Thank you, President Biden!

Too late. He's already blaming Trump for initiating the end of that war.

“The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese Army, they're not. They're not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There's going to be no circumstance for you to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan." - Joe Biden, July 8, 2021

https://www.the-sun.com/news/3477353/moment-diplomats-escape-us-embassy-in-helicopter-rescue-as-taliban-fighters-storm-kabul/

So he was just lying to you lackies and never had any intention of an orderly and safe exit.

Ok... lol.

Still trying to shift the blame is pathetic.

It's not that he's pulling the plug... it's that he tore out the plumbing first.

But if you like how the southern border is going... this is your kinda scenario.

https://twitter.com/theNuzzy/status/1427051039404957697

And now, predictably, he's calling on Biden to resign for carrying out a promise that he made.

And Trump released 5,000 Taliban fighters, including the guy who's likely going to be their new leader. https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/trump-taliban/ And he negotiated with the Taliban, cutting the Afghan government out of it completely. Trump was making promises to the Taliban, which he didn't involve the Afghani government in.

Biden did badly miscalculate how bad this would be, obviously, but Republicans trying to spin it are pretty ridiculous. One jackass right-wing YouTube girfter I watch because he's such a LOLcow is now screaming that Biden should be impeached... when a month or so back he was screaming that Biden was going to take credit for Trump's work and that pulling out was the exact right plan. I also watched this chucklehead say Biden pulled out too early... and then in his very next statement say that he should've pulled out in May like Trump was going to. Gotta make up ya lil'-ass mind, son.

I've also seen Republicans saying "Trump would have taken out all the weapons and equipment that have now fallen into Taliban hands!" So, he'd have left the Afghan forces unarmed to face the Taliban? I doubt even Trump would've been that stupid... but Republicans don't understand basic strategy, they just say things like fucking parrots. Just for the record, that "removing all the equipment" thing doesn't happen with military movement even if you don't have to leave troops supplied, because it's not cost-effective -- it'd cost more than the equipment's worth to move it and would drag the withdrawl out for months. If you don't have allies to arm in the region, you disable it and leave it.

In any case, it's a disaster, but it was always going to be a disaster. The Afghan troops were trained and equipped, but they didn't step up.

Bottom line is, there's blame to go around, but there was no graceful way out of the situation for anyone. If we'd stayed there another 20 years, we'd be seeing this same shit happening whenever we did leave. You're dealing with religious fanatics, and nothing stops them. And, unfortunately, we have right-wing evangelicals in our own country who have nearly identical plans for this country that the Taliban had for theirs.

Let's keep in mind, as R's scream about Joe Biden and Afghanistan, who invaded that country and who's responsible for keeping that war going...George W Bush and Dick Cheney and Republicans in Congress.

Top Taliban leaders are among the 5,000 that Trump released last year over everyone's objections

Top Taliban leaders are among the 5,000 that Trump released last year over everyone's objections

SemDem
Community
Sunday August 15, 2021 · 6:30 PM CDT

One year ago, the Donald released 5,000 Taliban fighters in exchange for a cease-fire to help his flailing presidential campaign, despite strenuous objections from both the Pentagon and the Afghan government. President Ashraf Ghani warned that their release would be a “danger to the world.”

We are finding out that many of these fighters entering Kabul, such as Mawlavi Talib, are top Taliban commanders who oversaw the assaults of the key cities this week. And they go up from there.

Why did Trump do something like that? Why does Trump do anything—it’s about himself:


Worse, the Taliban leader who is set to take over Afghanistan, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, has Trump to thank for his release:


The disaster unfolding in Afghanistan came from the deal that Trump made a year ago, except he wanted it to happen sooner—by Christmas of last year. He postponed it after his loss for Biden to deal with it in May. The Pentagon asked for more time, so Biden pushed it to the end of August. This enraged conservatives for delaying the withdrawal.

Keep in mind that Donald J. Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David the week of Sept. 11 to strike what was essentially a surrender deal, but cancelled after the obvious backlash of hosting the Taliban on 9/11. Instead, he sent Pompeo to Qatar to sign the deal with the Taliban, and announced that he had given the Taliban everything they asked for because “everyone is tired of war.”

