Quick rundown of who ordered what - https://www.newsweek.com/who-ordered-withdrawal-afghanistan-when-most-us-troops-leave-joe-biden-donald-trump-barack-obama-1619599
Trump signed a peace agreement with the Taliban in 2020, by which all American troops would leave the country by May 2021. “It’s time after all these years to bring our people back home,” Trump said then.
Later, Trump even demanded that all Americans be withdrawn from Afghanistan by Christmas—just weeks before he was to leave office after losing the November presidential election to Biden.
FWIW, there’s a lot about this on Reddit via anecdotal reports from former US military about how inept so many of the Afghan army trainees were and how unsurprised many were to hear how the ANA simply capitulated to the Taliban, surrendering their high-grade weapons and tactical gear with little resistance.
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On board a C-17 leaving Kabul…
Yeah I mis-typed. I meant ‘are’ not ‘see’.
Agree it’s fucked, but don’t think there’s much choice is there?
The other option is to get out with their guns and threaten/shoot them away. Assuming they even had the numbers to be able to control that crowd, which I doubt, then the last images of them leaving Afghanistan would show them attacking the citizens they were supposedly “trying to save”. Neither is a good look.
Not that there’s any way anyone will come out of this looking good anyway.
I would highly recommend listetning to this excellent episode of Politics Theory Other with the consistently great Paul Rogers
https://twitter.com/poltheoryother/status/1426267443316539392?s=20
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US had said a while back that they’d be leaving before the 20th anniversary.
Leaving regardless of whatever might be going on, clearly. I wonder if regular Americans see this as (or are being told this is) a victory. So many Vietnam parallels.
Lol @ worse than anything Trump ever did. Whoever said that this leaves us wide open to 9/11 attacks - the Taliban are seeking to be a legitimate government in charge of a country. This isn’t a terrorist organisation hiding in caves seeking notoriety and striking at the oppressive West. They’re not going to risk retribution from the US when they now have what they want
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Going by what gets posted on reddit, it seems as though they see it as the right thing to do as it saves them tax money and no Americans die anymore. This is the general non-political consensus from what I can tell. I naively expected a little less selfishness but american exceptionalism rules again. Considering that it was their idea in the first place.
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I mean that they’re dressing it up as something super positive now. They’re leaving ‘on time, as planned’, when they absolutely should not be. Fingers in the ears all round.
Being there was fucking stupid anyway. This is the result of twenty years of occupation. This would be the same result after 100 years of occupation. The Afghans support the Taliban because they’re one and the same. It’s impossible to fight any army that has no uniform and hides in plain sight.
I’m not saying leaving in this way was right, far from it, but it is inevitable that this was going to happy one way or another. The real cruelty comes from the people who have been living on borrowed western values for twenty years and now have to go back to barbaric shyria law bullshit
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By shooting any men, women or children who get in their way.
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Not exactly rare in government is it. Zambia just finally managed to oust their president who made Trump look docile
Depends how you want to define “legitimate” I guess.
I mean they want to be seen as legitimate on the world stage. Clearly that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen but it’s what they want. Being seen as a “real government” stops them being invaded for their horrible human right abuses
Do they expect people to be all, “Well, if you ignore the horrible human rights abuses, they are a good government”, like it’s some Smiths fan defending modern-day Morrissey?
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Well yeah. If the Taliban go in and kill the US, UK, Australian ambassadors in their embassies, then they’d face serious international reprisals in the form of further bombings or drone strikes for the next few years. Just buying themselves some time.
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Lengthy article from the Washington Post which predates all of this clusterfuck - https://archive.ph/8xjRk
Out of interest, I’m presuming that there’s a range of attitudes towards it, given we were over there for so long? This might be more applicable to Americans, but presumably the attitudes of the people who went out in 2003 are different to those of the people who went out in 2013 etc?