Afghanistan

[AtW]

"""Our mission was never nation building" says Joe Biden

US President Joe Biden has begun speaking on Afghanistan and has opened by saying the US has achieved its goal - to stop al-Qaeda, not to establish democracy.
“We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals, get those who attacked us on 11 September 2001 and make sure al-Qaeda could not use Afghan as a base to attack us again. We did that,” he said.
“We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and we got him.”
“Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to be nation building, it was never meant to be creating a unified, central democracy.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/li...e-news-updates

So Bin Laden was killed 2 May 2011 - Biden was VP until start of 2017, yet for some reason troops were not pulled

[d000hg]

So Bin Laden was killed 2 May 2011 - Biden was VP until start of 2017, yet for some reason troops were not pulled

Biden has been consistently and vocally in favour of withdrawing troops for years. He clashed with Obama and the government on this regularly and tried to convince people of his views. You do know what the V in VP means right, that he doesn't make the decisions?

Even the BBC covers this. The moment he got to be president, he enacted exactly what he'd always said he wanted to do. Which now looks like a terrible idea, but that's another matter

[AtW]

Biden - "it's everybody elses's fault"

Cowardly PoS left without answering questions from the press

[minestrone]

“Sen. Rick Scott, the chair of the Senate GOP campaign arm, questioned Monday whether President Joe Biden's cabinet should remove him from office, a near impossibility, over the sudden collapse of Afghanistan.

Scott, who is widely viewed as a potential 2024 presidential candidate tweeted: “We must confront a serious question: Is Joe Biden capable of discharging the duties of his office or has time come to exercise the provisions of the 25th Amendment?”

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/0...anistan-505141

That GOP PoS is a PoS, but he raises correct question

Biden is now praying that no real people (those with a US passport) end up dead during this “planned withdrawal”, start of 2023 GOP Congress (and probably senate) will do Kabul Commission like with Bengazi - nice prep for Trump to win it in 2024

I told you all this 5 months ago when I gave him 4.

He is finished now as there is no way back from this. It's a total disaster, they are stuck with Harris who is clearly on another level of total useless.

[AtW]

It's obvious the idiot wanted to finish it by 20th anniversary of 9/11 for his own political goals, what a .......rd.

[AtW]

Biden has been consistently and vocally in favour of withdrawing troops for years.

He was consistently wrong and now that he got in charge he implemented his wrong view that resulted in immediate disaster and this will have very far reaching repercussions for US policy for a very very long time: Put1n and China will make sure images of those interpreters (who had visas) that were falling off the airplane are everywhere where US needs local support.

[minestrone]

Seriously, the best thing that could happen right now is very rapid decertification of some states results and then put an elected republican in charge.


This is Sam Fox, Mick Fleetwood doing the Brits bad.

[mattster]

Until a few weeks ago this was an overwhelmingly popular decision in the USA. It's what they wanted.
Is your suggestion that they should indefinitely occupy a foreign nation?

It almost certainly still is an overwhelmingly popular decision in the US - I don't think this will damage Biden politically in the medium/long term at all, even though various GOP are jumping in to trash him as you might expect. The Americans want out of pointless foreign wars, and if anything the fact that things have unravelled so quickly just serves to highlight how pointless the whole exercise was.

It's a failure not only of the every president since 9/11, but even more so of the intelligence operation on the ground - presumably Biden didn't just guess that it would take 6 months for the Taliban to take Kabul, this is the information that he was given. Even so, they obviously knew that the country would fall relatively swiftly, so what really is the long term difference between what is happening now vs what they thought would happen in 6 months anyway?

[AtW]

It almost certainly still is an overwhelmingly popular decision in the US - I don't think this will damage Biden politically in the medium/long term at all

Fook Biden's political prospects!

This crazy decision will damage USA's foreign policy for decades.

[d000hg]

It's a curious one for the Trumpists. They've been arguing for ages they want out, but they will have to criticise Biden and tell everyone how much better it would be under Trump. Whereas it's precisely the Trumpesque decision to pull out in a grand gesture with no planning and no forethought that has led to the current situation.

And now there's the possibility of a proper war to get excited about.