues to voters and the GOP is still not addressing that and allowing their states to implode.

4. Afghanistan withdrawal was announced by trump for 1 May 21. He also released Taliban prisoners. So using this would be a mistake anyway.

5. Most Americans want us out of Afghanistan FYI.

1) its not over

2) maybe maybe not, but trump will be sure to bring it up

3) it is now, but in 4 years time it wont be

4) blaming trump won't get you anywhere

5) theres many ways to do this, a negotiation with the taliban for an orderly take over with conditions attached would have been the cheapest and least damaging. The way biden did it just screams incompetence.

@blaznwiipspman1: Oh shit, totally. Biden saying "guys we're giving the country back to the Taliban, which we came here to fight against in the first place" would be very well received. 🤣 Specially considering that the Taliban would wipe their ass to any agreement they had.

I'm surprised Biden had the balls to do this and I hope he keeps his position. As long as he doesn't uses this to start another war I take my hat off to him.

So far things are not even that bad. There's no fighting going on and in several cities the transition has been peaceful.

time to buy some defense stocks?

That was Biden's biggest mistake, not withdrawing on that date. I have no idea why he didn't do exactly what Trump had agreed to. He would've had perfect deniability if he did.

Instead, he extended the date for literally no reason, pissing off the Afghan government, Taliban, and religious leaders in the process.

That is true. By Biden waiting, he took full responsibility for it. It showed he didn't care about Trump's policy to exit, and at that point he took ownership of it.

Lmao at the mental gymnastics.

Orderly withdrawal

Even Merkel is calling Biden out. Things must be bad.

So Republicans wanted to take praise for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan when Trump was in charge, and they want to condemn the decision now that Biden is in charge?

At least someone in the Republican party realised the hypocrisy - they just quietly deleted their webpage on Trump's historic agreement to end the fighting and secure human rights in Afghanistan.

You can still find a copy here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210615230810/https://gop.com/president-trump-is-bringing-peace-to-the-middle-east-rsr/

Y'know, this makes me wonder why the military brass payed attention to Biden at all. When Trump ordered a pullout from Syria, the brass just straight up ignored the Commander-in-Chief and kept a contingency force there that was almost as large. Why didn't they do the same here?

As if it would have been easier earlier. SMH

20 years bombing the shit out of the taliban, giving afgan forces training, weapons, and still they got their asses kicked in a month. If this were trump this happened to, let's be honest, there would be a ton of people being fired right about now, generals and the entire intelligence agency. The secretary of defense would have gotten his ass kicked by trump too. Honestly that might not be a bad idea for biden too. Start firing the shit out of people.

The afgan policy there was dumb from the start. The taliban won because they knew we would get tired of funding a war, and thats why they just waited it out. If we were smart, securing funding from the host should have been the first priority. You could procure food, oil, people easily from the host country, even shelter. Instead we paid everything out of pocket.

On top of that, Afghanistan was making real progress. Just look at a gdp chart. From 1960 to 2000, their economy was flat, and grew from $500 million to 4 billion $$. From 2000 to 2020, with US presence, their economy grew from $4 billion to $20 billion. So biden saying the US presence was doing nothing is a complete bald faced lie.

We threw away all that plus all the money training the afghans, and the lives.

Just pointing out the textbook sunk cost fallacy employed here.

I have to wonder how this would have turned out if we hadn't split all of our attention and wasted trillions in Iraq. Either way I can't agree with this, anymore than abandoning the Kurds last administration. All leaving now does is prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that for all the bluster and wasted money and stupidly oversized military budget, America is neither capable or willing to police the world. Damned if you do damned if you don't I suppose, but then what the **** was the point of any of it but useless slaughter?

I have stated the only explanation/point to it that makes any sense.

We left the Afghans with the training and equipment to stop this. If they weren't such cowards running away at the first sign they might have to fight, then things could be different.

The US military may not be as thorough as I would like when they do take action, but at least they don't run away like little babies when threatened.

Do we blame Biden for choosing to keep the agreement once he took office? Do we blame Trump for signing it? Do we blame Bush for starting this mess?

I mean, hey if that's what you want to do but I'm a firm believer it's always been the Western regime's fault. Perhaps not always, perhaps not when it retained its freer, minarchistic, limited scope. But bear in mind that harmful Western interference in the Middle East has been going on about since oil was discovered there.

The West is the reason why the Middle East is what it is today and the West is the reason why Africa remains in poverty. Does anarchy seem more appealing now?

No. No it does not.

I keep hearing "the women... the women...": hindsight observation, they should have spent the last 20 years arming and training the women, 'cause yeah, they have the most to lose.

we have a winner.

been saying that for far to long.

but people like to blame other people. not

hey its a money issue

Hey guys, in unrelated news, we have new footage of the Jan 6th Insurrection of Washington, DC. More photos of these far-right extremists sitting in government offices.

Oh wait, that's the Taliban.

Sometimes it's hard to tell, they're alike in so many ways.

On a serious note, some of the footage come from there is heartbreaking, especially at the airport.

So sad, just a damn shame.

I'm torn between feeling pity for those people, and feeling indifferent towards them for not wanting to take care of their country. They could fight for it if they wanted to, if they could put aside their tribal differences and unite.

Easy to sit here in my privilege and second-guess them, though.

