Afghanistan

[emm]

Some Americans training the Afghans didn’t have much faith in them preventing a Taliban take over.
What happened between us the Nazi’s was different, not every war is comparable to WW1 and 2. For instance our soldiers had the support of their government, monarch and people. In Afghanistan they didn’t, why should they fight and risk their life if even your Prime Minister doesn’t believe in the cause?

exactly, and we went in and created a power vacuum, making ridiculous demands (as I have said before how can you insist a country has 50% female parliament when women have been denied education for decades?) There never seems to be any ackowledgment of the totally different social structure etc when in the middle east, in the UK, for example, we took hundreds of years to develop our system, 20 years is not a long time at all.
Obviously the whole situation is a disaster, but if the west now ever intervenes anywhere else in this way how would we ever find translators etc to collaborate when the ones we have used have just been largely abandoned to be punished by this despotic regime? I really think (and this is very much my opinion of course) had we not intervened, eventually local people would have got sick of the Talbian and risen up against them

 

[Merpedy]

The only way the West seems to know how to do anything is by funnelling money and introducing puppet governments

it was never going to work there but at least the leaders can deflect blame elsewhere

 

[AllSeeingEye123]

Maybe the training was actually not very good?

Maybe it doesn't take twenty years to learn to use a gun to shoot dead evil people? What do you suggest? Stay there another twenty years? Us as in the west are hated by the rest of the world as we always get involved in the business of other countries and try to be in charge of the earth. Enough of our troops have died there. If they had lost after putting up a fight they would have got credit. Instead they quit and ran as soon as the going got tough. What about people starting families? Who in their right mind would want to bring a kid in to that kind of environment? Selfish.

 

[Yel]

I think so many want a simple answer to a very complicated issue.

There are so many fuckups, like this:

In the spring of 2002, British officials floated an irresistible offer. They agreed to pay Afghan poppy farmers $700 an acre — a fortune in the impoverished, war-ravaged country — to destroy their crops.

Word of the $30 million program ignited a poppy-growing frenzy. Farmers planted as many poppies as they could, offering part of their yield to the British while selling the rest on the open market. Others harvested the opium sap right before destroying their plants and got paid anyway.

In a Lessons Learned interview, Anthony Fitzherbert, a British agricultural expert, called the cash-for-poppies program “an appalling piece of complete raw naivete,” saying that the people in charge had “no knowledge of nuances and don’t know they really cared.”

U.S. officials said the British wanted to be seen as doing something, even though they had little confidence the program would work. Michael Metrinko, a former U.S. diplomat who served in the embassy in Kabul at the time, said the results were predictable.

“Afghans like most other people are quite willing to accept large sums of money and promise anything knowing that you will go away,” Metrinko said in an oral-history interview. “The British would come and hand out sums of money and the Afghans would say, ‘Yes, yes, yes, we’re going to burn it right now,’ and the Brits would leave. They would then get two sources of income from the same crop.”

https://archive.is/bUNvv

 

[Mrs loizou]

Maybe it doesn't take twenty years to learn to use a gun to shoot dead evil people? What do you suggest? Stay there another twenty years? Us as in the west are hated by the rest of the world as we always get involved in the business of other countries and try to be in charge of the earth. Enough of our troops have died there. If they had lost after putting up a fight they would have got credit. Instead they quit and ran as soon as the going got tough. What about people starting families? Who in their right mind would want to bring a kid in to that kind of environment? Selfish.

So much to unpack here on my lovely Saturday night, was just about to put up my refugees welcome poster but will pause shortly to try and have some sort of intelligent debate.

You originally said the training was the best in the world, so why was this needed? Perhaps, just maybe, defeating a terrorist army is more complex than just 'shooting them dead'

'Stay another 20 years?' - I think you should finish a job you start

'if they lost after putting up a fight, they would have got credit' - what does this credit entitle them to exactly? Settled status? An application to leave the country where it is unsafe for them to remain? How is this measured exactly? Someone who fights gets a credit but those who don't - maybe they have a different job and cant fight.

