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Afghanistan falls
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 3:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Republicans are trying desperately in any way they can to make President Biden look bad. Needless to say, they are well known for their bold lies and unashamed distortion of the facts. And, where does their allegiance lie? With a total unfit and dishonest character like Donald Trump.

Frankly, this country is infinitely better off with Biden as president, and I believe most thoughtful folks realize that.
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mrgybe



Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5180

PostPosted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 4:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

coboardhead wrote:
I don't recall Mrgybe objecting when Trump negotiated with the Taliban and set a withdrawal date. His criticism, now, rings hollow.

You become less rational with each passing day, seeking excuses for this Administration's actions with the same vigor you applied to criticizing every action of its predecessor. Biden used a record number of executive actions to overturn a raft of Trump policies. Did his pen run out of ink before he could overturn this agreement? The President lied about the advice he received from the military, and used the "Trump agreement" as an excuse to orchestrate a chaotic, incompetent exit which cost lives, tens of billions in equipment, and undermined US credibility around the world. Whether the war itself was a mistake, or conducted poorly, is an entirely different issue. You lot don't get it; a significant majority in the county does.
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coboardhead



Joined: 26 Oct 2009
Posts: 4303

PostPosted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 4:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mrgybe

You are going to have to show me where I defended the US withdrawal from Afghanistan or made excuses for it. I am on record with criticisms of every President (Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden) over Afghanistan policy. I have warned that getting into Afghanistan without an exit strategy was folly.

My point is that your comments are no less partisan than anyone else's on this forum. Yet, you have no problem calling others partisan.

I might remind you that, in the end, I was right all along about Trump. His actions after losing the election are the closest thing we have come to our loss of our democracy in our modern history. So, you might want to consider leaving out comments that disparage my opinions based on my dislike of Trump. It never played all that well and now it sounds sort of silly.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 6:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Goal posts just moved again. Buggy whip won't admit that he said nothing when Trump cut a deal with Taliban. Said nothing when Trump tried to foment an armed attempt at sedition. But Biden...

What a dick.
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coachg



Joined: 10 Sep 2000
Posts: 3549

PostPosted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 8:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

We lost credibility with the world when we went into Afghanistan with a false purpose and no exit strategy. The day we went in the mess was going to fall on whoever pulled us out. It appears Biden was the only President in the last 20 years with balls big enough to do it, messy or not. At least we can now truly focus on China.

You are worried about the billions in equipment we left behind but are okay with us staying, wasting billions & lives.

Biden lied about the advice he received from the military? Where was you outrage when Trump revealed he withheld the true threat of the coronavirus?

Conservatives storm the capital, not a peep.

CB pegged you correctly; a partisan hack indeed.

Coachg
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 8:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

20,000 lies by Trump. Crickets. Suddenly, buggy whip has discovered that there are ethical issues around honesty. Only for Democrats; he can’t tell the truth to save his life. What do you want to bet that the last remnant of the British Raj will comment to condemn the attempted firebombing of Democratic offices in Texas? Don’t hold your breath.

https://www.kxan.com/news/local/afd-investigating-possible-arson-at-travis-co-democratic-office/

What a dick.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Thu Sep 30, 2021 10:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

As I’ve said before, seldom in doubt, often wrong. Yesterday General Frank McKenzie told the House Armed Service Committee that the collapse of the Afghanistan could be traced to the 2020 agreement with the Taliban. Once the number of U.S. troops was below 2500–well before Biden was elected—“the unraveling of the U.S.-backed Afghan government accelerated.”

I’m not saying I buy this completely, or that the withdrawal was well handled. In any such debacle—and I mean the whole Afghanistan mistake, not merely the withdrawal—people will try to save their careers by pointing fingers at others. My Congresswoman, alone, got it right. Stay out.

What I am saying is beware of people who express their opinions as facts. Beware of people who use hyperbole, such as the worst foreign policy debacle, to try to bully others. And beware of people who repeat the morning screeds of Murdoch from the WSJ. They only think that they are deep thinkers—they don’t actually do the work.
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mrgybe



Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5180

PostPosted: Thu Sep 30, 2021 10:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

coboardhead wrote:
Mrgybe, You are going to have to show me where I defended the US withdrawal from Afghanistan or made excuses for it.

Here you go.

coboardhead wrote:
I don't know how the withdrawal could have been better.

All of you do the same thing. You can't bring yourselves to criticize the man you voted for, so you avoid the question by pointing to "bad" behavior elsewhere, or screech that, since I didn't comment on other, completely unrelated matters, I must be a partisan hack.

