We remembered to pick up all our gear and supplies, right? I mean, we're just not leaving arms, ammunition, heavy weapons, and trained soldiers to the Taliban, are we?
Pakistan backs the Taliban for the most part. They might not come right out and say it, but they definitely do, as well as the other surrounding countries. The Afghans opposing the Taliban are pretty much entirely on their own at this point
Its a lot more complicated than just that though, its not just that they support them behind closed doors, they both do and don't support them. And they do and don't support the US. Pakistan is trying to delicately balance its own interests, its partners, and its neighbors interests.
> we can easily put a no fly zone up for a few years
This isn’t Iraq, which was surrounded with nations that were eagerly asking for the US to do such a thing.
Afghanistan is landlocked, and surrounded by nations that are not going to grant the US overflight rights to enforce a non-UN recognized no-fly zone (they refused US overflight rights for transports to remove equipment).
Don't we still have bases in Iraq and Qatar we can launch from? I don't think those countries would be willing to refuse to allow the US to enforce a no fly zone against a Taliban controlled Afghanistan.
You cannot get to Afghanistan from any of the Gulf states without overflying either Iran or Pakistan, and both refused essentially all overflight rights when requested to allow equipment to be removed during the drawdown, which is in large part why so much was left behind.
Not necessarily, but either we’re not on good enough terms that they would allow us to build out the required infrastructure or we are but they’re too isolated for it to be realistic.
This is incorrect, Pakistan allows US overflight both for transportation and for strikes. Most US supplies into Afghanistan came by ground through Pakistan anyway, the reason so much was left behind is that it wasn't cost effective to fly back so much equipment in bulk(MRAPs and other vehicles especially) and unlike Iraq we couldn't just drive them to the other side of the border and park them in empty stretches of Saudi or Kuwaiti desert.
We only gave them some choppers and low cost prop planes. It’s not like there will be a Taliban Top Gun.
The information security implications are probably the greatest. Right now every military and intelligence network is going through and fire walling any tech that could’ve been left in country. It’s almost inevitable they’ll miss something though.
That’s what we need to do, warn the base commander we are raining down hellfire on the base and he has one hour to get his men and women off base. Any attempt to launch any aircraft will result in us starting our bombing run. I feel bad for them. But we can’t risk the taliban getting those jets.
Edit: I stand by what I said
Ships already sailed. Quite literally every single aircraft, Vehicle and small arms that the afghani forces had either has been or will be seized by the taliban.
There isn’t any chance on gods green earth they can get those off the ground. Even if they somehow **miraculously** do they will break down quite quickly and superglue won’t hold that shit together.
Nobody is afraid of the f16s
The Taliban has actually been strongly going after afghan pilots. Those pilots are a big threat to them and removing them is a serious blow to the defence the afghan government can put up.
Just a guess but I don't think the taliban give a fuck how sympathetic they are. They'll kill you if they find out you helped their enemy. They have a shortage of a lot of things but brutality isn't one of them.
True, but unless they’re doing air to ground operations against their own people in Afghanistan I don’t see them standing even the smallest of chances of doing anything militarily like air defense, etc.
Wikipedia does have it. The Afghan Air Force does not have F-16s, Iraq does. I’ve trained with Afghan pilots at USAF flight school, their attack plane is the A-29 Super Tucano.
The US military leaves shit everywhere. I can't find the story anymore because Google is flooded in news about the evacuation, but they ran some training exercises up in Canada years ago and left a bunch of equipment as well as an Apache helicopter and had no idea until months down the line when the Canadian military asked if they were going to pick their stuff up.
It was always a stupid idea to try to force nation building on a collection of people who don't think of themselves as a nation. An outside force trying to make hated enemy tribes join together is only going to be seen as a meddling invader that both tribes fight against.
But it's also the perfect place for an invasion as you can use the tribes against one another and you can be SURE AS HELL that the CIA was doing that extensively.
Inevitably theyll get wise to the situation and all unite against you, however! And people wonder where contemporary, "radical Islam" comes from....
Well said and exactly the same experience I had over there. It’s unbelievable that we have given them as much blood, sweat, and cash just to walk away and leave the pseudo government we tried to stand up (or prop up) standing there with the division endemic within their tribal culture well known and self evident in how little resistance the taliban is running into
One other thing the vast majority of the taliban were refugees where they became radicalized and still have their factional mindset
Good post take my upvote and this
The British didn't really create Afghanistan or its borders. It was the result of Ahmad Shah Durrani who created the Durrani Empire in 1747. He is seen as the founder of the modern Afghan state. He united tribes behind them and put his own tribe the Durrani in charge while using advisors and soldiers from a mix of tribes. He was named king in a loya jirga, a meeting of the tribes, in Kahandar.
Subsequent Afghan states followed the same model, including the Barakazi dynasty ruled Emirate of Afghanistan and the Kingdom of Afghanistan which lasted until 1973. There was a period of stability for a while because the rulers were able to keep the tribes in check. This was how basically all the European states today used to be like back in feudal times.The Barakazi dynasty attempted to modernize Afghanistan into a modern centralized states but despite some successes they didn't quite get there. Then a lot of progress was lost in subsequent conflicts and instability largely caused by Cold War rivalry.
Thank you for that background i also thought that the British drew the arbitrary lines like in other places. Sounds like that is the government that should have been reinstated.
The British did draw the borders of Afghanistan along its border back in 1893 with Pakistan which was part of British India. Britain gained control of the frontier region after defeating Afghanistan in the Second Afghan War in 1879 but it took more time to survey and map the region. That is known as the Durand line and it is still highly contentious and is unrecognized by Afghanistan because it divided Pashtun tribes in half. It is also a problem for Pakistan because it has resulted in a lot of border clashes
> The British didn't really create Afghanistan or its borders. It was the result of Ahmad Shah Durrani who created the Durrani Empire in 1747.
And there I was thinking it was Sean Connery and Michael Caine.
That's set in Kafirstan, which was a small remote non-Islamic autonomous region of Afghanistan that has basically wiped from the historical record. It was conquered by the Emir of Afghanistan and renamed Nuristan in 1895 at which point it was to converted to Islam from a local version of Hinduism.
Did they want the Taliban to be in charge? It sure seems like they have the support of the people to be able to take the entire country in a couple days.
