Looking at the collapse of Afghanistan, and the likely re-emergence of Al Quaeda and ISIS, as well as the inevitable surge of Chinese, North Korean, Iranian and Russian aggression that will attend the adminstration’s show of not just weakness but pathetic senility, one looks for some bright spot.
“But it’s not actually Saigon…”
So – a bright spot to the most dismal day of American foreign policy since I watched that Huey take off from the roof of the embassy in fifth grade?
Maybe it’s this: some of the top “minds” in DC Democrat messaging are going to have to spend so much more time thinking of ways to convince people that “conservative white supremacist terror” is the greatest threat facing this nation, they won’t have time to think of anything new.
I said I was “looking” for a bright spot. I didn’t say I found one. But then, what the heck, we can’t even find the ^$#@ President:
Site note: as I watch thousands of Afghans trying and failing to flee for their lives because American bureaucracy is more concerned about Covid testing than mass murder…
…I have to wonder if Michelle Obama is still proud to be an American .
Because I’m have a touch of “not”, at the moment.
More tomorrow.
Here is what Joseph Robinette Biden is happy to take responsibility for:
Taliban terror begins with ‘kill list’ drawn up as women face torture and death
Brutal new rules have been drawn up by the Taliban which means women will face torture and death while targets on a ‘kill list’ could be murdered on their doorsteps.
Harrowing reports have already surfacing from Afghanistan as the government collapsed which paved the way for the Taliban to seize power nearly 20 years after being driven out by the West.
The Mirror understands there are claims of summary killings by the Taliban as fighters perform door-to-door searches throughout Kabul city.
They are hunting down former officials, ex police, soldiers and anyone who worked with the former Kabul government – or with coalition forces.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/taliban-terror-begins-kill-list-24771667
Reality: the Taliban takeover is going to provide the Taliban a huge cache of weapons and lead to mass rapes (including of juveniles) and the exclusion of women from society.
Emery: this is great news.
Emery, recommend that you don’t eat spicy food and smoke, ’cause if you do, you’ll blow your head off.
The E’s did get one thing right, early in the comments: nobody really cares about Afghanistan and in a few months, our shameful conduct will be a distant memory, carefully scrubbed from the internet by gatekeepers protecting us from mis-information. It won’t affect the elections any more than the bloody hand print in Benghazi did.
Conservatives will ‘vote harder’ but Liberals will still have all their vote-stealing mechanisms in place and if they get new legislation passed, will have even more. They’ll simply have to run the fake ballots through the counting machines a few more times.
Afghanistan is an embarrasment, certainly, but more importantly it is a distraction.
So we have gone from “There will be no Sagon moment,’ to “this Saigon moment is not happening,” to “This Saigon moment was anticipated and planned for,” all in 72 hours.
The people who believe Biden did a good job, here, aren’t being gas lit by Biden — they are gas lighting themselves.
Joe is having his porridge and stewed peaches…he will be ready to lead the free world as soon as someone wipes his butt, and puts a fresh diaper on him.
JD is right. No disaster matters to them as long as a single, stinking reprobate has access to the vote counting rooms.
By 2024, they’ll have smuggled 4 million fresh, 80 IQ peasants into the US to fill in the circles they are told to fill in, and sign where they are told to sign.
The Afghan people got the government they want. There is no point for the West to keep fighting the Taliban given that the Afghan people and army don’t even want to fight them themselves. It’s a sad outcome for the small minority of educated and open minded Afghans that get disproportional airtime in our Western media. But the Taliban seem to be the de facto legitimate government.
Doing a little research this morning.
Turns out that, believe it or not, Biden was lying in his little speech yesterday.
The “300,000 strong” Afghan military was not trained to be an independent fighting force, they were trained to act in concert with US logistics, intelligence, and air support.
The generals knew this. The state department & Biden were told this by the generals.
Biden ordered the withdrawal anyway.
So the military knew that this collapse would happen, but still they had no backup plan.
By allowing this to happen, they have damaged the reputation of Biden, the Democrats, and the military, that is, themselves.
Worst.
Elites.
Ever.
The abandonment of Afghanistan began on March 20, 2003 when the Bush administration invaded Iraq.
Yes, Biden ought to have waited until the end of the fighting season in Afghanistan before pulling out. Instead he chose the symbolic date of 9/11. Truly an unforced error.
