Animal-Mother posted:

https://twitter.com/BurgerPilled/status/1420966234821218311

mazzi Chart Czar posted:

The USA never won a war. (Just test driving this argument out for shits and giggles.)

quote:

Two of Afghanistan’s major cities are in danger of imminent collapse as the government struggles to contain a war that is splintering out of control. A Taliban advance on Herat in the west has cut the city off from the rest of the country. In southern Kandahar, where the Taliban have deep roots, rival tribes are taking sides, fighting for a share of the spoils when the dust finally settles.


In Herat, the capital of the province of the same name, Taliban fighters reached the outskirts on Thursday, forcing the closure of the airport. Rocket attacks on Friday hit the United Nations compound, where five members of the Afghan Public Protection Force were killed, police and security sources said. Militias led by local warlord Ismail Khan are fighting alongside the police and army, they said.

In the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban capital from 1996 until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, the picture is complex, hinting at a war within a war as age-old rivalries between local tribes spill into fighting over the vast sums to be made from licit and illicit trade through the Spin Boldak crossing into Pakistan.

Meanwhile, government forces are stretched and resources are dwindling. People are flooding into the capital, Kabul, to escape fighting, straining already limited capacity. Nighttime curfews have been imposed on 31 of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals. The closure of border crossings has cut imports, threatening food and fuel shortages as prices start to rise, and drastically cutting government revenues.

The fighting between the government and Taliban for control of Spin Boldak has provided an opening for tribal rivalries to come to the surface, said Enayat Najafizada, the founder and head of the Kabul-based Institute of War and Peace Studies think tank.

“These rivalries in Loy [greater] Kandahar have been simmering for 20 years, and as the tribes line up either with the Taliban or with the government, weaknesses are being revealed and opportunities presented for positions to change,” Najafizada said. The involvement of the tribes, as they fight each other, is adding firepower to the battle, though analysts say the Taliban are also being aided by fighters arriving from Pakistan, threatening to overwhelm Afghan forces.

Kandahar’s war was marked by brutality, with hundreds of men kidnapped or killed, said a senior government security source.

The value of goods passing through Spin Boldak has been estimated at $1.1 billion annually. Contraband including drugs—the Taliban control opium production in southern Afghanistan—and minerals offer huge profits for whoever controls the crossing.

Terror Sweat posted:

The only reason there's any opium there right now is because the US invaded. The Taliban got rid of all of it in 2001, then the US invaded

Animal-Mother posted:

https://twitter.com/BurgerPilled/status/1420966234821218311

Animal-Mother posted:

https://twitter.com/ABC7/status/549310295362260992

Taliban still owns the place, we didn't install a puppet "democracy," and Bin Laden got most of what he wanted; an endless, expensive military boondoggle.

Animal-Mother posted:

https://twitter.com/BurgerPilled/status/1420966234821218311

MoaM posted:

who could've predicted 'wanting to redo Vietnam' would end up bad.

Orbis Tertius posted:

yup. the taliban made the obvious choice to restart the opium harvest, under their control and supervision, to fund their war effort.

I swear I remember seeing some msnbc special following DEA agents in Afghanistan like doing no knock raids on poor heroin makers. just mind boggling stupid poo poo.

quote:

As America's war in Afghanistan comes to an end, many see the inevitable parallels to Vietnam -- a long aimless war, a determined enemy ready to out bleed us, and now an evacuation reminiscent of the chaos of Saigon's final hours.

When a war ends, two questions loom large: Was it worth it? And how do we end it? Only history can answer the first. Only we can answer the latter.

As North Vietnamese forces bore down in a final assault on the dying nation of South Vietnam, American diplomats, spies, and the small remaining cadre of military advisers desperately mounted a last-minute rescue. None of it was planned ahead of time. The fact that we were able to evacuate 130,000 of our Vietnamese wartime allies in such circumstances was a miracle. Many escaped via ships -- the remnants of the South Vietnamese Navy and merchant fleet -- and sailed to Guam.
Afghanistan is a landlocked country -- we do not have the luxury of an ocean and boats to aid us in the evacuation of the more than 70,000 Afghan wartime allies estimated in need of rescue from certain Taliban death.

We cannot load everyone into trucks and drive to safety now that our war is over.

Should we choose to save our Afghan wartime allies -- the interpreters, engineers, aid workers, and others essential to our effort -- we are going to need the largest airlift since Berlin after World War II.

The White House has finally agreed our allies must be evacuated and it has a plan to evacuate those who can make it to Kabul. Sadly, it is not enough. The Association of Wartime Allies recently polled the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa population. Nearly 49% are outside Kabul -- a population of approximately 34,000 people. Unless we go save them, they will die within weeks.