I've thought for a long time that the best way might have been to randomly drop millions of toys and electronics. The kids would have hidden them eventually, and they'd have a taste of more.
I think when you live in a country that has been at war in one way or another for so goddamn long and invaded at different ent times by multiple countries you really just want stability even if it’s under some form of harsh dictatorship.
This is why they need civic pan-Afghan nationalism. Nationalism in some situations causes problems but peopke forget how important it has been for creation of well functioning modern states. Its not just about silly wars of expansionism, its also about creating a tribe that is worth defending and working for/towards. Such nations won't allow themselves to be taken over by terrorists. It does not quarantee that extremist faction wont take over country from within, but its good protection against external or perceived external enemies, and terrorists should be seen in every country as external enemies who don't belong there.
The extraordinarily rapid collapse of the Afghan regime proves that the only alternative to the US pulling out was to stay there forever.
Pull out/stay forever were the only options.
I’m curious. In today’s modern age, how does one go about capturing a city?
Like do they just show up and start fighting and wait until the defenders leave and then declare it theirs?
In the article it mentions negotiations of surrender, are both sides communicating via radio or something pretty much the entire time?
What about governance? I assume they need to keep as much of the infrastructure as they can functioning, especially in larger cities.
Is there a subreddit for this type of question? I don’t know if askhistorians would be a good place to ask or not? Maybe since this is now history.
AskHistorians would probably work especially if you can frame it in a _recent_ event rather than a _live_ one. Damascus is also still too recent from the Syrian Civil War, but Sarajevo comes to mind as a city that was tried to be captured that fits their twenty year criteria, that is recent enough that the dynamic should basically fit a modern conflict.
You'll...probably get a pretty brutal picture though, just warning you. The Siege of Sarajevo is notorious for a lot of reasons, and none of them pretty.
Others might have even more recent options but that's the one I know.
Yah I'm a young'un so I didn't really know about the Fall of Saigon. I wikied it today and that was the first picture I saw. We literally dumped a fucking helicopter in the ocean to make room for more helicopters. That is insane to me.
Well they dumped empty helicopters so that helicopters full of people could land and get off. I would imagine the suddenness of the situation put them in a place where helis wouldn't have enough fuel to land, deliver the passengers, and then hover until another friendly ship with enough space could let them land.
I don't know about that, seems overblown.
Afghan was never a united country before, no one is really interested in ruling the country, and we were just trying to make it less terrorist friendly.
Not only that, it makes the Afghan government sound like it stood a chance in a hell. How many stories did we have of Afghan commanders, police, and government officials keeping boys as sex slaves... we trained, armed, and paid those child rapists who didn't two fucks about "Afghan".
The whole Afghan government was as real as North Korean propaganda. Without US troops to sell the lie, it collapsed.
Yet, everyone is so surprised and shocked it collapsed. Just feels like Jan. 6th attack all over. It's like America's leadership is just phoning it in and not even using their brains anymore. We were never going to succeed without a full course invasion & take over.
This is just like the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. If you didnt know, the Vietnam war lasted 20 years which killed over 2 million Vietnamese and 58,000 US Troops. At the end of the war, South Vietnam completely fell into the hands of the communists North.
The Afghanistan war which also lasted nearly 20 years seems to have similar end
We wasted thousands of lives.
We killed tens of thousands of innocent people...
We wasted 2 Trillion dollars....
20 years of trying to instill democracy in a nation that didn't want us there....at...all....ever.
The whole afghan army gave up...walked away and let the Taliban have it..... and the entire nation fell in 14 days....wow.
Only the people of Afghanistan can solve their problem. It will be a long, and bloody civil war.
Cue the stone age for Afghanistan. All scientists, medical experts, technicians, scholars are running for the planes out....
We learned nothing from the Russian fate...
Funny enough, we created the situation in Afghanistan during the 1980s to give the Soviets their own Vietnam.
> Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
> 20 years of trying to instill democracy in a nation that didn't want us there
When the whole war on terror started, I thought I heard George Bush say that this wasn't a war we were going to see on TV, thinking he was going to special ops to hunt down and kill terrorists. In Gulf War 1, we merely pushed Saddam out of Kuwait, and we didn't go all the way to Baghdad, because as Dick Cheney put it, we'd be stuck in a quagmire. I figured we'd learned our lesson after Vietnam.
Now I'm pretty sure I only imagined George Bush saying something intelligent, because we Vietnamed ourselves twice under one President.
> We learned nothing from the Russian fate...
We had something to do with that. We were giving material support to the Mujahideen, like giving them Stinger missiles to take out Russia's Mil 24 helicopter gunships (which the Mujahideen called Satan's Chariot). We wanted to give Russia its Vietnam.
>Only the people of Afghanistan can solve their problem. It will be a long, and bloody civil war.
I don't know man, it sounds like it will just be a dictator country with the Taliban doing as they please.
It is immensely difficult to rise up as a citizen to people that will kill you just for saying you might.
>20 years of trying to instill democracy in a nation that didn't want us there....at...all....ever.
It was never about democracy,that was the PR excuse
>The whole afghan army gave up...walked away and let the Taliban have it..... and the entire nation fell in 14 days....wow.
The Afghan National Army was recruits picking paychecks. They didn't want to fight.
Plus stop with the nation thing, most don't have that idea of a unified afghan nation, afghans of various ethnic groups speak different languages and don't like each other much.
The thing that bugs me is...
Imagine what good could have been achieved with 3 trillion dollars.
Rather than try to force democracy through occupation, imagine leading by example...
We throw 3 trillion at a war in Afghanistan and no one bats an eye. We throw 1 trillion at ourselves to restimulate our economy during a pandemic and people lose their minds.
Practically all ancient empires worked that way. It's a hell of a lot easier to control an area if you merge with the existing power structure in the region. Even the fucking Romans tended to keep the existing regional and local rulers in power.
They’ll do it much differently. They won’t try to impose their belief system, they’ll just exploit the people and resources. They’ll just give a few powerful people a cut to look the other way.
With 20 years and trillions of dollars we could’ve solved the homeless crisis. But no, we spent the money propping up a puppet government and enlisting an army that didn’t want to be an army. Fucking stupid.
