President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Our big mistake was that we shouldn’t have trained the Afghan men. We should have trained and supplied the Afghan women, who no doubt would be willing to fight for their lives and their freedom.

 

Maybe we would should have given weapons and training to the Afghan women instead of the feckless simps that were supposed to “protect” them. Better yet we should have declared mission (really) accomplished once bin Laden’s body hit the ocean floor and cut out losses.

EDIT: Baron on my brain length.

 

It’s not up to us to lift up 35M to ward off 100,000.
Unless we’re talking USA voters.

 

I don’t know what the answer in that fucked-up country is, but I’m pretty sure we looked at it from more angles in four pages here than the Bush administration did before invading. Maybe we should’ve had limited and attainable objectives in the country instead of trying to create a Western style outpost from where we could patrol the Middle East.

They were in a tough spot because the country wanted vengeance wherever it could find it, but they kicked over a hornet’s nest not long after watching the Soviets get stung to death.

 

The Taliban first came to power in the '90s as the force which would end a decade of civil war, often involving more than two sides. They promised stability, even if they used terror to create it, and that had enough appeal to allow them to seize power. Note: They didn't end the civil/tribal war, they just suppressed it more efficiently than the other factions.
A little story: About five years ago, I was reading an Economist article about street crime in Barcelona. It noted that a prominent victim of a snatch/mugging was the Afghan ambassador to Spain, who was relieved of his $20,000 Rolex. As an economy, Afghanistan does not have and never has had a pot to piss in except for its one mainstay -- growing opium. So it is reasonable to assume that a significant percentage of the tens of billions of dollars we poured into that country went straight to the wallets of the officials of the government we installed. Why build a school or train soldiers when you can buy a nice watch instead?

 

Yeah that would suck to be ruled by a minority faction of religious zealots who reject logic, reason and pluralism; who make lives hell for people even when they are technically out of power and inspire dread of what’s coming next when they inevitably retake control through extralegal means. Sure glad I don’t live anywhere like that.

 

And didn’t we try to get the people to stop growing opium? It’d be like telling a farmer in Iowa to give up on soybeans and corn and start growing bananas.

 

Which made all those stories in the U.S press about us teaching and incentivizing other crops all the more hilarious.

 

Right. So why try to stop them?