Biden - a disaster of a President

[cromwell]

Biden cannot hide behind Trump because it is his decision to pull out by 9/11/21.

Biden is trying to do exactly this!
Biden cancelled the Mexican border wall project and the Keystone XL pipeline project approved under Trump; he could pretty obviously have cancelled the Afghanistan deal too but chose not to.

[TheOstrich]

Harrowing scenes this morning on the BBC News of Afghani refugees racing alongside an American military plane trying to take off, and reports that as the plane did take off and gained height, two Afghanis fell off the fuselage.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-asia-58219963 Report posted @ 12:05

I hope Biden has a conscience; those deaths are of his making.

[Workingman]

I do understand the anger at Trump and Biden but I will ask this: "How long were US, UK and other NATO forces to be kept in Afghanistan? Till the end of days?

Let's be clear, apart from those deaths of their own fighters all the civilian and troop deaths in Afghanistan are owned by the Taliban.

Looking at a lot of the Taliban now on the street many of them would only have been toddlers during the last Taliban rule, so there must have ben a rolling programme of recruitment, brainwashing and adherence to Islamic Salafi beliefs. This process would have gone on and on.

[TheOstrich]

"How long were US, UK and other NATO forces to be kept in Afghanistan? Till the end of days?

Yep.

How long have we been in (West) Germany, and where would the Iron Curtain now be if we hadn't been a presence there?
You were there, WM (and Suff I believe) ..... do you both consider the deployment was / is a waste of time / resources?

[Workingman]

Ossie, the two things are not even remotely comparable.

The Cold War was a political stand-off between two heavily armed opponents each with the ability to take the other out of the game or MAD as it is still known. The dividing line was drawn at the end of WW2 and It was military v military, economy v economy, and propaganda v propaganda and both sides knew it. The Iron Curtain would have fallen eventually simply because the Soviet economy could not keep it going.

The Taliban are insurgents with religious fervour behind them and they are on jihad. Being Salafists they want to take Afghanistan back to the origins of Islam in the 7th century and install sharia law - nothing else matters. They really are prepared to become martyrs for their cause, as we have already seen with the suicide bombers of IS, Al-Qaeda, 9/11, Boko Haram, the Mujahedeen and others.

[Suff]

Agree WM.

Whilst BAOR was not really a waste of time, in that the USSR needed to expand or collapse internally, so they would have expanded and taken the cost; Afghanistan is a totally different ballpark.

They only understand one thing. What they want and that they are willing to kill any number of people to get it. The only reason they have not tried in the last two decades is because they could not win. The second they could win they did.

I can only see two possible ends to this. One is they win, take over Afghanistan and live in their religious utopia. Two is we cause a diaspora and turn the entire country into nuclear glass which will deny any return in any time relevant to humanity.

Neither is palatable to me, the only thing left was the compromise where we boot them out and accept the murders as a price of keeping this kind of ideology out of power. Apparently that's not palatable to anyone else. At which point we go back to One or Two.

[Workingman]

So, let's see. The Taliban are said to have about 60,000+ fighters in five Shuras (combat groups) and the population of Afghanistan is some 32 million. The Taliban are about 0.2% of the people or 1 in 530 of them.

They are vastly outnumbered by both the people and Afghan Security Forces (300,000+) so how have they taken control, and so quickly? My guess it that the majority of the population, especially the hillbillies, herders and poppy farmers, the majority, tacitly support them. The only real urban centre, Kabul, with six million people, 1/5 of the population, is not Afghanistan, the country.

I find it hard to be sympathetic. The Afghan people have it within their grasp to end this.... if they really want to. But do they?

We could supply the Afghan people with the arms and support to destroy the Taliban in a civil war without setting a foot in the place, so why don't we?

It's because we do not trust them not to side with the Taliban and turn against us at some point - they are simply not trustworthy.

[Suff]

This is true, we don't trust them because we did not see through the transition for long enough.

20 years is far too short a time to change the outlook of a population. It takes at least 50 years if not 100 to do a complete change.

As for 60,000 fighters? That is nearly 3x the front line combat troops of the UK. The 300,000 government troops have to protect the entire country and at least half of them will be administrative and not front line.

To face this kind of surge would have taken nearly 1m troops or full modern world technology. We denied the technology and dropped them back into WW2 conflict levels, they were unprepared, unsurprisingly and lost.

No real surprise there.

All we can do now is watch and wait to see how it turns out. Oh we can block them from the UN and other places of representation, refuse to recognise them and grind them into more poverty. But that jist tightens the Taliban grip.