Posted on 07/03/2021 11:07:18 AM PDT by Hojczyk
As American troops left their main military base in Afghanistan on Friday, marking a symbolic end to the longest war in U.S. history, locals living in the shadow of the base and in nearby Kabul were left ruing the past and bracing for what comes next.
Violence has been raging throughout Afghanistan in the weeks since President Joe Biden announced troops would withdraw unconditionally by Sept. 11.
With peace talks in Qatar stuttering, and roughly a quarter of the country’s districts having fallen to the Taliban in recent weeks according to one study, many are concerned that chaos looms.
Malek Mir, a mechanic in Bagram who saw the Soviet Army and then the Americans come and go, said he had was left with a deep sense of sadness at the futility of a foreign presence.
“They came with bombing the Taliban and got rid of their regime – but now they have left when the Taliban are so empowered that they will take over any time soon,” he said.
“What was the point of all the destruction, killing and misery they brought us? I wish they had never come.”
More than 3,500 foreign troops have been killed in a two- decade war, which has claimed over 100,000 civilians since 2009 alone, according to United Nations records.
Some, however, say the presence of foreign troops distorted Afghanistan’s economy and that it is time for the country to stand on its own.
“The Americans leave a legacy of failure, they’ve failed in containing the Taliban or corruption,” said Sayed Naqibullah, a shop owner in Bagram. “A small percentage of Afghans got so rich, while the vast majority still live with extreme poverty.
“In a way, we’re happy they’ve gone … We’re Afghans and we’ll find our way.”
(Excerpt) Read more at oann.com ...
Damn good question.
S hole people make s holes because they like living in s holes. The history of Afghanistan has been ignored. It has been and always will be an s hole until the culture changes and the people stop wanting to live that way.
Well it’s the Chinese Communist Party’s turn now
Our lives, treasure, equipment .... for what exactly? Oh, to turn Afghanistan back over to the Taliban who had it in the first place.
If you read this book they warned the Generals to say out after chasing
Osama bin Laden out...This country has nor won a war since WWII...
They did not have the General Patton theory on how to win a war
I think our military involvement (anywhere) should binary —
State 1) We have a base somehwere, like Guam, or Germany, or Italy, or wherever. We have forward deployment, and we train and we wait, but we’re not “using the military”.
State 2) We use the military. We bomb. Hard. We destroy things. We cause massive death. We make nations regret pissing us off. We deploy divisions and mess up infrastructure and damage nations horribly. We don’t stop the death and destruction until they beg us to stop and surrender unconditionally. Then we leave and we do not rebuild.
I think that if we’re not comfortable going “all out” then we need to hang back and just refrain from military involvement. We’ve been doing it pretty half-assed since 1945 and for the most part, our results have been less than one might hope.
And at least part of our problem is that certain people know they can get rich when we sell weapons to “the good guys” who are “on out side” and also get rich when we rebuild all the stuff we broke. We need to stop doing that. War should be about making people pay a price, not a get-rich-quick scheme.
“What was the point of all the destruction, killing and misery they brought us?”
Thanks to American funding and health care, the Afghans accomplished one big thing while we were there.
When we invaded the population was 20 million, now it is 40 million. There are now double the number of people who hate us.
The point was that the military industrial complex made lots of money—now they get to find somewhere else to rip off the taxpayer.
The point was that the military industrial complex made lots of money—now they get to find somewhere else to rip off the taxpayer.
My question as well. And if jorge busho ever gets tired of painting his toenails, maybe he’ll tell us the truth about why we became an occupation force with no objective.
It all goes back to Bush the W and his cabal of Globalist War Mongers.
What a disappointing and gelatinous mass of maleficent Nothingburger he turned out to be.
And Clinton and his New Worlders dragging us into the Balkans.
“We’re Afghans and we’ll find our way.”
Find it all you want but keep your cult beliefs there. We should have simply laid waste to the Taliban and left after salting the poppy fields. Perhaps allow only their women and children to immigrate but only upon being educated in the ways of the west.
Everyone here is ignoring that we got into Afghanistan because the Taliban had given safe haven to Bin Laden.
If we had not gone into Afghanistan after September11th, would we have seen more such .massacres in America? We will never know. Let’s discuss if you like.
“Then we leave and we do not rebuild.”
The classic objection to that is what happened after the First World War. Basically that’s what the Allied Powers did with the remains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - and what they got for not rebuilding was Hitler and the *Second* World War. The US Marshall Plan that rebuilt Axis countries after the war has meant that we didn’t get a Third World War 20-30 years later.
Neither should be a hard and fast rule, and there should be a lot of thought given as to when we should rebuild the losing nation and when we should not.
It's been an occupation and nation building the past decade and that's what's been a failure.
They brought it upon themselves.
Are we prepared to stop a Taliban with nuclear missiles — aimed at us?
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