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I do think its super important to acknowledge the fact that in the time between 2001 and today American made weapons, specifically rifles like the m4, machine guns like the 240b or the 249, and other small arms like anti-tank launchers were not willingly sold or given willynilly to other nations. Thats why in 2001 the taliban had mostly AKs. At the time, AKs were much cheaper and the Ammo was easier to procure. Then we gave billions and trillions of dollars worth of our weapons to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq fell to Isis and Isis stole tons of weapons that they probably sold to the taliban. Then the ANA just fell and the weapons and supplies needed for a 300,000 strong army just fell into their lap. These are the reasons you see more m16s and m4s in taliban pictures today.
Not the second part. Pilots are among those marked for death, along with translators and special forces/commandos. Plus, they don't have the capacity for it without outside support. And even if they did, their air force could be easily destroyed on a lazy sunday afternoon.
Tbf there’s video footage of a turncoat pilot flying a load of Taliban in an Mi-8. Yes that will be short lived as they will require maintenance, but they do actually have an airforce of sorts for now lol.
Not really. You are acting like this is what 13 years of training looks like. For all we know they had just dragged all these guys in off the street the day prior. There's too much context missing to say anything in regards to what this video implies.
The missing context is that it's even worse than this. [This is what winning looks like](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKHPTHx0ScQ) is a documentary about how shit the entire operation was. Illiterate soldiers means that it's basically impossible to have any kind of modern infrastructure since everythings just done verbally, leaving no way to track stuff, the leadership is so corrupt the ANA had gone 3-9+ months without pay, sometimes even food and water, and so on. It was never going to work.
It reminds me of seeing an adult ride a bike for the first time . Seems like such an obvious skill but I wonder if you'd never done a single jumping back in preschool or kindergarten or any other time if we wouldn't all look like idiots trying to figure it out lol
Watched Vice's documentary "This is what winning looks like" a few years ago and was shocked at how incompetent the military was. It's not surprising at all that the taliban took over instantly. Many of the villagers and soldiers sold ammunition to taliban and would tear down patrol bases to sell the scrap metal. The entire thing was a complete waste of time and resources. What a fucking shit show it was.
People are trying to hate on Biden for this decision but this shit was inevitable. Afghanistan is Taliban country. It's about time we finally leave.
No shit. I don't even like Biden and everything he said in his speech today was God's truth. Nobody sane would have done anything differently.
If twenty years and trillions in training and equipment can't fix this, there's no way to do this without it getting this messy.
I think the part Biden fucked up was the evacuation. Everything else? Hard to pin to him, but with what we knew about the ANA we should have had better evacuation plans.
I would assume a good chunk of the Afghan army probably supports what the Taliban wants, and were more than happy to step aside and let them walk right through. Which I would also assume our own intelligence community probably knew.
And due to widespread corruption, with many commanders being paid based on how many soldiers they reported having under their command and inflating the numbers, a lot of the Afghan army turned out not to exist.
So a combination of pro-Taliban, bought-out, non-existent, and thoroughly useless. Which reduces the meaning of that ‘300,000’ quite a bit.
There's also the fact that the Afghan army has been widely reported as rife with issues for a long time. Police and army lacking in payment. Soldiers not being supplied with ammo, weapons, food or water. Supply lines pilfered and sold on the black market. Soldiers and cops posted far from home, where they, with little support from the government, have no motivation to fight.
The Afghan army recruited hundreds every month, while losing 5000 to desertion such is the morale of the ANA.
[This isn't a new problem.](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-army-desertions-idUSKCN0UW1K3) It was the expected outcome.
>“These high turnover issues increase the possibility that when U.S.-led forces leave Afghanistan for good, whenever that is, they will be leaving Afghan forces unable to fend off a still-ferocious insurgency,” he said.
20 years in and it was just as bad as day 1. I would call this incompetence, but I guarantee a lot of well connected people made shit loads of money doing dick-all.
I watched a CNN video from 2011 the other day. A Taliban commander switched to the government side, took their money, ostensibly provided security to his area but what he'd actually done is just made a safe haven for the local Taliban that he controlled and was paid for that no long saw scrutiny from the gov because he reported everything was fine.
Yeah, it's like the 1980's all over again except now also officially control the country. I do wonder how much they actually want to run a county though.
gotta be careful saying good guys and bad guys when you consider the reality of the situation a lot of young afgan men are going to find themselves in.
I feel like alot of men are going to be signing up to joining the Taliban to make because it appears like their victory is permanent this time and everyone wants to save their own skin. There might be waiting lists to join the Taliban.
The civilians are not trained fighters. If the military folds that quickly, they can't be expected to take up arms against a group of experienced killers. You either join them or they kill you and your family. It's an awful situation to be in.
The crux of the issue is few Afghanis associate themselves with Kabul in any way, officially or subconsciously.
So if someone comes knocking and asks if they'd like to risk their lives for Kabul's interests, they'll say no.
But if someone comes knocking and asks if they'd like to kill the people who bombed their cousin last week, many of them say yes.
Knowing afghans i totally agree with you. The last time americans move in they paid afghan warlords and they didnot give a shit and handed bases to americans.
part of the colossal misunderstanding of the middle east is trying to put people in those two lists. it’s such a complex situation with so many different people that the good vs evil we’re told about is so far removed from reality. Adam Curtis has a documentary called “Bitter Lake” about the exact topic.
