The US War in Afghanistan

[ryzno]

It'd help with the opioid pandemic. Wait I just realized everything is a "pandemic".
Mind blown gif

 

[TB]

It'd help with the opioid pandemic. Wait I just realized everything is a "pandemic".
Mind blown gif

Epi, not pan.

 

[ryzno]

Epi, not pan.

Tell CNN. /s

 

[TexRex]

Tell CNN.

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

I wonder how long the outrage over Afghanistan will last..at least in terms of the indignation leveled at the Biden admin. At some point Afghanistan will cease to be an American concern in the same way that Americans largely don't care about how minorities, the press, or women are treated in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran or any number of countries controlled by autocrats/warlords. Unpopularly exiting a country would seem to have a lot fewer long term traps than unpopularly...or in the case of Afghanistan even popularly entering a country.

My prediction is that this will blow over for Biden no matter how hard he is pounded, from all sides, by the press in the short term because ultimately not that many people care about Afghans.

I don't know how else this could have gone and it's very sad.

 

[McLaren]

I wonder how long the outrage over Afghanistan will last..at least in terms of the indignation leveled at the Biden admin. At some point Afghanistan will cease to be an American concern in the same way that Americans largely don't care about how minorities, the press, or women are treated in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran or any number of countries controlled by autocrats/warlords. Unpopularly exiting a country would seem to have a lot fewer long term traps than unpopularly...or in the case of Afghanistan even popularly entering a country.

My prediction is that this will blow over for Biden no matter how hard he is pounded, from all sides, by the press in the short term because ultimately not that many people care about Afghans.

I don't know how else this could have gone and it's very sad.

From what I caught of his address, he seems to be fine with whatever heat he gets. I believe he did reflect that the departure was something Trump issued into place & did say the Afghan military helped bring it into effect by not even attempting to fight. But, I find it hard to disagree with his message that why should the US continue to put its own soldiers at risk after 20 years and working with the Afghan military if they just dip as soon as we're not there to carry the brunt of it.

I was however, tickled that Trump suddenly cared about refugees.

Can anyone even imagine taking out our Military before evacuating civilians and others who have been good to our Country and who should be allowed to seek refuge

 

[SestoScudo]

Hearing people here talking about Afghanistan as if the entire reason behind the utter chaos in the last 100 years or so was because of Muslims and Islam (a religion that prohibits harming women, kids and eldery during war mind you) and not because you know, hundreds of years of brutal colonisation, extremists funding and proxy cold wars by superpower nations around the world is quite devastating. Instead of any respect that goes to the people suffering in said region, you get people like this...











Isn't kinda odd how that that the majority of victims from all so called "islamic" militias & terroist groups attacks are....i dunno, Muslims? The reality is that almost nothing about them is islamic, in fact none of Majority Muslim countries around the world even represent said belief's. In fact, i bet that if you remove any and all resemblance of Islam from all Muslim Majority countries (Turkey, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Iran, Maldives...etc), it would barely even change %10-20 at most. This entire thing we see in parts of western asian countries are nothing more than a pure political and possibly racial issue/motivation. I know I'm going offtopic here but i can tell you that a lot of things in Afghanistan and other places would possibly not even happen if not for foreign governments interfering, invading and creating puppet states out of it.

At the end of the day, i just hope things just go well for them and everyone else out there. Thank you.

Islamic World spans from Morocco to Indonesia.

Arabs only form like 20% of the population of the Islamic World. When mentioning the Islamic World people get it mixed up with the Arab World. Arab World is mainly countries that speak Arabic and the population are Arab. I know North Africans mainly come from Berber heritage while Iraqis and Syrians are mainly descended from the natives that lived there same for Egyptians.

Arab is a cultural and language thing right?

Islamic World is not just the Arab world you have many non Arab countries like Turkey, Malaysia, Somalia, Mali, Niger, Indonesia, Central Asian countries, Pakistan, Bosnia, Albania and many more we even include Tatarstan and other lands that are federation or autonomous. Islamic World is pretty huge also not a single entity.

We can even include India. India is a majority Hindu population but the Muslim population there is pretty huge with 204 million.

The reason why "Islamic" terrorist groups or militias go after Muslims first is due to ideology because they see Muslims as either as heretics or the ones who left Islam so they have to be punished first before going after non Muslims. "Islamic" terrorist groups also go after ethnic and religious minorities in the Islamic world they believe maximum chaos and casualty would lead to rebellions in the countries. Its the issue of takfir there is a reason why many Muslim scholars call the Taliban, Isis, aq, boko haram as the Khawarij or the Neo-Khawarijites depending on the definition.

