Wars

[poorpete]

Wars suck, but so does losing war. A humanitarian disaster arrives where one previous did not exist. A democracy in ruin. It sucks. It makes sense for us to go in so many ways (and the public seems to agree). But it sucks. This sucks.

[Tahlvin]

Yep.

[Mando]

there's a million bad things about it and so little good other than compassion and showing mercy.

[Kyle]

This sucks. It also sucks that everyone who didn’t give a shit about Afghanistan for over a decade is now an expert and knows exactly where to lay blame. I was one of the only people that I know that spoke out against going into this war when it started twenty years ago- and this is the very reason I was opposed. Needless violence for no defined purpose or exit strategy. A pox on Bush for starting this travesty, Obama for continuing it, and Trump and Biden for botching this withdrawal.

[poorpete]

Agreed. I was against the war, but admit I was worried about the draft back then. Was also sick of bloodshed after watching three thousand people die on TV. But Afghanistan had a good purpose at first, not just revenge, or money, or to satisfy the military industry. Iraq, on the other hand...

I don't have time but someone should go through every Twitter comment on Afghanistan, especially from blue checkmarks, and see the last time they mentioned Afghanistan, because for most it was probably years or decades ago.

That might go for me too...

That said, given the botched exit, and the fear of instability and/or human rights disasters, it's understandable to second-guess. Through therapy, I've realized how important stability is, to me, and empathetically to other people. There's an obvious fear that this will reach me/us somewhow, through either terrorism or a bad US politician using this to attain power. Or that a rabid group in the US that doesn't care if they die and never give up could possibly take us down. But most is the worry for others and the guilt for not living up to our ideals.

I've often brought up how I'm no longer anti-war but pro-peace. I know we shouldn't trust the Taliban, but they are promising amnesty, rights for women, and a coalition government. I'm holding onto hope they keep their promises because that's all I can do now.

[Kyle]

I'll tell you who has a right to be super pissed: our vets. I know several vets that served in Afganistan and I they got fucked up from it. Some have severe PTSD. Plenty of our servicemembers lost their lives, health or limbs. And apparently it was for nothing. But that's not just something to be pissed at Biden for (or Trump for initiating a botched withdrawal)-- people should be pissed at both-- but at every president that perpetuated this pointlessness.

Not to mention the nearly 100,000 Afghanis (and I'm being conservative) who were killed in all this.

For what?

So pointless.

[Phoebe]

The people I know who served there and still have ties there are absolutely losing their s*** over the people who helped them and translated for them who are not getting out. Why would anyone ever do that service for us again after watching this?

[Stan]

I'll tell you who has a right to be super pissed: our vets.

I have a VA email account for a project and they've sent out several system wide emails saying they understand how much it sucks, how helpless the VA is to stop it, and offering extra mental health resources. This has been a punch in the nuts for them.

[Phoebe]

It's a thankless situation and I feel bad that 46 has to deal with it when it was a group project going back to 43 or even 40, depending on how you tell your history, but very little of it good. The level of vitriol reserved for Biden because he happened to be the one who presided over the deed is not surprising but is surely disappointing. Very few of those offering it could show evidence they gave even one partial fart of concern over anything happening in Afghanistan anytime in the last decade. It's not like people in this country gave a darn about things like that when they were voting on who should be president or representing us, so... Anyone who's been keeping up with the situation and personally concerned is free to criticize and everybody else should keep mouth shut, since it was firmly shut while we've been killing people in its name.

[Kyle]

I agree that Biden made the right decision to end the war. But the way this withdrawal was handled was incompetent. The abandonment of allies and citizens without a cognizant plan that anticipated a collapse of the paper thin government we installed is inexcusable. So I wholeheartedly agree that the blame for this war is spread amongst numerous staffers and presidents. But Biden's plan to leave was terrible and needlessly cost the lives of 13 soldiers and hundreds Afghans. He deserves the scorn he is getting. This was disgusting.

[Phoebe]

Happy to blame him for the bungled exit but I honestly think any of them would have bungled the exit. Or maybe a better way of putting it is that it was never going to go well, even with well-laid plans.

[Kyle]

Happy to blame him for the bungled exit but I honestly think any of them would have bungled the exit. Or maybe a better way of putting it is that it was never going to go well, even with well-laid plans.

I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s hypothetical because we didn’t have well laid plans. I’m not interested in blaming hypothetical presidents for hypothetical plans. But I do think everyone should be very angry with Biden for this unnecessary loss of life and incompetency.

[Mike]

Three previous administrations chose to lie to the nation and prolong the war rather than tackle this, so they get no points for this either, but the current situation is a travesty. At the very least, we should be doing everything in our power to help people who want to flee the mess we made. But as a nation, we have a shit track record of helping even the people who were directly on our military payroll, much less everyone else.

We could have had a plan for that at the very least

[Phoebe]

But didn't we? Or more to the point, is it Biden's fault, if he had good reason to believe we did? I just don't think it's realistic to assume that this could have been done in a much better way in a manner for which Biden is responsible. To be honest I blame him more in conjunction with Obama, because after they achieved the objective of taking out bin Laden, after having taken out other leadership of that group, that was a reasonable time to leave, and they had multiple years to accomplish it while Obama was still in charge. If Trump wanted to get out so badly, like he often said he did, where was his plan from day one? He had four years and approximately the same military leadership to work out the same plans. These aren't hypotheticals - this is how it actually was with those other guys. So yeah, blame Biden, but I just don't see why he gets it any worse than anyone else.

[Stan]

Biden's hands were tied by Trump's and Pompeo's crappy negotiations. During the negotiations, Trump kept tweeting how the troops were definitely coming home soon, which totally undermined the ability to accomplish any changes. I also saw an interesting factoid: we evacuated 7,000 Vietnamese in the fall of Saigon. We evacuated 37,000 Afghans.

edit: they're reporting ecacuating 124,000 civilians. I don't know how many of those are Afghans.

An analogous case occurred in Iraq. We left under Obama but he had no choice as Bush negotiated a complete withdrawal. Republicans fucked up but managed to push the repercussions back to their successors. Keeping a token force would have required agreeing to allow prosecutions for war crimes because of all the crap private contractors did.

Both cases also beg the question of how they fell so quickly after the mountains of money spent in the two countries (>$7,000 per person in the U.S.). Meanwhile federal contracts did booming business and the pentagon has never been successfully audited.

[Phoebe]

I feel like none of us even knows what we've been doing there. The real activities maybe have no relationship to the stated objectives. I don't think that's particularly conspiracy theory level: having whole bases there gave us access to a different side of both China and Russia, so who knows how much anyone really cared what happened within Afghanistan itself.

[Stan]

I feel like none of us even knows what we've been doing there. The real activities maybe have no relationship to the stated objectives. I don't think that's particularly conspiracy theory level: having whole bases there gave us access to a different side of both China and Russia, so who knows how much anyone really cared what happened within Afghanistan itself.

Well, much of the real reason for going into Iraq was to have a base next to Iran and south of Russian.

[Kyle]

I find it odd that the Trumpworld people are falsely claiming that Biden armed the Taliban, when it was actually the Reagan administration that provided over $3 billion to the Mujahedin to fight the Soviets, many of whom later became Taliban.

Before the Afghanistan war, I remember people warning against it and citing to the decade long struggle the soviets had there, referring to it as the USSR’s Vietnam.

[poorpete]

Seems an important context -- the media, and us, just didn't care anymore.



Trump signs deal with Taliban that sets this all in motion... blip...
Trump draws down troops.... blip...