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The End of the War on Terror

cobainwasmurdered

Waiting for Kamala to honour bets since June 2020
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Yeah this was exactly what was going to happen when the war ended and everyone has known it. Biden was just the first POTUS who actually had the courage to go against the military and everything else and do it.
 

909

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The pro-war media (almost the whole media) is really pissing me off today. They seem to have no concept of what it means to send a troop to Afghanistan. The troops are just numbers to these people, they don’t seem to understand or care that each troop is an individual soul that went through their whole life prior to being sent to a fucked up country like that. Even though there will be people that die because of this decision, it is unconscionable to just ignore that and keep doing the same thing for another twenty years. What has the human cost been? The death toll on the American side wasn’t super high but it was still too high. That’s 2420 Americans who passed way before their time, countless Afghans who died when they otherwise wouldn’t have. And that’s just the people who died.

It’s pretty rare that I feel this kind of way about a president doing something. The way I see it, the other three who didn’t do this are cowards who decided to do the easy thing and kept sending people over there to ruin their lives. They are the definition of cowards and nothing will ever change my mind about that. How could anyone have thought this was acceptable?

Everything Biden said was true. People just can’t handle it because they don’t think of those soldiers as anything but a number. The disorganized exit has a whole lot to do with the kind of country Afghanistan is, and namely Trump releasing a shitload of Taliban is a huge reason why it happened this way. But it’s also much more representative of a military that frequently lies to the President and presents the situation as something it isn’t. At least now we have a President who understands that and sees right through their bullshit, but of course the military was going to make the situation bad. That’s what they do.
 
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snuffbox

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Yes, the media, very nearly all of it, has been deeply embarrassing on this. Of course, they have been for some 19 years. And, yet again, it works. It is to be expected of the Republicans. Willfully forgetting the recent time where Trump threw a tantrum because he couldn't have the Taliban over to Camp David and go golfing. Scrubbing Trump's "historic success" (this exact thing) on Afghanistan from their websites. This is all they know to do. The media, too. Every fucking time. Neither of these things will stop. The only thing that can ever be changed is how people choose to react to these things. If they choose to fall for stuff like this, every single time, it will continue. Joe Biden has a lot more confidence than I do that people will start making better choices about how they view and react to things. I hope he's right.
 

Sex Machine Gun

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All I'll say in this thread is this:

Biden is correctly banking on the US public being absolute idiots when it comes to foreign policy. Any international kerfuffle is forgotten pretty quickly by our electorate because the public can't even find where different crises are on a map. "Afghanistan" might as well be "Mars" for how much the regular citizen thinks it affects them. There will be short-term bullshit hurled by the Republican opposition who wanted to leave NATO (y'know, the people conducting Afghanistan military operations and support) and now want to be colonizers again because Democratic President means anything President does is bad because President is Democratic and Democratic bad. Whatever. They'll be pissed for a week and then move back to masks or vaccines or gay marriage or abortion or whatever they present that they know their base understands.

Seriously, come back in a week and tell me how much this is being covered.

Even the supposed "left-leaning" outlets are trying to pin this on Biden, right now, today, as though this wasn't a fucking twenty goddamn year situation which was aggressively drawn down over the last few years.

This fucking hurts. Even though I knew the mission was doomed while I was there and saw the cracks, nay, chasms in the plan beyond strictly combat missions you have a bunch of fucking experts all of a sudden trying to talk shit with no fucking clue about anything.

I'm not angry at this, but I am incredibly sad. There were many good, decent people I got to meet over there who either worked directly for the US or communicated through our interpreters. They only seek some stability and with a foreign occupier there stability was impossible.
 
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King Kamala

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I don’t get Blue Dog Democrats like Maine’s own Congressman Jared Golden who are saying President Biden has the right idea in wanting to pull out of Afghanistan but we need US troops in Kabul until we can get all of our Afghani allies out safely.

Like I feel for everyone there opposing the Taliban but if we couldn’t ensure their safety over two decades then I am not sure how much more time protecting the Kabul Airport is going to accomplish that!
 

909

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We need to bring in troops for the evacuation but not for the reason they’re saying. We need them there to make sure the planes can take off. The Afghans who want to leave were stampeding the airport. The sad fact is if they kept doing that someone would have to shoot them because they’re going to make one of these planes crash.

They also have to keep the airport from being attacked because surrendering to the Taliban would be one of the most embarrassing things ever, and only very fucking bad things would happen to those forced to surrender.
 
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King Kamala

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909

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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:


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.
 
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