'They quit as soon as the going got tough' - if the taliban had taken over downing st, and marked my door with an X because I had daughters who could be married to fighters then yes, I would be out of there

'who in their right mind would want to bring a child into that environment?' - well, the promise of the US and the UK government over the last 20 years that the country will be a safe place would probably make you think it was going to be ok

Anyway, as my dear old immigrant grandfather used to say, and my immigrant father in law still does say - 'you cant argue with stupid'

So im off to a Spanish restaurant with my Greek friend, probably get an Uber there and my driver will be Bengali, probably drink some imported Argentinian wine. Might go to an Italian coffee shop after, and if I get really drunk and fall over, I'll probably head to A and E where I might be triaged by a Filipino nurse and then seen by an Indian Dr.

And I will be grateful that all these people are working tonight and helping make my life better. And that they have chosen to live in my wonderful diverse city.

Hope you have a similarly good evening

 

[emm]

Maybe it doesn't take twenty years to learn to use a gun to shoot dead evil people? What do you suggest? Stay there another twenty years? Us as in the west are hated by the rest of the world as we always get involved in the business of other countries and try to be in charge of the earth. Enough of our troops have died there. If they had lost after putting up a fight they would have got credit. Instead they quit and ran as soon as the going got tough. What about people starting families? Who in their right mind would want to bring a kid in to that kind of environment? Selfish.

yes, of course running a civil war is just "learning to shoot a gun" I don't get why you are even bothering to comment here, set up abother thread if you want to comment this crap . As for the family comment i cannot even be bothered to comment. Your ignorance is quite astounding.

 

[Yel]

The west were totally clueless about the obvious complexities of waring fractions. Just assuming whoever was against the Taliban was good, your enemies enemy isn't automatically on the side of good. They thought that because it was a less developed country the people were stupid and it would be easy to enrich them. No wonder they got played!

It makes little difference if the army folded in days or weeks, it was inevitable anyway.

 

[emm]

The west were totally clueless about the obvious complexities of waring fractions. Just assuming whoever was against the Taliban was good, your enemies enemy isn't automatically on the side of good. They thought that because it was a less developed country the people were stupid and it would be easy to enrich them. No wonder they got played!

It makes little difference if the army folded in days or weeks, it was inevitable anyway.

exactly, why do we never seem to learn our lessons?

 

[Yel]

exactly, why do we never seem to learn our lessons?

Arrogance and superiority? Of which Joe Biden is still oozing with.

 

[emm]

Arrogance and superiority? Of which Joe Biden is still oozing with.

it is just so depressing. What a surprise an old white man like him has no vision. Albeit Obama didn't seem to do any better either. What annoys me is that Biden acts as if he cannot turn over Trump's decsions, which of course he can

 

[Yel]

it is just so depressing. What a surprise an old white man like him has no vision. Albeit Obama didn't seem to do any better either. What annoys me is that Biden acts as if he cannot turn over Trump's decsions, which of course he can

He literally turned over just about all of trump's decisions apart from the one that matters the most and delays it to coincide with the peak of the seasonal fighting so it happens at the worst possible time. All because he wanted the 20th year anniversary to boost him.

Sure Joe, the US isn't a laughing stock after this

So depressing that there's no one credible!

 

[mcfeez]

The people stating that the Afghan army gave up at the first sign of trouble sound ignorant. The US were providing air support for Afghanistan, that is gone. They provided the country with helicopters however withdrew the thousands of contractors whose job it was to maintain them. Some towns they withdrew troops from overnight without even informing the Afghan commander - imagine the blow to the morale that would strike for the locals.

Biden has a lot to answer for. He didn't leave the Afghan army to fight for their own country, he completely abandoned them. No one expected him to follow through so completely on what Trump wanted.