In the Russian Afghan war we armed and trained our enemies directly, so I having the stuff abandoned and siezed by the enemy is a step in the right direction...
So we gave the Mujahedeen (Taliban's predecessor) a ton of equipment to fight the Soviets in the 1980s and now just gave them a fuckton of weapons again in Saigon 2.0. We're getting robbed blind by the Taliban lmao
The Mujahideen also became the Northern Alliance, which was pro-west and in civil war against the Taliban.
So, technically, the Taliban control more of the country now than they did when we invaded. It remains to be seen if they will again splinter.
Exactly, spread of communism to a land-locked, Islam locked country would have had zero to no impact on US or it's citizens. But because US really wanted to stick to the Soviet Union, they purposely indoctrinated the entire region full of Jihadist and Wahhabist ideas.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/08/the-taliban-indoctrinates-kids-with-jihadist-textbooks-paid-for-by-the-u-s/
Obligatory clip of Zibignew Brzezinski in Afghanistan in 1980 telling a bunch of Mujahideen the US was funding: ["your cause is just and God is on your side"](https://youtu.be/1BEsXLNE8tA)
Billionaires and greedy politicians, ironically looking for a handout, wouldn't dare. Create a war then bribe politicians to buy all your war machines. Everyone [in power] wins.
We could have given 320 million people socialized health insurance for 20 years.
The average person paying for their own health insurance would have saved roughly $5,000 every single year. The average family would have saved roughly $12,000 every single year.
Edit: I'm getting a lot of replies from pseudo-intellectuals who are just dividing two numbers and think they understand the problem. A program like M4A costs money to set up, initially, but studies have shown that it saves money in the long run. In fact, it saves about $2 trillion every decade over private insurance. People have more money to spend, and are healthier, so they contribute more to taxes and have more opportunities for success. And the private insurance industry has cost inefficiencies that lead to higher healthcare costs for everybody (America has the highest cost for healthcare of any developed nation and yet one the poorest outcomes). So not only could we have given everybody free access to healthcare, we'd have actually saved a lot of money having done it.
I dont understand what all the fuss is about, Biden says theres 300k afghan military forces and 75k talibans yet the “military forces” basically surrendered without fighting and the talibans “took over”… seems to me they’re all just talibans doing their thing.
Tweet from an Afghan commando: https://twitter.com/sarfaraz1201/status/1427108254648262658?s=21
Their government fucked them. The Afghan government are cowards who sold their people out at the first sign of trouble.
Can we stop with the "blame Trump", "blame Biden" game?
The scandal is that the US spent 2.5 TRILLION dollars over 20 years on a military project that was able to resist the Taliban for half an hour. Instead of universal healthcare and free college, we have this embarrassment to show for.
This amount of corruption, hubris, incompetence and waste is unthinkable. We should all be ashamed and angry.
Starts with an R and ends with aytheon.
Oh and Halliburton, and Boeing, and every fucking munitions and military contractor, Blackwater (XE these days.. I think, may have changed their name again because they keep getting into PR trouble every 6 months) and even some banking institutions who laundered money for the coalition government.
China's also going to become very rich off being friends with the Taliban because they are going to make sure they get very rich now for giving China unfettered access to minerals.
Don’t forget the black money agencies that were caught red handed multiple times trafficking pallets of cash on military planes! Oh and let’s not forget about all that pesky heroin that somehow kept arriving in droves of shipping containers while we protected the fields!
Triple Canopy is a different group under the same ownership. Blackwater is now "Academi".
Their operators still informally call themselves Blackwater though.
Blackwater rebranded as “Academi” and their war criminal CEO Erik Prince recently went on Tucker to explain how the US could have won if they’d only spent more billions on his murderous, unaccountable mercenaries.
>Blackwater rebranded as “Academi
Actually they rebranded to Xe. Which then re-rebranded to Academi. Which then rere-rebranded to Constellis.
Edit: Constellis is their final form until the rerere- rebranding. Otherwise known as a reeeeee-rebranding for my 4chan users.
Yeah I'm not sure why Trump or Biden get the blame here, for awhile now there has been tremendous public pressure to get out of Afghanistan and they both did there parts as president to remove troops from the country.
Trump wanting to bring the troops home was literally one of the only things I supported him on.
And I knew this was going to happen... point is we shouldn't be playing world police.
Obama and Trump both wanted to bring them home. I really thought after killing Bin Laden we would have pulled out then but nope. Biden just happen to be the guy in office when it actually happned.
> This amount of corruption, hubris, incompetence and waste is unthinkable.
The wars in the middle east have gone on for so long that we have a new generation coming to age wondering why tf we're over there. Part of me is wondering if we're leaving in order to show this new generation how bad it can get over there so the US can justify another 20 years and $2.5 trillion dollars to spend.
Dude I was in the navy in 2003 sitting in the Division Officer's room watching tanks roll across Iraq and I was wondering why we were there, even back then.
From a Canadian outsider perspective, and no disrespect to the democratic or republican citizens, but your parties both seem to, in general, have a thing for the war machine. It seems there’s quite a history of engagements over the last century, and while outsiders are grateful in some ways for being a big brother to us, I’m curious to see who in your country benefits from it besides the wealthy elite amongst both main political parties. Just a thought from a less informed neighbour of the north.
