Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[Iuz the Evil]

20 years of war…

 

What the heck?! This is such a total disaster… 

[Dr. MID-Nite]

4 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

It's bitter irony that the avowed party of small government and personal freedom is eager to use big government to quash any freedom it doesn't like.

 

Conservatives are perfectly fine with government as long as it aligns with their values and interests. Do you think they'd cry about "big government" if that government overturned Roe vs Wade? Not a chance. 

[Pattern Ghost]

On 8/12/2021 at 2:52 PM, Ternaugh said:

It's so wrong of me to see that picture and think of the trolley problem.

 

That's better than my first thought.

[Tom]

Afghanistan conflict: Taliban push into Kabul as president flees https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58223231
 

Well, this seems to be collapsing totally. The Taliban look to be in control before we even complete our withdrawal.  

[Ragitsu]

<vent mode on>

 

The cry of the right-wing: "You're being emotional." This, by the way, comes from the side that has managed to convince itself that anger and fear - their anger and fear, in particular - aren't emotions.

 

<vent mode off>

[archer]

1 hour ago, Tom said:

Afghanistan conflict: Taliban push into Kabul as president flees https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58223231
 

Well, this seems to be collapsing totally. The Taliban look to be in control before we even complete our withdrawal.  

 

Yeah, things are moving fast.

 

The Taliban has announced an interim government and a new head of government.

 

Taliban forces have entered Kabul to "prevent looting". And not just Kabul in general but occupying the presidential palace (which is kind of the facepalm event for an enemy force entering your capital city).

 

The US embassy has announced that it has ceased all operations. The military is trying to figure out how to evacuate the embassy personnel since the airport is taking fire. 1400 of the embassy employees are US citizens, 2600 embassy employees are not US citizens. No word on whether non-citizen employee will be evacuated or not. 

 

Since the city is invaded and the airport is taking fire, expect commercial airlines to cease operations. Over the past week, every seat on every commercial flight has been full as anyone with a valid passport has been fleeing the country.

 

There were approximately 71,000 Afghan translators who worked for the US military (that number including their families) still in Afghanistan waiting endlessly on US embassy personnel to process their visa paperwork. Thousands of that number have been waiting years for the embassy to process their paperwork.

 

Two weeks ago, the administration announced that we would also evacuate Afghan translators and their families who had worked for US non-profits and US news organizations. There's no official tally announced about how many people that was but I'd estimate they were talking over 100,000 people...who are still in Afghanistan because there wasn't even an existing program to, in theory, start getting them out of the country.

 

The 3000 troops Biden announced last Friday to be sent to Afghanistan to secure the embassy and the airport have started to arrive. Since the embassy has already lowered its flag and ceased operations, if those troops are used for embassy purposes at all, it'd be to run around the city and fighting the Taliban while collecting embassy personnel who haven't managed to get themselves to the airport on their own. (The embassy in one of its last acts warned Americans to shelter in place and not try to make it to the airport since there were Taliban out on the streets shooting people.)

 

The 5000 additional troops Biden announced yesterday to be sent to Afghanistan to stabilize Kabul during the evacuation...if they still deploy, they'll be landing in a Taliban-controlled airport and city. 

 

The embassy personnel had started yesterday destroying hardware and paperwork in anticipation of having to abandon the embassy some time in the next couple of weeks. Considering that the fall of the embassy seems to have come slightly ahead of schedule, I'm wondering if the destruction is complete or whether random bits of embassy hardware and software will be finding its way into the hands of everyone who we wouldn't want to have it.

[Iuz the Evil]

The Taliban now have our hardened military sites, vehicles, abandoned weaponry (all intended for the Afghanistan peacekeeping allies we had there)… they’ve occupied Kabul, control every major city in the nation. Nothing short of major military action would seem likely to change the current situation, and maybe that would only be a holding action at best. This is the culmination of four United States administration efforts, extending over 20 years.

 

 It’s appalling. I’m not suggesting any other outcome than a reversion to autocracy and a terrorist state was possible, I don’t know enough to competently opine on the likelihood of that. But the manner in which we exit, after the sheer quantity of blood and ordinance expended, leaves much to be desired. These folks are not going to be our friends, to put it lightly.

 

The “forever war” is just not really paying off in any meaningful way in my opinion. It’s depressing.

[Lord Liaden]

It's been a truism for 2,500 years: Afghanistan is where foreign armies go to die.

[Iuz the Evil]

10 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

It's been a truism for 2,500 years: Afghanistan is where foreign armies go to die.

Yes, absolutely. It’s the manner of exit that’s troubling me the most, rather than the exit itself (which it could be argued is long coming… this was after all, also Trump’s plan - yay bipartisan agreement).