Their whole premise is either targeting Muslims or Non Muslims. They are just blood thirsty proxies.

 

[UKMikey]

Could someone explain why W rejected the Taliban offer to hand Bin Laden over in 2014? Did his administration provide an official reason at the time?

Bush rejects Taliban offer to surrender bin Laden

Second week of bombing begins; Media visits village hit by missile

www.independent.co.uk

 

[Liquid]

 

[Tornado]

Could someone explain why W rejected the Taliban offer to hand Bin Laden over in 2014? Did his administration provide an official reason at the time?

Bush rejects Taliban offer to surrender bin Laden

Second week of bombing begins; Media visits village hit by missile

www.independent.co.uk

That article is actually from October 2001. IIRC the Taliban had a bunch of stipulations on what would happen to him following his surrender to the US, the most ridiculous of which that he would be tried in an Islamic court in Afghanistan while the Taliban still controlled the country.

 

[UKMikey]

That article is actually from October 2001. IIRC they had a bunch of stipulations on what would happen to him following his surrender to the US, the most ridiculous of which that he would be tried in an Islamic court in Afghanistan while the Taliban still controlled the country.

Thanks for the explanation.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Michael O'Leary looks on, wondering why he's been bothering buying jets with seats.

 

[UKMikey]

Michael O'Leary looks on, wondering why he's been bothering buying jets with seats.

Not to mention the SqueezyJet people.

 

[ToyGTone]

I was talking about the Taliban. Not the whole country. Do you actually support them?

Also Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Seriously, blow all of them off the map, it's not like they fight fair.

No.

But at this point, I'm convinced that the bigger terrorists are the one's who are supporting the idea of causing human suffrage overseas while managing to hide in the labels of "freedom, equal human rights and progression".

 

[Groundfish]

But at this point, I'm convinced that the bigger terrorists are the one's who are supporting the idea of causing human suffrage overseas while managing to hide in the labels of "freedom, equal human rights and progression".

Hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings kamikaze style murdering thousands was what?
An act of peace?
That said I have to say I don’t know why so many are attacking Biden.
Imo he did the right thing. The biggest negative or issue is explaining to American service people why they were there.
The plight of the Afghans is not America’s business. America was foolish to go in there to begin with.
Get our people out ASAP.
Good job.

 

[TexRex]

He's baaaaaaaaaack.

I don’t participate in this section anymore.
I disagree with most if not all of you regs.
Nothin personal. It’s just not worth my time to bother.

 

[Groundfish]

He's baaaaaaaaaack.

No. I just decided to post that opinion.
I’m flattered you remembered me, though hun.

 

[TexRex]

No. I just decided to post that opinion.

Yeeeeeaaahh, about that...

Hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings kamikaze style murdering thousands was what?
An act of peace?

An act perpetrated by an extreme (and extremist) minority. There were nineteen hijackers on 9/11. Out of how many million Afghanis? But wait...how many of the hijackers were actually Afghanis? None. There were fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the UAE, one from Lebanon and one from Egypt.

This, of course, is not to be construed as advocacy for those who perpetrate acts of terrorism.

...

If you say you don't participate in something and then participate, to whatever degree, in that which you say you don't participate, you're a liar.

Edit: I actually called this, by the way.

...Groundfish won't be back again until the next moral panic arises, whatever that may be...

 

[Keef]

causing human suffrage

That seems like a pretty good goal if you ask me.

 

[ToyGTone]

Hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings kamikaze style murdering thousands was what?
An act of peace?
That said I have to say I don’t know why so many are attacking Biden.
Imo he did the right thing. The biggest negative or issue is explaining to American service people why they were there.
The plight of the Afghans is not America’s business. America was foolish to go in there to begin with.
Get our people out ASAP.
Good job.

Again No, that wasn't what I'm implying at all. Its a tragic event no doubt about it and it's messed up.


What am i implying however is that I'm pretty sure that whatever Europe, North America, Soviets or other powerful countries have done to Africa and Asia in the last 100+ years of robbing resources, overthrowing governments, drawing up borders, installing puppet states, bombing nations and creating conflicts & proxy wars, is as bad if not worse than those terrorists which btw, these groups were literally funded by west and it's allies to fight off the Soviets in the first place ironically enough.

Again, I'm not supporting those terrorists at all nor do i have any problems against you and anyone else here.

But hearing some government officials from the developed world talk about human rights and war crimes in third world countries as if they were saints and never had any dark pasts or current issues is staggering. You can't just talk about what's been happening to Uyghurs in china when you been doing the same thing towards Palestinians, Algeria's, Iraqis...etc in current or recent past. Yes we are far from perfect and have our own problems from nepotism to corruption but stop trying to pretend like you're the heros who have never done a wrong and trying to "save the day" by doing the same actions as your enemy's.

