CSNbbs

Any mission we had in Afghanistan ended when Mullah Omar died a natural death. And the fact that he died of tuberculosis instead of a bullet meant that it ended in failure.

In Viet Nam, 1975, it seems we were leaving because we had lost. In Afghanistan, 2021, it seems we are losing because we are leaving.

I guess we can now add Afghanistan to the list of **** hole countries. Hope nobody had a Kabul vacation scheduled.

Maybe Biden needs to assign Harris to discover the root causes.

I hope the Taliban is at least addressing our people by their preferred pronouns.

Sundowner in Chief: There's going to be no circumstance where you'll see people being lifted off of the roof of an embassy of the United States.

Meanwhile we will be regaled with the choice of ice cream Hologram is enjoying at Camp David on vacation.

From elsewhere:

All Joe Biden had to do was nothing. Had Joe Biden done nothing, Afghanistan would not have fallen to the Taliban today. Had he just let the status quo continue, the status quo would have continued. Afghanistan would have plodded along and we would have kept the Taliban from power with a small force of American military personnel among whose ranks there had not been a single fatality since March 2020—17 months without a death.

It was the opposite of inevitable. It wouldn’t have happened if Biden hadn’t acted.

In so acting, Biden has cast the future of American foreign policy into the worst state of disrepair since the last helicopter-carries-people-to-the-airport-to-flee-the-country scene 46 years ago.

From me:

If you are President Xi, what do you learn from this? What does Taiwan and the Taiwanese people learn from this?

(08-15-2021 11:20 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote: [ -> ]In Viet Nam, 1975, it seems we were leaving because we had lost. In Afghanistan, 2021, it seems we are losing because we are leaving.

Wars end two ways--you win or you surrender. We didn't win. Because we didn't try to.

This war was lost a long time ago--when we went in with, "don't shoot back until you are dead," rules of engagement. That is not fighting a war to win, and we should never fight a war that we don't intend to win.

I don't think we know how to fight a counterinsurgency (COIN) engagement. I'm not sure anybody does, but I am sure that we don't. My thought has been to focus the Army on conventional warfare, get the Marines out of the baby Army business, and give them COIN to figure out. It's closer to their historic way of fighting than it is to the Army's. Westmoreland screwed up Vietnam because he tried to fight it as an Army war. 50+ years later, we still don't seem to have learned.

Im just wondering how long it will take the WH staff to take the ice cream stained bib off Biden and get an appearance from him about the Kabul debacle.

1. Debacle in Afghanistan: won't happen, says Biden. No helicopters on embassy roofs.
2. Violence spreading in blue cities.
3. Border crisis - border is closed, said Mayorkas.
4. Covid kicking up again.
5. CRT in schools

But one thing the Identity Party has achieved - we elected a black female VP. Historic progress.

(08-16-2021 09:22 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote: [ -> ]1. Debacle in Afghanistan: won't happen, says Biden. No helicopters on embassy roofs.
2. Violence spreading in blue cities.
3. Border crisis - border is closed, said Mayorkas.
4. Covid kicking up again.
5. CRT in schools
But one thing the Identity Party has achieved - we elected a black female VP. Historic progress.

And we stopped sending mean tweets and the armed services are now more woke than ever before.

(08-15-2021 01:21 PM)tanqtonic Wrote: [ -> ]From elsewhere:

All Joe Biden had to do was nothing. Had Joe Biden done nothing, Afghanistan would not have fallen to the Taliban today. Had he just let the status quo continue, the status quo would have continued. Afghanistan would have plodded along and we would have kept the Taliban from power with a small force of American military personnel among whose ranks there had not been a single fatality since March 2020—17 months without a death.

It was the opposite of inevitable. It wouldn’t have happened if Biden hadn’t acted.

In so acting, Biden has cast the future of American foreign policy into the worst state of disrepair since the last helicopter-carries-people-to-the-airport-to-flee-the-country scene 46 years ago.

