I was 10, but I still remember the clips on the news of people desperately climbing into a rooftop helicopter.
I didn’t really understand what was going on, or what or where Saigon was, but the images certainly made an impact.
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And so what begins?
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Bored silly saying it but it still needs to be repeated. Afghanistan shows that small arms are useless against a modern army. If you want to resist an invader in an asymmetric war IUDs are the weapon of necessity.
ETA
Not fixing it!
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IEDs, not IUDs.
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Small arms…
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Um… curse you autofuckup?
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There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
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The Taliban is promising a Khmer Rouge scenario. People aren’t willing stay and see If they would dare to accomplish the threats.
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It’s ok, the ‘defense’ contractors got theirs, as was the plan. The Afghanis will have to fend for themselves.
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I’ve hit my free article limit. Can you give the TL/DR summary?
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The article is a series of questions and answers, so it is hard to summarise, so I’ll copy and paste one of the key points:
There is a lot to learn, and, in fairness to the Biden Administration, it inherited from the Trump Administration a terrible situation, because of the concessions the Trump Administration had made to the Taliban about the timing of a U.S. withdrawal. I said earlier that the U.S. deployment that Biden pulled was small, and the violence faced by them was de minimis, but that was true largely because of the terms of the flawed deal that the Trump Administration had negotiated with the Taliban, in which one of the commitments by the Taliban was not to attack U.S. troops in exchange for a hard deadline of May of this year for the last troops to leave. So, when the Biden Administration, in the pressure-filled first weeks of its term, reviewed the situation, it understandably feared that, if it tried to repudiate or rewrite the agreement that the Trump Administration had reached, it might transform a relatively quiet and stable experience for the U.S. military into another bloody round of combat that would undermine the Administration’s plans and foreign-policy priorities. So it pulled the plug and got exactly that result, which is now all that anyone is talking about.
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Biden just concluded the deal made by the Trump administration, but delayed withdrawal from May to, well was supposed to be September, but here we are.
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That guy is looking at it wrong. It has nothing to do with their level of armament, and everything to do with a lack of will to fight.
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“Patriotic Americans, take note! You too can overthrow your constitutionally sanctioned, democratically elected government and replace it with a despotic theocracy!”
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What we should have done was set up a system to extract all of the interpreters, informants, cultural attaches and political refugees before we pulled a single troop out. There will be months of horrors for the people who faithfully served us and our vision of “Democracy” that we are abandoning.
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China is seizing the opportunity to tell the Taiwanese that the Americans will abandon them too, as well as assuming or implying that Taiwanese soldiers won’t be motivated to fight.
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Christ. Let’s not even talk about that. The US doesn’t want a shooting war with China. If China decided to take Taiwan by force instead of the tenuous “Sure sure, you’re totally independent Taiwan (it’s really part of mainline China.)” arrangement, there isn’t a lot we could do. Shortages from China during the pandemic have already thrown our economy for a loop. An actual cease of trade due to war?
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