"[It’s] time for someone else to do that work and it will be the Taliban and it could be surrounding countries."

Trump even had private discussions with the top Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. I could only imagine what was said and promised. Not only did Trump cave to the Taliban by giving them everything they asked for, but no members of the Afghan government were present. None. Trump completely cut them out of the deal.

WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 22: President Donald Trump listens to the opening prayer during Air Force Technical Sergeant John Chapman's Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House August 22, 2018 in Washington, DC. Chapman was killed March 4, 2002 during a battle in Afghanistan. After his helicopter came under heavy fire and crashed, Chapman and other team members returned to the snow-capped mountain to rescue a stranded service member. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

“We had a very good conversation with the leader of the Taliban today, and they’re looking to get this ended. The relationship is very good that I have with the mullah.” —Trump in Feb. 2020 after telling the Taliban he will remove all U.S. troops.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker, who was appointed under George W. Bush, blames Trump’s “peace” deal with what is happening now because Trump would only work with the Taliban and completely delegitimized the Afghan government.

To be clear, Trump’s deal was a complete disgrace that diminished our allies and strengthened the enemy. Trump reinforced the Taliban with their top fighters, and promised a quick retreat of American forces.

This essentially would establish the Taliban as the de facto regime once U.S. forces left. Trump is now lying, to no one’s surprise, saying that the peace accord he signed was “conditions-based.” It wasn’t.

You can read it yourself:


To be clear, Biden didn’t foresee how weak the Afghan government truly was. No one did. Other than that, I have no problem with leaving Afghanistan. If after 20 freaking years and trillions of dollars spent the Afghan government can’t hold up for even a week, what the hell is the point? How many more decades are we supposed to stay? How many more trillions need to be wasted? How many more American soldiers need to be killed? It turns out the whole Afghan exercise was about military contractors and corporations raking in profits. I suppose we shouldn’t have been so surprised.

Unless we wanted a permanent occupation, we needed to leave. If not, we should have just petitioned Afghanistan to be the 51st state in the union. That way, when they asked for money, we could tell them that’s not the federal government’s job and you can’t solve problems by throwing money at it.

If Trump was a better president, he would have worked out a withdrawal with the Afghan government. Yet Trump negotiated and got burned by a group of terrorists. Biden was handed a lemon, so he had two choices. He could have backed out of the deal or kept it in place. What he did was delay the withdrawal to Aug. 31.

I notice that all of the Republican legislators complaining about our troops not staying didn’t say crap about Trump’s withdrawal plan last year. Now they whine that we should have stayed forever. Of course, none of them have children who serve in the military, because endless wars are fine as long as it’s someone else’s kid. But let’s be honest: Afghanistan is no longer a major threat to our security. There’re other places our troops need to be. Yes, the Taliban are terrible for the people there, but there are no shortage of nations that oppress their own people. We can’t police all of them, nor should we. That certainly isn’t an excuse to stay there indefinitely.

At the very least, this will replace cancel culture and critical race theory as the Fox News outrage du jour, but it will ring hollow. The GOP loves to start endless wars. They had no problem selling out our Kurdish allies. They didn’t care that Trump’s hasty exit from Syria, on orders from Putin, forced us to bomb our own bases.

They said nothing when Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David during 9/11, or released thousands of their fighters—including the leaders who took over Afghanistan today.

Heck, the GOP had no trouble orchestrating a terrorist attack on our own Capitol.


Keep that in mind when they overuse the fainting couch this week.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/15/2046070/-Taliban-leader-and-top-commanders-are-among-the-5000-fighters-Trump-released-against-objections?pm_source=story_sidebar&pm_medium=web&pm_campaign=most-shared

(twitter posts at site)

***************

Biden took over a plan... modified it... and wanted to take credit for it when it was politically convenient. Now? Not so much.

April 14, 2021

"I’m now the fourth United States President to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan: two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.