From me:

If you are President Xi, what do you learn from this? What does Taiwan and the Taiwanese people learn from this?

Uhhhhh.... Sounds like someone forgot about the Trump/Taliban peace agreement?

Quote:The United States signed a deal with the Taliban on Saturday that sets the stage to end America’s longest war — the nearly two-decade-old conflict in Afghanistan that began after the Sept. 11 attacks, killed tens of thousands of people, vexed three White House administrations and left mistrust and uncertainty on all sides.

The agreement lays out a timetable for the final withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan, the impoverished Central Asian country once unfamiliar to many Americans that now symbolizes endless conflict, foreign entanglements and an incubator of terrorist plots.

The war in Afghanistan in some ways echoes the American experience in Vietnam. In both, a superpower bet heavily on brute strength and the lives of its young, then walked away with seemingly little to show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/world...-deal.html

This is a debacle more than one presidency in the making - going all the way back to GW. But it's not like Biden came in and decided, out of nowhere, to withdrawal troops. That formally started under Trump.

I do wonder why, as we started seeing the Taliban raise through the country, we didn't change course and stop the withdrawal. The Taliban gained ground so quickly, that it seems like the alarm bells should have gone off immediately. Was it just the lack of political appetite to reverse course? Or was their a military reason to not?

(08-16-2021 09:25 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote: [ -> ]I do wonder why, as we started seeing the Taliban raise through the country, we didn't change course and stop the withdrawal. The Taliban gained ground so quickly, that it seems like the alarm bells should have gone off immediately. Was it just the lack of political appetite to reverse course? Or was their [sic] a military reason to not?

I'll give you a military reason. We couldn't. Once they gained momentum, we didn't have a sufficient force to stop them.

(08-16-2021 09:27 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: [ -> ]

(08-16-2021 09:25 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote: [ -> ]I do wonder why, as we started seeing the Taliban raise through the country, we didn't change course and stop the withdrawal. The Taliban gained ground so quickly, that it seems like the alarm bells should have gone off immediately. Was it just the lack of political appetite to reverse course? Or was their [sic] a military reason to not?

I'll give you a military reason. We couldn't. Once they gained momentum, we didn't have a sufficient force to stop them.

I think it was a lack of political appetite.

FTR, not all of us supported or applauded everything Trump did. I did not like his dealings with the Taliban. However, I liked them better than Biden's.

(08-16-2021 09:32 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote: [ -> ]I think it was a lack of political appetite.
FTR, not all of us supported or applauded everything Trump did. I did not like his dealings with the Taliban. However, I liked them better than Biden's.

Certainly, there was never a political appetite to do what was necessary to win. And if you aren't going in to win, you should never have gone in the first place.

We pretty much had to respond to 9/11 in some way. But the way we chose--a 20 year half-assed military effort--was not a way to accomplish anything useful.

We don't know how to do counterinsurgency (COIN). Westmoreland proved in Vietnam that the Army approach did not work, but we have apparently learned nothing from that.

(08-16-2021 09:36 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: [ -> ]

(08-16-2021 09:32 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote: [ -> ]I think it was a lack of political appetite.
FTR, not all of us supported or applauded everything Trump did. I did not like his dealings with the Taliban. However, I liked them better than Biden's.

Certainly, there was never a political appetite to do what was necessary to win. And if you aren't going in to win, you should never have gone in the first place.

We pretty much had to respond to 9/11 in some way. But the way we chose--a 20 year half-assed military effort--was not a way to accomplish anything useful.

We don't know how to do counterinsurgency (COIN). Westmoreland proved in Vietnam that the Army approach did not work, but we have apparently learned nothing from that.

I don't think the choice in 2001 was to fight a 20 year half-assed war - that came by degrees over time.