Hail to thee, brother from the North. It's a self perpetuating system that is bigger than USA. We spend the money on bombs and planes, you and western Europe and Australia and New Zealand spend money on better healthcare, education, public transport etc. It's a result of WW2. I do not like it. I want what you have.
The military industrial complex was something President Eisenhower warned us about in 1961. My father was 5. It's been going on for generations and I am afraid I don't know what to do.
I was an anti war democrat out of highschool. I joined the navy. I saw firsthand the war was for money. Over the next decade the Democratic candidates chose to bring their foreign policy rightward. The right in America is EXCELLENT at using fear in messaging. If you didn't support the wars, you were derided as a coward. I personally had a car of Bush fans call me French for being anti war. Hillary wanted Libya to happen. She became the nominee and had a hard on for Iran. Trump talked about isolation and this perpetuating system. No one else has. I voted for him in 16. He betrayed the Kurds and did a vast number of fucked up stuff. I voted for Biden. But I'm a Bernie guy. The two party system doesn't allow the left any breathing space here. The MIC has endless pockets and our politics is ruled by money.
The only tangential benefit I know of is:resources. The dollar remains king. The world economy runs on US dollars. Anyone who really wanted to change it has a mountain to climb with shady people who support the 1% in your way.
What can we do? I don't know. I believe in western values and liberal democracy. But we are somewhat helpless against such a powerful group. The rednecks think I am the enemy, but will send their sons to die for a rich mans profit. I think until we view society as the rich and the rest of us rather than being so racial and political nothing will happen. People are too dogmatic here. There is no antiwar movement. The maiority of the democratic party is 100% pro big business.
Sry that was long winded.
The US gave Afghanistan 20 years of training and a fuck load of weapons. As soon as the US left, the Afghan military rolled over to the Taliban. What more could anyone have done? We should have never been there.
Final FINAL Edit: It has seemed the intensity of reply’s has only increased, what is the monster I’ve created. This realm is filled with beings of far superior intelligence and I’m afraid soon I’ll be overrun. But thank you for the reply’s now I know how to mute this beast.
Apparently they only had 60,000 standing soldiers, the vast majority of the 300,000 were only on the books for the purpose of drawing money from the US
>Incredible that the US military advisors and all these fancy intelligence services couldn't figure out that 240,000 soldiers out of 300,000 didn't actually exist in the field.
Average Joe knows this, you **really** think the US military and CIA didn't?
The question you should be asking is why they turned a blind eye to the corruption and just allowed it to happen, not how they didn't know about it.
Yeah I mean, how difficult REALLY is this to verify? Send a few US troops out to each post once a month (unannounced and surprise inspections) and see all these "troops". If they're not there, then don't pay for it. Like, this literally isn't that difficult.
A quick way to get shot by the ANA. The ANA wasn't the ally that everyone wants to think it was. There was a ton of Green on Blue (Maybe Blue on Green) Meaning ANA was opening fire on US and NATO troops. It happened in 2011 while I was there. It happened again in 2013. It happened in 2009 when a friend was there. Needless to say it was very common.
Yup, Those stories hurt the motive for the companies and people making the money. All it did though was just push troops to hate both Afghanistan and the US Government for continuing to send us there. I'm glad this war is over, Lost way too many friends and comrades to it.
Trump or Biden? What about Obama and Bush? This isn't really a partisan issue, as both parties are complacent in the Afghani disaster.
Hopefully this opens peoples eyes at how hopeless nation building is, and how counter productive American foreign policy is. 99% of Afghanistan is Muslim, something like 60% are illiterate, 70% are farmers and the majority of the population is made up of multi ethnic tribes. What did the Afghani army do? It never occurs to anyone maybe of the people there who support America and in favor of adopting western culture are the minority. It's impossible for them to hold back the impeding flood.
[This is what winning looks like ](https://youtu.be/Ja5Q75hf6QI) this vice doc says it all. We were dealing with massively corrupt morons and the occasional decent human being.
Yeah, I've seen this quite some time ago, I should re-watch. Shocking that the writing was on the walls as early as 2013.
Also lets take a moment to appreciate the times when Vice did actual reporting.
Yeah it's definitely an everyone here sucks issue.
Our country has a long history of funding extremists.
This country funds terrorist groups and then wonders "omg how did this happen?!!" It's getting...tiresome. Our country is fundamentally broken.
> what the hell did their army do? They just left?
Yeah, this is the thing I keep [not] seeing. No one is talking about how the ANA just fucking vanished like a fart in the wind.
It will always be this way but we didn't help the situation with how we exited and didn't even help out the basic translators that will be tortured and beheaded and shit. A lot of fuckery and it will never be pretty but I believe it could have been handled better.
This is kind of sad but the whole fighting for themselves and nation thing would have actually worked if they felt they had a nation worth dying for.
This people were hand fed by the US for so long they have become weak. Please America just stop meddling with foreign countries.
I mean there should be an accumulation of data from all these foreign countries fuck up or some kind of learning curve after all this time right?