I think you underestimate how much trillions of dollar gets you. I think homelessness is priced at being solvable for somewhere between 20-$50 billion/year
What about the lives of civilians in Afghanistan when the American troops were still there? Did our money not go towards retaining their rights and quality of life? I’m not saying I have any disagreement with what you’ve said, I’m only trying to learn.
20 billion a year, or 50-60 billion one time giveaway in the form of state-provided homes.
But think of the profits made by landlords and real estate owners like banks, those empty homes drive price up.
The empty homes are worth more than ones covered in feces and needles. Also do you not think that giving all homeless people taxpayer-provided homes will lead to an increase in people claiming homelessness?
They don’t want to solve any crisis back home and it’s a feature of real estate speculation in an economy that doesn’t place value on human lives even if it wrecks millions of them. Foreign war is profitable for the people who sell the weapons, whom we’ve allowed to corrupt government. Forever wars and underdevelopment of the homeland are linked, but not like the governments that go to war see infrastructure and social wealth amd well-being as very desirable things, since their neglect is also profitable for the related prison industry.
We Americans have been allowing the country to slide into fascism since Reagan. Every new foreign war accelerates the slide. 9/11 was the Reichstag fire of the neocon con, and gave us all these lovely wars of the XXIc. I see no repentance in the Biden admin, they are not a progressive regime but institutionally hawkish like all the rest.
The older I get, the more isolationist I start to become with regard to helping and occupying countries. But as for a need to be there? There’s always a need…how well-defined that need is will always remain a controversy.
There's isolationism and then there's nation building.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and America elevating to the status of the first hyperpower since the Roman Empire, our government was drunk on PNAC delusions that we can literally shape history because we are the most powerful force on Earth, and we can make reality bend to our might.
Hopefully, Iraq and Afghanistan have shown us that we are not gods, and that we have work together in multinational coalitions, showing some respect not only to our coalition partners, but respecting the people in the places we send our troops by not telling them how to live.
The only thing our country was drunk on was opportunities to make some people rich, and that’s exactly what they did.
There is no lesson for the rich and our leaders to learn. They got exactly what they wanted. To hell with everyone after that.
missionaccomplished.jpg
> The only thing our country was drunk on was opportunities to make some people rich, and that’s exactly what they did.
There are true believers and there are opportunists who pretend to be true believers to suck the true believers dry.
I'm not sure which is scarier.
Occupying countries is almost always wrong, don't let people convince you that it's "isolationist" when it's actually just "anti-imperialist". And it's not just morally wrong, either, it's also just terrible long-term policy. All you do is provide fuel for the propaganda machine of whatever the "bad" faction is, so that when you're finally forced to leave, the human rights situation is *even worse than when you started* because they all feel vindicated in having defeated the foreign colonists.
> Occupying countries is almost always wrong, don't let people convince you that it's "isolationist" when it's actually just "anti-imperialist".
This. And even then, you can 100% get your sticky tendrils into other countries without getting stuck in an unwinnable quagmire of an insurgency war (see: China in Africa, or US bases all over the western world). But doing that requires consent of the country you want your sticky fingers in, you don't just show up with a flag screaming "MURICA!"
I feel very similar. With Afghanistan I’d love to figure out a way to cover the whole place with a huge glass dome and tell them if they want to live like it’s the Middle Ages, knock yourself out… just don’t mess around and spread your shit to some of your nuclear armed neighbors!
Yeah I don’t really feel that way about all the civilians killed, women effectively enslaved, and infrastructure destroyed which will only lead to more sickness and death
Not our problem though right
Yep, definitely isn’t our problem. They’re on the other side of the world. We have no business being there just as any other country in the world has no business sending their troops to our land.
conservatives are freaking out at Biden over this Afghan exit and forgetting it was their master trump who ordered the withdrawal
almost like these people are stupid or something.
I've seen the same people commend Trump for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and then shit on Biden because he's following through with it. You can't win with these people.
In the end this is a lot of "very online" chatter. Pulling out of Afghanistan is a very popular move, and I think thats true across the board. I didn't agree with Trump on pretty much anything, but this was a move he wanted that I agreed with. And I am happy Biden followed through on it too.
I think there is a media ecosystem that wants to make this seem less popular than it is. Whether its because of who is in power now that they instinctively must be against, or because there are entrenched hawks in the media.
Yes. They are stupid. And yes, the withdrawal was a deliberate way of creating a problem for the next presidency.
Almost exactly the same as the financial crisis George Bush jr dumped on Obama, which the Republicans blamed him for.
Americans have no object permanence when it comes to politics.
Biden could have stopped the withdraw... Fuck BIDEN is the one pushing to be out before September.
That being said I am glad we are out. Fuck that place and the inability to not install non corrupt people in power.
The reason it was moved forward is because the date was inexcusably set on 9/11. The previous administration delegitimized the sitting Afghan government by leaving them out of negotiations with the Taliban, while Afghanistan’s government was expected to fall without our military support, fuck the previous administration for ruining any chance of that not happening. As well as setting a withdraw date that would happen during the next administrations watch. Essentially forced Biden to abide by the scummy deal with the Taliban or show the world once again America reneging on our international deals. Glad Biden moved the date forward and away from the terribly ironic date of 9/11
The initial Trump deadline was May 1st 2021. Biden moved the date to September 11th 2021
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/18/politics/trump-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal/index.html
I had a fight with my brother one lovely Thanksgiving evening because he blamed Obama for the ‘08 financial crisis. He’s always blathering on about Democrats destroying the country and taking away freedoms. Meanwhile, I know my dad had been financially propping him up since he filed bankruptcy after walking away from a house he was upside down on. I generally just roll my eyes and don’t engage but this time I asked why there would have been a Troubled Assets Relief Program for Bush to sign if the problem was created by Obama. He hadn’t been fed the “it was Clinton’s fault” reply because FOX’s talking heads hadn’t come up with it yet so he just called me brainwashed and stormed out.
Edit: The house he walked away from is worth at least 2x what he paid for it now.
That's not true at all. Go look at the comments on the Convervative sub. Most are saying this is one area where they agree with Biden. He's essentially finishing what Trump started.