Yesterday, on one of the blue networks, one of the Democrats commenting on this said that we had missed opportunities to get out - in 2001, 2003, and 2010. She did not elaborate. But I noticed because those dates were Bush, Bush, Obama.

If Viet Nam and Afghanistan have a lesson, it is that we do not fight guerillas very well.

(08-16-2021 09:45 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote: [ -> ]If Viet Nam and Afghanistan have a lesson, it is that we do not fight guerrillas very well.

We simply do not know how to do counterinsurgency (COIN). I'm not sure anybody does--the French were abysmal failures in Vietnam before us, as were the Brits and the Russians in Afghanistan--but I am sure that we don't.

The problem in Vietnam was that Westmoreland tried to fight it the way the Army would fight a major land battle in western Europe. One of the dumbest things he did, IMO, was instead of sending the Marines south to the Mekong delta to work out riverine warfare with the Navy, he sent them north to I Corps, and give the delta to the Army, which never really figured out how to work with the Navy in that environment. My 2/c Mid cruise (summer 1968) included attending COIN school in San Diego. A lot of the instructors there were pretty cynical about the way we were trying to fight in Vietnam.

If I were in charge, I'd tell the Army to focus on fighting a large overland war, and take the COIN mission and give it to the Marines to figure out. It's pretty clear that a different conceptual approach is required.

The NYT writer evidently flunked (or never took) history:

Quote:The agreement lays out a timetable for the final withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan, the impoverished Central Asian country once unfamiliar to many Americans now symbolizes endless conflict, foreign entanglements an incubator of terrorist plots.

NOW symbolizes? Most educated people know that Afghanistan has symbolized those things for centuries -- perhaps most of recorded history!

Quote:The war in Afghanistan in some ways echoes the American experience in Vietnam.

In both, a superpower bet heavily on brute strength and the lives of its young, then walked away with seemingly little to show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/world...-deal.html

That's a dumb take. If anything, US policy was the exact opposite: we bet on insufficient strength and avoidance of American casualties.

Sigh.

(08-16-2021 10:10 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: [ -> ]

(08-16-2021 09:45 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote: [ -> ]If Viet Nam and Afghanistan have a lesson, it is that we do not fight guerrillas very well.

We simply do not know how to do counterinsurgency (COIN). I'm not sure anybody does--the French were abysmal failures in Vietnam before us, as were the Brits and the Russians in Afghanistan--but I am sure that we don't.

The problem in Vietnam was that Westmoreland tried to fight it the way the Army would fight a major land battle in western Europe. One of the dumbest things he did, IMO, was instead of sending the Marines south to the Mekong delta to work out riverine warfare with the Navy, he sent them north to I Corps, and give the delta to the Army, which never really figured out how to work with the Navy in that environment. My 2/c Mid cruise (summer 1968) included attending COIN school in San Diego. A lot of the instructors there were pretty cynical about the way we were trying to fight in Vietnam.

If I were in charge, I'd tell the Army to focus on fighting a large overland war, and take the COIN mission and give it to the Marines to figure out. It's pretty clear that a different conceptual approach is required.

Agree.

Mind-boggling how we spent 20 years and trillions of dollars and the Afghan army folded like a house of cards. I'm sure there is blame to go around, but we should have been out of this war 10-15 years ago. Complete waste of taxpayer money.

On the vaccines, we need to switch to a true personal responsibility / consequences method. Private businesses should do as they please (I liked Amtrak's method of vaccination or weekly negative tests for those unvaccinated; no requirement for the vaccine, but make the lives of the willingly unvaccinated more inconvenient). For those adults that are willingly unvaccinated that require hospitalization from Covid, they should be put in a tent with a container of Advil and water and told "best of luck". If they do not want "experimental" vaccines (which work) or "experimental" treatments like remdesivir (which also have been shown to work), then they should be happy with some proven Advil and perhaps the counsel of a message board "doctor" of their choice. Those that do not believe in science (right or wrong), should not receive the benefits/consequences of science.