(...) Remarkably, as Jon Allsop pointed out in The Columbia Journalism Review, the word âBushâ was not mentioned once on any of the Sunday news shows the weekend Kabul was falling.
âHe looks like the Babe Ruth of presidents when you compare him to Trump,â Harry Reid, the former Democratic Senate majority leader, told The Washington Postâs Ben Terris, for a story this past week on Bush nostalgia.
With a memory like a goldfish, America circles its bowl, returning to where we have been, unable to move forward, condemned to repeat a past we should escape.
In the months before American forces withdrew, some 8,000 to 10,000 jihadi fighters from Central Asia, the North Caucasus region of Russia, Pakistan and the Xinjiang region in western China poured into Afghanistan, a United Nations report concluded in June. Most are associated with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, which are closely linked.
But others are allied with ISIS-K, presenting a major challenge to the stability and security the Taliban promise to provide for the country.
And in 6 weeks no one will be able to find Afghanistan on the map. It will be forgotten that fast.
Yes. Just like everybody forgets about Jerusalem, the West Bank, the former Palestinian Mandate, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq and America's favourite bastard child: ISIS/ISIL/Daesh.
Yea this is Trump's fault. smh We get what we deserve. I hope you are all happy. It may take years, but our continuing moral decline not as a government, governments have and will always be immoral or amoral, but as a people and the pain and suffering caused from it will eventually reach your white gated communities and when it does it will be too late. Good luck and Godspeed. No one is going to change their mind until it is done at the point of a gun apparently.
Hmm, has our morality declined, or do we just do a better job not pretending what is amoral?
Trumps fault? That's a bunch of garbage! It is Biden and his idiot administration with their heads up their butts. Thirteen brave Americans are dead because of Biden and his band of morons. The Dem.'s have blood on their hands and now want to divert the attention to the cat 4 storm in Mississippi. Let not a good catastrophe go to waste is their motto. Lets forget about the bumbling foreign policies of the Biden administration and focus on the hurricane down south. Biden needs to come out of his basement and face up to the result of his stupidity.
Yea this is Trump's fault. smh We get what we deserve. I hope you are all happy. It may take years, but our continuing moral decline not as a government, governments have and will always be immoral or amoral, but as a people and the pain and suffering caused from it will eventually reach your white gated communities and when it does it will be too late. Good luck and Godspeed. No one is going to change their mind until it is done at the point of a gun apparently.
That's all well and good, but I know of very few people who think that the way we withdrew is THE problem, but only an absolutist ideologue would think it was not A problem and a pretty big one at that.
In 2005, two of my colleagues at The American Prospect, Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias, wrote an essay I think about often. It was called âThe Incompetence Dodge,â and it argued that American policymakers and pundits routinely try to rescue the reputation of bad ideas by attributing their failure to poor execution. At the time, they were writing about the liberal hawks who were blaming the catastrophe of the Iraq war on the Bush administrationâs maladministration rather than rethinking the enterprise in its totality. But the same dynamic suffuses the recriminations over the Afghanistan withdrawal.
To state the obvious: There was no good way to lose Afghanistan to the Taliban. A better withdrawal was possible â and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable â but so was a worse one. Either way, there was no hope of an end to the war that didnât reveal our decades of folly, no matter how deeply Americaâs belief in its own enduring innocence demanded one. That is the reckoning that lies beneath events that are still unfolding, and much of the cable news conversation is a frenzied, bipartisan effort to avoid it.
Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure. Itâs also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of Americaâs foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan.
âThe pro-war crowd sees this as a mechanism by which they can absolve themselves of an accounting for the last 20 years,â Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told me. âJust think about the epic size of this policy failure. Twenty years of training. More than $2 trillion worth of expenditure. For almost nothing. It is heartbreaking to watch these images, but it is equally heartbreaking to think about all of the effort, of lives and money we wasted in pursuit of a goal that was illusory.â
Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, phrased it well: âThereâs no denying America is the most powerful country in the world, but what weâve seen over and over in recent decades is we cannot turn that into the outcomes we want. Whether itâs Afghanistan or Libya or sanctions on Russia and Venezuela, we donât get the policy outcomes we want, and I think thatâs because we overreach â we assume that because we are very powerful, we can achieve things that are unachievable.â (...)