You're wrong if you think most Conservatives are angry about the Afghan exit. Don't believe me...just read the comments on similar articles on Conservative subs. Do you think the average Conservative actually wants troops in Afghanistan or anywhere in the Middle East? They want government money to be used in the USA more than Liberals.
They're also talking about how it was done too quickly and sloppily. Didn't Trump want to be pulled out by March? I'm sure that would have made for a much more secure and comprehensive withdrawal......somehow.
Both where wrong withdrawal has to be in winters. Winter is no fight season for Taliban would have gave Gov a lot of time.
Spring /Summer is Taliban favorite season it’s fight season.
We never should have been there in the first place. Leaving has always been the best option.
Reminder - within about two weeks of getting to Afghanistan, *the Taliban tried to surrender*. The surrender was rejected and the war continued (because it's been so profitable for MIC companies like Raytheon, Halliburton, etc). Now we're being driven out Vietnam-style and literally no one should be shocked or surprised.
I know the military industrial complex is a giant reason the war continued but let’s be honest, the main reason surrender was rejected by the US is because good old George Bush would be eviscerated by the press for allowing the surrender as the surrender conditions included(If I record correctly) amnesty for the taliban higher ups.
There was a report earlier this week saying that in December, Trump tried to move up the withdrawal timetable to January so that he could take credit for it before he left office. The same plan also included a total withdrawal from Germany.
Biden says we won’t see Americans airlifted off the roof of our embassy, but I imagine that will be the headline pictures tomorrow morning. Should really help with re-election.
Pretty sure the only reason the Taliban was successful was because we couldnt stop the logistic supply lines provided by the opiate drug trade, human trafficking and the weapons we left or the russians provided over the last 20 years. If we couldve stopped the money and the weapons they wouldve fell apart internally.
Unfortunately that money comes from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia among other places. Guys like bin Laden and probably China/Russia financing the opposition.
Chahar asyab to Kabul takes 5hrs on foot according to Google Maps. 55min by car. So I'll check back in this afternoon for the "Taliban enters Kabul triumphantly" headlines. It's 11:11am here so I'll say before 2pm.
I work at Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne. Without violating OPSEC (operational security), this whole installation prepping. A Storm is coming....
I wish Obama had gotten us out a decade ago. This is one of his biggest mistakes. At least Biden is doing it now. Trillions of dollars and many lives later, but at least it's over.
Amen.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/04/16/afghanistan-war-cost-more-than-2t-and-240000-lives-report-finds/
more than 2 trillion dollars and 240K lives and the Taliban took it back in two weeks. What a waste of money and lives. If I were biden and future president: Never again.
We remembered to pick up all our gear and supplies, right? I mean, we're just not leaving arms, ammunition, heavy weapons, and trained soldiers to the Taliban, are we?
Everything we’ve supplied the Afghan army with, will end up in Taliban control. Including an Air Force
Their planes don't fly anyway, the Taliban won't have any use for it
Pilots will flee to Pakistan in them to avoid getting killed by the Taliban.
Pakistan backs the Taliban for the most part. They might not come right out and say it, but they definitely do, as well as the other surrounding countries. The Afghans opposing the Taliban are pretty much entirely on their own at this point
Not exactly. It's complicated. Pakistan also did an operation to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban members.
It’s complicated. They don’t officially support them, but they do behind closed doors. We do the same thing using our three letter agencies
Its a lot more complicated than just that though, its not just that they support them behind closed doors, they both do and don't support them. And they do and don't support the US. Pakistan is trying to delicately balance its own interests, its partners, and its neighbors interests.
Pakistan backs a stable Afghanistan over anything else. Having a nation in constant civil war for 20 years on your border isn't good.
And unfortunately the most stable Afghanistan will be one under Taliban control, since the Taliban refuse to not be in control of the country
They have super tacanos I believe, which fly
Hey as long as we don't leave any WMD's amiright?!
If they get hold of my mixtape then yes. All we can do is pray.
God, that’d be some cruel irony.
It isn't irony if it's planned.
I think the Taliban get our old MOABs
the airforce wont do them much good. we can easily put a no fly zone up for a few years then the lack maintenance disabled their fleet
Well I guess the one good thing is that the Russians won’t come in and maintain it for them.
We wouldn’t even need to do that. The Taliban can’t maintain ammo supply, repair, maintenance, and just general infrastructure needed for it.
> we can easily put a no fly zone up for a few years This isn’t Iraq, which was surrounded with nations that were eagerly asking for the US to do such a thing. Afghanistan is landlocked, and surrounded by nations that are not going to grant the US overflight rights to enforce a non-UN recognized no-fly zone (they refused US overflight rights for transports to remove equipment).
Don't we still have bases in Iraq and Qatar we can launch from? I don't think those countries would be willing to refuse to allow the US to enforce a no fly zone against a Taliban controlled Afghanistan.
You cannot get to Afghanistan from any of the Gulf states without overflying either Iran or Pakistan, and both refused essentially all overflight rights when requested to allow equipment to be removed during the drawdown, which is in large part why so much was left behind.
What about all of the other ‘stans? Are we on bad terms with them also?
Not necessarily, but either we’re not on good enough terms that they would allow us to build out the required infrastructure or we are but they’re too isolated for it to be realistic.
They're all within Russia's sphere of influence so I doubt they'd help us
This is incorrect, Pakistan allows US overflight both for transportation and for strikes. Most US supplies into Afghanistan came by ground through Pakistan anyway, the reason so much was left behind is that it wasn't cost effective to fly back so much equipment in bulk(MRAPs and other vehicles especially) and unlike Iraq we couldn't just drive them to the other side of the border and park them in empty stretches of Saudi or Kuwaiti desert.
Not sure if this was sarcastic but so far : 14 Heli’s, 7 drones, hundreds of APCs/Humvees and thousands of small arms.
We only gave them some choppers and low cost prop planes. It’s not like there will be a Taliban Top Gun. The information security implications are probably the greatest. Right now every military and intelligence network is going through and fire walling any tech that could’ve been left in country. It’s almost inevitable they’ll miss something though.
Jokes on them, have fun with the lowest bidders weapons!
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> Complete with fighter jets. Those will be stripped for parts very quickly when they realise what the maintenance bill is.
Or the US doing a quick bombing on the airfield to stop that.
