President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

It feels like we’re dissecting the death of an empire in real-time. The British at least got a century’s worth of unwinding and a handover of power to a friend in the U.S.

 

Probably. But 20 years ago we went into a country where the woman were not educated for the most part because they weren't allowed to be. And we've already read that this push from the Taliban is putting women back in that position. I think they'll be wholesale executions of women who are educated. And I think the will of the people to fight back is going to be tested. We couldn't set up a government that could stand against the Taliban. I don't know how they're going to stand on their own. We went into Afghanistan because the Taliban gave safe haven to bin laden and let him train there. We specifically went to depose the Taliban and 20 years later they're headed back in charge.

 

I would point out that the fact the Taliban has continued to exist and thrive despite 20 years of US military presence including many years of active warfare by as many as 100,000 troops indicates that awful as they are they have a solid base of public support.

 

The United States right now isn't that much better than Talibanistan.

 

Looks like we're headed there, too.

On a semi-related note, how appropriate is it that the stock purchased by Rand Paul's wife is for a company called "Gilead?"

 

That pretty much sums it up. It’s going to majorly suck for the Afghan women, especially those who have made strides when they had more freedom. But their men don’t seem like they want to fight for them.

 

How many Taliban fighters did the US kill in 20 years? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Yet they remain the most powerful force in the country that's not us. Now there's an obvious bandwagon effect happening now, just as it did in reverse when the US first invaded the country in 2001. But the organization's continued existence could not have happened if lots of Afghan men hadn't been willing to fight for it, even if their motive was not Taliban governance, but resistance to foreign (and non-Muslim) military presence. Enflamed nationalism has provided the support for many more than one horrible despotism throughout history.

 

How those Q fuckers morph shows how fucking far they are gone.

They ain't coming back to the land of the sane.

 

I, for one, have a hard time mustering up worry about what one Afghan does to another, especially when one of them has had 20 years of our money and supplies to get his shit together.

 

Maybe some majority of the Afghanistan population just wants to be ruled by theocrats?