The additional few months would have given the Afghanis time to adjust and get their footing. The Afghan’s who supported the American “mission” their would have had time to evacuate.
But it’s clear now that the outcome was likely to be the same.
The Afghan army has been fighiting and taking heavy casualties all along. And only a fucking moron like Pedo Joe wouldn’t have seen the humiliating defeat coming for America…Not even 30 days ago, as Joe was implementing his carefully crafted plan.
nytimes.com
Afghan War Casualty Report: July 2021
At least 34 Afghan security forces and 13 civilians were killed in the two last two days of July, with several incidents reported in and around the provincial capitals of Helmand and Herat provinces.
The deadliest attack occurred in Samangan Province, where the Taliban attacked Firoz Nakhchir district, killing eight pro-government militia members. The fighting continued for hours and one outpost fell to the Taliban. In the month of July, at least 335 security forces and 189 civilians were killed, though this is likely an undercount as the deteriorating security has made it increasingly difficult to verify casualties.
They gave up because Pedo Joe abandoned them. That’s it; period; end of story.
Leon pancetta makes my point for me. This is what everyone is saying, this is what Biden and his supporters want to ignore. “He didn’t really spend much time on the issue that I think really concerns the American people, which is the execution of that decision. What went wrong and how it is going to be fixed?” said Leon Panetta, a longtime adviser to Democratic presidents who served as defense secretary under President Barack Obama. “It just struck me that they were crossing their fingers and hoping chaos would not result. And it doesn’t work that way.”
It’s legal to plead your case in the alternative (I didn’t kill him; but if I did, it was justified) but the problem with that strategy is it undercuts your credibility (did you kill him or not, which is it?).
The E-gang is having the same problem on this thread. On 8-16 at 8:30, the Great Collapsing Afghan Disaster was Trump’s fault. From 10:07 to 10:23, Biden did a great thing. It was briefly the Afghan people’s fault (12:08) but Biden still did a wonderful thing (2:12, 3:5, 6:19) until it was their fault again (8-17 at 8:03 and 9:28) but now it’s Bush’s fault (10:00).
It’s not working, E. Pick one lie and stick with it.
Leftist reprobates are counting on short memories and their cheating to see them through the next election. They may well succeed with the cheating, but the 1/2 of the country that is not human garbage won’t be forgetting Biden’s disaster any time soon. Certainly not as long as there are wives of dead soldiers, and men without their arms and legs out there to remind everyone:
When you look at the impact of the war, what I keep thinking about is we’re never going to put it behind us,” she said. “It’s always going to be with us because of the injuries, because of the kids who don’t have parents, because of the spouses who lost their spouse and the parents who lost their children.’”
Trillions wasted on this black hole and in the end the Afghan army fled without firing a shot.
JD, the gaping E asshole is having a tough time keeping up with the talking points from his favorite cesspools. It’s chaos in there, and they just don’t know which way to turn.
They’re alternately frying Biden and his administration, and making excuses for him. Worse, after Pedo Joe’s disastrous speech yesterday, they’ve pretty much given up hope of pinning any of this on Trump.
It’s a lying, low IQ, plagiarizing asshole’s worst nightmare.
Regarding whether the Afghans have the government they want, wasn’t the former government, um, “elected”? So no, while the Taliban have won a war, they are not the government Afghans want. Funny how the ethics of elections seem to be rather situational for Democrats that way.
And to make things worse, his BFF, Bill Peterson, got run out on a rail.
As bad as it is, this humiliating defeat is not our biggest problem. The problem we all need to be concerned about is the incompetence and fecklessness that caused it.
Our top military commanders are kicking skilled soldiers out because they refuse to be guinea pigs, or to acknowledge women don’t have diicks. Our command structure is peppered with the least qualified grifters the reprobates could find.
According to the WSJ, a new report for Congress, prepared by retired naval officers Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, claims the United States Navy is an “institution adrift,” is not prepared for war, and is struggling through a “crisis” of woke leadership”
Keep in mind, the Chinese have 1 operational aircraft carrier right now. But they have 3 more under construction. And our Navy is in chaos.
Among the key findings: “Many sailors found their leadership distracted, captive to bureaucratic excess, and rewarded for the successful execution of administrative functions,” rather than for their readiness for combat.”
I guarantee you every unit in the Navy is up to speed on their diversity training,” one “recently retired senior enlisted leader” reportedly told the outlet. “I’m sorry that I can’t say the same of their ship-handling training.”
