More stuff from commenters on The Conservative Treehouse:
(I hope no one is upset with me that post stuff from there. I know some people don’t like CTH, but I think some of the people there have smart things to say and dig up interesting stuff.)
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Silas Lester
August 17, 2021 12:03 am
Reply to outhouse counsel
The President of Afghanistan fled with so much money they couldn’t get it all in the helicopter. The soldiers who fled the Taliban or surrendered were starved and poorly paid.
The corruption in Afghanistan was monumental. This is why it fell so fast.
Fangdog
August 16, 2021 11:41 pm
Reply to joeknuckles
The deep state only used Biden for the puppet Biden is. The deep states biggest fear is being exposed for the corrupt, criminal traitors they are. This is going to get ugly quickly. They want the focus on Biden and Afghanistan. They do not want the focus on a stolen, fraudulent election.
Cindy
August 16, 2021 11:20 pm
Warlord Black Panther team, Harris/Obama/Jarrett set-up Biden telling him to pull out ASAP. She was the last to talk to him. Biden must have been confused when things blew up so he wanted to call Obama wondering what he did wrong. His team told him not to. It explains why Harris refused to attend Biden’s speech. No wonder why Psaki (team Biden) took off for sudden vacation. The in-fighting must hell. Harris is going to pull the 25th. What a freaking joke our country has become. MSNBC is team Biden, CNN is team Harris.
WhiteBoard
August 16, 2021 11:10 pm
anyone around DEMs and getting their impression? thats a good gauge.
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bertdilbert
bertdilbert
August 16, 2021 11:13 pm
Reply to WhiteBoard
They are very quiet, the ones I have run into on message board. Normally they will have something to say. Now it is just silence. They know how bad this is.
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WhiteBoard
WhiteBoard
August 16, 2021 11:19 pm
Reply to bertdilbert
that means the quarantining them from the truth isnt working.
makes me wonder if The United States Coup portion was betrayed by another Sector of the Global Team. Like they did not expect it to truty topple in 72 hours.
Guest
August 16, 2021 11:01 pm
Matt Zeller seems like the real deal, but I’m suspicious that MSNBC gave him such a long uninterrupted time to talk. I suppose they want his lists of every person.
Ward
August 17, 2021 12:01 am
Reply to Guest
My thought exactly, this was a Toofer for Obama, he gets to arm the Taliban, give up Afghanistan, humiliate the US, and set the grounds for the removal of Biden
spoogels
August 16, 2021 10:47 pm
@JackPosobiec
·
10h
We now have multiple reports that US forces on the ground warned Biden the collapse was happening and he gave the order anyway, while saying the opposite in public
Afghanistan Didn’t Fall: It Never Existed
All wars are forever when you don’t know what you’re fighting for.
Excerpt:
“Afghanistan’s collapse: Did US intelligence get it wrong?” ABC News asks. “Afghanistan Is Your Fault,” barks Tom Nichols at The Atlantic. “Why Afghan Forces So Quickly Laid Down Their Arms,” Politico ponders.
The one thing that the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan is good for is more media hot takes.
Afghanistan didn’t fall because it never existed. The Afghan army laid down its arms because it also never existed. And not just because many of the 300,000 soldiers were imaginary. Its Pashtun members surrendered to their fellow Taliban Pashtuns, or fled to Iran or Uzbekistan, depending on their tribal or religious affiliations which, unlike Afghanistan, are very real.
The Afghan army was there because we spent $90 billion on it. Much like Afghanistan with its president, its constitution, and its elections existed because we spent a fortune on it. When we left, the president fled, the army collapsed, and Afghanistan: The Musical closed in Kabul.
Afghanistan isn’t a country. It’s a stone age Brigadoon of quarreling tribes, ethnic groups, Islamic denominations, and warlords manned by young men with old Russian and American rifles. Unlike the fiction of a democratic Afghanistan, that is something they will die for.
And in the coming years you will see some of those same soldiers who laid down their guns fighting and dying for tribes and warlords, even fighting the Taliban, in the real endless war.
The forever war isn’t something we invented after 9/11: Afghanistan has always been at war.
Americans are impressed that the Taliban held out for 20 years. They shouldn’t be.