 

[Piff paff puff]

https://www.archive.is/oldest/https...nstrate-governments-handling-Afghanistan.html

Too many do gooders without a grip on reality. It's not our fault that despite two decades of training and state of the art equipment the natives ran at the first chance of bother and didn't fight for their country.

All those sophisticated weapons left in the hands of the taliban/isis. Well that's an own goal if ever I saw one

 

[Sunflower91]

It’s really easy to criticise those Afghans trained by US and Uk military for not fighting back when you sit in a country not torn by war and having never shot someone dead yourself.
Those Afghans received training from some soldiers who were between the ages of 18 and 22- who’d had a years worth of training themselves and who were maybe experiencing war for the first or second time themselves having been abused and bullied by the people who had trained them the skills they’re trying to pass to a stranger with a language barrier. it’s hardily state of the art or the best in the world.

Nothing can prepare you for shooting a human being. Evil or not. Or having to making a judgement call of killing a potentially innocent person just because they are on a phone- and possibly an informant. Some soldiers/ ex soldiers will tell you that it just becomes a job- but I’ve seen first hand that it lives with them and not necessarily in a PTSD way.

Its not like a video game where you get a handy red icon to say “this is a bad guy”. You have one life not multiple when you’re being shot at in empty fields with no cover or on rooftops and not able to see who’s shooting at you or when you’re trying to cross an empty path filled with mines. Honestly I can’t blame people for being scared and doing what they can to survive.

Then there’s the fact that the taliban are also running around with weapons and training given to them by the US during the Cold War.

 

[Tatooine_legend1]

 

[Doneuplikeadogsdinner]

Personally I thik only women, children, the elderly and the disabled should be allowed out, the fit young men can stay there. It's always the men that cause the problems. I'd also like to see any woman in the west that chooses to wear the hijab currently to stop wearing it in solidarity to women that don't have that choice.

Do you think the women are so different that they don’t adore their husbands / fathers / brothers / sons .

 

[WritersBlock]

Here’s Blair’s take on things (finally)

 

[thegirlscout]

https://www.archive.is/oldest/https...Council-scholar-insists-Taliban-grown-up.html

I get that this is the Daily Mail and some people may question this but they have taken quotes directly from her Radio interview.
It’s quite worrying that she says every Muslim she knows is celebrating the return on the Taliban and that they have grown up and we should help them, especially when you read about how they have already started hunting for sex slaves or have murdered a woman because she didn’t cook their food properly. But saying that, she’s a scholar for the U.K. Sharia Council so she would have (in my own opinion) pretty backwards views on how women are treated (I’m sorry but no one can convince me Sharia law is a good thing for women). And she would mix with Muslims who have the same mindset as her.
She says that Afghanistan has been ruled by foreigners for 40 years and that ‘let the people of Afghanistan rule their own country and determine their own fate for a change’ but that’s not true right? Because the Taliban ruled from 1996-2001. And there was elections for Ghani, which although there are questions about fraud and such, he is an Afghan and not a foreigner.

 

[Rosie878]

I think Rory Stewart has a good explanation for the ‘why haven’t they fought back against the taliban’ question:

Until I watched that, I also wondered why the defence crumbled so quickly.

 

[Yel]

I like the Rory Stewart video, although I think it misses that more and more territory was being gained with each week so I don't think the skeleton staff was even treading water. So it wasn't a no brainer to just stay and things will remain constant, not that there's any easy decisions with this.

Apparently they could have supplied the Afghan army with Soviet machines that were lower tech but far easier to maintain. But of course they didn't and only spent it on US top of the range ones that are hugely complicated that they had no chance of running without support.

A commentator made an interesting point that previously there was no money in the country. But now it's been flooded with dollars the Taliban are more likely to fragment and argue over it.

Blair can duck off. He took a week to come up with that and refuses to go into any detail of his mistakes or admit responsibility. Why wasn't he at least saying this during the negotiations months ago? He's popping up to highlight others mistakes, which are pretty obvious.