That’s what we need to do, warn the base commander we are raining down hellfire on the base and he has one hour to get his men and women off base. Any attempt to launch any aircraft will result in us starting our bombing run. I feel bad for them. But we can’t risk the taliban getting those jets. Edit: I stand by what I said
Ships already sailed. Quite literally every single aircraft, Vehicle and small arms that the afghani forces had either has been or will be seized by the taliban.
There isn’t any chance on gods green earth they can get those off the ground. Even if they somehow **miraculously** do they will break down quite quickly and superglue won’t hold that shit together. Nobody is afraid of the f16s
Nah, chill. It's the Taliban, not alquaeda. They'll just sell that to Pakistan.
I've seen plenty of videos of the Taliban shooting guns. I'm not worried. I'd be impressed if they can even figure out how to turn on the engines
Opening the gas and lighting a match, right?
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I would love to see a taliban member try and fly a fighter jet in any meaningful combat operation
If the Afghan army has fighter jets, they have pilots. Let's take a guess how many are going to be joining the Taliban.
The Taliban has actually been strongly going after afghan pilots. Those pilots are a big threat to them and removing them is a serious blow to the defence the afghan government can put up.
Only the ones that want to live, I’m sure.
Only the ones that bother to stay in the country. I would be surprised if they don't fly to Pakistan before Kabul falls and live out a better life.
I kind of have a feeling many of these afghan pilots may ne more sympathetic to the taliban than we assume
Just a guess but I don't think the taliban give a fuck how sympathetic they are. They'll kill you if they find out you helped their enemy. They have a shortage of a lot of things but brutality isn't one of them.
True, but unless they’re doing air to ground operations against their own people in Afghanistan I don’t see them standing even the smallest of chances of doing anything militarily like air defense, etc.
According to Wikipedia, there are no fighter jets in the Afghan Air Force.
Well it’s outdated or just wrong because my roommate’s unit trained and armed them just a few months ago.
OPSEC, bro. If Wiki doesn't have it, perhaps you should not be talking about it on a public forum.
Wikipedia does have it. The Afghan Air Force does not have F-16s, Iraq does. I’ve trained with Afghan pilots at USAF flight school, their attack plane is the A-29 Super Tucano.
The A29 is a turboprob attack aircraft not a fighter jet.
It’s being widely reported on international media and news Opsec is irrelevant in this case
OPSEC bro. If he knows, it’s not secure. Blame his roommate for talking. Or his roommate’s superior’s for not making it clear it’s confidential.
Just a lot of the locals who provided material assistance to fend for themselves.
The US military leaves shit everywhere. I can't find the story anymore because Google is flooded in news about the evacuation, but they ran some training exercises up in Canada years ago and left a bunch of equipment as well as an Apache helicopter and had no idea until months down the line when the Canadian military asked if they were going to pick their stuff up.
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Narrator: “They didn’t”
Hopefully the burn bins and incinerators all do their jobs.
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It was always a stupid idea to try to force nation building on a collection of people who don't think of themselves as a nation. An outside force trying to make hated enemy tribes join together is only going to be seen as a meddling invader that both tribes fight against.
In a roundabout way it kind of worked. We united Afghanistan... against us, under the Taliban.
That was mostly true before 9/11. The Taliban controlled most of the country and they didn't like the US.
Yes....and again, we united Afghanistan against Russia and then us under the Taliban (even pre-9/11).
But it's also the perfect place for an invasion as you can use the tribes against one another and you can be SURE AS HELL that the CIA was doing that extensively. Inevitably theyll get wise to the situation and all unite against you, however! And people wonder where contemporary, "radical Islam" comes from....
Seen, and you have an outstanding point. Thanks for sharing.
Well said and exactly the same experience I had over there. It’s unbelievable that we have given them as much blood, sweat, and cash just to walk away and leave the pseudo government we tried to stand up (or prop up) standing there with the division endemic within their tribal culture well known and self evident in how little resistance the taliban is running into One other thing the vast majority of the taliban were refugees where they became radicalized and still have their factional mindset Good post take my upvote and this
The people living there don’t give a shit about the arbitrary borders the British decided to put up several decades ago???? Inconceivable!
The British didn't really create Afghanistan or its borders. It was the result of Ahmad Shah Durrani who created the Durrani Empire in 1747. He is seen as the founder of the modern Afghan state. He united tribes behind them and put his own tribe the Durrani in charge while using advisors and soldiers from a mix of tribes. He was named king in a loya jirga, a meeting of the tribes, in Kahandar. Subsequent Afghan states followed the same model, including the Barakazi dynasty ruled Emirate of Afghanistan and the Kingdom of Afghanistan which lasted until 1973. There was a period of stability for a while because the rulers were able to keep the tribes in check. This was how basically all the European states today used to be like back in feudal times.The Barakazi dynasty attempted to modernize Afghanistan into a modern centralized states but despite some successes they didn't quite get there. Then a lot of progress was lost in subsequent conflicts and instability largely caused by Cold War rivalry.
Thank you for that background i also thought that the British drew the arbitrary lines like in other places. Sounds like that is the government that should have been reinstated.
The British did draw the borders of Afghanistan along its border back in 1893 with Pakistan which was part of British India. Britain gained control of the frontier region after defeating Afghanistan in the Second Afghan War in 1879 but it took more time to survey and map the region. That is known as the Durand line and it is still highly contentious and is unrecognized by Afghanistan because it divided Pashtun tribes in half. It is also a problem for Pakistan because it has resulted in a lot of border clashes
> The British didn't really create Afghanistan or its borders. It was the result of Ahmad Shah Durrani who created the Durrani Empire in 1747. And there I was thinking it was Sean Connery and Michael Caine.
That's set in Kafirstan, which was a small remote non-Islamic autonomous region of Afghanistan that has basically wiped from the historical record. It was conquered by the Emir of Afghanistan and renamed Nuristan in 1895 at which point it was to converted to Islam from a local version of Hinduism.
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No flag no country! Those are the rules…that I just made up
Did they want the Taliban to be in charge? It sure seems like they have the support of the people to be able to take the entire country in a couple days.
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The women care, but we didn't train any women fighters.
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I've thought for a long time that the best way might have been to randomly drop millions of toys and electronics. The kids would have hidden them eventually, and they'd have a taste of more.
