I guess you didn’t want to post the part of that video where you can see people falling off the side of the plane from great heights.
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The road to hell is paved with commandeered American guns and military equipment.
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And cash…
Parse with tremendous prejudice. The Russians will be flooding the channels with propaganda. It’s what they do.
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You’re not the only one. I worked graveyard shift last night, and it was one long “fuuuuuck” with each news update.
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Yes but this skit was satire
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And just because this story needed a really fucked-up postscript:
In addition to all the obvious and profound suffering the people of Afghanistan are going through now and for the foreseeable future there are also going to be a lot of American troops experiencing PTSD over this debacle for the rest of their lives. Even the ground crews for the aircraft aren’t being spared the horror.
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It’s so sad… and here in the Netherlands the main topic in politics is now how we are going to get all the afghanistan refugees away from our borders… 
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The US sure didn’t come to try and “fix” anything when Hungary was having a revolution to get away from the Soviet Union in 1956, even though people really wanted them to. Which makes sense - that would have meant a confrontation with the SU, and we just weren’t worth starting WW3. (Then again, considering what is going on here now, perhaps it would have been worth to try some indirect methods. Orbán has come to power and manages to stay in power in a large part by exploiting the ways the “communist” system had poisoned our society…)
Anyway, the US is not trying, has not ever tried, to “fix” things. That might be the coating ideology that some might even believe, but it’s not the actual strategy. The US is trying to shape the world in a way that aligns with the US’ national interests as a superpower, balancing on domestic power struggles. Sometimes this means direct or indirect intervention somewhere; sometimes it means sacrificing people, groups, countries for sake of a larger purpose. This is no surprise, really, this is what all countries do, protect and proactively support their own interests, it’s just that the size and power of the US means it has more weight to throw around and it’s more visible.
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They flew out 640 people on a C-17, breaking just about every Air Force regulation. There are pictures of the people sitting on the floor of the cargo compartment. I hope they’re able to fly out a few more of the same.
From Teh Google: “A C-17A Globemaster theoretically can carry a maximum 171,000 pounds of cargo , just enough for 800 persons averaging 200 pounds each. But in terms of space, it’s only designed to seat 134 soldiers with their equipment.”
More details: 640 People, One Jet: Flight Trackers Reveal Heroic, Desperate Effort In Chaotic Afghanistan Evacuation
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I read in another article (can’t find it right now) that there are actually procedures for such an emergency. You have everyone sit down on the floor and run cargo straps from wall to wall in regular intervals for them to hang on to.
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The scorpion and the frog.
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Hence my scarequotes on the word ‘fix’. You’re making the same point I was.
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Send them to Aragón. They will be welcomed there:
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Meanwhile in Germany:
(An A400M has a capacity of 116 fully equipped soldiers or 37 metric tons of cargo, so could probably have carried a few hundred people to Tashkent)
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An early report was claiming a (supposedly verified) 800 passengers, but somehow only 640 people got off, so… But it still wasn’t close to the record 1000+ passengers evacuated on a 747 as part of the “Operation Solomon” airlift, nor was 640 people even a record for a C-17, as more people than that were evacuated on one in the Philippines back in 2013.
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Something else I’m not watching.
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It turns out that they counted all the people going on, but only the adults getting off, which is why there were two different numbers given. So there were actually over 800 people on that flight:
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