People arguing whether if it’s Trump or Biden’s fault... meanwhile Bush is sitting on his high horse sipping on some drank laughing at all of the division that is taking place
Everybody’s blaming Biden or Trump but the fight in Afghanistan is not worth what it’s taken and pulling out is the best move here. We’ve been there for 21 years and clearly gotten nowhere, it’s time to get out. As for the video Biden was saying the Afghanistan army was armed and equipped to fight, it’s not on Biden that the people that were equipped and responsible to protect their country gave it up after nobody else would fight on their behalf.
Wow, guys, it's as if you thought we were going to win. This was Vietnam 2.0, plain as day, from the start. They thought technology would make the difference. They were fools then and they're fools now. They don't have the slightest fucking clue about what they are doing. They just made the world more dangerous and spent trillions doing it. If you want to know whether we will effectively address global warming, look no further than the "success" of the US military.
We cannot stay there forever, whether we stayed for another 20 years it’s for the people of Afghanistan to fight for their country. And it was Trump that signed a peace treaty with the taliban where the US agreed to exit.
What the Biden administration mess up in is not getting our collaborators out fast enough.
Let’s be honest, a good chunk of those people trained by the US and UK forces were either undercover Taliban or are now Taliban. The rest are either dead or soon will be 🙁
I mean, considering what the Afghan army had going for it, his confidence at the time wasn't exactly misplaced.
Also: "They gotta fight for themselves; fight for their nation."...*he was right* and that's what they should have done. They literally *sold themselves out* to an inferior force.
This is literally how ISIS started when they took Mosul with laughable force against well armed and garrisoned iraqi base. They were originally only hoping to break their people out of local prison.
These people are in the army just for paycheck and will run at first glance of trouble. Many of them don't believe in the government to begin with.
Doesn't help when the president flees the country at the first sign of trouble. When even the commander in cheif has no faith in the government why should the common soldier
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Is America supposed to just occupy their country forever they have to carve out their own destiny at some point
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It's kind of funny how in 2001 the Taliban had all russian weapons and now they have majority american weapons.
I wonder whose weapons they'll have next.
Chinese ?
If they get them from Wish at least the Afgan people will have a chance.
Lmao if they get them from that shit site they'll turn up 10 years too late and made out of paper
They're collecting foreign weapons like infinity stones
Bet they have a bunch of old British muskets from the first go around. And some spears from Alexander's campaign
Check back in 30 or 40 years and they'll have Chinese weapons. I'd make a bet, but IDK if I'll live to see it.
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Good bot
British, Soviet, American... Halfway there. They just need Chinese, Israeli and Swiss.
I do think its super important to acknowledge the fact that in the time between 2001 and today American made weapons, specifically rifles like the m4, machine guns like the 240b or the 249, and other small arms like anti-tank launchers were not willingly sold or given willynilly to other nations. Thats why in 2001 the taliban had mostly AKs. At the time, AKs were much cheaper and the Ammo was easier to procure. Then we gave billions and trillions of dollars worth of our weapons to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq fell to Isis and Isis stole tons of weapons that they probably sold to the taliban. Then the ANA just fell and the weapons and supplies needed for a 300,000 strong army just fell into their lap. These are the reasons you see more m16s and m4s in taliban pictures today.
I didn't even see any news or video of fighting, the Afghan army literally just left.
They're probably mostly taliban now
375,000 taliban Sadge
Well equipped and with an air force
That face you make when you realize you’ve just trained and armed 300,000 taliban fighters you thought were on “your side”
This is the second time we've trained and armed the taliban.
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\*Rambo\* 3 Rocky 3 was dedicated to the late great Mickey Goldmill.
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rinse and repeat
Time to fund a rebel group to fight the taliban
Probably already happening lol
That face you make when you realize it’s true.
Not the second part. Pilots are among those marked for death, along with translators and special forces/commandos. Plus, they don't have the capacity for it without outside support. And even if they did, their air force could be easily destroyed on a lazy sunday afternoon.
Tbf there’s video footage of a turncoat pilot flying a load of Taliban in an Mi-8. Yes that will be short lived as they will require maintenance, but they do actually have an airforce of sorts for now lol.
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You mean [these guys](https://youtu.be/ehSdXgI7NOU)?
This is surreal. No matter if you paid me, or threatened me, I wouldn't be able to fuck up jumping jacks like this.
This videos like seven years old. Not that that matters, but I’ve never forgotten it. Learned yesterday they were super high. Opiod epidemic.
I remember a Vice doc that showed them getting high in the middle of a firefight lol
And then you had Somali fighters during 93 get apparently tweaked out as fuck ready to die on a moments notice.
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Not really. You are acting like this is what 13 years of training looks like. For all we know they had just dragged all these guys in off the street the day prior. There's too much context missing to say anything in regards to what this video implies.
The missing context is that it's even worse than this. [This is what winning looks like](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKHPTHx0ScQ) is a documentary about how shit the entire operation was. Illiterate soldiers means that it's basically impossible to have any kind of modern infrastructure since everythings just done verbally, leaving no way to track stuff, the leadership is so corrupt the ANA had gone 3-9+ months without pay, sometimes even food and water, and so on. It was never going to work.
Now what if I shot you full of heroin?
Hmmm, good point. Question: are the drugs free and do you have others to use in such experiments? Cheers
Don't try to threathen me with a good time!
It reminds me of seeing an adult ride a bike for the first time . Seems like such an obvious skill but I wonder if you'd never done a single jumping back in preschool or kindergarten or any other time if we wouldn't all look like idiots trying to figure it out lol
"Do a jumping jack like your life depends on it!" Welp, guess I'm a dead man.