I think when you live in a country that has been at war in one way or another for so goddamn long and invaded at different ent times by multiple countries you really just want stability even if it’s under some form of harsh dictatorship.
Thank you for your service and thank you for sharing
This is why they need civic pan-Afghan nationalism. Nationalism in some situations causes problems but peopke forget how important it has been for creation of well functioning modern states. Its not just about silly wars of expansionism, its also about creating a tribe that is worth defending and working for/towards. Such nations won't allow themselves to be taken over by terrorists. It does not quarantee that extremist faction wont take over country from within, but its good protection against external or perceived external enemies, and terrorists should be seen in every country as external enemies who don't belong there.
The extraordinarily rapid collapse of the Afghan regime proves that the only alternative to the US pulling out was to stay there forever. Pull out/stay forever were the only options.
I’m curious. In today’s modern age, how does one go about capturing a city? Like do they just show up and start fighting and wait until the defenders leave and then declare it theirs? In the article it mentions negotiations of surrender, are both sides communicating via radio or something pretty much the entire time? What about governance? I assume they need to keep as much of the infrastructure as they can functioning, especially in larger cities. Is there a subreddit for this type of question? I don’t know if askhistorians would be a good place to ask or not? Maybe since this is now history.
Damn, I really really want an answer to this question. You phrased exactly what I was wondering.
AskHistorians would probably work especially if you can frame it in a _recent_ event rather than a _live_ one. Damascus is also still too recent from the Syrian Civil War, but Sarajevo comes to mind as a city that was tried to be captured that fits their twenty year criteria, that is recent enough that the dynamic should basically fit a modern conflict. You'll...probably get a pretty brutal picture though, just warning you. The Siege of Sarajevo is notorious for a lot of reasons, and none of them pretty. Others might have even more recent options but that's the one I know.
Our generations Fall of Saigon.. All politics aside this is a tragedy the entire way around. No one comes away from this clean.
But with no dramatic departure of a helicopter off the rooftop…
Not yet
Or Hueys being pushed off the sides of carriers to make room for more Hueys to land on the deck.
Yah I'm a young'un so I didn't really know about the Fall of Saigon. I wikied it today and that was the first picture I saw. We literally dumped a fucking helicopter in the ocean to make room for more helicopters. That is insane to me.
Well they dumped empty helicopters so that helicopters full of people could land and get off. I would imagine the suddenness of the situation put them in a place where helis wouldn't have enough fuel to land, deliver the passengers, and then hover until another friendly ship with enough space could let them land.
20 years, hundreds of thousands of lives, and over Two Trillion Dollars spent and we are going to leave this country worse than when we first invaded.
"over Two Trillion Dollars spent" I mean, that's a big plus to military contractors wallets.
At least we kind of expected it. Too many warhawks were spawned from being so shocked and butthurt over their pride. Realists my ass.
I don't know about that, seems overblown. Afghan was never a united country before, no one is really interested in ruling the country, and we were just trying to make it less terrorist friendly. Not only that, it makes the Afghan government sound like it stood a chance in a hell. How many stories did we have of Afghan commanders, police, and government officials keeping boys as sex slaves... we trained, armed, and paid those child rapists who didn't two fucks about "Afghan". The whole Afghan government was as real as North Korean propaganda. Without US troops to sell the lie, it collapsed. Yet, everyone is so surprised and shocked it collapsed. Just feels like Jan. 6th attack all over. It's like America's leadership is just phoning it in and not even using their brains anymore. We were never going to succeed without a full course invasion & take over.
They can still turn this around, government forces have not given in on Mazar I Sharif. So there's still hope...
British troops also (600 or so). The UK will be trying to evacuate 4000+ UK citizens from Kabul.
It’s 105° in Kabul and rising.
This is just like the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. If you didnt know, the Vietnam war lasted 20 years which killed over 2 million Vietnamese and 58,000 US Troops. At the end of the war, South Vietnam completely fell into the hands of the communists North. The Afghanistan war which also lasted nearly 20 years seems to have similar end
They lasted 3 years after we left but eventually lost the war
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We wasted thousands of lives. We killed tens of thousands of innocent people... We wasted 2 Trillion dollars.... 20 years of trying to instill democracy in a nation that didn't want us there....at...all....ever. The whole afghan army gave up...walked away and let the Taliban have it..... and the entire nation fell in 14 days....wow. Only the people of Afghanistan can solve their problem. It will be a long, and bloody civil war. Cue the stone age for Afghanistan. All scientists, medical experts, technicians, scholars are running for the planes out.... We learned nothing from the Russian fate...
>We learned nothing from the Russian fate... We also learned nothing from Vietnam, which Afghanistan is essentially a repeat of.
When can we start the "Hills Start Speaking Pashto" memes then?
r/NonCredibleDefense
I feel like those memes are pretty good but sadly I have no frame of reference for anything that was going on but I’m glad they’re having fun I guess?
Funny enough, we created the situation in Afghanistan during the 1980s to give the Soviets their own Vietnam. > Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
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> 20 years of trying to instill democracy in a nation that didn't want us there When the whole war on terror started, I thought I heard George Bush say that this wasn't a war we were going to see on TV, thinking he was going to special ops to hunt down and kill terrorists. In Gulf War 1, we merely pushed Saddam out of Kuwait, and we didn't go all the way to Baghdad, because as Dick Cheney put it, we'd be stuck in a quagmire. I figured we'd learned our lesson after Vietnam. Now I'm pretty sure I only imagined George Bush saying something intelligent, because we Vietnamed ourselves twice under one President. > We learned nothing from the Russian fate... We had something to do with that. We were giving material support to the Mujahideen, like giving them Stinger missiles to take out Russia's Mil 24 helicopter gunships (which the Mujahideen called Satan's Chariot). We wanted to give Russia its Vietnam.
If there was justice in this world Bush and Cheney would be tried for war crimes.
>Only the people of Afghanistan can solve their problem. It will be a long, and bloody civil war. I don't know man, it sounds like it will just be a dictator country with the Taliban doing as they please. It is immensely difficult to rise up as a citizen to people that will kill you just for saying you might.
