Kabul madhouse

[Bailey Guns]

Military personnel are reportedly departing from HKIA. Rarely have I wished ill upon someone... Joe Biden is making it really hard.

[Gman]

This is setting up to be the greatest US humanitarian disaster possibly of our lifetime. I heard this morning the CIA director was meeting with the head of the Tally Ban yesterday. Purpose unknown, but reasonable speculation it was to negotiate for a delay to the 8/31 withdrawal date (why the hell are we even negotiating that?). Presumably the Tally Ban knows they have us over the proverbial barrel, and played hardball saying NFW. Hence this article, that just came out.

Given that the state dept and us.gov doesn't know where our people are, how many there are, where they are, and no plan to rescue - look out. We WILL BE abandoning Americans to their own fate beginning next week. I think it was a tell that the Pentagon spokesman (Kirby idiot) couldn't say the exact number of how many US citizens have already been evac'd. Thats just unacceptable. They seem to be hiding behind a defense of "chaotic situation" to give them cover for gross incompetence and planned evil in leaving people behind.

I believe Biden, Psaki, and Pentagon saying "those who want to leave will be able to leave" is a setup for an excuse saying those who didn't leave didn't want to leave. As though large numbers of US citizens would just prefer to live out their lives in that hellhole rather than return to the US.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spence...=breakingemail
The Pentagon had little to say Tuesday about the news that the Biden administration had failed in its humiliating attempt to grovel before the Taliban in order to extend the August 31st deadline for withdrawal and instead doubled down on its plans to be out of the country by the deadline that is just one week away. That plan, now, has also been approved by President Biden.

Major General Hank Taylor reported that 21,600 individuals were evacuated in the last 24 hours at an increased pace of one departure every 45 minutes, but Taylor and Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby repeated their earlier refusals to give an exact number ? or even a percentage ? of Americans who have already been evacuated from Afghanistan.

"There's been no change to the timeline of the mission which is to have this completed by the end of the month," Kirby said. "We are getting them out every day," he added of Americans seeking to evacuate Kabul.

"Several thousand Americans have been safely evacuated," Kirby said, repeating the quantifier he used in Monday's briefings. "That is as far as I'm going to be able to go today."

In addition to the question of how many Americans have been evacuated or who remain in Afghanistan, the Pentagon's insistence that they'd be out of the country by the end of August raise additional questions. Among them: How long will it take for the U.S. forces running the airlift from Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport to conclude operations and leave the country?

"I'm not going to get into a specific tick-tock here," Kirby said when asked when U.S. forces in Kabul would need to begin preparing for departure in order to meet the Taliban's August 31st deadline, adding it will take "at least several days" in order to get equipment and personnel "safely and effectively retrograded."

While "several days" is another nonspecific answer, there are less than seven days remaining so presumably, U.S. forces in Kabul will need to begin drawing down soon, setting up a scenario in which Americans stranded in Afghanistan could watch as U.S. forces pack up and leave them behind.

Kirby explained that the "retrograde" of U.S. resources and personnel must be done "very carefully and sequenced in a very methodical way," even as President Biden's overall withdrawal from Afghanistan has been anything but careful or methodical and his decision to abide by the August 31st deadline amounts to the United States taking orders from the Taliban.

With just seven days left to finish the airlift and even fewer before American troops have to begin packing up, the Pentagon says there will be "no other additional operations" to bring Americans stranded behind Taliban lines in Kabul or elsewhere in Afghanistan to Kabul's airport.

That guy Kirby is a tool. Even when asked for a percentage of the known Americans that have been evacuated, he repeatedly states ,"We don't have a perfect number." Nobody is asking for that you freaking moron.

The real answer is they don't know jack, they aren't willing to do jack, and a bunch of Americans are going to be abandoned by their government that is supposed to work for them.

I also heard about how they had to be methodical about the extraction. I laughed at the radio when I heard it. This has been one giant Charlie Foxtrot and only now they're concerned about some coordination?