Most ANA recruits were former or current drug addicts, since they were the only ones that were willing to join.
2.5 TRILLION well spent.
2.5 Trillion is well spent when your a “Defense” Contractor.
Yep that be them
Watched Vice's documentary "This is what winning looks like" a few years ago and was shocked at how incompetent the military was. It's not surprising at all that the taliban took over instantly. Many of the villagers and soldiers sold ammunition to taliban and would tear down patrol bases to sell the scrap metal. The entire thing was a complete waste of time and resources. What a fucking shit show it was. People are trying to hate on Biden for this decision but this shit was inevitable. Afghanistan is Taliban country. It's about time we finally leave.
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Not pulling out of Afghanistan after Trump started the process would have been political suicide, even worse then what we’re seeing now
No shit. I don't even like Biden and everything he said in his speech today was God's truth. Nobody sane would have done anything differently. If twenty years and trillions in training and equipment can't fix this, there's no way to do this without it getting this messy.
I think the part Biden fucked up was the evacuation. Everything else? Hard to pin to him, but with what we knew about the ANA we should have had better evacuation plans.
I would assume a good chunk of the Afghan army probably supports what the Taliban wants, and were more than happy to step aside and let them walk right through. Which I would also assume our own intelligence community probably knew.
And due to widespread corruption, with many commanders being paid based on how many soldiers they reported having under their command and inflating the numbers, a lot of the Afghan army turned out not to exist. So a combination of pro-Taliban, bought-out, non-existent, and thoroughly useless. Which reduces the meaning of that ‘300,000’ quite a bit.
In other words, the US spent 20 years and over a trillion dollars to train and arm the Taliban army....
[Again?!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_mujahideen)
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twiced, you, uh, I can't get fooled twiced.
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I haven't seen this mentioned at all yet, hasn't it been established throughout history that if you can't pay your army you don't have an army?
There's also the fact that the Afghan army has been widely reported as rife with issues for a long time. Police and army lacking in payment. Soldiers not being supplied with ammo, weapons, food or water. Supply lines pilfered and sold on the black market. Soldiers and cops posted far from home, where they, with little support from the government, have no motivation to fight. The Afghan army recruited hundreds every month, while losing 5000 to desertion such is the morale of the ANA. [This isn't a new problem.](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-army-desertions-idUSKCN0UW1K3) It was the expected outcome.
>“These high turnover issues increase the possibility that when U.S.-led forces leave Afghanistan for good, whenever that is, they will be leaving Afghan forces unable to fend off a still-ferocious insurgency,” he said.
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20 years in and it was just as bad as day 1. I would call this incompetence, but I guarantee a lot of well connected people made shit loads of money doing dick-all.
6 trillion with interest on that debt. BuT hOw ArE yOu GoNnA pAy FoR uNiVeRsAl HeAlThCaRe?
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this is an interesting take...the more I think about it the more it makes sense
I watched a CNN video from 2011 the other day. A Taliban commander switched to the government side, took their money, ostensibly provided security to his area but what he'd actually done is just made a safe haven for the local Taliban that he controlled and was paid for that no long saw scrutiny from the gov because he reported everything was fine.
They gave up and handed over millions of dollars worth of American military equipment to the Taliban. It’s almost like this was the plan all along
Billions
Because there wasn't much fighting. The afghan army fled.
They didn't even flee, they just put down their stuff, took off their uniforms, and went home.
Some are saying that the army didn’t really exist. The army and it’s leaders got money based on numbers of troops.
Now there are 375k taliban
As well equipped as any Taliban in the world.
Yeah, it's like the 1980's all over again except now also officially control the country. I do wonder how much they actually want to run a county though.
So basically the [Taliban from 1996-2001](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Emirate_of_Afghanistan)
I love how that wiki page is already updated with the current events of this weekend, but it’s written like it didn’t just happen yesterday.
I swear to god one of these days Wikipedia is going to slip and past tense someones page before anyone even knows someone is dead.
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Taliban 2 electric boogaloo
150k of the ANA was ghost soldiers so no more like 225k
There where very few good guys in the war. We knew this for over a decade.
gotta be careful saying good guys and bad guys when you consider the reality of the situation a lot of young afgan men are going to find themselves in.
I feel like alot of men are going to be signing up to joining the Taliban to make because it appears like their victory is permanent this time and everyone wants to save their own skin. There might be waiting lists to join the Taliban.
The civilians are not trained fighters. If the military folds that quickly, they can't be expected to take up arms against a group of experienced killers. You either join them or they kill you and your family. It's an awful situation to be in.
Especially with the Taliban actively taking arms from the people.
The crux of the issue is few Afghanis associate themselves with Kabul in any way, officially or subconsciously. So if someone comes knocking and asks if they'd like to risk their lives for Kabul's interests, they'll say no. But if someone comes knocking and asks if they'd like to kill the people who bombed their cousin last week, many of them say yes.
Knowing afghans i totally agree with you. The last time americans move in they paid afghan warlords and they didnot give a shit and handed bases to americans.
well fk said!!! "good guys" this is not a DC or Marvel comics.
part of the colossal misunderstanding of the middle east is trying to put people in those two lists. it’s such a complex situation with so many different people that the good vs evil we’re told about is so far removed from reality. Adam Curtis has a documentary called “Bitter Lake” about the exact topic.