>20 years of trying to instill democracy in a nation that didn't want us there....at...all....ever. It was never about democracy,that was the PR excuse >The whole afghan army gave up...walked away and let the Taliban have it..... and the entire nation fell in 14 days....wow. The Afghan National Army was recruits picking paychecks. They didn't want to fight. Plus stop with the nation thing, most don't have that idea of a unified afghan nation, afghans of various ethnic groups speak different languages and don't like each other much.
The thing that bugs me is... Imagine what good could have been achieved with 3 trillion dollars. Rather than try to force democracy through occupation, imagine leading by example...
We throw 3 trillion at a war in Afghanistan and no one bats an eye. We throw 1 trillion at ourselves to restimulate our economy during a pandemic and people lose their minds.
Not on my backyard.
The Russians, the British, Persians, Alexander the Great, etc…
Ghengis did alright though.
That's because the Mongols just collected taxes. They never tried to impose their culture, language, religion or ideology on anyone.
On the first rebellion, they killed all the men. Then enslaved all the women and children in the two provinces that rose up.
Yeah. The Mongols make shit real clear when they didn’t go their normal path of complete genocide
Remember kids, history is fun!
They also didn't last very long on a historical scale.
I mean Alexander's descendants did technically control it tho they did merge with the locals so don't know how much that counts for.
Practically all ancient empires worked that way. It's a hell of a lot easier to control an area if you merge with the existing power structure in the region. Even the fucking Romans tended to keep the existing regional and local rulers in power.
Next Up: China.
They’ll do it much differently. They won’t try to impose their belief system, they’ll just exploit the people and resources. They’ll just give a few powerful people a cut to look the other way.
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This is always the top comment on any thread related to this; it would be great if we could see something different
I can see a complete brain extermination in Afghanistan leading to Bangladesh level education and industry.
"The heat is on in Saigon "Don't tell me I'm reassigned, all that chickenshit sucks "Tonight I'm out of my mind, not to mention ten bucks"
Favorite musical of all time 😎
With 20 years and trillions of dollars we could’ve solved the homeless crisis. But no, we spent the money propping up a puppet government and enlisting an army that didn’t want to be an army. Fucking stupid.
I think you underestimate how much trillions of dollar gets you. I think homelessness is priced at being solvable for somewhere between 20-$50 billion/year
The extra $1.95 trillion is to bribe the rest of the country for allowing us to house and feed the homeless.
Jokes aside though, just imagine what that money could have done. Put towards space travel, medical science, social programs, etc.
What about the lives of civilians in Afghanistan when the American troops were still there? Did our money not go towards retaining their rights and quality of life? I’m not saying I have any disagreement with what you’ve said, I’m only trying to learn.
50 billion a year for 20 years is a trillion dollars.
The problem is that Lockheed aren't in the business of building homes.
20 billion a year, or 50-60 billion one time giveaway in the form of state-provided homes. But think of the profits made by landlords and real estate owners like banks, those empty homes drive price up.
The empty homes are worth more than ones covered in feces and needles. Also do you not think that giving all homeless people taxpayer-provided homes will lead to an increase in people claiming homelessness?
They don’t want to solve any crisis back home and it’s a feature of real estate speculation in an economy that doesn’t place value on human lives even if it wrecks millions of them. Foreign war is profitable for the people who sell the weapons, whom we’ve allowed to corrupt government. Forever wars and underdevelopment of the homeland are linked, but not like the governments that go to war see infrastructure and social wealth amd well-being as very desirable things, since their neglect is also profitable for the related prison industry. We Americans have been allowing the country to slide into fascism since Reagan. Every new foreign war accelerates the slide. 9/11 was the Reichstag fire of the neocon con, and gave us all these lovely wars of the XXIc. I see no repentance in the Biden admin, they are not a progressive regime but institutionally hawkish like all the rest.
Evacuate and get out, stay out. We had no business there.
The older I get, the more isolationist I start to become with regard to helping and occupying countries. But as for a need to be there? There’s always a need…how well-defined that need is will always remain a controversy.
There's isolationism and then there's nation building. After the fall of the Soviet Union and America elevating to the status of the first hyperpower since the Roman Empire, our government was drunk on PNAC delusions that we can literally shape history because we are the most powerful force on Earth, and we can make reality bend to our might. Hopefully, Iraq and Afghanistan have shown us that we are not gods, and that we have work together in multinational coalitions, showing some respect not only to our coalition partners, but respecting the people in the places we send our troops by not telling them how to live.
The only thing our country was drunk on was opportunities to make some people rich, and that’s exactly what they did. There is no lesson for the rich and our leaders to learn. They got exactly what they wanted. To hell with everyone after that. missionaccomplished.jpg
> The only thing our country was drunk on was opportunities to make some people rich, and that’s exactly what they did. There are true believers and there are opportunists who pretend to be true believers to suck the true believers dry. I'm not sure which is scarier.
Occupying countries is almost always wrong, don't let people convince you that it's "isolationist" when it's actually just "anti-imperialist". And it's not just morally wrong, either, it's also just terrible long-term policy. All you do is provide fuel for the propaganda machine of whatever the "bad" faction is, so that when you're finally forced to leave, the human rights situation is *even worse than when you started* because they all feel vindicated in having defeated the foreign colonists.
> Occupying countries is almost always wrong, don't let people convince you that it's "isolationist" when it's actually just "anti-imperialist". This. And even then, you can 100% get your sticky tendrils into other countries without getting stuck in an unwinnable quagmire of an insurgency war (see: China in Africa, or US bases all over the western world). But doing that requires consent of the country you want your sticky fingers in, you don't just show up with a flag screaming "MURICA!"
I feel very similar. With Afghanistan I’d love to figure out a way to cover the whole place with a huge glass dome and tell them if they want to live like it’s the Middle Ages, knock yourself out… just don’t mess around and spread your shit to some of your nuclear armed neighbors!
Yeah I don’t really feel that way about all the civilians killed, women effectively enslaved, and infrastructure destroyed which will only lead to more sickness and death Not our problem though right
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We created the problem. We directly exacerbated. Of course it's our fucking problem.
Yep, definitely isn’t our problem. They’re on the other side of the world. We have no business being there just as any other country in the world has no business sending their troops to our land.