 

If we cannot manage our involvement better than this, maybe we shouldn’t play at nation building. Our track record kind of sucks. I’m conflicted as to whether we are too soft/civilized or just not very strategic/overly concerned with the political sensibilities of our regional allies (especially Pakistan). 
 

Whatever one’s personal perspective, it’s hard to paint this as anything but a horrific catastrophe.

[BNakagawa]

On 8/12/2021 at 2:48 PM, Ragitsu said:

Clearly, the man on the left is afraid of the unmasked man on the right and trying to encourage social distancing.

[archer]

7 minutes ago, BNakagawa said:

Clearly, the man on the left is afraid of the unmasked man on the right and trying to encourage social distancing.

 

You have to watch out for those Swiss guys wielding automatic weapons....

[archer]

US State Department this evening issued a statement.

 

They're planning to evacuate the non-citizen employees of the US embassy as well as the citizens "over the coming days".

 

The few translators and their families who've completed the application process will be evacuated to the US. The rest, well, the State Department says it's going to be looking for additional locations where they could be evacuated to. (And while all of this looking around at various international locations is happening, I suppose the Taliban is going to go on vacation for the next few months rather than capture the airport.)

 

The statement doesn't say how those people will be evacuated. But since the civilian flights are already full and probably not going to continue while the airport is under siege, either the State Department is lying or they're expecting the military to provide transportation.

 

https://www.state.gov/joint-statement-from-the-department-of-state-and-department-of-defense-update-on-afghanistan/

 

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/567964-us-says-its-working-to-secure-kabul-airport-evacuate-americans-and-afghans

[Cygnia]

Fascist Fandom and Raging Incels: Tracing the Baffling Nerd-to-White-Nationalist Pipeline

[Lord Liaden]

On 8/15/2021 at 6:57 PM, Iuz the Evil said:

Yes, absolutely. It’s the manner of exit that’s troubling me the most, rather than the exit itself (which it could be argued is long coming… this was after all, also Trump’s plan - yay bipartisan agreement).

 

If we cannot manage our involvement better than this, maybe we shouldn’t play at nation building. Our track record kind of sucks. I’m conflicted as to whether we are too soft/civilized or just not very strategic/overly concerned with the political sensibilities of our regional allies (especially Pakistan). 
 

Whatever one’s personal perspective, it’s hard to paint this as anything but a horrific catastrophe.

 

The Allied reconstruction plans in Germany and Japan after WW II had the right priorities: security for the citizens; rebuilding infrastructure; investing in the economy. Create goodwill by helping the populace regain their independence. Today both nations are stable, prosperous, and American allies.

 

The precedent was clear but ignored. Since the Afghan war started, no American administration or other country has been willing to invest the resources to do the same there. Since little was sown we're reaping dust.

[archer]

41 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

The American reconstruction plans in Germany and Japan had the right priorities: security for the citizens; rebuilding infrastructure; investing in the economy. Create goodwill by helping the populace regain their independence. Today both nations are stable, prosperous, and American allies.

 

Since the Afghan war started, no American administration has been willing to invest the resources to do the same there. The precedent was clear but ignored. Since nothing was sown we're reaping dust.

 

We spent a LOT of money building schools, hospitals, police stations, electrical systems, water systems, etc.

 

We spent loads more hiring and training police and military. 

 

Much of the problem was that there was an active enemy who was opposed to schools, hospitals, and police stations. They didn't seem to have as much problem with water or electricity. And they were violently opposed to police and military.

 

Also we gave the Afghan government money to pay their soldiers. But there were consistent reports for years that pay didn't actually reach the soldiers either in full or on time.

 

There were also scattered reports for years that the government deployed the military without food or water and without adequate amounts of ammunition.

 

We did a lot of the right things for "nation-building" (if you believe in the concept). But the Afghan government wasn't cooperative in trying to run a functional country and the Taliban wasn't interested in having a functional country.

 

When we went in originally, we put the last elected leader in Afghanistan back into power and let him form a government (he'd also been the leader of the Northern Alliance government-in-exile).

 

That was fine in theory and would have been fine if our intent was to immediately declare victory and leave. 

 

But the guy was part of the old mujahedeen freedom fighter coalition which had kicked out the Soviets then formed a government and mismanaged it to the point that a bunch of religious students (Taliban) from Pakistan was able to come and oust them from power.

 

Fighting skill is great and being a military leader is great. But that kind of leadership skill doesn't necessarily translate into skill in running a large bureaucracy in a country which has no tradition of an organized and competent government which the populace supports.

 

Say what you will about the war era Germans and Japanese governments. But the concept of "a government which runs the whole country" had widespread support in both places. So replacing one government with another government was much easier there than trying in Afghanistan to replace loosely-organized chaos of Taliban rule with a competent government.