There’s no time in Afghanistan. Two decades of war are horrifyingly incomprehensible to Americans. To Afghans, it’s the way things have always been. We stepped into a place that has been a war zone for centuries, took sides, supplied weapons, and then left as everyone knew we would. The British and the Russians came and went. After us, the Chinese will come and go.
And the forever war will go on endlessly.
Before us, the Russians wanted the Afghans to pretend to be Communists. We wanted them to pretend that they were Democrats. But the Afghans aren’t ‘Afghans’, they’re Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Balochs, Hazaras, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, everything else is just a temporary costume.
The Taliban, another Pashtun bid to seize power, will be met with resistance, not by the proponents of a free and democratic Afghanistan, but by rival tribes and warlords.
We’ll probably end up funding some of them. And maybe this time we won’t be stupid enough to ask them to hold elections or any of the other nation-building nonsense from Foggy Bottom.
Our Afghanistan campaign after September 11 was fast, clever, and ruthless. The men who conducted it understood the society. They worked together with warlords to crush the Taliban. Their goal was a quick and dirty victory that would make an example out of the Taliban.
Our allies were anyone whose current factional interests in the endless power struggle aligned with ours. As the years went on, some of our allies became enemies, and some enemies became allies. The Taliban were the bad guys, but just like in Syria, so was everyone else. There were plenty of innocents caught in the crossfire, but innocents have no power.
The average Afghan rural villager doesn’t think of being a citizen of some country called Afghanistan. He cares little for elections and his elders confuse Americans with the Russians and sometimes even the British. The elites in Kabul are happy to dress up their power grabs in presidential titles and constitutions that no one else in the country cares about. USAID pays girls in Kabul to play at feminism and college graduates to talk about international relations.
None of it mattered a damn in the vast majority of the country as we are now finding out.
But, Afghanistan didn’t become a complete disaster for us. Until Obama.
American forces peaked at 25,000 under Bush. Obama quadrupled them to 100,000. That’s the year more American soldiers were wounded than during the entire Bush administration.
1,200 Americans died during Obama’s Afghanistan surge, not just because he quadrupled the number of soldiers, but because the military was told to stop trying to defeat the Taliban.
Our soldiers became community organizers with guns who were told not to fight.
No hearts and minds were won. But cemeteries filled up with boys from Texas and West Virginia who weren’t allowed to shoot back because Obama wanted to win Muslim hearts and minds.
The military brass who embraced Obama’s strategy buried and crippled a generation of young men. Countless men and women came home wounded inside. They overdosed or killed themselves.
The surge receded. The military brass pulled back to secure the cities while the Taliban secured the rural areas that we spent so many lives on. All they had to do was wait for us to leave.
...If we learn anything from Afghanistan, from Iraq, and from September 11, let it be this.
There have to be boundaries, physical and conceptual borders, between us and the rest of the world. American exceptionalism can’t be a narcissistic belief that everyone ought to be like us. If everyone could become us, there would be nothing exceptional about us. Our exceptionalism is that the rest of the world isn’t like us and never will be. And that if we want to protect ourselves, we have to stop trying to define the world or allowing the rest of the world to redefine America.
We could have won in Afghanistan, swiftly and decisively, and left, if we hadn’t been seduced into believing that Afghanistan could be America and that Afghans deserved to be Americans.
Likewise, Iraq.
Victories became defeats and cemeteries filled with the dead because we lost sight of the truth about Afghanistan and about ourselves. The more we think about Afghanistan or any place in terms of ourselves, the less we see it for what it is. And that can be a deadly illusion.
Americans have spent the last century trying to turn the world into America. Let’s spend this century making America what it was always intended to be: a refuge from the rest of the world.
We won’t win wars anymore because we can no longer remember what we’re fighting for. Unable to draw boundaries between the enemy and ourselves, between our nation and the world, we’ve lost touch with the fundamental purpose and even the concept of what a war is.
To win a war, we have to remember what we’re fighting for. Ourselves.
The Afghans understand that concept. Perhaps they understand it too well. But it’s time we learned it too. If we can’t go to war for ourselves, not for democracy, human rights, or so that Afghan girls can go to school, then we will lose soldiers, lose wars, and lose our nation.
All wars are endless and forever when you don’t understand what it takes to win.
Meme captured for posterity
SS1