These people are deranged.
The war was a scam and too many people were invested in it continuing. The US government took it upon themselves to engage in a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to defense contractors who sold shitty equipment that had to regularly be upgraded, maintained, replaced, etc. We sent soldiers over there on missions that never made sense just because we weren't willing to confront this scam. Afghanistan in itself was one big potemkin country. They had a government that didn't govern anyone. We sent people and equipment there in order to provide a governmental facade. Nothing about this actually existed in a way you could manifestly prove was working as it was supposed to. We let defense contractors steal the wealth of the nation and we let them get away with it. Their last pathetic attempt to cause another conflict was to allow them to feed stories to a media that wanted to hear something juicy because their ratings have been in the toilet.
People have these baked in opinions of the media because of things they have actually done, it isn't solely because Trump told people to hate the media. These feelings didn't sprout up overnight. It doesn't help that, as Kreese recently said, the fake news is free and the actual news is something you have to pay extra to see. And sometimes that's fake too! In tandem with each other Big Defense and Big Media (they might be the same thing, actually) have been allowed to paint a wildly successful evacuation as something that was mismanaged from the moment it was conceived. If anything it was mismanaged deliberately by the military in order to attempt to get Biden to keep troops there, but really, it wasn't mismanaged at all. We evacuated over 100,000 people and lost 13 soldiers despite the mission taking place in a complete lawless shithole. People had plenty of advance warning that they needed to leave, they did not avail themselves of that. I'm not one to easily assign blame to people who are now victims, but they knew they needed to leave. They knew for 18 months.
We can't move on from this until people understand how much of a scam this was, because at some point they're going to try it again. Industry in this country depends on it. This war never needed to happen, it happened because the entire thing was a scam. Not everyone was in on it, and all things considered the Bush Administration manipulated intelligence to get people to think the way they wanted people to think, but a lot of people sure were in on this. The Taliban
offered to turn over Osama and anyone else from Al-Qaeda. The Russians offered for us to use their bases in joint missions to bomb Afghanistan, to do what we needed to do, but what we needed was for people to make money. We declined both those offers because this wasn't about killing Osama or getting rid of the Taliban. The biggest problem in this country is that the media is in on the scam. Their endorsement of it may allow this to happen again. Most of the stories and op-eds during the invasion were absolutely deranged and people ate them up. These same people still have the jobs they had when the invasion started. They haven't been cancelled for their racist opinions, they're around to do it again. Some of them have been fed stories by the scammers, they regurgitate them without even bothering to investigate whether or not they're true. The story posted above by Brody may or may not be true. There were other stories during this evacuation that were proven to not be true. The "guy hanging from the helicopter' is the most obvious one.
Meanwhile if you dig hard enough:
Not long before the U.S. finished its Afghanistan withdrawal, the Taliban stopped a bus headed to Kabul's airport, saying it might be rigged with bombs.
www.nbcnews.com
Look, the fact is that Al-Qaeda started this war, we decided we didn't give a shit about that part. The Taliban did not start it. The Taliban are not the good guys here and nothing I posted should be read as defending the Taliban, but there are no good guys. Look at how many people are dead, if you think the US coalition are good guys here, your moral perspective is seriously warped. At least 51,000 civilians are dead. The Taliban did not want to fight us. This is a fact. They said if we stopped bombing them they would turn over the people we wanted. That is a surrender and we decided not to do that because the scam was decided to be in the best interests of the people in power. In the long run, Osama won this war. Most of what has happened in the US over the last twenty years can be directly tied back to 9/11, and/or our response to it. And its been 20 years, but nothing has changed that much. Instead of talk about the Afghani president carrying millions of dollars into exile, we had to shit on an evacuation that was successful by pretty much every definable metric.
Iraq was bad, but in a lot of ways this was worse because the scam had more justifiable pretext that would lead nobody in power to question it.