 

When the Taliban took over in 1996, they were for the most part literally a bunch of kids. They had 16 and 17 year olds taking over and being senior government officials. Somewhere around 2010 I saw one of them in the news who after years of running their foreign affairs office had left Afghanistan behind to go to college in the west.

 

He was 29 years old.

 

Not when he took over the senior Taliban government post in 1996 but he was 29 when he was going to college in 2010.

 

And the scary thing was that the people of Afghanistan by and large in 1996 thought that a government run by a pack of kids (from religious schools funded by Osama bin Laden) could do a better job running their country than their government was doing.

 

The pack of kids proved the people of Afghanistan wrong. But the margin of competence between the two was very close.

 

So when we invaded, we put the formerly elected bozo back into power. We didn't have much choice since he was the internationally-recognized leader of the country already.

 

But that was the starting point that we had to work with: seven years of incompetent government by the mujahedeen from 1989-1996 then six years of incompetent government from 1996-2001 by primarily run by a bunch of kids who had no formal education beyond learning to read the Koran.

 

That's not a large talent pool from which to draw competent government officials.

 

/ramble

4 minutes ago, archer said:

 

 

[archer]

MSNBC's Deadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace was absolutely brutal on the analysis of Biden's Afghanistan speech this afternoon.

 

MSNBC's chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel called Biden's assurances that we were going to evacuate Afghans who'd worked for us "a fantasy". Then he went one to tell about one translator he talked to this week who'd been waiting four years for the State Department to verify that he'd actually worked for the US military. Engel then pointed out that the translators were entered into a biometric database used by the military so positively identifying that he'd worked for the military was as simple as putting his thumb on a scanner and looking at his picture.  

 

Engel said that it took his staff, which didn't have access to the biometric database, 45 minutes to verify the guy's identity and that he'd worked for the US military as a translator.

 

The Matt Zeller, the leader of a non-profit No One Left Behind https://nooneleft.org/default.aspx?, who came after Engel was even more brutal as he detailed how the government ignored the database his NGO compiled of the identity and current location of 14,000 former military translators as he tried over and over for months to find anyone in government who would take the information from him.

 

48 hours ago, they contacted him and asked him for the information.

 

The analysis of the president's speech was beyond brutal and I'm not doing a good job of relating how brutal it was. And honestly, if a Democrat president loses the support of MSNBC staff and the liberal-leaning guests they invite to their shows, that's a sign of how badly the president has screwed the pooch on this one.

[archer]

I mentioned the No One Left Behind organization earlier. Among other things, they help interpreters make their way through the special visa application.

 

Their website directed me to an official General Accountability Office graphic showing how the process is intended to work when working at maximum efficiency (not that it operates at maximum efficiency, but what the government thinks of as optimal speed for getting these people out of Afghanistan like we promised).

 

 

 

[DShomshak]

I admit, I am surprised it took the Taliban less than 2 weeks to recapture Afghanistan. I thought it might take a few months.

 

I have long been sure they would end up back in charge. Every report I've ever heard about the Afghan government, from the Economist, BBC, NPW, or wherever, has stressed its utter disinterest in competent governance. More interested in keeping the aide money flowing so they could embezzle it. Village elders who accurately perceive they are not getting any help from their central government, so they must look out for themselves while knowing the Taliban is not going away, not giving up, and not sparing anyone who gets too chummy with the foreign infidel.

 

I remember the US Ambassador who quit his job in Afghanistan, saying the country didn't have nationalism; it had "Valleyism." People were loyal to their villages in a particular valley; no further.

 

The only people who believed in Afghanistan as a state were... the Taliban. And Western diplomats who have proven, over and over, they have no flipping clue how people outside their rather privileged stratum of the Western world actually think.

 

Many years ago, I watched one of those documentaries made after 9/11, that tried to explain Who They Were And Why They Did It. It included an interview with a Taliban fighter who predicted this day. You will get tired, he said, and go home. But we won't get tired, because we fight for God. We will keep fighting. And when you get tired and go home, we will come out of the hills and take up right where we left off. And what do you know, he was right.

 

I do not think that Taliban fighter had to be right. But building a MIddle Easter/Central Asian state that isn't a theocratic horror-show could not be done by people who didn't really want to be there, made no secret of it, and kept one eye on the exit. And, moreover, still wanted to think of themselves as nice people and be seen as such by the folks back home and in the wine and cheese soirees of their diplomatic peers. I shall not suggest what I think such a task *would* entail, because, first, I lack expertise to make my opinions valuable, and second, it would probably offend many here, perhaps to the extent of getting me banned.

 

But I will predict that in the coming year, Afghanistan is going to become absolutely horrible. Purges killing tens of thousands, and possibly reaching Cambodian 'Killing Fields' intensity, as the Taliban cleanses their Emirate of Western, secular influences. Millions more fleeing as refugees. Jihadists around the world pledging fealty to the Taliban and committing more atrocities in its name, emboldened by its example, and likely with financial backing from it.

