https://twitter.com/BartenderHemry/status/1432454167352815619
https://twitter.com/BartenderHemry/status/1432454503039647746
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Imagine trying to explain to someone in 2002 that in 2021, TV’s Frank from MST3K would be retweeting Richard Marx quote-tweeting Scott Baio calling out Patton Oswalt and Alyssa Milano on something called twitter over the just-now-concluding Afghanistan War.
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Now do Afghanis and NYT op ed writers start to care here.
https://twitter.com/DeptofDefense/status/1432492782837501956
https://twitter.com/barbarastarrcnn/status/1432502940196089859
The Afghanistan withdrawal does invite an interesting question: if the Taliban weren’t cooperating - how do you get the last people out? Obviously a plane taking off is an easy target. I guess you have to do helicopters with anti-aircraft defense and land somewhere nearby.
Seems like speechwriters often have no contemplation of how certain lines are going to be used against the speaker. Like, “90% of Americans who wanted to leave were able to leave” isn’t going to play the way you think it is.
(Other than that, I think this address has been good).
Most of the criticism of the withdrawal isn’t justified and comes from people who would prefer we stay. But it is still true that we’ve left a lot of people behind. Many will get out eventually, I hope, but that will take years for some of them. Some are going to be imprisoned or killed by the Taliban.
I don’t know how much better we could realistically have done but if a month ago Biden had said, ok, here’s the plan: let the Taliban take over the entire country, including Kabul, and only then start the evacuation and hope they don’t mess with us, I don’t think many would have said that was a good plan.
Any alternative plan would have required the puppet Afghan government we installed to be stable and have popular support. As played, it is what it is.
Relatedly, it’s only bad to rely on the Taliban’s goodwill to evacuate if they are as deranged as the West portrayed them to be for the last 20 years. In reality, it turns out it was completely fine to rely on them.
Biden should be pushing the line that more lives would have been lost if he’d stuck to the May 1 deadline that Trump negotiated.
People say this but I don’t see why it must be true. Afaict, we didn’t even try to slow down the collapse. Doing enough to get safely the hell out of dodge seems like would have been a better plan.
If Biden believed in that image of the Taliban, it makes his plan even worse. I don’t know much about military tactics and strategy, but covering your ass is a pretty basic idea. We got lucky.
If anyone is looking for a way to directly help refugees from Afghanistan, this extremely grass-roots organization can help. I don’t know Miry but many of my neighbors do.
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Not really, if the Taliban were really that barabaric, the puppet Afghan government wouldn’t never have cut deals with them and laid down their arms. They made peace w/ the Taliban and had trust that the Taliban would honor that deal because they are not the type of people that would suicide bomb evacuating Americans just for funsies.
The Taliban’s relative reasonableness is why they gained enough popular support over the last 20 years to govern, why the Afghan government collapsed so quickly as all the key leaders had preordained deals w/ the Taliban as soon as the US left, and why the evacuation went so smoothly.
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Any bets on who?
The 100,000 Afghans who just ditched everything for an uncertain future as refugees seem somewhat less sanguine about theTaliban’s reasonableness.