Man I remember when I got my bachelors and wasn’t sure what to do with myself so I signed up for OCS for the Army. About midway through I got cold feet though thinking even if I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life did I really want to spend the next couple of years in wars I didn’t believe in? So I withdrew my application. I’m glad I did because thinking it would be only couple of years was even more naive on my part.
An entire generation just completely wasted.
This is how it was always going to end.
The question was which president was actually going to pull the trigger on getting out and have that taint their term.
Biden pulling out in the beginning of his term. Whenever we pulled out all the bad stuff was inevitably going to happen. I bet Biden’s hoping everyone pushes it to the back of their mind over the couple of years before the next election.
The pullout is unpopular?
“Defeat” is unpopular. The same people who cheered troop withdrawals under Trump will never forget how Biden lost Afghanistan.
Very much agree. There are several aspects of American policy that are basically doomed to failure because they are based on (objectively false) assumptions that Americans make about their country’s natural, God given, and durable place as the globally dominant nation. But Americans, including most Democrats, are extremely emotionally invested in these assumptions. It feels inevitable that these assumptions will not be relinquished proactively to head off the worst of America’s decline. These assumptions need to be broadly shattered by the collapse of the empire and the rise of China as the world’s leading power. Its going to be a fun century!
Among NYT op-ed writers, neo-cons, and future Republican voters, yes. It’s like after Vietnam when we had an entire generation of conservatives who thought liberals lost the war because we were too namby-pamby about fighting it.
Afghanistan isn’t really comparable to Vietnam in any meaningful way other than being a front for the MIC to gorge itself on public funds at the expense of foreign lives that most Americans dgaf about.
Saw a post on reddit that the taliban is placing a ban on vaccinations. Just another thing to add on how fucked up that place is going to be.
I think we’re in a new phase of politics where Republicans bullshit isn’t going to stick anymore except within their base. Trump exposed everything about them, and he was going to pull out too.
Todays Republican party is extremely white nationalist, so they aren’t going to care about whats happening in Afghanistan.
I was about to make a Vietnam comparison!
Almost all the weapons the Viet Cong had were American. This was carefully documented by the great I.F. Stone. People didn’t realize this because tptp wanted people to think the Soviets and/or the Chinese were supplying them and Vietnamese opposition was manufactured by other foreign interests. And the Viet Cong were not winning big battles and seizing American arms. What happened was there was a lot of sympathy and corruption in the South Vietnamese military and arms just flowed through them.
I expect it’s the same here. I doubt we’ll get an I.F. Stone and media access is much more controlled now than it was during the Vietnam war (not that Stone had access, he didn’t), but I wouldn’t be surprised if we never had anything resembling a coherent consistent Afghan military partner (for lack of a better word - that one is not very good) and we’ve essentially been supporting our opponents the entire war.
In terms of the withdrawal though…Vietnam clearly the right thing…Afghanistan maybe right, maybe not, but will result in a terrible future for the people who can’t flee.
We could probably stay there for a long long time and maybe Kabul eventually becomes a West Berlin, but that requires a lot of imagination to imagine.
Terrorism is the new communism as the weapon of fear for US governments, so that’s one similarity.
Britain, the US and the USSR have truly fucked up this once peaceful country. Again.
Yep, it’s all the same as far as military budgets go.
The only reasonable thing to do for Afghans, and it’s really cheap and easy, is to let/help a lot of them immigrate to Western counties and become citizens. Also not happening.
There were plenty of decent people who got fucked over when we left Vietnam. How many decades should we have stayed?