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

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

https://www.commoncentsmom.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/100-million.jpg

100-million.jpg

good morning!

Four cars full and too much to fit in a helicopter, so they had to leave a couple of million on the tarmac at the airport, if you believe the reports.

xp

"Anything to declare?"
"Just my two suitcases and these, uh, 40 bags of dry cat food. It's the only kind my cat will eat!"

Do we know for sure he wasn't just cosplaying as Mr. Monopoly?

Profiles in courage!

Grotesque spectacle of people mocking the democratic puppet ruler of Afghanistan

We should have stayed another 5 years in Afghanistan, given president moneybags some more time to build a coalition. Perhaps he was preparing to bring those bags around to the provinces to give them to the farmers

"real human active force"

“We’d make condolence payments of around $1,000 to $2,000... people thought, ‘Okay, this is fine, we paid them out’ — but you killed their fucking family. How could they not hate you forever?”

I talked to Afghan War vets.

Co-pub with @dailyposter https://t.co/cY41o1mlE6

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) August 17, 2021

“I had to talk guys out of just shooting farmers because they thought it would be fun,” Kirell told me. “They literally didn’t care by that point.”

TIL that the largest dollarbill denom = $100 which scotches my own plan to run to the airport with $169m in notes >:(

guess i cd spend some of it on like 200 stout portage-minions

i thought we invented crypto so we didnt have to suffer the inconvenience of actual bags of actual money when doing illegal stuff

*image of former president of afghanistan near an ATM at the back of a pawn shop in Paterson, NJ, trying to convince owner to convert 42304.2312100 dogecoin to $500 million dollars*

I suppose the Talibans are neither humans, active, real or influential in the region.

Is there some reason you keep using a plural for Taliban? It's a plural noun: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Taliban

Sorry if that's pedantic, I'm curious if there's some significance to your usage that I'm not getting

The singular is Talib.

It’s from french in which we say les Talibans and dyslexia probably why I didn’t pick up the difference in english.

So yeah just a honest mistake, thanks for noting!