At the end of the day, I'm just an irrelevant kid from a tiny irrelevant country on a random forum about a random racing game talking about a serious political issue like this. I hope you're all doing well and I'm sorry if i sounded rude towards anyone but discussions like this don't work well on a place like this or really most of the internet for the matter.

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

Again No, that wasn't what I'm implying at all. Its a tragic event no doubt about it and it's messed up.


What am i implying however is that I'm pretty sure that whatever Europe, North America, Soviets or other powerful countries have done to Africa and Asia in the last 100+ years of robbing resources, overthrowing governments, drawing up borders, installing puppet states, bombing nations and creating conflicts & proxy wars, is as bad if not worse than those terrorists which btw, these groups were literally funded by west and it's allies to fight off the Soviets in the first place ironically enough.

Again, I'm not supporting those terrorists at all nor do i have any problems against you and anyone else here.

But hearing some government officials from the developed world talk about human rights and war crimes in third world countries as if they were saints and never had any dark pasts or current issues is staggering. You can't just talk about what's been happening to Uyghurs in china when you been doing the same thing towards Palestinians, Algeria's, Iraqis...etc in current or recent past. Yes we are far from perfect and have our own problems from nepotism to corruption but stop trying to pretend like you're the heros who have never done a wrong and trying to "save the day" by doing the same actions as your enemy's.

At the end of the day, I'm just an irrelevant kid from a tiny irrelevant country on a random forum about a random racing game talking about a serious political issue like this. I hope you're all doing well and I'm sorry if i sounded rude towards anyone but discussions like this don't work well on a place like this or really most of the internet for the matter.

I'm not seeing the kind of blanket statements on this forum that you seem to be implying we are all making. The middle east has become a tragedy for a multitude of complex reasons going back hundreds of years. I will say that I feel like GWB, just after 9/11 perpetuated a certain kind of proud & damaging ignorance in the west that has rendered us unable (us meaning the American public) or unwilling to see truth or humanity in the middle east. It was these two lies:

1. "They hate us because of our freedoms" - This was a real crowd pleaser and allowed Americans to absolve themselves of any responsibility for our adventurism all across the board, but particularly in Africa and the Middle East - while simultaneously getting everyone onboard the self righteous revenge train. It was such an easy answer for freedom-loving patriots to accept. Attaching the violence of 9/11 to such a strong attribute of the American self image was deeply damaging to our ability to see clearly.

2. "Axis of evil" - Evil was far to strong of a sentiment to clumsily lob at entire nations and it has fed into rampant islamophobia in the west. Bush might have known that, for instance, all 80 million people living in Iran were not evil...but that was not how the message was received. The message received was that Iraqis, Iranians, and North Koreans were actually evil...an irredeemable attribute. What this did, IMO, was actively sabotage any sort of public will for diplomacy. We couldn't talk to them, we have to blow them up! Iran was actually helping the US with Al-Qaeda and actively fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan until Axis of Evil basically shut down all diplomacy between the US and Iran. Imagine how much better the situation in Afghanistan could have gone if one of their neighboring countries...with a vested interest in the stability of the nation and a far deep understanding of the cultural complexity there would have taken up security instead of us? Probably a lot less American bodies in the very least...

Taking both of those things together as truth, it would be understandable for a typical American to see all of the middle east as a bunch of inhuman savages and that whack-a-mole was our only recourse. That's certainly how Donald Trump saw them when he didn't see them as transactional opportunities. So we've proceeded over the last 20 years with the two enormously unhelpful assumptions framing our attitudes towards the middle east. Of course it would end in disaster.

 

[TexRex]

BREAKING: Military General Outraged That Military Deployment Ends

 

[Touring Mars]

One could argue that there are better ways to spend $274 million a day for 20 years...

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

One could argue that there are better ways to spend $274 million a day for 20 years...

Like buying 100,000 Mclaren F1s?

 

[Danoff]

I wonder how long the outrage over Afghanistan will last..at least in terms of the indignation leveled at the Biden admin. At some point Afghanistan will cease to be an American concern in the same way that Americans largely don't care about how minorities, the press, or women are treated in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran or any number of countries controlled by autocrats/warlords. Unpopularly exiting a country would seem to have a lot fewer long term traps than unpopularly...or in the case of Afghanistan even popularly entering a country.

My prediction is that this will blow over for Biden no matter how hard he is pounded, from all sides, by the press in the short term because ultimately not that many people care about Afghans.

