What in God's Green Goodness Are We Up To In Afghanistan?

More terrorist videos.

pic.twitter.com/xFYRk2QLl8

— Yall hear that (@BloodsareCrips) August 16, 2021

In Afghanistan we are seeing the reality of what it means to flee. The world changes overnight. You grab what you can and run. If a smuggler says "I can get you to safety" you put your life in his hands and you pay what you can. There is no form to fill and no queue to join.

— Satbir Singh 🧡 (@SatbirLSingh) August 16, 2021

"I don't think the Biden speech was bad? It's rare for a president to acknowledge failure and piss off the Beltway national security establishment."

What about the thousands of Afghan civilians killed? Any thoughts on those?

Is that part of "The Great Game"?

the function of this speech isn't a maoist struggle session where 46 fesses up before his accusers to all the wrongs and cruelties of his predecessors and the policies of the war-machine he heads, it's to connect with and firm up the two thirds or so of the US voting public who wanted out, and to begin to shunt some small part of the kneejerk commentariat and the blob so-called in the direction of acknowledging this withdrawal as (i) a fait accompli and (ii) medium-term good not bad

in realpolitik terms the evident ugly downside of this is that even acknowledging let alone dwelling on continued humanitarian issues is instantly to offer up hostages to mission-creep back in, to garrison-think and recapture-and-protect: and we're already hearing these noises, because humanitarian rhetoric has been so deeply invaded and distorted in washington and elsewhere by the all-war-all-the-time factions (who are in some confusion currently but hardly diminished in presence or media access)

there's a case for team biden saying "this is a good speech" exactly (and only?) bcz clear positive audience response helps with this firming-up aspect -- turning the us public a little further away from global adventurism fingers x-ed (well, also i suppose bcz it burns the piss of various anti-isolationist uk melts and ghouls lol, tho i acknowledge this is a v trivial and parochial and shallow concern). basically the bit that's good is him saying something clearly adjacent to "we're bad at this shit and from now on we should cut it out"

The people who thought Joe Biden gave a great speech are the same people who thought American Beauty was a great movie.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) August 16, 2021

humanitarian rhetoric has been so deeply invaded and distorted in washington and elsewhere by the all-war-all-the-time factions (who are in some confusion currently but hardly diminished in presence or media access)

The most grotesque development of the last twenty years.

yeah, I have no answer to the current situation but samantha powering our way out of this is not my preferred route

To acknowledge the thousands of civilians killed and to talk of a plan in place to safeguard Afghans whose lives are in danger so that more aren't killed should be part of the speech or of that tweet instead of nonsense around Afghans not wanting to fight lol.

Notice anything about this picture of people escaping in a US plane? No women...odd...? https://t.co/VfgbSTHHKE

— Polly Toynbee (@pollytoynbee) August 17, 2021

Massively weird to lie about it.

today i saluted the afghanistan vet who lives on my floor and said "Suck My Dick Sir! Mission Failed" then went home and dead lifted 300lbs

— wint (@dril) August 17, 2021

nnt's brane moving along the same channel (possibly in the opposite direction):

The gym of the Presidential Palace in Kabul.
Not a single Taliban tried to deadlift. One of them pressed ~50 lbs. Tells you something about the strength of the other side. https://t.co/atIZVWBlMb

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 16, 2021

like you need to be ripped and be able to bench 90 with your dick to fire an automatic weapon!

I was watching Hearts and Minds the other night, lots of the conscripted US soldiers looked average build and not particularly ripped, it didn't prevent them from becoming genocidal killing machines.

Interesting thread on Sharia law

A thread about the Taliban & sharia law. Everyone knows the Taliban run a brutal and oppressive legal system. But there are different ways a legal system can be bad and understanding how the Taliban's is bad, and how it isn't, is crucial for understanding their enduring appeal 1/

— James E. Baldwin (@james_e_baldwin) August 16, 2021

Massively weird to lie about it.

🐦[Notice anything about this picture of people escaping in a US plane? No women...odd...? https://t.co/VfgbSTHHKE🕸
— Polly Toynbee (@pollytoynbee) August 17, 2021🕸]🐦

i think there's a fair chance the 2018 photo is the one she was was actually responding to and no one picked it up till too late (opinion writers aren't fact-checked particularly closely)

Biden’s speech was bad. It’s not the Afghans’ fault that the occupation was a giant grift for military contractors. It’s stupid to think we could help them build a competent administrative state while engaging in corrupt practices ourselves. Passing the blame unto them is not just hypocritical but evil.

Evil too is the impulse to demonize the refugees. The US needs to accept every Afghan who wants to come over. It is our fault that the Taliban is not only back in charge, but more powerful than ever.

Worth reading: especially note Fair’s point that 80-90% of US investment in Afghanistan ended up back in US economy, siphoned by contractors https://t.co/vt8ulq3wTU

— James Millward 米華健 (@JimMillward) August 17, 2021

gdi: https://www.reuters.com/article/afghanistan-tech-conflict/afghans-scramble-to-delete-digital-history-evade-biometrics-idUSL8N2PO1FH

Evil too is the impulse to demonize the refugees. The US needs to accept every Afghan who wants to come over. It is our fault that the Taliban is not only back in charge, but more powerful than ever.