 

I would of course prefer to be wrong. But I do not think history will be kind to the Biden administration for this decision.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

I dare say it won't be. But there is one other factor that Biden had to weigh in his decision. Donald Trump pulled the United States out of several key international agreements signed by previous administrations. Then he announced the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, and made that formal commitment in talks with the Taliban. (Which, by the way, is completely the reverse order in which anyone with a lick of sense would negotiate. You don't reveal your intentions before the deal is struck.)

 

If Joe Biden had reneged on yet another agreement, it would have confirmed to the world that America's promises are worthless, which would have crippled the country's ability to negotiate long-term arrangements with anyone.

[Lord Liaden]

15 hours ago, archer said:

 

We spent a LOT of money building schools, hospitals, police stations, electrical systems, water systems, etc.

 

We spent loads more hiring and training police and military. 

 

Much of the problem was that there was an active enemy who was opposed to schools, hospitals, and police stations. They didn't seem to have as much problem with water or electricity. And they were violently opposed to police and military.

 

Also we gave the Afghan government money to pay their soldiers. But there were consistent reports for years that pay didn't actually reach the soldiers either in full or on time.

 

There were also scattered reports for years that the government deployed the military without food or water and without adequate amounts of ammunition.

 

We did a lot of the right things for "nation-building" (if you believe in the concept). But the Afghan government wasn't cooperative in trying to run a functional country and the Taliban wasn't interested in having a functional country.

 

When we went in originally, we put the last elected leader in Afghanistan back into power and let him form a government (he'd also been the leader of the Northern Alliance government-in-exile).

 

That was fine in theory and would have been fine if our intent was to immediately declare victory and leave. 

 

But the guy was part of the old mujahedeen freedom fighter coalition which had kicked out the Soviets then formed a government and mismanaged it to the point that a bunch of religious students (Taliban) from Pakistan was able to come and oust them from power.

 

Fighting skill is great and being a military leader is great. But that kind of leadership skill doesn't necessarily translate into skill in running a large bureaucracy in a country which has no tradition of an organized and competent government which the populace supports.

 

Say what you will about the war era Germans and Japanese governments. But the concept of "a government which runs the whole country" had widespread support in both places. So replacing one government with another government was much easier there than trying in Afghanistan to replace loosely-organized chaos of Taliban rule with a competent government.

 

When the Taliban took over in 1996, they were for the most part literally a bunch of kids. They had 16 and 17 year olds taking over and being senior government officials. Somewhere around 2010 I saw one of them in the news who after years of running their foreign affairs office had left Afghanistan behind to go to college in the west.

 

He was 29 years old.

 

Not when he took over the senior Taliban government post in 1996 but he was 29 when he was going to college in 2010.

 

And the scary thing was that the people of Afghanistan by and large in 1996 thought that a government run by a pack of kids (from religious schools funded by Osama bin Laden) could do a better job running their country than their government was doing.

 

The pack of kids proved the people of Afghanistan wrong. But the margin of competence between the two was very close.

 

So when we invaded, we put the formerly elected bozo back into power. We didn't have much choice since he was the internationally-recognized leader of the country already.

 

But that was the starting point that we had to work with: seven years of incompetent government by the mujahedeen from 1989-1996 then six years of incompetent government from 1996-2001 by primarily run by a bunch of kids who had no formal education beyond learning to read the Koran.

 

That's not a large talent pool from which to draw competent government officials.

 

/ramble

 

 

You are correct. The conditions in Afghanistan did not mirror those in Germany and Japan. And America did spend a lot of money in Afghanistan. Over two decades. There was no plan for rebuilding at the start of the invasion. The goals were constantly changing. Efforts were haphazard, and often handed out to private contractors. There was little central coordination or oversight. The coalition was eager to hand over as much responsibility as they could to the proxy government they installed, which as you say, anyone local could have told them was corrupt and incompetent.

 

The mission was bungled from Day One, and the more time passed without addressing its fundamental flaws, the more intractable the situation became.

[archer]

 

Collin County is just north of Dallas.

 

That was last night with Gov Greg Abbott attending a crowded event for Republican leaders.

 

Today Abbott tested positive for COVID.

 

The governor's office is claiming that they're doing contact tracing.

[Cygnia]

39 minutes ago, archer said:

 

Today Abbott tested positive for COVID.

 

 

[DShomshak]

Heard on NPR just minutes ago, however, that Abbott is asymptomatic. Because, of course, he's vaccinated.

 

The elites protect themselves. Then they tell the common folk they don't need to protect themselves, because FREEDOM!

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

I really shouldn't look at American political stories after dinner. 🤢

[aylwin13]

17 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

I really shouldn't look at American political stories after dinner. 🤢

Or ever, nowadays.