After consulting closely with our allies and partners, with our military leaders and intelligence personnel, with our diplomats and our development experts, with the Congress and the Vice President, as well as with Mr. Ghani and many others around the world, I have concluded that it’s time to end America’s longest war. It’s time for American troops to come home."

Afghanistan's collapse: Did US intelligence get it wrong?

American intelligence sources say they correctly predicted the fall of Kabul.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/afghanistans-collapse-us-intelligence-wrong/story?id=79470553

"This is a crisis of untold proportions," Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) told NBC News Sunday as Taliban militants swept into Kabul. "This is an intelligence failure. We underestimated the Taliban and overestimated the resolve of the Afghan Army."

But numerous U.S. officials tell ABC News that the opposite was true, insisting that key intelligence assessments had consistently informed policymakers that the Taliban could overwhelm the country and take the capital within weeks -- essentially repeating the 1975 fall of Saigon, when helicopters hastily evacuated diplomats from the U.S. embassy's rooftop as the North Vietnamese Army stormed into the South Vietnam capital.

"[U.S.] leaders were told by the military it would take no time at all for the Taliban to take everything," an anonymous U.S. intelligence official told ABC News. "No one listened."

A senior congressional official who asked not to be named in order to discuss sensitive briefings told ABC News that intelligence officers had warned the U.S. leaders about a swift and total victory by the fundamentalist Taliban militants who had held power in Kabul during the late 1990s up until after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The intelligence community assessment has always been accurate; they just disregarded it," the official told ABC News, speaking about the Biden administration.

"...it's that he tore out the plumbing first."

It was TRUMP who did that. See above. Dumbass.

Speaking of plumbing...





Leading to this...





Now hear this...

Like him or not, it's pretty hard for any reasonable person to argue with anything he's saying here:

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1427361332840501249

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1427362971014111238

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1427363511521402883

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1427364925819736072

Afghanistan isn't a country, it's a region full of competing religious tribes.  You can't build a nation out of a bunch of warring sects... and nation-building was never the goal in the first place.

It's a mess, yeah, but it was always going to be a mess.  Somebody just had to have the balls to say, "Okay, there's going to be a hit, but I'll take the hit to stop the waste of America's blood and treasure."   So, Biden did that.

And, face it, Republicans were going to hate him whatever the results are... because America has a warring-sect problem of its own, and not much different from Afghanistan's.

Floridatexan wrote:"...it's that he tore out the plumbing first."

It was TRUMP who did that.  See above.  Dumbass.

Biden owns it dipshit. He abandoned Trump, military, and the intelligence. He thght he knew better. He's incompetent. Have you seen the poor Afghans falling off of planes desperately trying to escape? The huddled masses of women and girls crying in abject horror? Have you no humanity beyond political convenience? Biden botched this just like he has every major issue in 5 decades of public "service". You're simply a useful idiot. Try to deny this too.

https://truthout.org/articles/biden-tried-to-absolve-himself-for-afghanistan-aftermath-but-he-voted-for-war/

Yet Biden is not without culpability in all this. In a CBS interview in February of 2020, the topic of withdrawal from Afghanistan was raised by host Margaret Brennan, who asked if Biden would bear responsibility if the U.S. withdrew and the nation collapsed into chaos. “Do I bear responsibility?” Biden replied. “Zero responsibility.”

A nasty echo of Trump in those words, and far from the truth besides. In September of 2001, then-Senator Biden voted with 97 other senators to give Bush the authority to wage war in Afghanistan. That vote also approved what has become known as the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), one of the most broad, violent and insidious pieces of legislation ever to pass through Congress. That AUMF is why the U.S. was legally able to remain in Afghanistan for 20 years, and served as a blueprint for the 2002 AUMF, which gave us the Iraq War. Biden voted for that, as well.

If you voted for it, Mr. President, you’re responsible for it, too. It’s a big ol’ crap sandwich, and everyone gets to take a bite.

"I shouted out, Who killed the Kennedys? When after all it was you and me." How many times did The Stones demand that Trump stop playing their music at his shit hole rallies?

