Afghanistan
POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Sunday, November 30, 2025 19:54
VIEWED: 16870
PAGE 5 of 22
And we changed the face of Afghanistan forever. Now Russia and China need to invest more to protect from Afghan, Happy spending.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:So why are you complaining about the withdrawal?
Originally posted by THG:
And we changed the face of Afghanistan forever. Now Russia and China need to invest more to protect from Afghan, Happy spending.
THUGGER is an idiot. It's that simple.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:We can thank the passionate and violent, yet chickenhearted, American people for demanding revenge. Their Congress, also being full of the chickenhearted, could NOT tell the American people "No, since killing civilians is wrong, we will not be killing hundreds of thousands of women and children just because you are scared all the time and can't sleep at night." Before there were terrorists, the chickenhearted American citizens were in fear of Russian Commies and then Chinese Commies and then North Korean Commies and then Cuban Commies and then South Vietnamese Commies and then . . . . There is always somebody new that chickenhearted Americans are in fear for their lives and there will always be a majority in Congress supporting killing civilian women and children. It is the way 99% of Americans are made in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
And who exactly do we thank for that? Congress? Bush the deux? Obama?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
We can thank the passionate and violent, yet chickenhearted, American people for demanding revenge.
Sure Americans were gung-ho to punish Afghanistan after 9/11. (And what a cluster of disinformation and propaganda it took to conflate Afghanistan-the-country with 9/11 !!)
U.S. MILITARY ATTACKS AGAINST AFGHANISTAN (OCTOBER 2001)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxAllxxxxxxRepsxxxxxxDemsxxxxxxInds
Approvexxxxxxxx90%xxxxxx97%xxxxxx85%xxxxxxx87%
Disapprovexxxxxx6%xxxxxxx1%xxxxxxx10%xxxxxxx6%
Don't Knowxxxxxx4%xxxxxxx2%xxxxxxx5%xxxxxxxx7%
But all that went south quickly.
IS THE U.S. DOING THE RIGHT THING BY FIGHTING THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN? (2009)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxAllxxxxxxRepsxxxxxxDemsxxxxxxInds
Approvexxxxxxxx47%xxxxxx67%xxxxxx36%xxxxxxx45%
Disapprovexxxxxx42%xxxxxxx25%xxxxxxx55%xxxxxxx41%
Don't Knowxxxxxx11%xxxxxxx8%xxxxxxx9%xxxxxxxx14%
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/publics-views-of-afghanistan-war-have-tur
ned-sour/
2013
Support for the war in Afghanistan has dipped below 20%
https://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/12/30/cnn-poll-afghanistan-
war-most-unpopular-in-u-s-history/
2019
majorities of both veterans (58%) and the public (59%) say the war in Afghanistan was not worth fighting
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/10/majorities-of-u-s-vet
erans-public-say-the-wars-in-iraq-and-afghanistan-were-not-worth-fighting/
Since the war dragged on far longer than public support, who do we thank for it shambling forward like a zombie? It was really popular under Bush the deux. Maybe we should thank Obama perhaps since public support for the Afghanistan war was very low during his administration? I know we can't blame Trump, since he negotiated the American withdrawal.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:Quote:So why are you complaining about the withdrawal?
Originally posted by THG:
And we changed the face of Afghanistan forever. Now Russia and China need to invest more to protect from Afghan, Happy spending.
THUGGER is an idiot. It's that simple.
I'm not. I'm glad were out. Our being out fucks Russia and China.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
This is for all the morons here who've posted many times about how America created the Taliban.
T
Christine Fair: Pakistan, the Taliban and Regional Security
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Biden’s Basic Question in a 2009 White House Meeting Exposed the Folly of the Afghanistan War
by Ryan Grim https://theintercept.com/2021/09/02/afghanistan-obama-war-biden/
On the afternoon of October 9, 2009, President Barack Obama met with his top generals, Cabinet officials, and his vice president to hash out strategy for the war in Afghanistan. Earlier that morning, Obama learned he’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The war in Afghanistan was now eight years old, and Obama had campaigned on the idea that the Bush administration’s effort there had been headed in the wrong direction.
Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, along with much of the military brass, were pushing for a troop increase of 40,000 to 85,000 in Afghanistan. Doing so would allow for a counterinsurgency strategy, they claimed, and would give the Americans time to recruit and train a larger Afghan national army and police force. The pivotal meeting is captured in Bob Woodward’s 2010 book “Obama’s Wars.”
Advocates for an expanded war found their most nettlesome opponent in Joe Biden.
“As I hear what you’re saying, as I read your report, you’re saying that we have about a year,” Biden said to McChrystal. “And that our success relies upon having a reliable, a strong partner in governance to make this work?”
McChrystal said yes, that was the case. Biden turned to Karl Eikenberry, a former general who was now ambassador to Afghanistan. “In your estimation, can we, can that be achieved in the next year?”
Eikenberry told Biden no, it was not possible, because there was no strong, reliable partner in Afghanistan. Eikenberry followed with a pessimistic 10-minute assessment of the situation and pinpointed another logical failure that would manifest itself more than a decade later. “We talk about clear, hold and build, but we actually must include transfer into this,” Eikenberry said, adding that to eventually withdraw, the transfer was key.
