Again and again…
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not to be too depressing, but this is from last year:
https://www.voanews.com/usa/us-funds-used-pay-afghan-warlords
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Afghan Cease-Fire Deal Struck in Doha Collapsed After Ghani Fled
The weeks leading up to Kabul’s collapse saw a flurry of diplomatic activity by the U.S. and its allies in Qatar aimed at heading off exactly the chaotic scenes in the Afghan capital that have so horrified the world and put Joe Biden’s presidency on the defensive.
Among those efforts was a tantalizing agreement that could have guaranteed calm. Afghan and Taliban negotiators tentatively reached a deal in which all sides would declare a two-week cease-fire in exchange for President Ashraf Ghani’s resignation and the start of talks on setting up a transitional government, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations.
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Granted, but you know how peoples’ attention spans tend to be. The previous regime would be a good place to start. Mea culpa for not making that sufficiently clear.
Of course not! It has pretty much always been so. Those qualities were just far more overt than usual during his occupancy of the WH.
He gave permission for assholes to out themselve, & out themselves they did… & still are.
A mixed blessing, at best.
With or without him, it was still being undone. He helped accelerate the process.
I’m not gonna derail the topic any further.
More on topic:
Dick Cheney commented that Trump made a mistake & Biden made it worse.
Of course, he neglected to mention that it was he that started this mess in the first place.
Damned if I can remember [formerly]GOP POSTUS that was a decent human being.
Ike, maybe, but I don’t remember him… barely remember JFK, for that matter.
It’s been a steep slide downhill since then, for them.
EDIT:
clarity
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In case any of you get into some discussion where you need some sort of evidence that this is largely Trump’s responsibility:
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What was Biden supposed to do? Back out of the deal and withdrawal that was very much in progress before he took office? Stay for another 20 years?
For someone who’s supposed to be such a “conservative”, I don’t see anything conservative about spending trillions more dollars and American lives fighting these unwinnable battles.
If anything, it seems like the Right Wing Outrage Machine is more pissed off about the whole idea of our supposedly invincible military being humiliated on the battlefield versus the overall human impact of this colossal waste of time, money, and lives.
I’ve thought about this a lot over the past week or so, and the more I think about it the less I am able to think of a way this could have ended up any other way than it did.
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Dick Cheney needs to continue to go fuck himself, as he’s one of the KEY people who got us here.
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Hey guys, hear me out here- I think that if we just commit to another 20 years of occupation, we can sort things out and have a really smooth withdrawal.
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Yeah but they’re not the only the beneficiaries. Not even the main ones that we should be paying attention to.
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Joe Biden voted for the Afghanistan War. Even if he did not negotiate the withdrawal, he was one of the 98 senators who voted for this to happen at some point. Not a single senator stopped to ask what the withdrawal plan, what “victory” would look like.
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Do you really mean that every person in ‘those’ countries think like that? Don’t have any feeling of morality or idea of fairness, and justify corruption or cruelty? Not sure what -ism this is, but it’s hugely prejudiced. Don’t have much more experience than living in Kenya for a year, which is often depressingly corrupt, and I’ve met bureaucratic stereotypes that gloat with their power and corruption, and thieves that do anything to scrape by. But most people I’ve met are not much different in ideas of morality and good/evil than me. The main difference is that they are used to things being like that, and have no real hope of things getting better, so they just roll with it as there is no other option. Just people, crooks and heroes but mostly normal people, living in a faulty system (which I guess is due to colonial history and the massive thievery then and now by the outside world).
ETA: I do agree that this doesn’t foster trust or loyalty in the government or military leaders. I wouldn’t have done any different if I was an afghanistan soldier in those circumstances.
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This would have been a diplomatic mission executed by embassy personnel and is pretty standard for this type of situation (since, you know… we have plenty of experience in the field of toppling governments). The guys at Crooked Media have been harping on this for weeks, if not months. They should have started the process of certifications on Jan 20th and had a plan for every person to evacuate before they left. Even if they had to set up an interim camp with a regional ally, it would have been a far better outcome than whatever horror awaits them now.
ETA: Of course, now it’s a military operation:
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Thinking was represented as not patriotic, unamerican, and frankly treasonous by mainstream political opinion and the media at the time. And mostly since to be fair.
Obviously a moment’s reflection would lead you to reject that bullshit, they successfully took it off the table through the operation of overwhelming jingoistic propaganda and brainwashing.
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Ashraf Ghani was the presidente of Afghanistan. He had to flee Kabul the other day. But he also wrote a book about rebuilding broken nations.
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