[quote="PkrBum"]

Floridatexan wrote:
Biden owns it dipshit. He abandoned Trump, military, and the intelligence. He thght he knew better. He's incompetent. Have you seen the poor Afghans falling off of planes desperately trying to escape? The huddled masses of women and girls crying in abject horror? Have you no humanity beyond political convenience?

“Glibertarians for forever war!”

You can’t make this shit up.

What a rube.

(Starts around the 46 minute mark if the gizmo I tried doesn't work)

Takeaways:

- he didn't throw as much blame on Trump as he could have. Trump made a stupid "deal" with the Taliban out of his own vanity, and gave them concessions he shouldn't've, including freeing 5,000 of their fighters... including the guy who's leading them now. And if that's not enough, he removed sanctions against them and unfroze their assets, which no doubt helped them be in the shape they were in to overrun the country so quickly. https://time.com/5794643/trumps-disgraceful-peace-deal-taliban/ Trump did his usual "I like to have good relationships with America's enemies!" thing, same as his nonstop bootlicker act with Putin and his "rub my belly" fawning over Kim and his "it's okay to cut up our journalists" groveling to MBS, and went around the Afghan government to promise the Taliban things. Leaving the government out of the loop, he even wanted to invite the Taliban to Camp David, the offer of which made them look like legitimate rulers on the international stage! Why? Because Trump is a simpleton who likes to trust promises from bad guys, because he needs "tough guys" to like him. It's an old neuroses with him and he's helpless before it. The "master negotiator" did what he always does -- gives his adversary a bunch of stuff and gets nothing but promises in return. Fucking simp.

Biden could have and should have laid more blame at Trump for setting this up, but he chose not to because he's willing to take more responsibility for it than is even due him. I get that he's trying not to split the country up (it's already gonna be split, anyway, because right-wingers have monetized division -- they've built a big entertainment industry on hate-thy-neighbor), but... I dunno, I'd've be harsher on the guy who handed him the situation.



- he admits the country fell apart more quickly than anticipated. That's more of a concession of facts than you'd ever get out of Trump. Honestly, Biden's failing there was to be optimistic at all. He should've known that you're not going to get a bunch of warring tribes to act like a country. Not sure why he was so hopeful, but, guess that's how he is.

-- He rightly says that the Afghan forces just gave up. And that's on them. They were trained -- for a generation they were trained -- they were equipped, and they made their choice to let their own country down... because they don't have one. They just have a religion... and, like every religion, it's nothing but sects, all division, nothing unifying.

-- Hope he'll carry through with the humanitarian efforts and hold the Taliban accountable if they start any atrocities. It's a bad situation, but Afghanistan's own government let them down as much as anyone. They were given the means... and they did nothing with them.

-- He's right that more time, money, and American troop deaths would not have changed a thing. This was never about nation-building, but the Afghan people had a chance to build a nation. They discarded it. (Biden's not saying that, but I am).

- "The buck stops with me." Can't even imagine Trump ever saying that, about anything.

He ignored Trump's preconditions on the taliban to withdraw. He ignored military advice. He ignored intelligence reports and predictions. He cut and ran to meet a political and ideological deadline of 9/11. Who exactly would that date be of significance to? The United States? No... it's a tragic date to us. Damn the torpedoes because he never had any intention of accepting blame. The buck stops here? Lmao... read above "no responsibility". The blame shift just came off as lame and indefensible. It's a clusterfuck. He was incompetent and arrogant. Only useful idiots are running cover for that and they look as bad as he does.

Sal wrote:

PkrBum wrote:

Floridatexan wrote:
Biden owns it dipshit. He abandoned Trump, military, and the intelligence. He thght he knew better. He's incompetent. Have you seen the poor Afghans falling off of planes desperately trying to escape? The huddled masses of women and girls crying in abject horror? Have you no humanity beyond political convenience?

“Glibertarians for forever war!”

You can’t make this shit up.

What a rube.

You've never seen me support a war. Not Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen... etc.

Unlike Biden who voted for and supported them all. You voted for that by proxy. Warmonger.