“Sometimes I think we care more about whether we have enough diversity officers than if we’ll survive a fight with the Chinese navy,” one “anonymous active-duty lieutenant” told investigators.”
The Chinese are laughing at us.
“Ten sailors died in August (2017) when the destroyer USS John S. McCain collided with the Alnic – an oil tanker – while approaching Singapore.
This followed the crash in June between the USS Fitzgerald, another destroyer, and container ship ACX Crystal near Japan, which killed seven sailors.
In January, USS Antietam (a Ticonderoga-class cruiser) ran aground in Tokyo Bay.
The report concluded that the “crew was unprepared for the situation in which they found themselves through a lack of preparation, ineffective command and control, and deficiencies in training and preparations for navigation”.
Emery, you rat bastard, it’s hard to fire shots when you have no ammo. Ghani is the one that told the army not to resist the Taliban, while he packed up four cars with U.S. aid dollars; money that was supposed to pay for food, ammo and fuel. You might want to actually learn something about military tactics before you type your unadulterated bull shit, especially since you’re a typical libidiot that didn’t serve.
All is proceeding as planned:
An administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record told me that there are an estimated 10,000 U.S. citizens in the country, with the vast majority in or near Kabul. Some are residents, journalists or aid workers who may not want to leave. Most are scrambling to escape. Some are dual nationals or children of Americans who may not have the proper passport or visas, but the State Department has not told them how to fix their paperwork.
The State Department and the Defense Department basically have two options: negotiate safe passage for American citizens with the Taliban, if possible, or send the U.S. military out into the city to bring Americans back to the airport before the Taliban gangs find them. Officials working on these cases inside the government told me they have no clear guidance from the White House and not enough support.
. . .
“American citizens’ houses have been ransacked, and they are in hiding because the Taliban are terrorizing and tormenting neighborhoods. That’s happening all over Kabul,” said another senior GOP congressional staffer who has been fielding calls and emails from Americans in Kabul. “There are a lot of people who are falling through the cracks. [The administration] didn’t have a plan to handle this on a mass scale. . . . For the people in Kabul, they’ve basically said it’s up to them to get to the airport.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/16/biden-must-rescue-thousands-us-citizens-trapped-afghanistan/
You might want to actually learn something
bosshoss, Emery’s interest in learning something is measurable on the same scale as the Afghan army’s willingness to fight the Taliban.
It’s not just one screw up, it is nested screwups: https://twitter.com/i/status/1427629638432477189
SecDef LLoyd Austin was supposed to have been one of the people who advised Biden against the rapid draw down, predicting that the Afghan army would collpse.
Yet he had no backup plan?
“I think the turnout tonight demonstrates the high regard in which the vice president is held in the extended Obama family,” Rouse told the crowd of about 50 people. “And I think that that message is not out as far as it should be.”
Yet searing, anonymously sourced quotes from Obama kept appearing through the race. One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Speaking of his own waning understanding of today’s Democratic electorate, especially in Iowa, Obama told one 2020 candidate: “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”
Biden’s weaknesses were such that even Clinton reconsidered her decision not to get into the race last fall, according to Reines.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/08/14/obama-biden-relationship-393570
The Sun (UK)
US President Joe Biden faced a global backlash yesterday over his handling of the Afghan crisis — its biggest foreign humiliation in almost 50 years.
Mr Biden, 78, finally dashed back to Washington DC last night — after being accused of hiding at Camp David as the crisis unfolded.
The hasty pullout was branded the largest foreign humiliation for the US since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.
A picture released by the White House showed Mr Biden talking to generals from an empty war room over the weekend, isolated and alone.
He was criticized for “going into hiding” by traveling to Camp David with wife Jill on Friday, as the Taliban advanced. Democrat lawmaker Debbie Dingell, a Biden ally, said: “It does feel like the fall of Saigon.”
Leftist London Times
President Biden’s unrepentant defence of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan was met with a wave of criticism as he vowed that the buck stopped with him, only to blame an array of others.
Biden said that he stood “squarely behind my decision” and that he could not send more Americans to die “in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight”. His speech drew damning responses from the foreign policy and military establishment, as well as prominent Republicans and politicians from his own party.
“The president’s failure to acknowledge his disastrous withdrawal provides no comfort to Americans or our Afghan partners whose lives hang in the balance,” the moderate Republican senator Mitt Romney, a bitter opponent of Donald Trump, tweeted.