Let's be clear. No one outside the military industrial complex and the most severe neocons have any issue with the withdrawal in Afghanistan, Hell we all welcome it. The valid criticism comes in the method in which it was done. It does not take a brain scientist to know that you do not publicly give an exact deadline and you slowly start to remove any Americans and Afghans who would be in danger of staying due to assisting us in the conflict as well as any equipment that the Taliban can use to reverse engineer BEFORE you remove the troops to avoid this tragic inevitability. The incompetency in the logistics is astounding. I agree with every word in this article, I often think of the huge opportunity we missed out on not electing Dr. Paul as our President.{#Sad} And BTW nice to know Ron Paul is all of the sudden a relevant and reliable source of information for you considering he is ridiculed at every turn when his point of view does not fit the narrative here.{#Ask}
Heard on the radio while driving from there to here or maybe there, so I don't know who it was speaking, but they said that without a firm deadline, no one was leaving. We announced a draw-down in troops years ago, right? and Trump brought that down lower (at least he bragged about getting most Americans and the huge amount of materiel out of there already)... whoever was left imagined the status quo would hold indefinitely and imagined their work there to be worth the (incorrectly assessed) risk. And that sounded pretty accurate to me. When the National Guard comes to evacuate some town in the hurricane's path, there's always someone who stays behind.
Ron Paul is nuts about a lot of things from my point of view, but I'm not part of the stratification where once you identify one position a person holds, you can safely assume you know how that person will vote on everything else.
Broken clock ron paul reaches the moment he is correct. Had to happen eventually (according to statistics and stuff).
Or: he was right all along, and it took our power structure a trillion dollars and a quarter million dead bodies to admit it.
And it didn't have to end this way. Over the last 20 years there were numerous opportunities to make peace and broker a deal where the Taliban transitioned from a guerilla army to a political faction at the table. Opportunities squandered because of political cowardice and the failure to learn a simple lesson of history: a patient insurgency will outlast a reluctant empire far from home.
Really? I'm not subscribed but maybe it's part of the WaPo or LaTimes etc. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This weekend the US experienced another âSaigon moment,â this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americansâ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away.
The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the âexpertsâ doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame. Politicians and pundits who played cheerleader for this war for two decades are now rushing to blame President Biden for finally getting the US out. Where were they when succeeding presidents continued to add troops and expand the mission in Afghanistan?
The US war on Afghanistan was not lost in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attack on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building.
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks I proposed that we issue letters of marque and reprisal to bring those responsible to justice. But such a limited and targeted response to the attack was ridiculed at the time. How could the US war machine and all its allied profiteers make their billions if we didnât put on a massive war?
Congress has kicked the can down the road for 20 years, continuing to fund the Afghan war long after even they understood that there was no point to the US occupation. There were some efforts by some Members to end the war, but most, on a bipartisan basis, just went along to get along.
The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke.
The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots.
The mainstream media has uncritically repeated the propaganda of the military and political leaders about Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and all the other pointless US interventions. Many of these outlets are owned by defense industry-connected companies. The corruption is deep. American citizens must also share some blame. Until more Americans rise up and demand a pro-America, non-interventionist foreign policy they will continue to get fleeced by war profiteers.
Political control in Afghanistan has returned to the people who fought against those they viewed as occupiers and for what they viewed as their homeland. That is the real lesson, but donât expect it to be understood in Washington. War is too profitable and political leaders are too cowardly to go against the tide. But the lesson is clear for anyone wishing to see it: the US global military empire is a grave threat to the United States and its future.
âRon Paul
Broken clock ron paul reaches the moment he is correct. Had to happen eventually (according to statistics and stuff).