This was a major misstep. That's why I have commented. Obama ignored military advice to leave a small residual force and allowed ISIS to step into the vacuum with disastrous results. Many of you made excuses then. We ended up sending a force back into Iraq. Biden has done the same thing in the most chaotic manner imaginable. We'll see what happens. As for the military genius in California who can't see the difference between our own forces using state of the art equipment, and handing that same equipment over to an extremist organization, you just shake your head.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Thu Sep 30, 2021 10:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sigh. Selective outrage rears its ugly head again. Without, of course, any discussion. Forgotten in the latest screed is Syria. From the Atlantic:

Quote:
The strategic costs were these: a Turkish assault on the United States’ Kurdish partners in the counter-ISIS fight; an unknown number of ISIS prisoners—perhaps 100, Esper told CNN—escaped from prison in the chaos before officials claimed that they’d been recaptured; a reordered map of northern Syria taking shape, with Russia and Turkey as key power brokers filling the vacuum; and a Kurdish partnership with the regime of Bashar al-Assad, who has used chemical weapons and indiscriminate bombings of civilians in a bid to keep power over the course of an eight-year civil war.


The political benefits were practically nil. The president has long promised to bring American troops home and reduce the country’s military commitments abroad, but this month’s decision, and the sudden way it was announced, drew condemnation from some of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, including Senator Lindsey Graham. “Pray for our Kurdish allies who have been shamelessly abandoned by the Trump administration,” Graham tweeted soon after Trump first made the announcement (though the senator has since declared himself “increasingly optimistic”). U.S. officials who had spent months trying to maintain an uneasy peace between Turkey and the Kurds, and who had emphasized the importance of the U.S. presence in Syria to keep the pressure on a down-but-not-out ISIS, were suddenly left explaining to furious lawmakers why the president seemed to have rejected the logic of their efforts.


Equipment left behind?

Quote:
Less than a week after President Donald Trump formally ordered the U.S. military to withdraw the majority of its forces from Syria, the Pentagon carried out an unusual mission in the northeastern part of the country. A pair of F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets delivered a precision airstrike, not to protect a joint U.S.-Turkish patrol on the border or bomb an ISIS haven back to the Stone Age, but to destroy a major U.S. ammo cache housed in a former cement factory that had been converted into a U.S. special operations base and Kurdish training camp. The stated reason: to “reduce the facility’s military usefulness.”

This unusual mission underscores the logistical nightmares wrought by a hasty U.S. military withdrawal from the country. Military sources have told reporters that the sortie, which cost roughly $23,000 per hour per aircraft, was ordered “because the cargo trucks required to safely remove the ammo are needed elsewhere to support the withdrawal.” Army Colonel Myles Caggins, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Syria and Iraq, tried to play the incident off as routine, saying that “blowing the ammo was part of the plan,” but Brett McGurk, a former U.S. envoy to the multinational alliance, tweeted that the mission constituted an “emergency ‘break glass’ evacuation procedure reserved for an extreme worst-case scenario.”

McGurk isn’t wrong. “Trying to destroy munitions from the sky like this does not work as well as air planners think,” John Ismay, a New York Times reporter and former Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer, tweeted. “Some of the weapons you hit will detonate sympathetically, sure. For the rest, you’ve blown open secure storage and made it available to anyone with a pickup truck.”


Now I don't know the precise facts about what was left behind in Afghanistan--but I watched a news clip of a general claiming nothing. Underlying this, of course, are the different failures of the military. I guess nobody remembers McChrystal. Or the touted "surges" urged by the military. Or the counterinsurgency initiative. Or the reliance on high tech military equipment in a low tech country with a low tech insurgency that had captured the countryside because it promised them, and actually delivered, less violence. All of these efforts, pursued with the best of intentions, failed long before Biden came into office.

I have sympathy for all of the Presidents as they have tried to understand and reason with their military commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq--and I don't leave Trump out of that. I understand the reluctance of the military--who didn't make the decisions to invade--giving up on something that has cost them the lives of the men they command. I am sympathetic to their determination, and their willingness to give their best in trying circumstances. But their tools are those of violence, not those of peace-making.

My objection here is to the continued partisan selection of our woeful history in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and the selective outrage and opinions presented as unassailable facts.

What a dick.
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Thu Sep 30, 2021 2:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well mrgybe, since you seem to know so much about the "tens of billions of equipment" left in Afghanistan, maybe you can give us an accounting of the "state of the art" stuff left behind.

If the truth be told, you really don't have a clue. It's quite clear to all of us that your information comes from one of your highly biased opinion sources. Just another wild eyed rant from Biden haters.

That said, I think we all know that lots of military support hardware was left behind, but in reality, none of it can be deemed to be "state of the art" equipment. If you really want to blame someone, you might start with the responsible senior military officers that were running the show in Afghanistan. They're the ones that ultimately decided what equipment was to be left behind.
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