I don't post on this forum very often. In fact only once before, when I thought that certain forum members were being disrespectful to the late Prince Phillip.
Well the situation in Afghanistan is becoming very alarming now and I just hope that all of the people from the UK manage to escape in time.
I 'm aware that many Americans are on this forum, some supporters of President Biden. Have you any positive thoughts on his recent actions?
Thank you
OK, so when you've watched Bitter Lake, try this
A historical view on the mess that is Afghanistan and the political
machinations that led to where we are today
Bitter Lake Dir : Adam Curtis (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4393514
It's on the BBC iPlayer and has been since it's release ...
Bush / Cheney / Rice et al where on BBC program about 9/11 last night
and two points stood out
a) Bush's CIA Intelligence advisor within 30 minutes said the
the attack was by Al-Quaeda and not Iran or Iraq
- so why did Bush decide to start a war with Iraq
b) Bush is still boasting the he's a "War President"
Fascinating photos of Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s . . .
From the Foundation for Economic Education website, a list of the billions in military equipment the US left for the Taliban . . . interesting charts!
Remember that Agent Orange was all “we’re getting out of Afghanistan,” and taking the US troop numbers from 15,000 (and they were already loosing ground to the Taliban) to 2,500 within a year. So the die was cast prior to Biden taking the oath of office. Republicans are scrubbing their websites of everything related to their position of getting out of Afghanistan.
Biden know of the true cost of war, and made the decision. It was never going to go well on any level. Last year, now or in the next 10 years.
Arguably, Afghanistan destroyed the British Empire. Later, the Soviet Union spends 10 years there, and now there is no Soviet Union. The US spends 20 years there and…
.
Both of those passages seem like they're preceding a "but."
Donna Brazile also became a Fox pundit. She was about as mainstream, limo liberal as one could possibly be. As far as I know, most presidents continue or increase whatever warring was underway during the previous administration. Trump praised Biden for the Afghanistan exit. I just think of Colin Powell saying, “You broke it, you bought it,” meaning the US and I assume US allies would be in Afghanistan and Iraq forever. There are Democratic and Republican elites that are war hawks, like Clintons and Bushes. They see war as a way to make a lot of money. There are plenty of non-elite war hawks in both parties. One party blames the other depending on who’s president if a war is unpopular. In the early noughts, I stopped listening to and reading Greg Palast, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Webster Tarpley, Matt Taibbi and whoever else I was introduced to via Pacifica Radio station KPFA, especially the show Guns and Butter. It was all too depressing and that Webster Tarpley is a nutter. I’ve caught Taibbi, Scahill and Greenwald a few times on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman and Juan González. Democracy Now! is depressing as well, but I still watch that sometimes. In 2019, YouTube’s algorithm determined that I needed to watch a clip of Glenn Greenwald getting slapped by right-wing journalist Augusto Nunes during a radio show, called Pânico, in his adopted country.
Watching it again, it looks like two guys who haven't thrown many punches in their lives taking a few symbolic swings at one another . . .
The difference between "non-interventionists" (US) and humanitarian "anti-war" folk seems apparent in the emphasis of the former on saving "American lives", not all lives.
In fact, extreme versions (Trump, Tucker Carlson) combine overtly racist views with "non-interventionism". They evidently don't care about bombing foreigners, who they seem to regard as subhuman. Their cost-benefit calculation doesn't put foreign deaths on the "cost" side of the war ledger, so to speak.
But they appear to have cleverly packaged their "non-interventionism" to sell to many gullible anti-war folks. (This was a conscious strategy by Steve Bannon, reportedly - to get dissident 4chan/reddit youth aboard his cause). One of the mechanisms of this propaganda has been to constantly, repeatedly equate "liberalism" with war-mongering "interventionism" (so: Biden, like Hillary Clinton, is presented as the war candidate, and let's conveniently forget that Trump in fact escalated every conflict he presided over, ramping up bombing in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, increasing civilian deaths - in some cases to record-high levels).
I think the messaging by Greenwald & Taibbi, et al, has been instrumental in promoting this Bannonesque line (no doubt inadvertently in Taibbi's case, but who knows with the multi-millionaire Fox News regular pundit Glenn Greenwald).
