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Al-Saqr posted:would be funnier if you added a turban/ beard to the cat someone else can do it, i'm too busy with work today.
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Aug 20, 2021 16:31
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Ardennes posted:Yeah, it is also why anger at enlisted soldiers specifically seems pretty hollow to me. Many times just an economic choice, and the vast bulk of the military nowadays doesn't get anywhere near a battlefield. That said, there was a big effort in the British press to demonize the Boers themselves (and it was one of the earlier applications of concentration camps). Yeah domestic propoganda valorizing imperialists seem to be essential to the project. What's nice about today is that no one seems to be buying it domestically other than the blob of media/think tanks/defense industry freaks. It'd be great if this is the beginning of a shift to America being a more self contained, even isolationist country.
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Aug 20, 2021 16:32
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https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1428742209654988805?s=20
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Aug 20, 2021 16:34
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Nucleic Acids posted:Is there anything at all to this show other than “Girlboss Witches OOHRAH!”? theyre also all lesbians
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Aug 20, 2021 16:37
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shouldn’t have hosed your biographer Bozo lol watch as your poo poo crumbles
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Aug 20, 2021 16:39
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https://twitter.com/cnni/status/1428743398509457414?s=20
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Aug 20, 2021 16:41
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One of the pics of the interior of the planes said it had had 614 refugees in it. So 50000/614 = 81.3 so 82 flights. If the time limit is 2 weeks, you need one taking off every 4 hours.
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Aug 20, 2021 16:42
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Al-Saqr posted:lol iran and the Taliban are now best buds what a world America did leave a legacy in Afghanistan FRIENDSHIP
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Aug 20, 2021 16:42
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Al-Saqr posted:shouldn’t have hosed your biographer Bozo lol watch as your poo poo crumbles this guy is responsible for the biggest governmental leak since Snowden and arguably made money off it. Reality winner shared a page of poo poo that every person with a low level security clearance knows and the loving Mueller report threw out there, she's still locked in the Pain Cube
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Aug 20, 2021 16:44
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" . . . buy my book and please ignore my criminal conviction and my disgraceful exit from public life!"
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Aug 20, 2021 16:45
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readin this poo poo, and lol betray-us just going off about more air support: That was a psychological blow, I think, the significance of which may not have been obvious to all. Then you actually had the withdrawal. And this was not of forces in frontline combat. What we had were advise-and-assist units, who were located in the headquarters of the Afghan forces, and they include essentially liaison teams and tactical air controllers who can—with the aid of drones over the top of battlefields—confirm the targeting necessary for true close air support. We are not talking about bombing the mountain over there. We are talking about bombing as close to troops in combat as was possible.
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Aug 20, 2021 16:48
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Calm down, Beavis. hope this is a bit uncleposting
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Aug 20, 2021 16:50
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Al-Saqr posted:shouldn’t have hosed your biographer Bozo lol watch as your poo poo crumbles I like how people worshipped Petraeus for solving the Iraq problem even though his solution was just outsourcing everything the to various religious factions (Getting Sunni death squads to kill Shia)
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Aug 20, 2021 16:52
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Was there an error somewhere along the way, given that when we pulled out this collapse just happened? How did we not prepare for that in twenty years? I just think it was premature to leave. Now, you can say, Well, when do you leave? Ideally you say that there are certain conditions. Let’s keep in mind that everyone is criticizing nation-building. Well, part of nation-building is developing security forces. It is developing institutions that can take over tasks that we were provided. Undoubtedly, there were innumerable mistakes made in the name of nation-building and infrastructure overbuilt. You can name the different shortcomings. But, again, you have to build something you can hand off. Keep in mind that, once we topple the Taliban, we own the country. It’s easy to say, “You got Osama Bin Laden. What are you hanging around for?” Well, because Al Qaeda will be back. If there is one thing we should have learned in the last twenty years of war, it’s that if you don’t keep an eye on an Islamist extremist group, it will come back. You think that’s the main lesson? Well, there are a lot of lessons. There are actually five lessons from the last twenty years of war, if you want to hear them. Yes, please. The first is that Islamist extremists will exploit ungoverned spaces, or spaces governed by kindred spirits in the Muslim world. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when and how it will be.