― treeship., Tuesday, August 17, 2021 11:22 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

US, Canada and Europe should welcome all refugees of course. But the Talibans are back because the Talibans are back, they had most of the country under their thumb before 9/11, they would be in power today if the US had never intervened, today they are hundreds of thousand of them, they regrouped, found weaponry and allies and have a much better understanding of Afghani culture than the Americans ever tried to have. It would be good to see some movements and their origins not as residual failures of American foreign policy but like as a real human active force that have their own reasons to oppose imperalism and impose their views of society and politics at home, they did pretty much the same to the Soviet Union.

those pesky talibans

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real human active force

this alone is proof you have no idea what you're talking about

Well explain why then.

Heather Cox Richardson from today: "It strikes me that some of the same people currently expressing concern over the fate of Afghanistan’s women and girls work quite happily with Saudi Arabia, which has its own repressive government, and have voted against reauthorizing our own Violence Against Women Act. Some of the same people worrying about the slowness of our evacuation of our Afghan allies voted just last month against providing more visas for them, and others seemed to worry very little about our utter abandonment of our Kurdish allies when we withdrew from northern Syria in 2019. And those worrying about democracy in Afghanistan seem to be largely unconcerned about protecting voting rights here at home.
Most notably to me, some of the same people who are now focusing on keeping troops in Afghanistan to protect Americans seem uninterested in stopping the spread of a disease that has already killed more than 620,000 of us and that is, once again, raging."

<distantly, from the top of a huge mountain of skulls> ‘Well, perhaps now you see that inaction has consequences too.'

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) August 16, 2021

"real human active force"

Australian military in Afghanistan, 2007 pic.twitter.com/iUvhlOQvSV

— . (@ImReadinHere) August 17, 2021

“Nation building” in afghanistan was not only a mistake but a farce. There was so much corruption on the US side that we cannot possibly say we made a good faith effort to leave them with a competent military and government.

Still—there is a weird pleasure some seem to be getting from america’s humiliation that is grotesque to me. It is the afghans who suffered under the US occupation and it is the afghans who will now suffer under the taliban.

My outrage overall though is with Biden’s framing of the issue. “The afghans weren’t willing to fight.” Get the fuck out of here.

"there is a weird pleasure some seem to be getting from america’s humiliation that is grotesque to me"

it's called being the rest of the world, fule!

America can shrug this off though. Afghans can’t. Especially Afghan women and girls.

typical lib, can't even be honest that what you really care about is the decline of your rotten empire.

sorry, but why it is "grotesque" to you that people despise America?

You’re mixing me up with someone else.

"Still—there is a weird pleasure some seem to be getting from america’s humiliation that is grotesque to me."

I've not seen much knee jerk anti-US stuff around actually.

I listened to the most recent chapo and they seemed kinda giddy idk

yes but it is still possible to feel happy that American power seems to have taken a hit (even though it is probably quite an illusionary hit they have been quite willing to take) without coming out for the Taliban or not giving a flying fuck about summary executions etc

Sure.

It’s more the Biden position I hate though. The idea that this is the failure of Afghanistan, despite the US’s best intentions.

he's a near senile fuckwit, but what he said was quite clearly stated. It was addressed to his domestic audience more than the big world stage I think.

I'd say explaining to a domestic audience afraid of nuance that, in his mind, our policy for 20 years is almost as much to blame as Afghan perfidy counts as maturity.

Blaming the Afghans + terrible domestic advice is an example of maturity, in other words, and the Beltway press doesn't give a shit anyway.

He didn’t say that though

He said something like “we can’t fight for a country that is unwilling to fight for itself.”

"Afghan perfidy" covers his blinkered state of affairs.

I get the POTUS will never say 'we dropped the ball' and anyone who believes he would or even should is living in cloud cuckoo land. However, you can't occupy a nation already known for vast corruption, then enable even more corruption and blame the citizens or political leadership for being corrupted. Mentioning that he met the political leaders a month ago and asked them to clean up their mess is beyond the pale.

Very crucial point: USA didn't waste trillions in Afghanistan on nation building. It wasted trillions on money that mostly enriched American contractors. https://t.co/D0z7tVqd4t

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 17, 2021

The US did not merely enable corruption. Our presence there was a pretense for massive profiteering on the part of defense contractors.

We were not even seriously trying to set the Afghans up for success. It was a massive scam.

i think you have the US mistaken for one of those nice countries like NZ or Canada

New: Afghan ambassador in Tajikistan says President Ashraf Ghani escaped with $169m worth of cash in bags before Kabul fell to the Taliban, BBC reports.

— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) August 18, 2021

how many bags do you think he'd need? enough to contain all the cash but not enough for people to notice