Ending forever war$ . . . that was one of the things that livened up my ears during those Republican debates from Trump. Like me, he hates the dumb, no-mission, endless wars. Did that damn pipeline ever get built? In the early noughts that’s what I’d convinced myself Afghanistan was all about. That and those fields of poppies.
I used to like Matt Taibbi's writing, but not so much these days.
I find his take on Afghanistan incredibly hypocritical, tbh. Like Glenn Greenwald, he's making vast sums of money on Substack by appealing to a MAGA audience in addition to his usual audience - by making everything about Biden and those "awful" libs, dems and "deep state".
Not that I'm a big fan of Biden. But he's damned either way. The argument that withdrawing would result in chaos is what the generals have used to delay all this time. Continue that line as public stance, and Biden is damned as warmongering promoter of forever wars. Present an (unrealistically) optimistic forecast of withdrawal (as politically necessary prerequisite to withdrawal), and he's damned because of what was always going to happen, regardless of who's president.
Well, I guess at least Taibbi isn't quite as hypocritical as Greenwald (who supported the invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq - although he spuriously denies the latter).
It's kind of nauseating to me watching some nominally 'anti-war' people (who were insistent on 'ending the forever wars') seeming almost gleeful when a withdrawal of occupying troops has negative effects - just because it gives them a chance to "dunk on the libs" again, as it were.
Straightforward analysis from Matt Taibbi.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/afghanistan-we-never-learn?r=ie96l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy
This situation is primarily because of Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld.
They wanted to go into Afghanistan. They get the “credit”.
Those who did not foresee this outcome 20 years ago were deluding themselves.
.
"Hearts and minds" . . .
hmmm, maybe Afghanistan could have been resolved better if George W. Bush, Dick Cheney & Donald Rumsfeld et al hadn't decided to pile into Iraq...
"Forever Wars" never end the way proponents hype them.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya - so much for "regime change", eh ?
And I don't believe the spin coming from Taliban either
- they're old school and have a long memory.
It's looking bad.
A lot of irony and hypocrisy over this issue. Trump promised withdrawal from Afghanistan, but didn't deliver on his promise. Remember headlines like this?:
Trump pledges to withdraw troops from Afghanistan by Christmas; Taliban cheer
The president has made walking away from "ridiculous endless wars" the cornerstone of his foreign policy. (Reuters / NBC News, 2020)
Trump in fact escalated every conflict he presided over, ramping up bombing in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, increasing civilian deaths (in some cases to record-high levels) while removing civilian protections and reducing accountability. In the year after Trump became president he oversaw more than 10,000 US-led coalition airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, with a 215% rise in civilian deaths. Also, US weapon sales to foreign countries increased under Trump.
Look at the history. The British in the 1840's, Russia in the 1980's. Now this situation in the last 20 years. They say history repeats itself so much that it stutters. Hearing personal stories of people I knew that served there, this was going to be the outcome. I first started hearing it back in 2008. Wars of this nature are never a good thing. And it will get worse before it settles down in that region of the world, sadly, I believe. To say what this administration could have done better, they should have opened up a few history books. Maybe they wouldn't have withdrew as quickly. A withdrawal was going to be the way out, as history displays. I can only hope we become more intelligent as a civilization and learn from the past. Better to live with different ideologies and debate with with good intentions because wars of this nature have never ended. Maybe our intelligence and reasoning will improve. I can only hope.
It was the wrong decision to "go into" Afghanistan, just ask Moscow!
Now with this exit, 20+ years later, after so much blood and treasure gone, it would seem that the whole enterprise, unfortunately, might've been for naught. It's difficult to determine what the original intention was and I've stopped thinking about it. What did Barbara Bush say about her "beautiful mind?" It's something like that, probably.
"We" don't do very well in that part of the world, methinks, with these various adventures.
Hopefully, after DC and allies leave, the Taliban will change and arrive at the decision that women need full rights in all spheres of society and they can go burqa-free if they choose to. Hopefully, the Taliban will then decide that religious tolerance and plurality of opinion is the best way forward. They'll determine that a separation of mosque and state is worth a try. I don't think even one of those is on the horizon. It's not that kind of place and hasn't been for a while.
Twenty years in Afghanistan has driven home to me the concept that never the twain shall meet.