Oooh, a slap from milksop Mitt…that’s gotta hurt.
Lefties at Le Monde are bent..
NATO countries were left with little choice but to pull out the roughly 7,000 non-American forces in Afghanistan after President Joe Biden announced in April that he was ending the U.S. involvement in the war by September, 20 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director-general of London’s Royal United Services Institute, said that Britain – which for much for the war contributed the second-largest number of troops to the mission – “was especially upset that the Biden administration didn’t consult it more fully about the decision to withdraw this summer.”
So you’ve got troops at the Kabul airport, and for now they can turnaround planes, but there are as many as 10,000 Americans in and around Kabul who have to get to the airport before they can get out on one of those planes.
There is no plan to get those Americans through taliban check points and into the airport.
Monumental fuckup by an administration hailed by the media for its “competence.” This failure is awesome, the slow bleed of Americans out of Kabul, or held hostage or killed by the taliban, will be on the nightly news for a long time.
There are now approximately 3x as many tropps in Afghanistan than there were before Biden began his withdrawal of forces.
A failure on so many levels. Absolutely epic!
Hey, remember this? Waaaaay back on 25 November 2020….
In his first interview since being confirmed as the next president, Mr Biden told NBC: “America is back – we’re at the head of the table again.
“I’ve spoken with over 20 world leaders and they are pleased and somewhat excited that America is going to reassert its role in the world and be a coalition builder.”
“coalition builder”…lmfao
NYT..circling the wagons
Intelligence Warned of Afghan Military Collapse, Despite Biden’s Assurances
Even as the president was telling the public that Kabul was unlikely to fall, intelligence assessments painted a grimmer picture.
Aug. 17, 2021Updated 1:13 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Classified assessments by American spy agencies over the summer painted an increasingly grim picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and warned of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, even as President Biden and his advisers said publicly that was unlikely to happen as quickly, according to current and former American government officials.
By July, many intelligence reports grew more pessimistic, questioning whether any Afghan security forces would muster serious resistance and whether the government could hold on in Kabul, the capital. President Biden said on July 8 that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall and that there would be no chaotic evacuations of Americans similar to the end of the Vietnam War.
The drumbeat of warnings over the summer raise questions about why Biden administration officials, and military planners in Afghanistan, seemed ill-prepared to deal with the Taliban’s final push into Kabul, including a failure to ensure security at the main airport and rushing thousands more troops back to the country to protect the United States’ final exit.
One report in July — as dozens of Afghan districts were falling and Taliban fighters were laying siege to several major cities — laid out the growing risks to Kabul, noting that the Afghan government was unprepared for a Taliban assault, according to a person familiar with the intelligence.
Intelligence agencies predicted that should the Taliban seize cities, a cascading collapse could happen rapidly and the Afghan security forces were at high risk of falling apart.
A brutal catalogue of twenty years of failure.
/SIGAR’s new Lessons Learned report, What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction, examines the past two decades of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan/
https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/lessonslearned/SIGAR-21-46-LL.pdf
Intelligence agency says they said one thing. Probably did. But they likely also said another, and a third, all couched as probabilities based on sources which is the same method that gave us yellowcake uranium in Iraq.
Much as I’d like to use the intelligence agencies as a stick to beat The Garden Administration, I suspect this is simple ass-covering as people are demanding to know why we were blindsided again.
If these are the same ‘intelligence agencies’ who gave us Benghazi and the Russian Dossier, then I’m not too impressed with their statement. Sounds like CYA as people are demanding to know why we were blindsided again and what are we getting for the billions we’re spending on spies.
Two comments moderated in succession. I’m on a roll.
Trump wanted out last year. He held an interagency review, and as a result, kicked the can down the road until May of this year. Biden held no formal interagency review before he committed to a withdrawal of all us military forces from Afghanistan. He may been advised by the generals and spies and diplomats not to do this, but not in formal way with a documented risk assessment. That’s why there was no plan, other than “withdraw “ This is all Joe.
The Taliban are a private outfit. They can do what they want.