This administration bows down to the Taliban. I remember when this country bowed down to no one. From superpower to a joke in 8 months. I want my country back.

[Singlestack]

If the .gov would callously simply abandon American citizens en masse, what regard do you think they have for citizens here with a different political view? Given that the left has dehumanized those not on their side of the ideological spectrum as extremists and terrorists, would anyone seriously believe they have anything but ill will and contempt? These people do not value human life at all and would discard anyone else in a heartbeat (with a heartbeat).

[hollohas]

That's the biggest lie ever perpetuated about the left, that they care about people. They don't. No matter how much they try to pretend otherwise, they do not value humans AT ALL.

The writing is on the wall for this now.
We're seeing the preface to overt classification of people of different viewpoints (ex: vaxed vs unvaxed) here currently and it's ramping up daily. That classification is the required first step to political retribution of certain groups. Next step, and seeds are being planted now, is complete disregard for the wellbeing of certain classes (ex: refusing to provide medical care for unvaxed). After disregard for wellbeing, the next step is open aggression. These seeds are being sowed too. The unvaxed are literally being labeled terrorists...the only reason for that is to make aggression against them acceptable.

This road is going nowhere good.

[Gman]

If the .gov would callously simply abandon American citizens en masse, what regard do you think they have for citizens here with a different political view? Given that the left has dehumanized those not on their side of the ideological spectrum as extremists and terrorists, would anyone seriously believe they have anything but ill will and contempt? These people do not value human life at all and would discard anyone else in a heartbeat (with a heartbeat).

Maybe if the Americans stranded in Afghanistan could only communicate that they were unvaccinated, maybe then they could get the attention of this administration.

When our government doesn't care about some of us, it really doesn't care about any of us.

[00tec]

To be fair, politicians in general don't really care about people at all. Most of them are career brown-nosers and have no real life experience outside of a knee band-aid at the age of 5.

[Rooskibar03]

Yeah but the snowflakes don’t have to read mean tweets anymore so it’s all good.

That's the biggest lie ever perpetuated about the left, that they care about people. They don't. No matter how much they try to pretend otherwise, they do not value humans AT ALL.

The writing is on the wall for this now.
We're seeing the preface to overt classification of people of different viewpoints (ex: vaxed vs unvaxed) here currently and it's ramping up daily. That classification is the required first step to political retribution of certain groups. Next step, and seeds are being planted now, is complete disregard for the wellbeing of certain classes (ex: refusing to provide medical care for unvaxed). After disregard for wellbeing, the next step is open aggression. These seeds are being sowed too. The unvaxed are literally being labeled terrorists...the only reason for that is to make aggression against them acceptable.

This road is going nowhere good.

[Aloha_Shooter]

All I can say here is that I've never been so glad to no longer be in uniform and subject to Article 88 of the UCMJ.

[hollohas]

I feel terrible for the soldiers that have been dealing with this. Can't be easy seeing especially the kids outside the airport.

Killing bad guys is one thing. Dealing with a humanitarian crisis where a whole bunch of desperate people will surely suffer if not helped, that's got to be hard. Not to mention the likely event they will be boarding planes while Americans are still there and will likely be killed. That's going affect these guys.

[Mtneer]

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

"Afghanistan's collapse: Did US intelligence get it wrong?" ABC News asks.
"Afghanistan Is Your Fault," barks Tom Nichols at The Atlantic.
“Why Afghan Forces So Quickly Laid Down Their Arms,” Politico ponders.

The one thing that the Taliban's conquest of Afghanistan is good for is more media hot takes.

Afghanistan didn't fall because it never existed. The Afghan army laid down its arms because it also never existed. And not just because many of the 300,000 soldiers were imaginary. Its Pashtun members surrendered to their fellow Taliban Pashtuns, or fled to Iran or Uzbekistan, depending on their tribal or religious affiliations which, unlike Afghanistan, are very real.