The Taliban claims to control 85% of the country and is fighting to take the cities it does not yet control. They may take Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city, within weeks. An Association of Wartime Allies survey estimates that 3,200 Afghan allies are currently trapped in Kandahar.

The Taliban has a presence on Afghanistan's roads and have created checkpoints for vehicles. They have used biometric data at these checkpoints to identify US allies and administer their death sentences on the side of the road. Hundreds have already suffered this fate, according to No One Left Behind.
Commercial air travel is scarce between Afghan cities, and most of our allies cannot afford the ticket. The Afghan military cannot defend or move these people. Only US troops can do it. Now, we have two options before us. Either we accept the mass murder of people we made a promise to save or we take bold action. I argue we must do the latter.

The President should order the 82nd Airborne Division or the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force back into Afghanistan. We should retake airfields we held mere months ago. Some remain in Afghan military control, others we will likely have to seize from the Taliban by force. From these air bases, we should begin the evacuation of our Afghan wartime allies that should have properly occurred before we withdrew any of our own forces.

Terror Sweat posted:

Lmao at this image of opium in Afghanistan Maybe this is the reason the US invaded

quote:

Ironically, the only power that has demonstrated an ability to cripple the Afghan drug industry is the Taliban.

In July 2000, when the Taliban controlled most of the country, its reclusive one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, declared that opium was un-Islamic and imposed a ban on growing poppies.

Much to the surprise of the rest of the world, the ban worked. Afraid to cross the Taliban, Afghan farmers immediately ceased planting poppies. The United Nations estimated that poppy cultivation plunged by 90 percent from 2000 to 2001.

....

The Taliban had hoped the 2000 opium ban would win favor in Washington and entice the United States to provide humanitarian aid. But those hopes collapsed when al-Qaeda — which had been given sanctuary by the Taliban — launched the 9/11 attacks.

Animal-Mother posted:

Terror Sweat posted:

Lmao at this image of opium in Afghanistan Maybe this is the reason the US invaded

Orbis Tertius posted:

yup. the taliban made the obvious choice to restart the opium harvest, under their control and supervision, to fund their war effort.

I swear I remember seeing some msnbc special following DEA agents in Afghanistan like doing no knock raids on poor heroin makers. just mind boggling stupid poo poo.

Milo and POTUS posted:

lol at the dea in afghanistan. I mean I don't doubt it. It just makes me laugh

Animal-Mother posted:

https://twitter.com/BurgerPilled/status/1420966234821218311

Animal-Mother posted:

https://twitter.com/BurgerPilled/status/1420966234821218311

Palladium posted:

Their gear looks sick tho

Orbis Tertius posted:

something I did not know: according to that wapo article the brits tried, without full US support, a strategy of paying off afghan opium farmers, but it failed because the perfidious afghans didn’t keep up their end of the bargain, apparently!

which is funny because A. no poo poo they’re going to take advantage of a largesse coming from a foreign occupying force and B. racist poo poo about afghans aside, it obviously failed because the US military didn’t support it, meaning it wasn’t part of a larger strategy of holding territory.

Palladium posted:

Their gear looks sick tho

etalian posted:

Barely used too, also apparently the US left so fast from main bases like Bagram they left behind military equipment like weapons and ammunition

Also lol at any nation that willingly went along with contributing troops to the US Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

etalian posted:

Also lol at any nation that willingly went along with contributing troops to the US Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Zedhe Khoja posted:

maybe the real victory in afghanistan was all the failed mining schemes america made along the way
https://rattibha.com/thread/1387403852685717507?lang=en

PawParole posted:

not failed at all, the Taliban makes half a trillion off of mines America paid to build.

Regarde Aduck posted:

Oh yeah that was cool. Our generals and politicians were all ‘we brits know how to handle this, not like those brute Americans’ and for a while it seemed like our military really did seem to be handling things well with minimal bloodshed. Then it turned out we were secretly just paying factions to ceasefire. Then the Americans found out and it really damaged US/UK military integration. Like the American generals were just calling the British military utter clowns and our press and politicians just stopped talking about Afghanistan at all.

mazzi Chart Czar posted:

The USA never won a war. (Just test driving this argument out for shits and giggles.)

But, world war II - Russia did it, and then a German bomb finished it off.
Buut, World war I - The USA was kid who lived on an oil field across the river when everybody else just destroyed themselves
Buuut, Civil war - Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself.

Buuuuuuuut, Revolutionary war
England: "I DON"T CARE ANYMORE!" - Marries India
France: "Heh heh heh sucks to be you England. Oh poo poo i'm out of money!" - king beheaded.

Homer Simpsons yelling "DEFAULT! DEFAULT! DEFAULT!"

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

https://twitter.com/RYP__/status/1376857309549191171