Eikenberry said he “would challenge [the] assumption” that the U.S. and the Afghan government were even aligned. “Right now we’re dealing with an extraordinarily corrupt government,” he said.
Petraeus, when he spoke, acknowledged what had become obvious. “I understand the government is a criminal syndicate,” he said. “But we need to help achieve and improve security and, as noted, regain the initiative and turn some recent tactical gains into operational momentum,” Petraeus said, adding that he “strongly agreed” with McChrystal’s pitch for a larger force.
Biden cut in: “If the government’s a criminal syndicate a year from now, how will troops make a difference?” he asked.
Biden was getting at something fundamental: Did anybody believe what the generals were proposing was actually possible? Biden’s questions were largely ignored by the war planners, but the conversation held in that meeting makes clear that the answer was readily available by 2009: It was not possible and would collapse quickly once U.S. support was withdrawn. Instead of following Biden’s lead, the Obama administration allowed the carnage to drag on fruitlessly for another 12 years.
Woodward’s next lines are the most telling: “No one recorded an answer in their notes. Biden was swinging hard at McChrystal, [Defense Secretary Bob] Gates and Petraeus.”
Biden pressed on. “What’s the best-guess estimate for getting things headed in the right direction? If a year from now there is no demonstrable progress in governance, what do we do?”
Again, no answer.
Again, Biden asked: “If the government doesn’t improve and if you get the troops, in a year, what would be the impact?”
Finally, Eikenberry responded. “The past five years are not heartening,” he said, “but there are pockets of progress. We can build on those.” In the next six to 12 months, he added, “We shouldn’t expect significant breakthroughs.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, said that the dilemma was whether to focus on adding troops or better governance. “But not putting troops in guarantees we won’t achieve what
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
We should have just turned Mecca to glass 20 years ago.
Nobody in the world would even be having this conversation right now.
Sure glad that Biden* let in 100,000 terrorists though. Have fun when they engage everybody, m'kay?
--------------------------------------------------
Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Afghanistan v. Star Trek’s Prime Directive
On February 9, 1967, hours after the US Air Force pounded Haiphong Harbor and several Vietnamese airfields, NBC television screened a politically momentous episode of Star Trek. Entitled “The Return of the Archons,” the episode marks the debut of the Prime Directive – the supreme law of the fictional United Federation of Planets, and its Starfleet, banning any and all purposeful interference with alien people, civilizations, and cultures. Devised in 1966, as President Lyndon B. Johnson was sending another 100,000 troops into Vietnam, the Prime Directive constituted a direct, though well-camouflaged, ideological challenge to what the US government was up to.
Having remained central to the Star Trek series to this day, the Prime Directive is even more pertinent now. Military escapades always entail a variety of separate issues, making it hard to have a rational debate about their merits. For example, were the US invasions of Vietnam or Afghanistan motivated by good intentions, whether containing totalitarianism or saving women from radical Islamists? Or were those intentions invoked to provide political cover for cynical economic or strategic motives? Were they wrong because the US forces were defeated? Or would they have been wrong even in victory?
The beauty of the Prime Directive is that it cuts through this labyrinth of confusion and deception: the invader’s motives, good or bad, matter not one iota. The Prime Directive bans the deployment of superior technology (military or otherwise) for the purposes of interfering with any community, any people, or any sentient species. It is, in fact, quite drastic: Starfleet personnel must respect it even if it costs them their lives.
In the words of Captain James T. Kirk, “a starship captain’s most solemn oath is that he will give his life, even his entire crew, rather than violate the Prime Directive.” To which his successor, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, adds: “The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules; it is a philosophy … and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes … no matter how well-intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.”
Entrenching such a philosophy in a mainstream American TV series, and in the midst of the biggest escalation of the Vietnam War, was a bold move. There can be little doubt that it was an intentional critique of US foreign policy. In the episode “Patterns of Force” (1968), Star Trek’s screenwriters conjured up a Federation social engineer who tries to help a primitive planet develop by instilling in its people a humanist attitude while also building a state with the efficiency that only an authoritarian regime can muster. His well-meaning intervention soon unravels as the patterns of authority he introduced beget institutionalized racism, and the humanism he tries to nurture is crushed by a regime espousing genocide.
Star Trek’s writers were not naive moralists or isolationists. They understood that, as with all rigid moral imperatives, their Prime Directive could not be applied straightforwardly. Simply turning up in a foreign land, or on another planet, meant interfering in some way. Although Starfleet officers are shown prepared to die rather than violate the Prime Directive, in plenty of situations their moral outrage causes them to bend or even ignore it. In “A Private Little War” (1968), they encounter a planetary civil war where one of the two factions has been supplied with advanced weapons by the Federation’s arch foe, the Klingons. How could they respect the Prime Directive when the competing superpower is not?
Deciding that the best way to respect the Prime Directive is to violate it, they attempt to level the battlefield by providing almost identical weapons to the other faction. The result is an out-of-control arms race and a rare unhappy ending.
But not all violations of the Prime Directive lead to disaster. “A Taste of Armageddon” (1967) depicts a bizarre war between two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
There's at least 3 new Star Trek shows that prove that Leftists don't give a shit about Star Trek or the Prime Directive.
--------------------------------------------------
Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME