People dropping off a C-17 at 500ft isn’t a very good look.
The airplane tragedies certainly show just how desperate the people were regarding Taliban rule. Today there have been reports emphasizing the Taliban’s conciliatory attitude and reassuring other Islamic oriented countries of their good behavior. One difference to the Taliban now versus 20 years ago is that even Taliban have had 10 or more years of access to the internet and social media, also the “Arab Spring” and the many complexities of those events. Presumably Taliban should be much more aware of world opinion and perhaps be concerned about some of it. Anybody know how many cell phones and Chromebooks Taliban actually have.
I listened to a man today who is the ranking Republican on a Congressional committee dealing with military and security, He expressed concern that we never did anything about obtaining the rare earth minerals from Afghanistan and which China is so eagerly grabbing throughout the world. He also spoke about how long it takes to process the papers for the Afghan translators and families. What I want to know is if these things were so important why weren’t they being done during the last administration, especially if we were leaving in May. The ranking Republican was very concerned that we had not done a good job of caring for the people who helped us as translators, etc. Is this similar to the way we did not honor our commitments to the Kurds several years ago because it was more important to have the Turks happy? Pretty soon nobody is going to trust it is safe to help us. He also mentioned that we should have gotten bin Ladden when he was at Tora Bora and nipped a lot of this trouble in the bud. My question is how did the CIA manage to loose the maps they had made of Tora Bora? Did this happen so that lots of money could be made on military efforts. Cheney and Halliburton certainly cleaned up in Iraq. What kind of exposure did they have to US money in Afghanistan, and who else were major beneficiaries in executing projects that were not very effective for the Afghan people, but sure cost a lot of our tax dollars?