At least Trump’s plan was fluid and would be based on the situation on the ground. He was actually listening to his commanders, contrary to the lies that he wasn’t, as perpetuated by the propaganda machine. Further, it’s worth noting that no U.S. force members were attacked or killed in the 17 months since Trump announced the treaty. The difference being that Trump told the Taliban leadership that if they did anything against our forces, he would bomb them back to the Stone Age and since they saw what happened to ISIS, they knew that he wasn’t f-ing around. According to a friend of mine, whose brother is in the U.S. diplomatic corps, told my friend that our allies may not have liked Trump’s style, but they respected him because he had the guts to call out NATO for not paying their share of their defense.
Oh, yea. This is kind of cold, but IMO it’s sweet justice. The WaPo apparently has several of their muck rakers still in Afghanistan and was finally critical of the man that they have been ass kissing for many years.
Xi is watching, and telling the Taiwanese that the Afghanistan debacle shows that American promises of aid and military assistance are meaningless https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1231636.shtml I’m hearing our NATO Allies are nervous. They should be, with asshat in the White House.
Remember Saddam’s rape rooms in Iraq? Mistreatment of women was given as ad additional justification for war. Hearing a lot of that again, today.
This is going to make me sound like a cold, heartless bastard, but here’s some harsh truth: they’re not American women. Our military exists to defend our wives and daughters here in America, not every wife or daughter around the globe. We are not the global police, the global social workers, the global crisis hotline.
Honestly, I’m not sure we can save what’s left of America but if we want to try, we simply must tell the rest of the world “Sorry, you’re on your own” and cut back our military commitments. Give up the empire. Save the nation. Let them fend for themselves.
Joe Doakes, the devil’s advocate notes that we have two examples in the fairly recent past of powerful nations that “turned their backs on the world.” Thoss would be China after about 1500 AD and Spain about two hundred years later. Both were at the peaks of their wealth and influence at the time.
But the world kept going — other nations’ economies kept growing, while their economies did not. The result was that China and Spain became backward by standing still.
There is a thing in economics called the “production possibilities frontier” This is the hypothetical output of an economy if it was perfectly efficient. That includes not just free trade, but mechanization, open immigration, consumer choice, and a few other things. At any one time, the production possibilities frontier is constrained by any or some or all of these. Why our economic overlords are obsessed with free trade between nations and open immigration, over consumer choice and mechanization, is probably because they see those as the easiest “choke points” standing between them and the swelling of their personal portfolios.
Max P – there’s an ebb and flow to empires. Rome ruled from Hadrian’s Wall to the Persian Gulf until it got soft and fell. The Soviet Union covered seven time zones until it didn’t. There was a time when the sun did not set on the Britain Empire; nowadays, the colonies are gone and the home island is struggling to retrieve its sovereignty from bureaucrats in Brussels.
The United States enjoyed a brief time of world domination after World War II when other industrialized nations were recovering from bombing. We mistook lack of competition for superiority – military, industrial, financial, governmental. We thought we could pick up the White Man’s Burden to bring enlightenment to the savages and impose our will on the unwilling through threat of force.
The United States’ time on center stage is drawing to a close, hastened by the loss of legitimate government. It’s becoming more clear daily that the 2020 election was stolen, that Covid was not a crisis but was cover for the theft, that The Garden Administration is little more than a collection of wokesters who govern by slogan instead of experience and our military is run by risk-averse butt-kissers in high heels.
Imagine you are living in Rome in 470 AD. You hear reports of military defeats. You know the barbarians have crossed the border. You see foreigners admitted in droves and having more influence with officials in the capital city than citizens. You see the public more interested in bread and circuses than in preserving its civilization. What do you think will happen to the empire? Now imagine you’re in Wisconsin today, seeing the same things. What conclusion should you draw?
I assert the only way to save a portion of America is to go back to the basics. Give up trying to run the world, to save the world. End foreign aid. Bring the troops home. Secure the borders. Change immigration and refugee law. Slash spending. Maybe even devalue the dollar so we can pay our debts, or simply repudiate the debt and start ove with a different financial system (remember, the Federal Reserve system only started in 1913, we had different systems before that). I don’t have a complete plan but I know the one we’re following is heading in the wrong direction.
I fully agree with JD. Problem is, our government and other assemblies (academia, entertainment, and corporate America) have been infiltrated with people who do not wish to preserve the country, our economy, nor our way of life. That will be our real battle in the coming years. I think that’s the underlying reason of the left’s hate for Trump. He was not one of them. He disrupted their plans and started exposing them to us. Grabbing pussies was merely red meat for the low-IQ left.