Posted on 08/18/2021 4:04:27 PM PDT by PoliticallyShort
It’s impossible to know what would have happened in a Trump second term, but had he done what Biden just did, the result would have been the same. In truth, the only way out of Afghanistan was just to get out: order home all civilians, close the embassy, destroy anything that couldn’t be shipped, keep the military there just long and strong enough to protect the evacuation. And then go. The Biden Administration didn’t do any of that because it, and the whole “national security” establishment, knew that doing so would be to admit failure, to advertise its own bankruptcy. So, just like the foolish wishful thinking that began the disaster two decades ago, they talked themselves into believing that an orderly exit was possible without a plan, that the Taliban meant what they said at the “peace talks,” that those Afghan “security forces” and “civil society” institutions were anything stronger than tissue.
“The Romans,” Machiavelli says, “made their wars short and big.” We Americans have taken to making our wars small and long. We inflict pinprick strikes over decades rather than getting the whole thing over within a matter of days or weeks. A better strategy, right after 9/11, would have been to do what we did, but finish the job at Tora Bora—and then leave immediately, with a note on the fridge saying “If you do anything like that again, we’ll be back quickly with overwhelming force, and we’ll leave just as quickly. We will do that as many times as you make us.”
(Excerpt) Read more at americanmind.org ...
>> It’s impossible to know what would have happened in a Trump second term
Unlikely a complete withdrawal.
The author is a fool.
Trump didn’t trust them, and they feared him.
180 deg difference.
I humbly disagree with the author.
His treatise pretends (1) we did everything right that we could do, (2) we did nothing wrong, made no mistakes, mo policy errors, always had the right objectives and (3) we - the U.S. - in no way helped create the conditions we have today. I think that sort of thinking is false.
Let me propose Rambo VI
We have military we left and still have in other countries.....S. Korea comes to mind. Japan, and Taiwan to name a few.
Osama bin Laden was very likely out of Afghanistan by late 2005. What were we doing?
Bush never wanted to get him. He knew if he got him, there would be too much pressure to get out before he could start his pet Nation Building Project.
And we’re going to save these people from fight-to-the-death Taliban?
A training officer told me of having to teach recruits how to drive a humvee. He told them to mount up. They stood there, not moving. Comes to find out most of them had never been in any vehicle and did not know how to open the vehicle doors.
A very few are trainable to some degree, but even fewer could do basic weapon maintenance, very few could read, and most had no motivation to fight.
Hopeless, we should have left after UBL was killed.
THANK YOU
My opinion exactly.
This and Iraq were about nothing other than furthering the New World Order.
I wish I could take back every post I made here supporting that idiot and his stupid wars. Oh well, live and learn.
Doomed from the start? Not even the Bush crowd left civilians by the 10s of thousands and billions worth of weapons behind
Stop
It is a fact of war that war doesn’t end until the enemy says it does. Until the enemy quits.
The Taliban can’t quit, they have nothing else to do and are stuck in a warrior cult.
What is coming to light is that the Taliban created a “backdoor” to most of the Afghan Division and Corps commanders and HQ staff months ago. They were bribed to surrender their troops and did so.
You accept the Taliban gold or you get the Taliban lead.......
The Biden regime’s grave miscalculation – the termination of the “Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau” within the State Department – likely endangered the lives of thousands of American attempting to evacuate the war-torn country. - https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/trump-blasts-bidens-afghanistan-miscalculation/
Let’s stop trying to fix everyone, and just worry about containing them. Complex forms of government requiring civic participation is beyond a country with a mean IQ of less than 90. Afghans will be living the same way 100 years from now as they were 100 years ago.
Yep. My emBASEee strategee. From my home page
I have been advocating for several years a policy I call ‘embaseees’. Embassy + AirBase —> EmBASEeees. We go into a terrorist country, clear out their taliban equivalent, then withdraw to very large Embassies, perhaps 3 of them. Have them big enough to encompass a military airbase where we can use it for decades on end to conduct anti-terrorism operations. As long as the ‘host’ country aint killing Americans then we let them have self-sovereignty. Kind of like how we operated in the Phillipines for decades. We could even have an intermediate zone that we patrol but it would be autonomous. Let them have their taste of freedom. A referendum every 10 years to see how large the boundaries of the intermediate autonomous zone should be.
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There are two distinct concepts talked about lately as if they are tied together. They are not. First, whether the United States should have been there that long can be debated. It was probably a waste of men and material.
However, the second concept, declaring the mission over and getting out, is not part of the first. The way Biden quit will always be beyond human comprehension, if corrupt motivations can be ruled out. I don’t think they can, and I think he did it for China’s benefit.
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