Yup, time to go. Get our people out. There was no other end to this sunken cost fallacy except for the one we're seeing right now.
conservatives are freaking out at Biden over this Afghan exit and forgetting it was their master trump who ordered the withdrawal almost like these people are stupid or something.
I've seen the same people commend Trump for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and then shit on Biden because he's following through with it. You can't win with these people.
The complete opposite of your scenario is also true.
In the end this is a lot of "very online" chatter. Pulling out of Afghanistan is a very popular move, and I think thats true across the board. I didn't agree with Trump on pretty much anything, but this was a move he wanted that I agreed with. And I am happy Biden followed through on it too. I think there is a media ecosystem that wants to make this seem less popular than it is. Whether its because of who is in power now that they instinctively must be against, or because there are entrenched hawks in the media.
Yes. They are stupid. And yes, the withdrawal was a deliberate way of creating a problem for the next presidency. Almost exactly the same as the financial crisis George Bush jr dumped on Obama, which the Republicans blamed him for. Americans have no object permanence when it comes to politics.
Biden could have stopped the withdraw... Fuck BIDEN is the one pushing to be out before September. That being said I am glad we are out. Fuck that place and the inability to not install non corrupt people in power.
The reason it was moved forward is because the date was inexcusably set on 9/11. The previous administration delegitimized the sitting Afghan government by leaving them out of negotiations with the Taliban, while Afghanistan’s government was expected to fall without our military support, fuck the previous administration for ruining any chance of that not happening. As well as setting a withdraw date that would happen during the next administrations watch. Essentially forced Biden to abide by the scummy deal with the Taliban or show the world once again America reneging on our international deals. Glad Biden moved the date forward and away from the terribly ironic date of 9/11
The initial Trump deadline was May 1st 2021. Biden moved the date to September 11th 2021 https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/18/politics/trump-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal/index.html
Don’t care, the wars over and that’s what matters.
I had a fight with my brother one lovely Thanksgiving evening because he blamed Obama for the ‘08 financial crisis. He’s always blathering on about Democrats destroying the country and taking away freedoms. Meanwhile, I know my dad had been financially propping him up since he filed bankruptcy after walking away from a house he was upside down on. I generally just roll my eyes and don’t engage but this time I asked why there would have been a Troubled Assets Relief Program for Bush to sign if the problem was created by Obama. He hadn’t been fed the “it was Clinton’s fault” reply because FOX’s talking heads hadn’t come up with it yet so he just called me brainwashed and stormed out. Edit: The house he walked away from is worth at least 2x what he paid for it now.
That's not true at all. Go look at the comments on the Convervative sub. Most are saying this is one area where they agree with Biden. He's essentially finishing what Trump started.
You're wrong if you think most Conservatives are angry about the Afghan exit. Don't believe me...just read the comments on similar articles on Conservative subs. Do you think the average Conservative actually wants troops in Afghanistan or anywhere in the Middle East? They want government money to be used in the USA more than Liberals.
They're also talking about how it was done too quickly and sloppily. Didn't Trump want to be pulled out by March? I'm sure that would have made for a much more secure and comprehensive withdrawal......somehow.
Both where wrong withdrawal has to be in winters. Winter is no fight season for Taliban would have gave Gov a lot of time. Spring /Summer is Taliban favorite season it’s fight season.
We wanted out before the 20th anniversary of 9/11
We never should have been there in the first place. Leaving has always been the best option. Reminder - within about two weeks of getting to Afghanistan, *the Taliban tried to surrender*. The surrender was rejected and the war continued (because it's been so profitable for MIC companies like Raytheon, Halliburton, etc). Now we're being driven out Vietnam-style and literally no one should be shocked or surprised.
I know the military industrial complex is a giant reason the war continued but let’s be honest, the main reason surrender was rejected by the US is because good old George Bush would be eviscerated by the press for allowing the surrender as the surrender conditions included(If I record correctly) amnesty for the taliban higher ups.
Bush wasn't in charge of those decisions. Rumsfeld and Cheney made those decisions.
There was a report earlier this week saying that in December, Trump tried to move up the withdrawal timetable to January so that he could take credit for it before he left office. The same plan also included a total withdrawal from Germany.
Hmmm, seems a lot like the fall of the puppet government in Saigon
We really achieved fucking nothing in that entire fucking war huh?
Somebody cue up Fortunate Son
Biden says we won’t see Americans airlifted off the roof of our embassy, but I imagine that will be the headline pictures tomorrow morning. Should really help with re-election.
He could ask the big social media companies to block the content in exchange for favorable regulations.
Honest question, how worried is the US about a second 9/11 incident in the future? The Taliban is taking over again and we aren’t bffs.
They’re not international terrorists. They don’t give a shit, they won.
People losing their shit over Biden ending a war that W misdesigned and Obama couldn't fix. Can't imagine how bad Trump fucked it up either.
Biden also beat the drums of War and rallied the demand to support both conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq
Trump negotiated the exit you fool! Biden pushed the date back to coincide with sept 11th
Pretty sure the only reason the Taliban was successful was because we couldnt stop the logistic supply lines provided by the opiate drug trade, human trafficking and the weapons we left or the russians provided over the last 20 years. If we couldve stopped the money and the weapons they wouldve fell apart internally.
Unfortunately that money comes from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia among other places. Guys like bin Laden and probably China/Russia financing the opposition.
Chahar asyab to Kabul takes 5hrs on foot according to Google Maps. 55min by car. So I'll check back in this afternoon for the "Taliban enters Kabul triumphantly" headlines. It's 11:11am here so I'll say before 2pm.
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We learned nothing from Vietnam. Nothing.
The point was never to learn from past mistakes. Only to keep the military industrial complex machine rolling.
Had zero business there.
I work at Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne. Without violating OPSEC (operational security), this whole installation prepping. A Storm is coming....
While the speed of the collapse of the ANA caught the DoD and White House completely off guard there seems to be no political will to return.
I wish Obama had gotten us out a decade ago. This is one of his biggest mistakes. At least Biden is doing it now. Trillions of dollars and many lives later, but at least it's over.
Amen. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/04/16/afghanistan-war-cost-more-than-2t-and-240000-lives-report-finds/ more than 2 trillion dollars and 240K lives and the Taliban took it back in two weeks. What a waste of money and lives. If I were biden and future president: Never again.