I don't know how else this could have gone and it's very sad.

I'm basically in agreement with everything said in this post. People don't really care, and after 20 years, there wasn't going to be a great time to exit where something like this wasn't going to happen. If we were going to do something about it, we needed to take ownership of the problem, like literally... like making it a US territory. Otherwise, let it go. Maybe we could have made it look cleaner, I don't honestly know. But the end result would be quite similar.

 

[TexRex]

I'm basically in agreement with everything said in this post. People don't really care, and after 20 years, there wasn't going to be a great time to exit where something like this wasn't going to happen. If we were going to do something about it, we needed to take ownership of the problem, like literally... like making it a US territory. Otherwise, let it go. Maybe we could have made it look cleaner, I don't honestly know. But the end result would be quite similar.

In effect, nearly 155.5 million Americans voted for this in 2020.

 

[Keef]

I wonder how long the outrage over Afghanistan will last..at least in terms of the indignation leveled at the Biden admin. At some point Afghanistan will cease to be an American concern in the same way that Americans largely don't care about how minorities, the press, or women are treated in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran or any number of countries controlled by autocrats/warlords. Unpopularly exiting a country would seem to have a lot fewer long term traps than unpopularly...or in the case of Afghanistan even popularly entering a country.

My prediction is that this will blow over for Biden no matter how hard he is pounded, from all sides, by the press in the short term because ultimately not that many people care about Afghans.

I don't know how else this could have gone and it's very sad.

I'm basically in agreement with everything said in this post. People don't really care, and after 20 years, there wasn't going to be a great time to exit where something like this wasn't going to happen. If we were going to do something about it, we needed to take ownership of the problem, like literally... like making it a US territory. Otherwise, let it go. Maybe we could have made it look cleaner, I don't honestly know. But the end result would be quite similar.

Same here. I don't blame people for getting riled up, it's human nature when things turn out poorly, but at this point, after all these years, it kinda seems like people are just trying hard when it comes to this. As I'm offering my opinion now, everybody seems to have an opinion on how this should've been handled, seemingly unaware that at no point in the last 20 years did they manage to offer anything of substance. Any adult who is old enough to remember the beginning should be mature enough to realize this was always going to happen, and any kid who wasn't even born when it started likely has no idea what they're talking about.

There are a lot of things in the world worth caring about and frankly this ain't one of them. This is like a bad breakup on an international scale and grown adults should've learned their lesson by now. It's exhausting. The vast majority of Afghans clearly wanted to date the trashy guy with the scraggly beard - that's their problem.

Afghanistan and Trump - two of America's dumbest problems solved within 9 months. We should be jumping with joy.

 

[ScottPuss20]

One of my cousins served in Afghanistan with the Australian Army and he's not happy with the situation. Nor is he happy with the idea that the soldiers failed the Afghans. The people on the ground could see that the Afghan forces would struggle on their own, no matter what they did. But the higher-ups making the decisions simply couldn't see the trouble and pulled out a moment's notice without a suitable plan. Such is the humanitarian crisis right now. The Afghans couldn't help themselves and the soldiers KNEW that long before the Taliban strolled in to Kabul. It's pathetic.

 

[Keef]

couldn't

Didn't want to.

We gave them every tool and skill but national pride. They don't have any. They didn't care and they never did. I also know a few people who spent time there, one of them 13 years in total, and it's too bad that they became so invested in the Afghani people. But we all know that how a person acts in your presence vs what they do when you're not around are two different things and I think we just witnessed that on a national scale. Most of us have been stabbed in the back at some point but none of us have had the entire government walk out like the bell rang.

It's not our fault. It's not our soldiers' fault. It's not our generals' or our leaders' fault. It's not even the fault of the Afghanis who helped us and actually wanted change. It's the fault of the vast majority of the country, none of whom wanted what we were trying to give them, which was frankly anything but Taliban rule. Look at the satellite images - millions of people across the country walking and driving around these cities, bustling with traffic, doing things that people do. They did everything that people do except elect a government that actually functioned. You can't explain that.

 

[Danoff]

One of my cousins served in Afghanistan with the Australian Army and he's not happy with the situation. Nor is he happy with the idea that the soldiers failed the Afghans. The people on the ground could see that the Afghan forces would struggle on their own, no matter what they did. But the higher-ups making the decisions simply couldn't see the trouble and pulled out a moment's notice without a suitable plan. Such is the humanitarian crisis right now. The Afghans couldn't help themselves and the soldiers KNEW that long before the Taliban strolled in to Kabul. It's pathetic.

Probably should have given them another 20 years huh?