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Aug 20, 2021 16:55
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psycho poo poo You are giving rules and saying why they are important, but, when someone asks why the things you say were necessary didn’t happen in Afghanistan in twenty years, how do you understand the answer? It’s really complicated and complex! And you don’t take a seventh-century, ultra-fundamentalist, theocratic Islamist regime, now it would be an emirate, and turn it into a modern military power. You can say the Taliban did that, but they had bases in Pakistan, and that is something you cannot forget. That’s why, when I was nominated to be the commander in Afghanistan and, subsequent to that, I said we would not be able to accomplish in Afghanistan what we did in the surge in Iraq, which was seemingly miraculous to some people, but we believed we could do it. We knew we could do it. And we got that. I laid this out to [Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld in September, 2005, when, on my way home from Iraq, he asked me to come to Afghanistan. And the first slide in the briefing was “Afghanistan does not equal Iraq.” And it laid out all the differences, all of which made Afghanistan the most challenging context in which to fight an insurgency. No. 1, the insurgent headquarters are outside the country, and the Pakistanis refused to deal with them. Beyond that, the country has very limited roads and other infrastructure. So, every time we increased bases, they had no money. By the way, the Taliban is about to experience this. In any event, we were up to No. 3, which is that the United States, in taking action against Islamist extremists, has to lead. The fourth lesson is that, if you want to really deal with the problem, you can’t counter terrorists like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State with just counterterrorist forces. You have to have something that is more comprehensive. You need all those elements, but we don’t want to do that. “We” the American people? The American military and State Department. The American government wants the Iraqis to do the fighting on the front lines. We want the Somalis and Somali surrogate forces to. So we are up to No. 4. But the key there is that you have to have a comprehensive approach, but we don’t want to be doing the frontline fighting, we don’t want to have to do the political reconciliation we brokered in Iraq, we don’t want to have to do the restoration of basic services, reëstablishment of local institutions, repair of infrastructure, et cetera. We want local forces and local governments to do that. No. 5 is, the reason that we need those host-nation forces to do that fighting on the front lines is that we have to have a sustainable approach. And sustainability is measured in terms of the expenditure of our blood and treasure. And, if you can get that down sufficiently, you don’t see people demonstrating in the streets in the way we saw in the final five or more years of the Vietnam War. And that means determining how to help host-nation forces without having to put our troops on the front lines, except in extremis. But we can maintain a very considerable number of unblinking eyes around the world with Reapers [armed drones]. In any event, every unit has a drone nowadays, and they are all helpful, but the Reaper is the coin of the realm. You can never have enough of those. You are putting forward the need for a sustained effort at every level—military, political, financial— But very sustainable. We have drawn down in Afghanistan from a hundred and fifty thousand coalition forces that I was privileged to command at the height of the war to below twelve thousand. But let’s not forget who has been doing the vast majority of the fighting and dying on the battlefield in Afghanistan, which is why I found the comments about the Afghan forces not fighting disappointing. Anybody who served in Afghanistan knows a number of Afghans who died on the battlefield, which is something like twenty-seven times the number of U.S. losses. So to say that the Afghans won’t fight for their country needs an asterisk. And it should say the Afghans will fight for their country if they are confident someone has their back and will provide reinforcements of ammunition, food, medical supplies, will provide emergency medical evaluation, and, most important, will provide close air support to get them out of a tough fight. Keep in mind, again, that the Taliban could mass anywhere on what were some isolated outposts. ............... So more resources and more time? Yeah. And time is actually the most important resource. In Afghanistan there was all this impatience that it was our longest war and all the rest of that, overlooking the fact that we have been in Korea, which still is technically—obviously people aren’t being shot and killed—but we have way more than thirty thousand troops there and in Japan. If you knew that this would end after twenty years, do you think policymakers should have acted differently? We needed to do what we did, by and large. Did we do more in many cases? Perhaps. Certainly the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. We did too much, you are saying? Overbuilt. This kind of stuff. Threw resources at problems. You have them now and you are not going to have them a year from now, if you see what I mean. There were even cases where we went too far with our troops. It took us too long to realize that we went too far with some of our troops. Some of these valleys, the people there didn’t like the Taliban, but they hated everybody. They didn’t want us in there or others in there. You had to learn how far you can go. What would you do differently if you knew you had to come out in 2021? Boy, it is really hard to say. You would like to build an Afghan air force that is more substantial. But nothing is easy. You teach somebody how to teach English and be an air-traffic controller and you know what they do? Instead of working for the Afghan government, they go work as a translator for the United Nations because they get paid more. It is one challenge after another, and you have to work your way through it. You have to have enormous fortitude and determination. Somebody asked me if we lost the Afghan war. I said I don’t think we lost it. I think we withdrew from it. And I think there is a pretty big distinction there.
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Aug 20, 2021 16:56
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Man, it's been a while since I read an editorial by triple-Pulitzer winner Thomas Friedman. Good to see that half his articles are still self-fellating reference to his own concepts like the flat world.
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Aug 20, 2021 16:59
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etalian posted:I like how people worshipped Petraeus for solving the Iraq problem even though his solution was just outsourcing everything the to various religious factions (Getting Sunni death squads to kill Shia) And even then ISIS wiped out the entire sunni contingent of Patraeus's militias when they started rolling. his solution was 'let iran and it's militias handle it'
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Aug 20, 2021 17:08
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good morning cspam has america fixed the situation yet?