The Afghan army was there because we spent $90 billion on it. Much like Afghanistan with its president, its constitution, and its elections existed because we spent a fortune on it. When we left, the president fled, the army collapsed (when U.S. stopped paying the soldiers), and Afghanistan: The Musical closed in Kabul.

Afghanistan isn’t a country. It’s a stone age Brigadoon of quarreling tribes, ethnic groups, Islamic denominations, and warlords manned by young men with old Russian and American rifles. Unlike the fiction of a democratic Afghanistan, that is something they will die for.

And in the coming years you will see some of those same soldiers who laid down their guns fighting and dying for tribes and warlords, even fighting the Taliban, in the real endless war.
The forever war isn’t something we invented after 9/11: Afghanistan has always been at war.

Americans are impressed that the Taliban held out for 20 years. They shouldn’t be.

There’s no time in Afghanistan. Two decades of war are horrifyingly incomprehensible to Americans. To Afghans, it’s the way things have always been. We stepped into a place that has been a war zone for centuries, took sides, supplied weapons, and then left as everyone knew we would. The British and the Russians came and went. After us, the Chinese will come and go.

And the forever war will go on endlessly.

Before us, the Russians wanted the Afghans to pretend to be Communists. We wanted them to pretend that they were Democrats. But the Afghans aren’t ‘Afghans’, they’re Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Balochs, Hazaras, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, everything else is just a temporary costume.

The Taliban, another Pashtun bid to seize power, will be met with resistance, not by the proponents of a free and democratic Afghanistan, but by rival tribes and warlords.

We’ll probably end up funding some of them. And maybe this time we won’t be stupid enough to ask them to hold elections or any of the other nation-building nonsense from Foggy Bottom.

Our Afghanistan campaign after September 11 was fast, clever, and ruthless. The men who conducted it understood the society. They worked together with warlords to crush the Taliban. Their goal was a quick and dirty victory that would make an example out of the Taliban.

Our allies were anyone whose current factional interests in the endless power struggle aligned with ours. As the years went on, some of our allies became enemies, and some enemies became allies. The Taliban were the bad guys, but just like in Syria, so was everyone else. There were plenty of innocents caught in the crossfire, but innocents have no power.

The average Afghan rural villager doesn’t think of being a citizen of some country called Afghanistan. He cares little for elections and his elders confuse Americans with the Russians and sometimes even the British. The elites in Kabul are happy to dress up their power grabs in presidential titles and constitutions that no one else in the country cares about. USAID pays girls in Kabul to play at feminism and college graduates to talk about international relations.

None of it mattered a damn in the vast majority of the country as we are now finding out.

But, Afghanistan didn’t become a complete disaster for us. Until Obama.

American forces peaked at 25,000 under Bush. Obama quadrupled them to 100,000. That’s the year more American soldiers were wounded than during the entire Bush administration.
1,200 Americans died during Obama's Afghanistan surge, not just because he quadrupled the number of soldiers, but because the military was told to stop trying to defeat the Taliban.
Our soldiers became community organizers with guns who were told not to fight.

No hearts and minds were won. But cemeteries filled up with boys from Texas and West Virginia who weren’t allowed to shoot back because Obama wanted to win Muslim hearts and minds.

The military brass who embraced Obama’s strategy buried and crippled a generation of young men. Countless men and women came home wounded inside. They overdosed or killed themselves.

The surge receded. The military brass pulled back to secure the cities while the Taliban secured the rural areas that we spent so many lives on. All they had to do was wait for us to leave.

The speed with which the Taliban took the country only seems magical to CNN viewers.

The country was theirs for the taking. The Taliban fought few battles. The various warlords and leaders began switching sides when Biden announced his withdrawal to join the winning team. That’s the Islamic team backed by Pakistan, China, Turkey who are the big boys still standing.

But that doesn’t mean that they won’t switch sides next month or next year.

The hated government in Kabul was backed by our money and our air power. We’re out, so are they. But the locals will hate the Taliban too. And as the Chinese come in to set up mines, run roads, and offend the locals, they’ll find out what we, the British, and the Russians learned.

