Politics Thread

The military's top general thought he might have to save the country from Trump.

www.salon.com/2021/07/16/donald-trumps-military-coup-didnt-quite-happen--but-it-was-much-closer-than-we-knew/

Biden's administration treats the pandemic like a legitimate problem, which puts it leagues ahead of the previous administration in my book.

What's the deal with Afghanistan right now? Sounds like US leaving and Taliban taking over exactly as before 20 years or so ago.

The true target 20 years ago wasn't the Taliban, it was Al Queda, who were taken out.  They probably should have left something like two years after Bin Laden was killed, but "the blob" refused to admit that nation-building wasn't going to work in Afghanistan and just tried to delay and delay and delay long past any real need to.

Blame for this can be passed to every administration back to Reagan, but regardless this is a humanitarian disaster and Biden's poor evacuation of our allies there and overconfidence in the Afghan government is going to haunt this administration forever. I understand he was given a raw deal since Trump and Pompeo were the ones touting that the Taliban had been defeated and the imminent withdrawal from Afghanistan was going to be a smooth one, but Biden could've changed the timeline after examining the logistics and what's unfurling before our eyes is nothing short of a debacle.

Was this inevitable, as Biden claims? Perhaps. It's not like the Bush administration went there under good intentions or with a legitimate plan. But seeing the Taliban take over Kabul is a total gut punch.

Can't disagree with any of that. The military has known this was a worthless cause for decades, but never changed the game plan and clearly didn't have a clue on how to successfully get the hell out of there when the inevitable came knocking.

I'm not pointing the blame to Biden. Like you said, he's well aware of the disaster he and Obama inherited from Bush and also the destabilization in the region during Trump when he abandoned our Kurdish allies and left it to his buddies Putin and Erdogan. But it still doesn't make the reality of what's occurring any easier to stomach. Nor does it help the optics of leaving the Afghan people who helped American troops there for twenty years to die at the hands of the people we promised we'd protect them from. Yes, we had to get out of there and stalling this any longer doesn't help. But couldn't we have at least waited until all the necessary people were evacuated? 

True, and we're already seeing the GOP backtracking on all of Trump's "peace talks" with the Taliban.

www.businessinsider.com/gop-blames-biden-for-afghanistan-withdrawal-but-trump-brokered-the-deal-2021-8


I can't fully agree that nothing else could've been done to prevent what we're seeing now, that all of this would have played out this way regardless, but I also can't disagree that this has been a disastrous campaign since its inception and there was never going to be an outcome that would've satisfied anyone.