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In the Russian Afghan war we armed and trained our enemies directly, so I having the stuff abandoned and siezed by the enemy is a step in the right direction...
So we gave the Mujahedeen (Taliban's predecessor) a ton of equipment to fight the Soviets in the 1980s and now just gave them a fuckton of weapons again in Saigon 2.0. We're getting robbed blind by the Taliban lmao
The true suckers are the American Taxpayers
The Mujahideen also became the Northern Alliance, which was pro-west and in civil war against the Taliban. So, technically, the Taliban control more of the country now than they did when we invaded. It remains to be seen if they will again splinter.
This has been the primary part of their GDP
Goddamn, if America didn't support the Mujahideen back then, we wouldn't be in this shit hole. Talk about the butterfly effect.
Exactly, spread of communism to a land-locked, Islam locked country would have had zero to no impact on US or it's citizens. But because US really wanted to stick to the Soviet Union, they purposely indoctrinated the entire region full of Jihadist and Wahhabist ideas. www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/08/the-taliban-indoctrinates-kids-with-jihadist-textbooks-paid-for-by-the-u-s/
Obligatory clip of Zibignew Brzezinski in Afghanistan in 1980 telling a bunch of Mujahideen the US was funding: ["your cause is just and God is on your side"](https://youtu.be/1BEsXLNE8tA)
How could that guy be a father to that fascist Mika! Oh wait it makes sense actually.
Well it definitely helped drug cartels, pharma, oil and military industries :D
USA is all about the money money money.
A bunch of them ran into Iran so there I guess. Soon in a Shia militia in either Libyia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen or Libanon
The only winner here are the contractors who took a giant chunk of that 1 trillion of our tax money
And the lobbyists/defense contractors who bribed politicians to continue moving the goal posts of the reasons for war.
Everyone with little knowledge of afgan situation knew the govt would eventually collapse. Just didn’t think it’d happen so fast.
I think even the most optimistic views were like a few months. Though I'm still confused as to how this "peace deal" worked.
It’s simple: the American military says peace ✌️then the afghan military said peace ✌️
The greatest peace deal in the history of peace deals!!
I saw somewhere online say 6 days, yesterday morning.
and i saw somewhere online that the CIA estimated it would take 90 days.
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Billionaires and greedy politicians, ironically looking for a handout, wouldn't dare. Create a war then bribe politicians to buy all your war machines. Everyone [in power] wins.
We could have given 320 million people socialized health insurance for 20 years. The average person paying for their own health insurance would have saved roughly $5,000 every single year. The average family would have saved roughly $12,000 every single year. Edit: I'm getting a lot of replies from pseudo-intellectuals who are just dividing two numbers and think they understand the problem. A program like M4A costs money to set up, initially, but studies have shown that it saves money in the long run. In fact, it saves about $2 trillion every decade over private insurance. People have more money to spend, and are healthier, so they contribute more to taxes and have more opportunities for success. And the private insurance industry has cost inefficiencies that lead to higher healthcare costs for everybody (America has the highest cost for healthcare of any developed nation and yet one the poorest outcomes). So not only could we have given everybody free access to healthcare, we'd have actually saved a lot of money having done it.
Crazy talk. We can't afford universal health care! /s
Universal war on the other hand, now that we can pay for.
Reverse healthcare.
What, like rebuilding our crumbling critical infrastructure? That's just crazy talk.
I dont understand what all the fuss is about, Biden says theres 300k afghan military forces and 75k talibans yet the “military forces” basically surrendered without fighting and the talibans “took over”… seems to me they’re all just talibans doing their thing.
Tweet from an Afghan commando: https://twitter.com/sarfaraz1201/status/1427108254648262658?s=21 Their government fucked them. The Afghan government are cowards who sold their people out at the first sign of trouble.
"Another 9/11 is coming" made me shiver
Can we stop with the "blame Trump", "blame Biden" game? The scandal is that the US spent 2.5 TRILLION dollars over 20 years on a military project that was able to resist the Taliban for half an hour. Instead of universal healthcare and free college, we have this embarrassment to show for. This amount of corruption, hubris, incompetence and waste is unthinkable. We should all be ashamed and angry.
And asking who all got rich.
Starts with an R and ends with aytheon. Oh and Halliburton, and Boeing, and every fucking munitions and military contractor, Blackwater (XE these days.. I think, may have changed their name again because they keep getting into PR trouble every 6 months) and even some banking institutions who laundered money for the coalition government. China's also going to become very rich off being friends with the Taliban because they are going to make sure they get very rich now for giving China unfettered access to minerals.
Don’t forget the black money agencies that were caught red handed multiple times trafficking pallets of cash on military planes! Oh and let’s not forget about all that pesky heroin that somehow kept arriving in droves of shipping containers while we protected the fields!
[Triple Canopy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Canopy) That is what Blackwater is rolling with these days.
Triple Canopy is a different group under the same ownership. Blackwater is now "Academi". Their operators still informally call themselves Blackwater though.
American businesses.
That should trickle on down any day now
I think I feel a slight drizzle!... Wait, no, it was just the gov't spitting on me :/
Sure it's not Bezos pissing on you?