Afghanistan doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s its own forever war of quarreling tribes.

The forever war will continue whether or not we’re there. But we’ll probably be there in one form or another. We never really understood Afghanistan or Iraq. And so we can’t escape them.
Al Qaeda and ISIS will operate out of Afghanistan. So will countless other Jihadi fighters.

Americans didn’t invent the forever war. It’s been going on in the Islamic parts of the world for over a thousand years. It’s unfashionable and politically incorrect to mention it. That’s why the media carefully describes the Taliban as “religious students” without naming the religion. It’ll refer to Sunni and Shiite infighting in Iraq while leaving off the “Islam” part of the group.

We came to defeat the Jihadists behind September 11 and we stayed behind to reform Afghanistan. But what were we reforming it from? We couldn’t name the problem.

And when you can’t name a problem, you never come up with a solution.

Having failed to fix Afghanistan, the process is now underway to bring as many Afghans as possible to America. The old plan to bring 100,000 “interpreters” and their family members has been vastly expanded to make any Afghan who did any work for American organizations, from aid groups to the media, eligible to come to America. By the time they’re done, we may end up with a million Afghan refugees in America. Some of them will become Islamic terrorists.

The final act of fighting terrorism is bringing the terrorists to America to create more terror.

The real tragedy of Afghanistan isn’t just that we lost so many of our best and brightest in the dust, it’s that we learned nothing from the experience. Nothing except to blame ourselves.
We didn’t fail Afghanistan. Nor did we lose Afghanistan. It was never ours or anyone’s.

Afghanistan wasn’t our forever war. It’s the forever war of the warlords and tribesmen who will keep on fighting it until the water dries up, the cattle die, and they all move to Fremont where 25,000 Afghans already live. Our mistake was not recognizing what Afghanistan was.

Americans like to believe that everyone is like us. It’s an easy trap to fall into. Wherever we go, the people speak English, listen to our music, and wear Nike shirts. They have opinions about our presidents and want to know how easy it is to move to Fremont. And we cheerfully supply them with more Nike shirts, bad music, worse movies, and try to persuade them to create a United States of Iraq or a United States of Afghanistan. Then when it doesn’t work out, they move to Fremont, Minnesota, or New York City, run for Congress, and tell us they hate us.

If we learn anything from Afghanistan, from Iraq, and from September 11, let it be this.

There have to be boundaries, physical and conceptual borders, between us and the rest of the world. American exceptionalism can’t be a narcissistic belief that everyone ought to be like us. If everyone could become us, there would be nothing exceptional about us. Our exceptionalism is that the rest of the world isn’t like us and never will be. And that if we want to protect ourselves, we have to stop trying to define the world or allowing the rest of the world to redefine America.

We could have won in Afghanistan, swiftly and decisively, and left, if we hadn’t been seduced into believing that Afghanistan could be America and that Afghans deserved to be Americans.
Likewise, Iraq.

Victories became defeats and cemeteries filled with the dead because we lost sight of the truth about Afghanistan and about ourselves. The more we think about Afghanistan or any place in terms of ourselves, the less we see it for what it is. And that can be a deadly illusion.

Americans have spent the last century trying to turn the world into America. Let’s spend this century making America what it was always intended to be: a refuge from the rest of the world.

We won’t win wars anymore because we can no longer remember what we’re fighting for. Unable to draw boundaries between the enemy and ourselves, between our nation and the world, we’ve lost touch with the fundamental purpose and even the concept of what a war is.

To win a war, we have to remember what we’re fighting for. Ourselves.

The Afghans understand that concept. Perhaps they understand it too well. But it’s time we learned it too. If we can’t go to war for ourselves, not for democracy, human rights, or so that Afghan girls can go to school, then we will lose soldiers, lose wars, and lose our nation.

All wars are endless and forever when you don’t understand what it takes to win. All wars are forever when you don’t know what you’re fighting for.