A lot of people are trying to use the immediate and total collapse of the Afghan puppet state as evidence that we shouldn’t have pulled out. It’s actually evidence that we should have pulled out over a decade ago. Everyone pointing out that the mission was to transfer money from the taxpayers to defense contractors is spot on.
And to the people ITT saying that the Afghan people don’t want to live under the Taliban… What people want and what people are willing to fight and die for are very different, and the side that is willing to fight and die for twenty years has a lot more weight in the conversation than the side that merely wants things.
The correct play here for the US morally is to allow as many Afghans to immigrate to the US as they want… and then to let the people who choose to remain live under the legitimate government of Afghanistan: the Taliban.
It’s also time for us to be real with ourselves about the shitty warlords we’ve been propping up in Afghanistan being anything but corrupt shitty warlords with plenty of their own human rights abuses to account for. They never had any legitimacy clearly since no one seems to be willing to fight for them without us paying them.
How could a bunch of conservative nutjobs have a plurality of support in their country and figure out a way to gain power? Oh wait…. If you imagine that the % of Afghans that are down w/ the Taliban are similar to the % of Americans that are Trumpkins then it all makes sense… even down to the Taliban softening its governing actions from their harsh rhetoric a tad to keep in tact a governing coalition.
I wonder if maybe a one-term, lame-duck president is the only one who could pull us out. If Kamala Harris was in charge, does anyone think we’d be withdrawing?
I guess that’s one theory. Anybody who’s voting based on this in '24 was probably already voting for fascism anyway. For everyone else, if they even noticed it’ll be forgotten by the time infrastructure week starts up again.
USA #1 suffered something like 25x the casualties in Vietnam and there was a draft(!), Vietnam had a major impact on the lives of basically everyone. Meanwhile, most people barely even remembered we were still in Afghanistan
According to Google the population of Afghanistan nearly doubled from 20 million to 38 million in the twenty years of the US occupation. Contrast that with a population decline from 1990 to 2000 when the Taliban governed.
I hope that the generation of children that were born in the last twenty years decide to reject the Talabin and somehow take their country back. Who knows how that will happen or how long it will take, and there will be a lot of suffering in the mean time. But hopefully these kids will decide to live in a country with that values basic human rights!