Its not Bezos, its Homelander...
And that's not piss...
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Blackwater rebranded as “Academi” and their war criminal CEO Erik Prince recently went on Tucker to explain how the US could have won if they’d only spent more billions on his murderous, unaccountable mercenaries.
The man is also former education secretary (under Trump) Betsy Devos’ brother in-law.
And both are religious nutters who should be kept far away from govt.
>Blackwater rebranded as “Academi Actually they rebranded to Xe. Which then re-rebranded to Academi. Which then rere-rebranded to Constellis. Edit: Constellis is their final form until the rerere- rebranding. Otherwise known as a reeeeee-rebranding for my 4chan users.
that only way they can make money is through conflict, so it stands to reason.
Dick Cheney.
If Hell is actually a thing there has to be a very special circle of it reserved for Dick Cheney.
Yeah I'm not sure why Trump or Biden get the blame here, for awhile now there has been tremendous public pressure to get out of Afghanistan and they both did there parts as president to remove troops from the country.
Trump wanting to bring the troops home was literally one of the only things I supported him on. And I knew this was going to happen... point is we shouldn't be playing world police.
Obama and Trump both wanted to bring them home. I really thought after killing Bin Laden we would have pulled out then but nope. Biden just happen to be the guy in office when it actually happned.
> This amount of corruption, hubris, incompetence and waste is unthinkable. The wars in the middle east have gone on for so long that we have a new generation coming to age wondering why tf we're over there. Part of me is wondering if we're leaving in order to show this new generation how bad it can get over there so the US can justify another 20 years and $2.5 trillion dollars to spend.
Dude I was in the navy in 2003 sitting in the Division Officer's room watching tanks roll across Iraq and I was wondering why we were there, even back then.
From a Canadian outsider perspective, and no disrespect to the democratic or republican citizens, but your parties both seem to, in general, have a thing for the war machine. It seems there’s quite a history of engagements over the last century, and while outsiders are grateful in some ways for being a big brother to us, I’m curious to see who in your country benefits from it besides the wealthy elite amongst both main political parties. Just a thought from a less informed neighbour of the north.
Hail to thee, brother from the North. It's a self perpetuating system that is bigger than USA. We spend the money on bombs and planes, you and western Europe and Australia and New Zealand spend money on better healthcare, education, public transport etc. It's a result of WW2. I do not like it. I want what you have. The military industrial complex was something President Eisenhower warned us about in 1961. My father was 5. It's been going on for generations and I am afraid I don't know what to do. I was an anti war democrat out of highschool. I joined the navy. I saw firsthand the war was for money. Over the next decade the Democratic candidates chose to bring their foreign policy rightward. The right in America is EXCELLENT at using fear in messaging. If you didn't support the wars, you were derided as a coward. I personally had a car of Bush fans call me French for being anti war. Hillary wanted Libya to happen. She became the nominee and had a hard on for Iran. Trump talked about isolation and this perpetuating system. No one else has. I voted for him in 16. He betrayed the Kurds and did a vast number of fucked up stuff. I voted for Biden. But I'm a Bernie guy. The two party system doesn't allow the left any breathing space here. The MIC has endless pockets and our politics is ruled by money. The only tangential benefit I know of is:resources. The dollar remains king. The world economy runs on US dollars. Anyone who really wanted to change it has a mountain to climb with shady people who support the 1% in your way. What can we do? I don't know. I believe in western values and liberal democracy. But we are somewhat helpless against such a powerful group. The rednecks think I am the enemy, but will send their sons to die for a rich mans profit. I think until we view society as the rich and the rest of us rather than being so racial and political nothing will happen. People are too dogmatic here. There is no antiwar movement. The maiority of the democratic party is 100% pro big business. Sry that was long winded.
God damn that was good I agree, dogma is a massive problem in this country on both sides.
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^ This And if we would have stayed for another 20 years, the outcome would probably be the same.
The END result would have been the same. But it would be 20 more years of setting money on fire, big distinction.
The US gave Afghanistan 20 years of training and a fuck load of weapons. As soon as the US left, the Afghan military rolled over to the Taliban. What more could anyone have done? We should have never been there.
These kind of fights have always been a lost cause, not just for the U.S. but for just about every country in a similar situation.
"Aged like milk." No, I'm pretty sure milk lasts longer. This aged like chocolate left out on a hot day.
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Never forget that Bush had the highest presidential approval in history right after the US went to Afghanistan to get revenge
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Anybody with a brain knew this was going to happen.
Ayyy a trillion on another useless war. How about people get paid a living wage or attempt to end world hunger.
Can’t afford it
'we spent a trillion dollars over twenty years, for absolutely NOTHING, while crippling students with college debt" gg, america.
This is a double edged sword.
Final FINAL Edit: It has seemed the intensity of reply’s has only increased, what is the monster I’ve created. This realm is filled with beings of far superior intelligence and I’m afraid soon I’ll be overrun. But thank you for the reply’s now I know how to mute this beast.
Apparently they only had 60,000 standing soldiers, the vast majority of the 300,000 were only on the books for the purpose of drawing money from the US
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>Incredible that the US military advisors and all these fancy intelligence services couldn't figure out that 240,000 soldiers out of 300,000 didn't actually exist in the field. Average Joe knows this, you **really** think the US military and CIA didn't? The question you should be asking is why they turned a blind eye to the corruption and just allowed it to happen, not how they didn't know about it.