I think more than anything we've given people in bad situations the impression that they do not have to fight for their own countries and someone else will save them. Those people got a better opportunity than most people living in a shitty situation will ever get, and they wasted it. They were the privileged ones when the US was willing to help. And as in most situations, that privilege led to complacency and laziness. If they were unwilling to fight for their country, why should we fight for it for them?

I've talked to many people over the years who served in either Afghanistan or Iraq and some of the stories they have are both bizarre and, I think, highlight why democracy just won't work there. They'd say give orders to the local security forces to set up a checkpoint, and then when they come around to check up on them they'd been charging people to pass the checkpoint going into their own pocket. They couldn't understand why this was wrong.

Corruption there starts low and goes all the way up.

Never should have been there. Its not our country, why should we protect it? Happy its over, thank you president biden! They need to learn to protect themselves and not ask other countries to risk thier lives and money to fight a battle that isnt ours.

Was against it then and still against it now. We need to worry about home.

Yeah this is cultural differences.

Not saying this to be judgmental or critical, but some cultures might as well be aliens to us, and vice versa. It takes a certain amount of education (not necessarily formal) for someone to be of the mindset "OK, there are different cultures out there in the world, we need to make room for that" and a lot of people just don't get that, both here in the US, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

I wonder if you ask a typical rural Afghan how many languages he thinks are spoken in the world, what his answer would be. Probably a low number, which is especially ironic given that Afghanistan has dozens (if not hundreds) of dialects, which is yet another hurdle to unification.

Sad days.

Money and power can't buy everything it seems. Even calling this logistical fiasco an epic fail is an understatement.

I would say it's more Bush's Afghanistan mess. Starting the pullout was one of the few good things Trump did and the U.S populace doesn't want to be in Afghanistan, particularly forever. Once the bad press from our war-hungry ghouls dies down, it'll be considered a popular decision.

Oh, how short memories are.

Trump was on another level of incompetence comparatively. He would announce policy through tweets ffs, one of his brilliant spontaneous brain farts that would inevitably leave those in his administration reeling to damage control and try to figure out how the hell they were going to make things work. Recall the chaos that ensued after the travel ban announcement early on? Or the announcement transgenders were barred from military service? I don’t think Trump discussed his policies at ALL with those under his command, he simply would have a generalized idea and order it out of the blue with no consideration paid to matters of logistics, humanities, economic ramifications, etc etc. Ironic you say you can’t abide a guy getting everything wrong and then stand behind Trump. Christ, the man was incompetence incarnate.

Trump’s idea of “leadership“ wasn’t to do any actual work, it was to dictate, expect his subordinates to do everything, take all the credit when it went well, or moan and blame democrats or whoever or whatever was politically expedient when it didn’t. If you don’t think this would‘ve happened under Trump, you’re deluding yourself. We’d be seeing the exact same outcome, if not much worse.

Main difference being, we wouldn’t be hearing “I’m the president, the buck stops with me”, but instead “THE DO NOTHING OBAMA-APPOINTED DEMOCRAT GENERALS FAILED AGAIN!!” Or some such petulant, divisive, partisan whiny garbage.

After 9/11 the US, the most powerful nation, decided to forgo all the economic and humanitarian levers that could have been used to get the Taliban to comply with giving up Osama and Al-Qaeda. The Taliban had zero interest in spreading their form of Islam all over the world that Al-Qaeda wanted to do. The Taliban just simply benefited from the economic and military training that Al-Qaeda could give them. Afghanistan doesn't have a strong government that can effectively control the entire country. It's Warlords hobbling along into the next day without them and their family being ousted and hung from a street lamp. Ashraf Ghani is lucky he got out.

Democracy will never work, when the soil isn't fertile for it.

Serious cultural changes need to be made for democracy to work in a lot of middle eastern nations. Simply toppling an existing government wont do it. The biggest threats to democracy are ignorance, a mememe attitude and supremacist ideologies. Wars like this will always fail when the goal is retribution, rather than rehabilitation of the hearts and souls of the people. There is a reason we have been more successful to democratize Iran without toppling their leaders.

When a society or culture, puts too much emphasis on power structures. Democracy will always fail.

@mrbojangles25: And this is one of the many issues that ignorance and supremacist ideologies can cause. There are a lot of people who are sheltered in their youth from differing viewpoints, especially in ultra-conservative regions, such as most parts of the middle east, this turns them hostile not only towards non-muslim parts of the world, but also eachother. Of course, cultural is VERY plastic, and all this could be changed in a generation or 2, given the right pushes. Unfortunately, the middle east was pushed in the complete opposite direction when religious fundamentalists were heavily promoted due to their anti-soviet stance. In Afghanistan, a group of radicals, who had no real education, or no real skill, aside from an indocrtination in an radical sect only did what they had the power to do. Use violence to wrest power from a country they had no business running, dragging down the culture with their insane beliefs.

@davillain-: I agree. I'm just saying that if the Trump cult is going to criticize Biden for leaving Afghanistan they should be pointing fingers at Trump too.

But I have now realised that one of the Taliban prisoners released by Trump is going to become the new ruler and on top of that he seems to be quite close to both China and Russia so that might be the reason why there's going to be a lot of noise in the coming days coming from the Orange cult.

I remember Biden speaking pretty highly of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan over the last 20 years. Odd that his belief we should actually leave it only began this year.