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Aug 20, 2021 17:09
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I like how Petraeus implicitly claims the seventh century Islamic empire was ultra fundamentalist
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Aug 20, 2021 17:11
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Koirhor posted:I’m such a sucker for marketing now I want an AK in Russia they sell blank firing full auto AKs for cheap so people can have fun blasting the air in celebration, safely the US isn’t cool enough to follow their lead
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Aug 20, 2021 17:13
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Aug 20, 2021 17:13
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https://twitter.com/clarissaward/status/1428750831071944722?s=20
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Aug 20, 2021 17:14
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Who could possibly accept these refugees
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Aug 20, 2021 17:15
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Step 1: half-rear end the evacuation until the media gaze shifts elsewhere Step 2: Americans only, everyone else gently caress-off
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Aug 20, 2021 17:16
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I wonder where they could go 
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Aug 20, 2021 17:20
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Oh God. There's going to be another shitstorm in the US over betraying allies yet not wanting to accept them on our shores. The GOP has already been trying to rile up their base by complaining about Afghans being on the planes before Americans. This is so bad. Why do I suspect every country wants the US to storm back and invade again?
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Aug 20, 2021 17:22
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https://twitter.com/albamonica/status/1428753428516413441?s=20 europe huh
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Aug 20, 2021 17:23
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Eric Cantonese posted:Oh God. There's going to be another shitstorm in the US over betraying allies yet not wanting to accept them on our shores. The GOP has already been trying to rile up their base by complaining about Afghans being on the planes before Americans. Don't blame the GOP, this is all up to the Biden admin.
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Aug 20, 2021 17:23
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spacemang_spliff posted:I wonder where they could go I think there's a lot of empty space in Australia still, let's try there.
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Aug 20, 2021 17:24
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The media bullshit is just universal. Our public broadcaster has an article literally headlined "Well-Informed Taliban Go Door To Door Systematically In Bloodthirsty Revenge"*. Also an Amnesty-sourced story about how the Taliban killed some dudes (back in June). *No mention of the U.S. leaving behind a treasure trove of biometric data on collaborators.
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Aug 20, 2021 17:24
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Shageletic posted:
Yes, 20 years and 100 times the GDP of the country wasn't enough.
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Aug 20, 2021 17:24
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spacemang_spliff posted:I wonder where they could go on the bright side, courtesy of the first six months of the year, the liberal commentariat's all warmed up to tell another round of brown people "yeah i know you're fleeing awful conditions, but it'd be a lot more convenient for us if you died in a cage"
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Aug 20, 2021 17:26
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spacemang_spliff posted:I wonder where they could go i mean, this is a bit of a logistical issue because they can't do 15 hour flights at 300% passenger capacity. The overloaded flights were just doing short hops to Qatar. Even if they're going to the US immediately that air bridge is going to take a very long time direct at reasonable passenger loads. of course this all ignores that its probably not a simple logistical issue because even the democrats hate immigrants
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Aug 20, 2021 17:26
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let’s inject some flavor into the midwest jeez
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Aug 20, 2021 17:26
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Apples McGrind posted:someone else can do it, i'm too busy with work today.  the Taliban might not be in power today if only the posters in the funny politics forum had expressed more outrage. tragic
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Aug 20, 2021 17:28
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I like all the company guidebooks about "washing hands with hot soap and water" for something that's a aerosol respiratory disease
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Aug 20, 2021 17:29
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Nothus posted:Don't blame the GOP, this is all up to the Biden admin. Agreed that the Biden administration should have accounted for this in some way and need to find a solution, but I'm just saying if people think we can just land everyone directly to the US is ignoring the political and logistical obstacles to it. Plus, if the emphasis is on getting people out, those planes need to be able to cycle back and forth on pretty regular intervals.
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Aug 20, 2021 17:31
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trucutru posted:Yes, 20 years and 100 times the GDP of the country wasn't enough. Isn't the $2Tn lowballed because it doesn't count things like interest and poo poo?
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Aug 20, 2021 17:34
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Apples McGrind posted:everyone in this thread [dials up the volume] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tulBy6AIqfo
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Aug 20, 2021 17:38
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Atrocious Joe posted:I like how Petraeus implicitly claims the seventh century Islamic empire was ultra fundamentalist I like how the age of their religion is only ever mentioned when it's muslims. You never hear anyone try to interpret the USA's actions by referencing it's fundamentalist 1st century religion founded by Jewish renegades or thoughtfully muse about how obviously India would behave in this certain way, due to their reliance on their 3,000 year old polytheistic beliefs. It's only ever: "blah blah, backwards Islamic lunarics literally living in the 7th century etc etc".
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Aug 20, 2021 17:43
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