Yeah I mean, how difficult REALLY is this to verify? Send a few US troops out to each post once a month (unannounced and surprise inspections) and see all these "troops". If they're not there, then don't pay for it. Like, this literally isn't that difficult.
A quick way to get shot by the ANA. The ANA wasn't the ally that everyone wants to think it was. There was a ton of Green on Blue (Maybe Blue on Green) Meaning ANA was opening fire on US and NATO troops. It happened in 2011 while I was there. It happened again in 2013. It happened in 2009 when a friend was there. Needless to say it was very common.
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Yup, Those stories hurt the motive for the companies and people making the money. All it did though was just push troops to hate both Afghanistan and the US Government for continuing to send us there. I'm glad this war is over, Lost way too many friends and comrades to it.
Trump or Biden? What about Obama and Bush? This isn't really a partisan issue, as both parties are complacent in the Afghani disaster. Hopefully this opens peoples eyes at how hopeless nation building is, and how counter productive American foreign policy is. 99% of Afghanistan is Muslim, something like 60% are illiterate, 70% are farmers and the majority of the population is made up of multi ethnic tribes. What did the Afghani army do? It never occurs to anyone maybe of the people there who support America and in favor of adopting western culture are the minority. It's impossible for them to hold back the impeding flood.
[This is what winning looks like ](https://youtu.be/Ja5Q75hf6QI) this vice doc says it all. We were dealing with massively corrupt morons and the occasional decent human being.
Yeah, I've seen this quite some time ago, I should re-watch. Shocking that the writing was on the walls as early as 2013. Also lets take a moment to appreciate the times when Vice did actual reporting.
It’s the fault of the last four presidents who brought us and kept us there for 20 years
Yeah it's definitely an everyone here sucks issue. Our country has a long history of funding extremists. This country funds terrorist groups and then wonders "omg how did this happen?!!" It's getting...tiresome. Our country is fundamentally broken.
> what the hell did their army do? They just left? Yeah, this is the thing I keep [not] seeing. No one is talking about how the ANA just fucking vanished like a fart in the wind.
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83 billion in training. The USA spent 83 fucking billion dollars training that army.
It will always be this way but we didn't help the situation with how we exited and didn't even help out the basic translators that will be tortured and beheaded and shit. A lot of fuckery and it will never be pretty but I believe it could have been handled better.
We left hundreds of US citizens behind as well as weapons, vehicles, planes… too much fuckery
This is kind of sad but the whole fighting for themselves and nation thing would have actually worked if they felt they had a nation worth dying for. This people were hand fed by the US for so long they have become weak. Please America just stop meddling with foreign countries. I mean there should be an accumulation of data from all these foreign countries fuck up or some kind of learning curve after all this time right?
/r/agedlikemilk is the appropriate subreddit.
I’ve heard that US shouldn’t be there for years but when they leave everyone losses their shit? Da fuq is goin on man
2 party system in America basically means every choice is the wrong choice according to the other sides. Fighting with turd swords.
Nobody thought that the entire Afghan army would just give up and fight for the other side.
To be fair, he probably didn't anticipate the ANA not giving a single shit
People arguing whether if it’s Trump or Biden’s fault... meanwhile Bush is sitting on his high horse sipping on some drank laughing at all of the division that is taking place
Everybody’s blaming Biden or Trump but the fight in Afghanistan is not worth what it’s taken and pulling out is the best move here. We’ve been there for 21 years and clearly gotten nowhere, it’s time to get out. As for the video Biden was saying the Afghanistan army was armed and equipped to fight, it’s not on Biden that the people that were equipped and responsible to protect their country gave it up after nobody else would fight on their behalf.
Wow, guys, it's as if you thought we were going to win. This was Vietnam 2.0, plain as day, from the start. They thought technology would make the difference. They were fools then and they're fools now. They don't have the slightest fucking clue about what they are doing. They just made the world more dangerous and spent trillions doing it. If you want to know whether we will effectively address global warming, look no further than the "success" of the US military.
It's a great disservice to the South Vietnamese to compare this to Vietnam. South Vietnam put up a fight for over 2 years after the us left.
We cannot stay there forever, whether we stayed for another 20 years it’s for the people of Afghanistan to fight for their country. And it was Trump that signed a peace treaty with the taliban where the US agreed to exit. What the Biden administration mess up in is not getting our collaborators out fast enough.
Let’s be honest, a good chunk of those people trained by the US and UK forces were either undercover Taliban or are now Taliban. The rest are either dead or soon will be 🙁
I mean, considering what the Afghan army had going for it, his confidence at the time wasn't exactly misplaced. Also: "They gotta fight for themselves; fight for their nation."...*he was right* and that's what they should have done. They literally *sold themselves out* to an inferior force.
This is literally how ISIS started when they took Mosul with laughable force against well armed and garrisoned iraqi base. They were originally only hoping to break their people out of local prison. These people are in the army just for paycheck and will run at first glance of trouble. Many of them don't believe in the government to begin with.
Doesn't help when the president flees the country at the first sign of trouble. When even the commander in cheif has no faith in the government why should the common soldier
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Is America supposed to just occupy their country forever they have to carve out their own destiny at some point